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For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference. There are no numbers to look up and understand things from. It applies to the equipment: Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available). Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time. If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc. If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image. It's literally what they're designed to do. How much do they do this though? Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc. It applies to the look we're creating: Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution". How much is desired? What are the references? I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including: My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4. How soft is it though? Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want! I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things. Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help. My solution is to reference things back to film. I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film. This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful. 8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema. My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways... Texture, which is what I've talked about so far: - I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between) - I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference. These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related. Dynamic Range and Contrast: - How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process? - What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s? or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period? Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets. Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution. When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense. What else? Image stability is another one. 8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look. Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others. Depth of field is another one. Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand. There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me. The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in. Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like: The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm. I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe. The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens. Any other combo doesn't make sense. (This is an actual example I've worked out through testing). The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments. This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes. (This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work) iPhone? Where does it sit in all this? It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance. GH7. What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting). What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic. I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.

There's a realisation I keep hitting in my setups, despite me trying to keep a small kit. It goes like this: Start with a small camera body Think about the lenses I'd use with it for that project Think about the shooting style and approach and think about extra rigging and accessories that would require ----<realisation occurs>---- If the setup is going to be that big - why not use a larger body with better features / quality I'm having that realisation with this GoPro. Not that there's a ton of small bodies with 10-bit recording, which we've all complained about at great length, but just having a camera body with more than 3 buttons and a screen that is larger than a postage stamp etc is actually quite useful.

I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective. “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” - Saint Francis of Assisi I'm 100% for not gatekeeping. Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.

Luc Forsyth likes it, or what he saw at NAB anyway. This is a setup they had with a broadcast servo-zoom lens on it. His comments (link with timestamp) He's worked on the survival show Alone for a few seasons and they use dozens of GoPros, but the footage always looks like it came from a GoPro This new model with a proper lens attached looked like footage from a real camera The broadcast zoom setup (with a phone as a monitor) handled like a proper camera He doesn't use AF when rigging cameras to vehicles etc most of the time so the lack of AF doesn't bother him in that context

I think it's a loss for us, as he was doing independent testing of things that no-one else was, like DR, and commenting on various combinations of modes and features, especially which combinations of modes and features couldn't work together. This is all information that the other people don't bother with because their 'reviews' are really just product showcases or first-looks. As much as the camera journalism and independent review ecosystem is in a sorry state, it just got worse.

Great write up and thanks for making the effort. I can see that shooting the Alexa with a neutral / clean lens with deeper DOF and crushing the whites / blacks and it not having carefully sculpted lighting etc would mean it would be an easier act to follow for MFT. As I see it, the limitations of the GH5 compared to the Alexa would be the colour science on skin tones etc, DR, and shallower DOF with character lenses.. most of which weren't significant in how it was shot. I have no experience with an Alexa but I've heard that it's a two/three person camera and that operating it solo is difficult. When I think about things like that, combined with the weight and form factor, I can really understand how limiting it would be to operate compared to how fast the GH5 etc are. I do have some idea about coverage and how incredibly demanding actual "real" productions are. When I analysed Parts Unknown and saw the quantity and quality of shots required for a 40 minute episode I was blown away. Most shots were professional but not incredible, but there were something like 1000 of them in each finished episode. Which they manage to get in something like 5 days on location. I suspect the speed and flexibility difference between the Alexa and GH5 is really a microcosm of the DSLR Revolution. Sure, some of that would be shooting style from the operators and some would be camera choice (ARRI made the Amira for being much more portable/faster) but even between an Amira and GH5, if the goal was getting as much acceptable quality coverage as quickly as possible then the lighter camera has the edge for sure. Pair it with one of those tripods where a single mechanism releases all the joints simultaneously and you'd be able to really cover a scene very quickly. I remember doing a graphic design course back in the day and they said that you can use whatever stock images you like for your projects, and as long as they don't actually clash with the theme of your project then no-one will notice. Since hearing this I have paid attention to such things and it's definitely true - the graphics really don't have to be related at all. I suspect b-roll is partly like this too, as long as you have someone talking and include things that are vaguely related to the subject then it'll work like forgettable eye candy to keep the viewers attention. The Kuleshov Effect is working in your favour for sure. I love the quote "kids love colour and motion" which I think was from a movie and used very sarcastically, but I suspect some of the purpose of b-roll is just to keep that part of our brain from getting bored while we're listening to the person say the thing. Of course, there is an art to it for sure and talented people will be shooting and making edits that create magic by being a lot more than the sum of their parts. Great to hear you were able to navigate the politics and that the end result was a success in the eyes of the boss. Going back to the ARRI takeover and strategy, the fact that ARRI created the Alexa Mini as a 'special use' camera and then everyone switched to it for the whole production says (to me at least) there's a demand for smaller camera packages. It would be amazing if the new management didn't realise this and see what they can do with smaller bodies still. I'm sure ARRI would have a good idea about sales figures for things like the RED Komodo and Komodo-X etc, which are very small, which must further emphasise the demand for smaller packages. I understand that cinema cameras potentially do things like heat/cool the sensor so it's at the optimum temperature and this requires size/weight for the mechanisms and also significant battery power too, so maybe making things smaller is more difficult than we'd imagine. I like to point out to people that the GH7 has a lot more stuff in it than the smaller cameras people compare it to (IBIS, cooling, internal RAW, etc), but in this case we're comparing mirrorless cameras with cameras that literally have heaters in them, so it's not a straight comparison by a long shot.

