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kye

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Everything posted by kye

  1. I recently bought a new treadmill and was amazed that the high-end ones required a subscription model. I wouldn't be averse to buying a GX85 updated firmware, but to buy and re-buy the damned thing over and over again is ridiculous. Yet another reason to snap out of the specifications trance that everyone seems to be in and focus on making better videos, rather than making the same videos with better spec'd equipment.
  2. Welcome to doing video! