Michael S

While I agree that it's very pleasant to grade a project where all clips have the same exposure level, I've found that I really like the ACES CC curve - because it's perfectly straight! This makes matching exposure a doddle. I just need to move the whole waveform up or down to match one shot with another. Again, if I could slap on a LUT and walk away I absolutely would - I would even burn it in!
But for real world shooting it's incredibly difficult to nail exposure every time. And by "nail" I mean get the exposure that looks best to me. The topic of how to expose correctly is a rabbit hole when shooting outside of the studio: angle of the grey card to the light source, how to use a reflective meter correctly, worrying about K constants etc. Even when shooting negative film, there is always room for adjusting the brightness of the image in the printing or scanning process to compensate for "errors" in exposure.
For me, with digital video, the ideal solution is to shoot log, adjust the signal in ACES CC space to balance all clips, and send that to a nice conversion. This is a slightly different approach to what @kye suggests in the first post, I think, which is to not accept a given conversion as is, but to grade each clip to taste after the conversion. Instead, I have a conversion that I feel is nice enough without further tweaking, but I am using ACES to digitally re-work the signal in such a way that it's very similar to what you would get if the scene were brighter/darker, high-key/low-key, warmer/cooler. In this way it's actually very similar to shooting RAW photographs and using a RAW converter. And it allows for conscious decisions such as ETTR strategies, as well as compensating for errors.
So my post work involves a brightness slider, a contrast slider and a colour wheel. And that's it!

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this whole thing, which is the elephant in the room, is that all movies and TV and videos are a fiction.
Anything scripted is a fictional reality of course.  
Documentaries are a fiction too, taking hours of interviews, b-roll, on-location and historic footage and editing them down to a hopefully coherent string of snippets is a radical departure from the reality.  In documentary editing they talk about "finding the story in the edit" - if I go out my front door into reality I don't have to "find the story in reality" and even if I believed that made sense how could it possibly occur?  
Wedding films are so romanticised that most wouldn't even call them a documentary, despite being made exclusively of filmed-on-location non-scripted cinema-verite.
Even the walk-around videos shot by @markr041 are a long way from reality.  If I was actually present in these locations then I could go wherever I want, talk to whoever I want, etc - the set of choices of each video represents one single possibility from an infinite number of creative choices, just like every edited film is one of an infinite number of possible edits that could be made.  These films are edited in real-time, moment-by-moment, and cannot help but include an almost infinite number of creative choices.
In this context, ALL choices are creative choices to contribute to the final film.  
So what does this mean?
Well, if all work is fiction (of some sort or other) then every choice is a creative one.  The choice of a high-resolution aberration-free lens is a choice just like any other.  If I am shooting something modern then a modern lens is appropriate, if I am shooting something gritty then a gritty lens is appropriate, if I am shooting something vintage then a vintage lens is appropriate.
But here's the kicker....  if everything is a fantasy, to some degree or other, then there is no such thing as a neutral choice.  Clean lenses have just as much look as anything else, it's just an absence of technical aberrations.

I think a key piece of the puzzle is the human side - how we see and how our brains interpret what we see.
Our eyes have an aperture range and focus just like a camera lens, so anything that is outside of this range isn't going to look natural.  
Images with slightly too shallow a DoF for the perceived subject distance will seem un-natural, but might be what we see if we have been poisoned or drugged and our pupils dilate beyond their normal range.  If you go shallower than this range and it's just going to look completely wrong.  It's AN aesthetic, but it might not match your DESIRED aesthetic.
Our pupils dilate in low light conditions, so it's going to seem more plausible to open the aperture a bit in low-light situations.  Our eyes do adapt the gain from our rods/cones so shooting with a fixed ISO isn't necessary as there is some flex there.  In very low light we switch from the cones (which are the colour-sensing ones) to the rods (which are monochrome) which is why in very-low light we can't see much / any colour.  Reducing saturation in colour grading might help in making scenes set in very low light feel more natural.
Our pupils also dilate when we are looking at something we really like / love, and our eyes can adjust the gain down a bit to compensate, so opening up the aperture for romantic scenes is also appropriate.
The other non-DoF element is in colour.  We tend to remember scenes as being more colourful than they actually were, and I would theorise that this effect is greater if the memories were positive ones, so this could also be taken into consideration during post-production.
I think a large part of film-making is using the equipment in ways that deliberately trigger the right emotional notes and psychological connotations, so knowing what these are and using them to your advantage is going to help your work be interpreted correctly, and the piece be more engaging.

