Cosimo

I've learned a lot about film-making over the years, most of it came through discovery and experimentation, but the best film-making advice I ever got was this...  
See how much contrast and saturation you can add to your images
This probably sounds ridiculous to you, and I can understand why it would, but hear me out.  Not only is it deceptively simple, but it's hugely powerful, and will push you to develop lots of really important skills.
The advice came from a professional colourist on some colour grading forums after I'd asked about colour grading, and as I make happy holiday travel videos it seemed to be a logical but completely obvious piece of advice, but it stuck with me over the years.  The reason I say "over the years" is that the statement is deceptively simple and took me on a journey over many many years.  When I first tried it I failed miserably.  It's harder than it looks...  a lot harder.
The first thing it taught me was that I didn't know WTF I was doing with colour grading, and especially, colour management.
Here's a fun experiment - take a clip you've shot that looks awful and make it B&W.  It will get better.  Depending on how badly it was shot, potentially a lot better.
It took me years to work out colour management and how to deal with the cameras I have that aren't supported by any colour management profiles and where I had to do things myself.  I'm still on a learning curve with this, but I finally feel like I'm able to add as much contrast and saturation as I like without the images making me want to kill myself.  I recently learned how the colour profiles work within colour management pipelines and was surprised at how rudimentary they are - I'm now working on building my own.
The second thing it taught me was that all cameras are shit when you don't absolutely nail their sweet-spot, and sometimes that sweet-spot isn't large enough to go outside under virtually any conditions, and that sometimes that sweet spot doesn't actually exist in the real-world.
Here's another fun and scarily familiar experiment - take a shot from any camera and make it B&W.  It makes it way better doesn't it?  Actually, sometimes it's astonishing.  Here's a shot from one of the worst cameras I have ever used:

We're really only now just starting to get sub-$1000 cameras where you don't have to be super-gentle in pushing the image around without risking it turning to poop.  (Well, with a few notable exceptions anyway...  *cough* OG BMPCC *cough*).  Did you know that cinematographers do latitude tests of cinema cameras when they're released so they know how to expose it to get the best results?  These are cameras with the most amount of latitude available, frequently giving half-a-dozen stops of highlights and shadows, and they do tests to work out if they should bump up or push down the exposure by half a stop or more, because it matters.
Increasing the contrast and saturation shows all the problems with the compression artefacts, bit-depth, ISO noise, NR and sharpening, etc etc.  Really cranking these up is ruthless on all but the best cameras that money can buy.
Sure, these things are obvious and not newsworthy, but now the fun begins....
The third thing it taught me was to actually see images - not just looking at them but really seeing them.
I could look at an image from a movie or TV show and see that it looked good (or great), and I could definitely see that my images were a long way from either of those things, but I couldn't see why.  The act of adding contrast and saturation, to the point of breaking my images, forced me to pay attention to what was wrong and why it looked wrong.  Then I'd look at professional images and look at what they had.  Every so often you realise your images have THAT awful thing and the pro ones don't, and even less often you realise what they have instead.
I still feel like I'm at the beginning of my journey, but one thing I've noticed is that I'm seeing more in the images I look at.  I used to see only a few "orange and teal" looks (IIRC they were "blue-ish" "cyan-ish" and "green-ish" shadows) and now I see dozens or hundreds of variations.  I'm starting to contemplate why a film might have different hues from shot-to-shot, and I know enough to know that they could have matched them if they wanted to, so there's a deeper reason.
I'm noticing things in real-life too.  I am regularly surprised now by noticing what hues are present in the part of a sunset where the sky fades from magenta-orange to yellow and through an assortment of aqua-greens before getting to the blue shades.
The fourth thing it taught me was what high-end images actually look like.
This is something that I have spoken about before on these forums.  People make a video and talk about what is cinematic and my impression is completely and utter bewilderment - the images look NOTHING like the images that are actually shown in cinemas.  I wonder how people can watch the same stuff I'm watching and yet be so utterly blind.
The fifth thing it taught me was how to actually shoot.
Considering that all cameras have a very narrow sweet spot, you can't just wave the damned thing around and expect to fix it in post, you need to know what the subject of the shot is.  You need to know where to put them in the frame, where to put them in the dynamic range of the camera, how to move the camera, etc.  If you decide that you're going to film a violinist in a low-bitrate 8-bit codec with a flat log profile, and then expose for the sky behind them even though they're standing in shadow, and expect to be able to adjust for the fact they're lit by a 2-storey building with a bright-yellow facade, well... you're going to have a bad time.  Hypothetically, of course.  Cough cough.
The sixth thing it taught me is what knobs and buttons to push to get the results I want.
Good luck getting a good looking image if you don't know specifically why some images look good and others don't.  Even then, this still takes a long time to gradually build up a working knowledge of what the various techniques look like across a variety of situations.  I'm at the beginning of this journey.  On the colourist forums every year or so, someone will make a post that describes some combination of tools being used in some colour space that you've never heard of, and the seasoned pros with decades of experience all chime in with thank-you comments and various other reflections on how they would never have thought of doing that.  I spent 3 days analysing a one-sentence post once.  These are the sorts of things that professional colourists have worked out and are often part of their secret-sauce.
Examples.
I recently got organised, and I now have a project that contains a bunch of sample images of my own from various cameras, a bunch of sample images from various TV and movies that I've grabbed over the years, and all the template grades I have developed.  I have a set of nodes for each camera to convert them nicely to Davinci Wide Gamma, then a set of default nodes that I use to grade each image, and then a set of nodes that are applied to the whole project and convert to rec709.
Here's my first attempt at grading those images using the above grades I've developed.  (This contains NO LUTs either)

