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H254/h265 files are always difficult to deal with, but if you can adapt your work flow to rendering proxies then things get way easier to manage. I do understand that they don't work for jobs where you have to turn around an edit asap though.

I'm not sure about the Sony, but on the GH5 the focus peaking is only calculated on the screen/EVF resolution, not on the full-resolution image being filmed. I've found this a real limitation and one of the reasons that MF is easier with the EVF than the screen, as it has a higher resolution than the screen. I never thought about it before, but in that sense, extra resolution is useful for MF.

One of the challenges is that YT videos aren't just sample footage. They can be technique-related instead of equipment related, or can be centred around camera rigs or lighting equipment etc. It's always tricky to keep a balance of having too many videos that aren't of much interest vs not posting links to anything even if it would be useful and on-topic. The platform rewards clickbait titles and thumbnails so searching YT itself for information can be frustrating, whereas if a video is recommended to you by a human being then it's more likely to be worthwhile. I watch a lot of videos and only post the ones that I find truly useful or interesting, and even then I try and add some commentary about why I've posted it and why it might be useful for someone else to watch.

Same with me. Although I certainly do appreciate the quality of the equipment-related blog articles.

I agree that AI could doo a reasonable job of it if implemented well. I have wondered why there aren't more tools that fix issues in footage like this, but you're right that we've come a long way, and what's yet to come will dwarf everything still!

One challenge would be how to fill the frame. If you straighten the lines (from this //////// to this ||||||||) then the problem is that you have to crop off the sides a bit (see diagram #2) Then you'll either get black bars on the sides, or you'd have to crop in, but if it just cropped in and out based on horizontal movement then that would be very strange. If you were doing it in post with accelerometer data then you could make good decisions about cropping and other things, so maybe that's the better approach - to save the accelerometer data in the footage then process it afterwards.

I'd be happy to pay a small membership fee, and I agree it might keep out some of the people only around to create drama. The subforums aren't frequented as much as the main page, but maybe if you created more of them then they'd become more of a thing? We have pinned threads for things like the P4K / GH5 / etc and putting those into subforums would help as it means you can have separate threads for various aspects of those cameras rather than the questions and discussions all being mixed up. One idea that might make the knowledge in the forums more available (and therefore valuable) is to let the first post in each thread remain editable indefinitely. This would allow the original author (OP) to add links to posts further on in the thread of particular usefulness, kind of like a contents page. I've seen that work on other forums and I think it could work well. This would also give the OP a sense of ownership and even encourage a little bit of OP moderation, which doesn't seem to exist much as the OP is simply the first person to post and doesn't have any kind of different permissions on a given thread. If people are pimping their wares then why not build on the paid membership concept and have sponsors who then get their own subforum? It then benefits both the site and them, and it makes it clear that the content in that subforum is specifically for a paid user and kind of makes it more 'official'. They might also direct more traffic here if they use it for their own product support and link from their product websites. Portfolios and showing work is a very interesting idea. I recently saw a YT video for a site for colour grading that was in beta and I followed the link to have a look and it required you register and required a website or showreel, which as an amateur I don't have. Thing is, it got me thinking that maybe I should create one, not to pretend to be a pro or anything, but just because it is a challenge and a learning experience. I don't know if requiring people to have one would block too many people who can't / won't show their footage or that it might be too much work to prepare something, but if you did then it would certainly make people more 'real' and raise the barrier to people who don't create but just want to criticise. Hope this is useful

Great news @Andrew Reid - the community you have built is valuable (and the knowledge accumulated useful) that it would be a shame for it to be lost. Let us know how we can help make it better..

reddit? I'm not really sure what forum-style platforms are around these days. Yahoo Groups came to mind, but that's probably been closed for a decade or something, and just shows my age!

Has anyone used Telegram? I haven't. Something that supports longer posts would be good - super short messages don't make it easy to have deeper discussions. It would be great if we could find a place to move our discussions to, rather than get scattered to the wind.

All the best Andrew. I've actually owned a forum in the past and understand the amount of work involved, so thanks for that. I suspect you see me as one of the idiots, and that's unfortunate. I've learned a great deal on here, and although my sometimes passionate prodding of others has unearthed new information beyond the surface stuff, it can also be challenging, so apologies. I tried to contribute original content and link to content I found genuinely useful myself, so hopefully that went some way to balancing things out. I hope you are able to get back to a more positive mindset - life is too short to be miserable.

To be clear, I'd suggest the vast vast majority are good natured team players. It seems that there are a select few who have talent so significant that they are tolerated in the industry, perhaps finding a small cohort that can stand to work with them. In many other industries it doesn't matter how good you are, there are levels of attitude problem that mean you can't really operate in any meaningful way at all.

I agree. Correlation isn't causation, but I do suspect that quite a few on here are also higher-level pros of some kind or other who care about their reputation. I'm not a film-making professional, but everything online is potential fodder for a background search when applying for work, so there is that. Of course, I've noticed that the film-making industry seems to be relatively tolerant of people who simply can't get along with others, whereas they'd have a much harder time in some other industries where things are more about getting along with people rather than your talent eclipsing your attitude problems. For example I can't imagine how Werner Herzog would go in the forums!

Interesting. The liftgammagain.com forums are real names only and are very civil. Other sites even require you to submit a profile and/or folio of work before you can join. It's an interesting idea, and anything that raises the level is worth a try. I'd support it.

The lensrental blog talks about how some modern lenses (including my MFT Voigtlanders) are built in such a way that they can't be serviced. I'd imagine its likely to be things like glueing instead of screwing things together etc. In a sense, almost everything is repairable, but the thing working against that is the cost of labour. When you buy a $1500 lens and it breaks, if its going to take 30 hours of labour to take it apart, diagnose the issue, order spare parts, re-assemble, test everything and measure the optics, and send it back to you, and they're charging $50 p/h then you just paid the cost of a new one in labour alone. You can argue that the one serviced by the technician might be better aligned and setup than one out of a factory, but in high quality manufacturing environments the equipment may be so specialised that its hard to replicate the things manually. For example machines might have special tools that can exert huge forces onto a part but do it accurately and do it without leaving marks because the tool shape is exactly the same shape as the surface they're pushing onto. There's a big push in places like the US for "Right to repair" legislation because you buy a huge $250k tractor and it develops a fault and in order to diagnose it you have to call out a licensed service technician because the computer port requires proprietary software and is encrypted to stop you fooling with it. So instead of you being able to diagnose and fix the tractor in the middle of the field in an afternoon you have to wait, pay a call-out fee, then have the tech spend 2 minutes working out that a sensor needs to be replaced and another 5 minutes fixing it.