Let's compromise and meet in the middle, and admit 1.5x is the "most cinematic". 

Just found this video outlining a bunch of new features in Baselight (the other worlds best colour grading platform) and it confirms exactly what my thoughts were about sharpening and blurring, starting at 31m:
He set up a frequency generator that starts at low frequencies on the left and goes higher towards the right, then uses the waveform monitor to show the amplitude, essentially showing a frequency response plot.
The plot looks like this before any transformations:

Adding sharpening to the image increases the amplitude of smaller frequencies:

and a simple Gaussian blur reduces them:

which is what we want to counteract the effects of in-camera sharpening, as well as replicate the decreasing response of film:

I'm HUGELY encouraged now that I've worked out that a blur is a reasonable approximation of a more analog look, and that it also reverses sharpening.
Another thing he demonstrates is that by increasing contrast on the image, you are amplifying the contrast of both the fine detail as well as the lower frequencies, so you're changing the texture of the image in ways that may not have occurred had the scene been lit with a greater contrast ratio.
At 46m he shows an example (from Mindhunter, which was graded heavily in Baselight, fun fact!) with this being how it was shot:

then you might add an effect in post like there was an additional light source:

which has the effect of amplifying the contrast on everything, including fine details (ie, what sharpening does), but then he uses a special tool they've developed that only adds contrast to the lower frequencies and doesn't amplify the finer details, and voila:

Now it looks natural, like that could have been how it was on set.
I suppose you might be able to build this operation using frequency separation, but in Baselight it's just a slider.  I guess that's one of the many reasons why instead of buying Resolve for $299 you'd buy Baselight, which is more of a "mortgage your house" sort of thing.
The rest of the talk is excellent and worth watching, and this one that is more recent has some new stuff that is also fascinating:

I feel seen !
The last wedding I went to a few months ago had announced a complete ban on posting pictures online and as a consequence no one took any pictures at all, presumably because if they weren't able to post them in semi-real time then they had no value at all.
As a consequence, the only person that had any images at all was this old duffer.
I tell a lie, there was one person who ignored it which was the groom's sister who took the position that her brother and new sister-in-law aren't exactly Jay Z and Beyonce so there was no embargo with Hello magazine to honour. 
 
 

As someone who lives half his life at weddings, I can assure 'you' (ie, folks in general) it is extremely rare to see a guest toting anything resembling a camera at a wedding and it's been that way for quite some years now.
I might see the odd 60+ year old guest fumbling with an old DSLR or the occasional hipster with something Fuji flavoured, but otherwise nada, it's wall to wall phones and if they are not taking snaps with them, they are gazing at them for whatever enlightenment they individually receive from these devices.

Performance champion ahead! Impressive results tested by German review site slashcam. They tested more than 2 hours of 4K 50p in the summer heat of  Berlin, at 30 degree Celsius and still 3 bars left for the battery status.
Camera can record Cine 4K 60p with 600mbps All Intra internally and 800mbps to SSD, also giving Open Gate internal h265 or Prores to external SSD, plus internal Pros HQ in HD. It offers most of the recording option and codecs of the GH6.
4K 120p seems downsampled and the same quality as from the GH6. Dual Gain is available at lower Isos and automtically active up to 4K 60.
Pdaf was performing as good ad expected. It's like a GH6 with exellent AF and possibly even better Dual Gain implementation and image quality for video. The camera was running on a beta firmware. Check the website for your own reading pleasure via translate with deepl or other translators if you don't dig German at the moment.😊
 
 

The R5 was a bit of watershed moment because we proved that there was a deliberate obfuscation by Canon but it also shod light on the shilling and/or powderpuff testing aspects of a swathe of the YouTube bros.
The reaction from many of them to the original report by @Andrew Reid was particularly vicious and then, sans apology, they then made shameless hay by doing the shock faced testing videos.
Never once acknowledging that not only was the camera on fire but also their pants.
I think it then died off because it was belatedly addressed through firmware and people shrugged and said "well no one is going to risk releasing an overheating camera again".
Neither aspect was re-dressed fully though so it has been waiting to come back again, not least because a lot of the bros have invested serious crypto into those stock footage flames to do the follow up "honest re-test" videos after they've surfed the wave of the initial "reviews".
I might be being a bit cynical there though 🙂