Fascinating, and reassuring too. This is why I concentrated on colour grading - the hardware was good enough and the gap was squarely with me. Can you shed any light on what colour grading / image processing was done to get an acceptable match? Was there any particular way you shot with the GH5, or lenses etc you used in order to get it to match? I would think (if it was me) that going out shooting with a GH5 knowing it would have to be intercut with Alexa footage would trigger lots of thinking about how to best go about it so it would be good enough.

It's an interesting update for sure. While I find the upgrading process to be too much of a PITA to upgrade unless there's a killer feature in the next version I really want to use, there are a few things in there that are interesting from an AI perspective. The first is the AI Face tools, with AI Face Reshaper & AI Face Age Transformer. This is interesting because it shows their ability to track and understand faces is vastly improved from the previous generation of Face Refinement tool, which was obviously designed to have very soft masks because their tracking wasn't that great. I did an excellent course in Beauty Retouching which used Resolve and basically you apply different treatments to each area of the face as each has a different tone/colour/texture and you had to mask each one manually yourself. The ultimate would be for the AI face tools to detect the face and output a mask for each area of the face, automating the masking/tracking. The second is the Adjust Focus with AI CineFocus, which simulates a shallower DOF, and is a combination of a blur plugin with their depth map plugin. When the depth map plugin came out I tried it on some deep DOF shots to see how it did, and the results were worse than the iPhone 'cinematic mode' with the edges being a very obvious blurry transition, and you couldn't apply anything more than a barely perceptible blur before the edges ruined the shot. The fact this is now an integrated plugin means it's gotten better to the point they're willing to put it forward for this application. It's probably still a long way from blurring the background but keeping each hair on the subject in-focus, but it shows increased confidence. I know they are also doing tonnes of little things in the background too. I went through a phase of posting to the BM forums and suggesting features as I came upon things that annoyed me, and to my amusement I had professional colourists (including from Company3) reply and say they've been suggesting the same improvements to BM for year after year, and I notice that a number of these have gotten fixed in the last few versions. Still, there are gaps in the things I'd really like. One is the stabilisation, which can't handle any kind of shot that isn't perfectly rectilinear, and has no support for removing rolling shutter etc. This is possible, and I went down a deep dive at one point some years ago looking for a solution and there was a product that did it flawlessly, but the product was in the thousands-of-dollars price range so wasn't worth it for me. The stabilisation also lacks the ability to stabilise the tilt/pan/roll/zoom in different amounts. If I shoot with the BMMCC and an OIS lens for example, the lens stabilises the tilt/pan quite well but has zero roll stabilisation. I'd like to stabilise the roll almost to 100% to keep it almost perfectly fixed, while also stabilising the tilt/pan maybe 40% just to smooth off the rough edges. This isn't possible, except if I build something in Fusion, which apart from forcing me to learn Fusion, also requires I go into the Fusion window to track the shots as well, I can't build a custom OFX and then apply it in the Edit or Colour page. I don't know why BM didn't just make the stabilisation occur in a node, that way you could just apply it several times however you wanted, but it's a 'special' thing that happens once in the image pipeline, and once only. My biggest wish for Resolve 22 is lens emulation. Like the Face and CineFocus tools, the lens emulation ingredients are all there if you combine them yourself manually, but integrating them into one plugin would be pretty sweet!

CineD posted this interview. I haven't watched it yet, as I'm not exactly in the market for an ARRI anything, but I'd be curious to know if there are any plans in there to go for smaller cameras.. With MFT bodies getting larger and larger and ARRI bodies getting smaller, maybe we're at the point where they will meet!