The creative brief for the grade was to push the contrast and saturation to give a "punchy" look, but without it looking over-the-top.  They're not graded to match, but they are graded to be context-specific, for example the images from Japan are cooler because it was very cold and the images from India were colourful but the pollution gave the sun a yellow/brown-tint, etc.
Would I push real projects this far?  Probably not, but the point is that I can push things this far (which is pretty far) without the images breaking or starting to look worse-for-wear.  This means that I can choose how heavy a look to apply - rather than being limited through lack of ability to get the look I want.
For reference, here are a couple of samples of the sample images I've collected for comparison.
Hollywood / Blockbuster style images:

More natural but still high-end images:

Perhaps the thing that strikes me most is (surprise surprise) the amount of contrast and saturation - it's nothing like the beige haze that passes for "cinematic" on YT these days.  
So, is that the limits of pushing things?  No!
Travel images and perhaps some of the most colourful - appropriate considering the emotions and excitement of adventures in exotic and far-off lands:

I can just imagine the creative brief for the images on the second half of the bottom row...  "Africa is a colourful place - make the images as colourful as the location!".


In closing, I will leave you with this.  I searched YT for "cinematic film" and took a few screen grabs.  Some of these are from the most lush and colourful places on earth, but..... Behold the beige dullness.  I can just imagine the creative brief for this one too: "make me wonder if you even converted it from log...."

 

@Brian Williams welcome to motioncam man, I find it very nice and I am skint like you. I cannot invest money into expensive cameras since I am not in this video business, so I am enjoying it as it is. Developers are working on this app to improve it and solve some of the bugs and is getting better and better, keep sharing your videos!

@Brian Williams welcome to motioncam man, I find it very nice and I am skint like you. I cannot invest money into expensive cameras since I am not in this video business, so I am enjoying it as it is. Developers are working on this app to improve it and solve some of the bugs and is getting better and better, keep sharing your videos!

Anyway...
Nice work, Brian. The sound of a lawn mower going over branches brings back many memories of my childhood.
I liked the quality and can really see the raw look, especially in your dog's hair.
Since I've exclusively shot raw video for years, I'm curious to hear how the post process is? I could see this being a great B-cam when I need to go incognito. Did you use the gyro function?

I'm confused as well... as someone who posts test shots, I understand what it's like to put yourself out there on a public forum. So I applaud anyone on this forum that is willing to share.
Since you post a lot of shots from your camera(s) of the week, I'd think you may have the same reservations and extend the same courtesy.
Truth is, I loved everything about Brian's post and despise almost everything about your reply...
It's a shame that with all of your money, you can't seem to afford common courtesy and manners.

Just a recent discovery. I think I still had an iPhone the last time I even thought about raw video on a phone, and there wasn’t a useable app anywhere at the time (esp. not on the iPhone, I assume there probably never will be). The closest I got was the iPhone 13 Pro with ProRes, but after dropping close to $2k for the 1TB version so that it could hold all that ProRes, I started to think it wasn’t worth the money, for what I was doing at least (which is filming my kids basically).
So I was kind of floored yesterday when I just happened to discover Motioncam, especially the fact that I could dust off my old T5 ssd and plug it into the phone to record straight to the ssd. Such a cheaper setup, and I’m getting 4K raw. I kind of thought I was giving up on mobile filmmaking when I went over to android, but I guess not!

@Brian Williams On the contrary..  Lots of interest, as expressed in this thread!
Smartphone sensors have enormous potential if we could just get all the ridiculous over-processing out of the way to get to the image.  I've developed a powergrade that matches my iPhone to my GX85 to suit the work I do, but RAW would be the far easier option, that's for sure!

Maybe this has been discussed before, (Or maybe people don't care about such things at this point in technology), but I just discovered this app for my Pixel 7 Pro called Motioncam Pro that can do C4K raw CDNG, and to an external SSD at that.
Again, maybe this app has been around for awhile and I'm late to the game, and I know its just a tiny sensor, but for someone broke like me, who can no longer afford my old GAS lifestyle, this is a pretty fun and cheap way to get back into the grueling fun of raw video.
The app can even export gyro data for use in Gyroflow, for stabilization.
Nothing too exciting here-
 

A 3d pop effect starts to show together with defocus characteristics of a real anamorphic lens. I can see a number of 2x anamorphic  purists jumping on this and saying that there is not enough oval defocus. The scope used is a custom 1.5x compression ratio . Flares to my eyes look much more natural than those artificial over coated lens on the market such as Ulanzi, moment and the like.
 

I'd give up resolution, viewfinder, any type of raw, photo capabilities. In my book the perfect camera would 14+ stops of real dynamic range, solid 4k up to 120fps, good IBIS, autofocus, ND filters... The only things that hits really close to all of that is the Sony FX6, but it's a bit out of what I can afford. Thinking of picking up a used FS7 one of these days as the prices come down

I would give up all three as long as DR remained in the 12-13 stop territory. 

We all have features we'd like to see on the next round of cameras, even if that feature is "the same but cheaper", but what features do the more modern cameras have that you would give up?  Some might question why we'd want to give anything up, but in general terms, every feature costs money to manufacture or design or do R&D, and many features require extra battery capacity, make the camera larger, make it less reliable, etc.
This is likely to be controversial, so please remember that we all use our cameras differently!
I'll go first, to set the stage / start the fight:
Resolution
I don't need 8K, or even 6K.  I'd be happy with a 5K sensor because it allows downsampling to 1080p even with a 2x digital crop.  All-else-being-equal, a 5K sensor would have better battery life, better rolling shutter, and better low-light performance than an 8K one.  I'd also be happy to give up any output modes greater than 4K, or even 1080p.
  Dynamic range
I don't need anything more than about 12 stops, in fact it creates issues in post when trying to "fit" the whole DR into a rec709 output file.  Also, the less DR the sensor has, the less stretched the codecs bit-depth is - 14 stops of DR requires a 12-bit log file to match the quality of fitting 12 stops of DR in a 10-bit log file.  This means that the 10-bit log profile on your 14 stop camera is only as good as a 12 stop camera was with a 8-bit log file, and I've had colour quantising issues with those in the past.
  External RAW
An external recorder (plus the cables, extra batteries, extra chargers, etc) is too large and heavy for me to basically ever use.  If no consumer cameras offered external RAW then they'd be forced to get off their a$$es and improve the internal codecs, offering things like All-I in all resolutions/framerates, as well as paying attention to things like how to change WB in post (there is no reason why compressed codecs can't be as flexible in post as RAW - it's only because they implemented crap codecs/profiles) - the Prores from the OG BMPCC is night-and-day better than the 10-bit log from other cameras.   ....and show me a single consumer camera that supports a 12-bit compressed codec - I don't know of a single one, yet they're all falling over themselves to give external RAW at firehose bitrates. What would you prefer you weren't paying for / carrying around?