Had a Telegram channel for political commentary. I only used smartphone to type posts, many of them so long that exceeded Telegram character limit. After a while I realized if I write shorter comments and post them as caption of a photo, it will be reshared many times more! I knew pictures are more popular than text, but the thing that shocked me was that this happened in my channel, which was all about politics! Cause I assumed those few people in society, at least, who are interested in boring political discussions, are disciplined enough to not show general facebook user behavior. But I was wrong. 

Just to get back on topic...
The trend isn't limited to photo, video or filmmaking forums, it's all forums...
A friend recently reminisced how he used to talk to fans of his favourite band online all the time and do meet-ups.
The band's unofficial forum was a hub for this, but now it doesn't even exist.
It is just people on a Facebook group now, posting pics and pressing like.
This is due to smartphones and the fact they lack a proper keyboard for longer form content and interactions.
Plus a few social media apps have replaced .com websites.
Hope to see a reversal of it as this is not using the internet to its true potential.
People should put the phone down and get back online via a laptop or desktop machine instead!

The power efficiency of one chip can be very different from the efficiency of another due to node size and to what degree it's processing is hardware accelerated. Maybe Sony uses a relatively large (= cheaper) node size or the chip has less optimized hardware for the processing it needs to do. There might also be more sample variation with Sony as the cooling efficiency can depend a lot on how well various parts are thermally connected during assembly. There is always some margin of error on soldering points, application of paste and lubricants during assembly and if this margin is larger than what the designers assumed you get clear sample variation.

Correct. I remember having read somewhere that BM uses FPGA technology while the big names use ASIC which explains a lot about the different size and performance characteristics between these products.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/fpga-vs-asic/

The power efficiency of one chip can be very different from the efficiency of another due to node size and to what degree it's processing is hardware accelerated. Maybe Sony uses a relatively large (= cheaper) node size or the chip has less optimized hardware for the processing it needs to do. There might also be more sample variation with Sony as the cooling efficiency can depend a lot on how well various parts are thermally connected during assembly. There is always some margin of error on soldering points, application of paste and lubricants during assembly and if this margin is larger than what the designers assumed you get clear sample variation.

The power efficiency of one chip can be very different from the efficiency of another due to node size and to what degree it's processing is hardware accelerated. Maybe Sony uses a relatively large (= cheaper) node size or the chip has less optimized hardware for the processing it needs to do. There might also be more sample variation with Sony as the cooling efficiency can depend a lot on how well various parts are thermally connected during assembly. There is always some margin of error on soldering points, application of paste and lubricants during assembly and if this margin is larger than what the designers assumed you get clear sample variation.

Another point that is bothering me right now: the lack of testing some details point, coupled together with (looks like) the companies refusing to answer some technical details. Some examples:

- Electronic shutter for stills: what are the penalties, if any, besides rolling shutter? In the past, I remember some smaller Panasonics reverting to a lower bit depth when using it. Tested in my current cameras, the RAWs have the full bit depth, but it is real bit depth or less bits wrapped in a bigger bit depth "container"? There is a dynamic range penalty? Never find a correct (and justified) answer.

- Always is said that a 4k image downsampled from a larger read in camera render a better image than a 4k crop of the sensor. Looks logical - but why the image quality from the Open Gate cameras (hence, using a 1:1 readout of the sensor) are showing no image penalty?

- Which cameras have (or not) plug-in power for using external mics? Good luck to find out.

Every review is the same topics over and over. Taking the X-S20 for example: no one mentioned that the Face / Eye AF is not only better, but is totaly different than before, you have to use is a very different way. No comparison between the penalties of using lower data bitrates - is 360mbps and 200mbps much different? Or 10-bit 4:2:2 and 10-bit 4:2:0 - I've discovered this is a HUGE topic for Windows users this week, because Nvidia cards only have decoders for 10 bit 4:2:0, you could have the best RTX 4xxx card and your 10 bit 4:2:2 footage will only decode using CPU; and only the newer Intels CPUs with iGpu have hardware decoders 10 bit 4:2:2.