Yeah, agree with you, and you should have fun with your lens choices - some cool stuff in there. One thing you might have fun with is matching the 9mm PanaLeica to your less clinical lenses, I have the 9mm and it's incredibly sharp - my sharpest lens by a long shot I think. Just remember, amateurs ask "what is the best way to sharpen your footage?" and the pros reply "actually, I soften the image on most projects I grade". I find the GH7 to be almost invisible, which seems bizarre when you consider the size and weight of it, but it's true. With my AF zoom lenses I find a composition by eye, raise the camera, adjust the screen if required, adjust the zoom, hit the AF-ON for it to focus, check the histogram to make sure exposure is good and adjust vND or ISO if required, then hit record. With manual lenses I do the same thing but normally hit record then manually focus the lens. In situations where the light isn't that variable, it's just a matter of vND -> hit record -> focus. It's like the camera is just a screen and a record start/stop button on it, and the rest of the action happens on the lens and in front of the camera. The experience is more like I'm operating a lens rather than operating a camera. People talk about how complicated the menus are in this camera or that camera and TBH I don't really know what they're talking about. You buy a camera, work out what modes you might be interested in, test them, then choose which mode you'll use and save that to a profile, and from that point on the camera is essentially a box where you only adjust something once in a blue moon. The reviewers act like you're taking one shot in 48p 5.7K Prores HQ V-LOG and the next in 23.976p 1080p h264 HLG and the next in 30p C4K h265 in Sepia or some BS. Quick - the bride is about to walk down the aisle - change settings! Why can't I assign the shadow slider in the picture profile menu to a hot button?!? It would save me so much grief!!

What are you shooting and what lenses are you contemplating? I can't recall what your other normal equipment is, but MFT opens up a Pandoras Box whole world of possibilities with adapters etc too (if you don't need AF) so that can be fun too. I've been shooting street video at night with two combos that work incredibly well.. the first is my 42.5mm F0.95 with the Sirui 1.25x anamorphic adapter on the front, making it an equivalent of 68mm F1.5 and creating beautiful rendering wide open, but the combo is 1.3kg / 46oz so I also got a Takumar 50mm F1.4 on a speed booster, which is equivalent to a 71mm F2.0, which is much more vintage but is tiny and almost a full 1kg lighter. I'm contemplating a native 35mm F0.95 or F1.4 to replace both and have a less vintage but still lightweight for travel shooting. I also rock the 14-140mm for day shooting while travelling, and in brighter places the 12-35mm F2.8 is pretty hard to beat. So many great lenses. If you don't need crazy DOF then MFT is a great option, even with the larger body sizes.

I have used several c-mount lenses on my GX85/GH5/GH7 cameras without incident, along with many others on these forums. I have the right adapter that goes in a bit further and gives infinity focus, so there should be enough room. I can't speak for other adapters or OM1 cameras, but it's definitely possible with the MFT flange distances.

Getting good affordable 960p would be cool for lots of people. I see the science explainer channels showing bad quality 960p and the richer channels with Chronos setups. Don't get me wrong about them not being cameras that appeal to a large number of people. They're very good for getting the new "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME AND WIDE AND SMOOTH AND DEFINITELY SHARP SHARP SHARP!!!!" style of video that looks more like video than anything ever made before, but as soon as they say it's a cinema camera, there are 27 things they have to change from every other model ever made, and to bet they'll get every single one of them right is a very long shot indeed.

Well WTF - turns out "1 inch sensor" is marketing BS and it's actually 13.2mm wide, making the crop factor 2.73x, and only just a touch larger than Super 16 which is 2.88x. Source Lots of MFT glass and also lots of c-mount options too as already suggested. Ironically, with the lack of electronic contacts you can't control the aperture on most modern MFT lenses, so much of the sharpest glass will be unavailable (making the 8K sensor spec rather redundant!). However getting shallow DOF will probably be more difficult, especially as we have no idea what kind of focus assists it will have, so stopping down might be the best move (focus wide open then stop down to eliminate any slight errors) and that will sharpen up older / lesser lenses. This might end up being the mythical tiny S16 cinema beast that people have wanted (or said they wanted!). It's much smaller than even the BMMCC and that's before you realise the BMMCC doesn't have a screen so you have to rig it up to use it. I am still skeptical though - there's lots of stuff we still don't know about and given GoPros history I have complete faith that they'll include at least one fundamental fatal flaw that will prevent this.