Andrew posted on his twitter that Iphone 6s was really something colorwise and after that it became that color went downhills. You can check his og post yourself.
Loved the look of "Tangerine". That was shot on an even older iphone model 4, i think.
Motioncam app looks nice. Storage and other aspects are "a bit" of a hassle though.

I was quite excited when Apple introduced prores support, thinking that it would mean that images would be more organic and less digital-looking, but wow was I wrong - they were more processed than ever.  I think the truth is hiding partly behind that processing, where the RAW image from them would struggle in comparison.
I shot clips at night on my iPhone as well as other cameras, and I noticed that the wide angle camera on my iPhone was seriously bad after sunset - even for my own home video standards.  I did a low-light test and worked out that the iPhone 12 mini normal camera had about the same amount of noise as the GX85 at F2.8, but the iPhone wide camera was equivalent to the GX85 at F8!  and that was AFTER the iPhone processing, which would be way heavier than the GX85 which had NR set to -5.
Apple says that the wide camera is F2.4, so basically the GX85 has about a 3-stop noise advantage.  There are lots of situations where F8 isn't enough exposure.  
I'm not sure where we're at in terms of low light performance, but this article says that this Canon camera at ISO 4 million can detect single photons, so there is a definite limit to how large each photosite can be.  Of course, more MP = less light in each one.
In terms of my travels, I still prefer the GX85 to the iPhone when I can - being a dedicated camera it has lots of advantages over a smartphone.

The answer is motioncam.

Lots of them are, but as you brought it up, here are my impressions on the above:
It's still far too sharp to be convincing - I noticed this in the first few seconds of the video - TBH my first impression was "is this the before or after footage?"..  of course, once you see the before footage then it's obvious, but it didn't immediately look like film either The motion is still choppy with very short shutter speeds - this would require an VND which isn't so easy to attach to your phone I think that people have some sort of hangup about resolution these days and as such don't blur things enough.  For example, here are three closeups from the above video.
The original footage from the iPhone:

Their processed version:

A couple of examples from Catch Me If You Can, which was their reference film:



As you can see, their processed version is far better, but they didn't go far enough.
I've developed my own power grade to "de-awesome" the footage from my iPhone 12 Mini and detailed that process here, but here's a few example frames:





I'm not trying to emulate film, I'm just trying to make it match my GX85.  Here are a couple of GX85 shots SOOC/ungraded for comparison:


I haven't got the footage handy for the above shots, but here are a few before/afters on the iPhone from my latest project from South Korea.
iPhone SOOC:

iPhone Graded:

iPhone SOOC:

iPhone Graded:

iPhone SOOC:

iPhone Graded:

I'm happy with the results - they're somewhere in between the native iPhone look (which I've named "MAXIMUM AWESOME BRO BANGER FOR THE 'GRAM") and a vintage cinema look.  My goal was to make the camera neutral and disappear so that you don't think about it - neither great nor terrible.
Going back to Dehancer / Filmbox / Filmconvert / etc..  these are great plugins actually and I would recommend them to people if they want the look.  I didn't go with them because I wanted to build the skills myself, so essentially I'm doing it the hard way lol.
The only thing I'd really recommend is for people to actually look at real film in detail, rather than just playing with the knobs until it looks kind of what they think that film might have looked like the last time they looked which wasn't recently...  I keep banging on about it because it's obvious people have forgotten what it really looks like, or never knew in the first place.
And while they're actually looking at real examples of film, they should look at real examples of digital from Hollywood too - even those are far less sharp than people think.  The "cinematic" videos on YT are all so much sharper than anything being screened in cinemas that it's practically a joke, except the YT people aren't in on it.

Great post - I just wanted to add to this from a colour grading perspective.
I did a colour grading masterclass with Walter Volpatto, a hugely respected senior colourist at Company 3, and it changed my entire concept of how colour grading should be approached.
His basic concept was this:
You transform the cameras footage into the right colour space so it can be viewed, and apply any colour treatments that the Director has indicated (like replicating view LUTs or PFEs etc) - this is for the whole timeline You make a QC pass of the footage to make sure it's all good and perhaps even out any small irregularities (e.g if they picked up some outdoor shots and the light changed) At this stage you might develop a few look ideas in preparation for the first review with the Director Then you work with the Director to implement their vision The idea was that they would have likely shot everything with the lighting ratios and levels that they wanted, so all you have to do is transform it and then you can fine-tune from there.  Contrary to the BS process of grading each shot in sequence that YouTube colourists seem to follow, this process gives you a watchable film in a day or so.  Then you work on the overall look, then perhaps apply different variations on a location/scene basis, and then fine-tune particular shots if you have time.  He was absolutely clear that the job of the colourist was to simply help the Director get one step closer to realising their vision, the last thing you want to do as a colourist is to try and get noticed.
It really introduced me to the concept that they chose the camera package and lenses based on the look they wanted, then lit each scene according to the creative intent from the Director, and so the job of a colourist is to take the creativity that is encapsulated into the files and transform them in such a way that the overall rendering is faithful to what the Director and Cinematographer were thinking would happen to their footage after it had been shot.  Walter mentioned that you can literally colour grade a whole feature in under a week if that's how the Director likes to operate.
I have taken to this process in my own work now too.  I build a node tree that transforms the footage, and applies whatever specific look elements I want from each camera I shoot with, and then it's simply a matter of performing some overall adjustments to the look, and then fine-tuning each shot to make them blend together nicely.
In this way, I think that the process of getting things right up front probably hasn't changed much for a large percentage of productions.

More rainbow flarytails test 🙂 with Oneplus 8 pro + custom  anamorphic 1.5x scope.
I hope you like it and if not please leave your feedback.
Thanks!

A 3d pop effect starts to show together with defocus characteristics of a real anamorphic lens. I can see a number of 2x anamorphic  purists jumping on this and saying that there is not enough oval defocus. The scope used is a custom 1.5x compression ratio . Flares to my eyes look much more natural than those artificial over coated lens on the market such as Ulanzi, moment and the like.
 

A 3d pop effect starts to show together with defocus characteristics of a real anamorphic lens. I can see a number of 2x anamorphic  purists jumping on this and saying that there is not enough oval defocus. The scope used is a custom 1.5x compression ratio . Flares to my eyes look much more natural than those artificial over coated lens on the market such as Ulanzi, moment and the like.
 

A 3d pop effect starts to show together with defocus characteristics of a real anamorphic lens. I can see a number of 2x anamorphic  purists jumping on this and saying that there is not enough oval defocus. The scope used is a custom 1.5x compression ratio . Flares to my eyes look much more natural than those artificial over coated lens on the market such as Ulanzi, moment and the like.
 

A 3d pop effect starts to show together with defocus characteristics of a real anamorphic lens. I can see a number of 2x anamorphic  purists jumping on this and saying that there is not enough oval defocus. The scope used is a custom 1.5x compression ratio . Flares to my eyes look much more natural than those artificial over coated lens on the market such as Ulanzi, moment and the like.
 

Quick test with OPPO A54 5G raw 10 4000x1680

gem. bump:) reread a bit. didnt understand much of the techincalities. still fascinated. beautiful stuff. thanks for posting this back then! @Cosimo

Hello Vladimir, so glad you made one 1.6X scope, looks good man!