Everything is very shallow. 

This is pretty much how us event shooters work to a T. 
With weddings especially, many folks like to think theirs is different and in some ways they are…but basically they are the same…
Couple get ready separately followed by ceremony followed by congrats, drink and nibbles followed by meal and talking and dancing.
When you have been to 800 of the things over 23 years in 15+ countries in every month and in every weather with many cultures and size ranging from 2 to 400…
People are indeed creatures of habit with little variety in reality!

I've shot long enough with small sensor, 8-bit rec709 camera's that I got used to "just try to get the recording as close as possible to what you want the final image to look like". So don't drop saturation and contrast to the bottom during recording, only to pull them up in post. This would only make sense if there is a lot of reserve DR in the highlights, and when you are working on a camera where you have to try these tricks, there never is.
Never use auto WB (or auto exposure) as this may make the colours and exposure shift during the shot which is very hard to correct afterwards. It's easier if they are off with a constant error, that's quite easy to fix as long as you are not too far off.
When using these cameras with limited DR I was quite fanatical with setting the whitebalance manually as these cameras tend to exaggerate differences in colour (and contrast). With mixed lighting, artificial light may seem fiercely red while daylight is fiercely blue at the same time. Now that I've got a camera with good DR (Lumix S5) I just set the WB to cloudy when outdoors and incandescent when indoors. Only when encountering weird artificial light (LED, fluorescent or sodium) I might set a custom white balance. Minor corrections might be required in post but nine out of ten times it looks perfectly natural to me. In daylight, shadows are slightly blue, sides exposed to direct sunlight are slightly yellow, just as it is in real life. Only when all image content is exposed to either shadow or sunlight and the shots are of considerable length I might adjust the WB to the specific light just like how my eyes (or brain actually) would adjust to the colour of the ambient light.
It is not so much direct advice that I got but when doing a course on making videos the most important thing I took from it is that people are more predictable then you might think which is especially useful when doing event videography. People are animals of habit and a lot of things we do are ritualized. This means you can always try to think ahead of what might happen next in the coming 10 seconds/minutes/hours and ask yourself what is the most interesting part about that, and how to best visualize that. The result of this is that you will find yourself more often in the right spot at the right time which is I think the most important quality of an event videographer. I remember once recording a wedding video for a friend (I'm not a professional videographer in any way) who also hired a photographer who was just starting out as a wedding photographer. Well, the photographer was actually just a colleague from work for whom this was a nice opportunity to build a portfolio to get started in the business. But I noticed that it happened several times that the photographer had to sprint to the spot where I was already waiting as he realized he was in the wrong spot for what was about to happen next. Always keep anticipating for what might happen, decide what the interesting aspect of that is, and how to best visualize that. You will not always get it right, but the number of times you get "lucky" will increase.
 

Another great bit of advice I got in my early days was to go study paintings.  Particularly Vermeer's and Caravaggio's.  
As an idiot that didn't understand what made a nice image work and a bad one fail, just analyzing and deconstructing the craft of painting helped a ton.  Absolutely brand-dead simple ideas like having your subject brighter than the background (contrast) confounded me as a newbie, but once I started seeing the techniques like that in practice I couldn't unsee it, and I got better.
Which is why I'm pretty camera agnostic these days.  There's so many fundamental techniques that need to be in place and exercised to create awesome images.  Grabbing the most expensive camera/lens doesn't accomplish that for you, it only assists.

Yes, I usually do that just to get decent looking 1080p when it's played, irrespective of the original source material.
In case anyone is interested, this is an example FFmpeg command line to process 4:3 PAL DV into 1440x1080p H.264 at 20Mbps using the Intel QSV encoder (command should be all on one line, input=PAL_DV.avi, output=PAL_DV_1080p.mp4):
ffmpeg.exe -i PAL_DV.avi -vf estdif,scale=1440x1080:flags=lanczos+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int+full_chroma_inp,unsharp -c:v h264_qsv -preset veryslow -b:v 20M -c:a aac -b:a 256k PAL_DV_1080p.mp4
 

I'm sorry for the small (wo)man getting crushed by this, but when you are working on a freelance basis, that's part of the deal and a foreseeable risk. You are essentially an entrepreneur with the risks that comes with it. If you find you can't strike and have effectively no leverage on your employer, you know that you are in a vulnerable position.
I'm not saying I'm fine with companies exploiting people by "outsourcing" all work from contracted employees to freelancers but it is a trend that is happening over the years and it is up to governments to re-balance the risk and reward between employers and employees through legislations. Because if we leave free market forces reign supreme, we either end up with an industry that is exploiting people, or an industry that can't get the people it needs because everyone becomes aware of it's practices and decides to pursuit their ambitions elsewhere, where less risk is involved. Sometimes something of a crisis is needed to make people aware and improve things.

I'm sorry for the small (wo)man getting crushed by this, but when you are working on a freelance basis, that's part of the deal and a foreseeable risk. You are essentially an entrepreneur with the risks that comes with it. If you find you can't strike and have effectively no leverage on your employer, you know that you are in a vulnerable position.
I'm not saying I'm fine with companies exploiting people by "outsourcing" all work from contracted employees to freelancers but it is a trend that is happening over the years and it is up to governments to re-balance the risk and reward between employers and employees through legislations. Because if we leave free market forces reign supreme, we either end up with an industry that is exploiting people, or an industry that can't get the people it needs because everyone becomes aware of it's practices and decides to pursuit their ambitions elsewhere, where less risk is involved. Sometimes something of a crisis is needed to make people aware and improve things.

I'm sorry for the small (wo)man getting crushed by this, but when you are working on a freelance basis, that's part of the deal and a foreseeable risk. You are essentially an entrepreneur with the risks that comes with it. If you find you can't strike and have effectively no leverage on your employer, you know that you are in a vulnerable position.
I'm not saying I'm fine with companies exploiting people by "outsourcing" all work from contracted employees to freelancers but it is a trend that is happening over the years and it is up to governments to re-balance the risk and reward between employers and employees through legislations. Because if we leave free market forces reign supreme, we either end up with an industry that is exploiting people, or an industry that can't get the people it needs because everyone becomes aware of it's practices and decides to pursuit their ambitions elsewhere, where less risk is involved. Sometimes something of a crisis is needed to make people aware and improve things.

1) colour
The sensor in cameras is a linear device, but does have a small influence in colour because each photo site has a filter on it (which is how red, green, and blue are detected separately) and the wavelengths of light that each colour detects are tuned by the manufacturer of the filter to give optimal characteristics, so this is a small influence in the colour science of the camera.
The sensor then just measures the light that hits each photo site and is completely Linear.  Therefore, all the colour science (except the filter on the sensor) is in the processor that turns the Linear output into whatever 709 or Log profile is written to the card.
2) DR
DR is limited by the dynamic range of the sensor, and of the noise levels, at the given ISO setting.  If a sensor has more DR or less noise then the overall image has more DR.
The processor can do noise reduction (spatial or temporal) and this can increase the DR of the resultant image.  The processor can also compress the DR of the image through the application of un-even contrast (eg crushing the highlights) or clipping the image (eg when saving JPG images rather than RAW stills) and this would decrease the DR.
3) Highlight rolloff
Sensors have nothing to do with highlight rolloff - when they reach their maximum levels they clip harder than an iPhone 4 on the surface of the sun.
All highlight rolloff is created by the processor when it takes the Linear readout from the sensor and applies the colour science to the image.
There is general confusion around these aspects and there is frequently talk of how one sensor or other has great highlight rolloff, which is factually incorrect.  I'm happy to discuss this further if you're curious.

For such occasions I actually just use the built in microphone of my S5 with a self-made mini wind-muff stuck on it using double-sided tape. For capturing ambient sound it is good enough and not much worse than an external omnidirectional microphone. I'm actually always a bit surprised by the quality of the microphones Panasonic puts in their cameras. This has also been true for their camcorders. You may tweak the frequency response to taste in post. Using a fairly low recording level so the auto-limiter doesn't need to kick in also helps.
In my experience, when you want to capture some specific sound like someone talking to camera, having a directional microphone on top of the camera is not helping much due to poor placement of the microphone. But if someone else has positive experiences I'm curious to know as well.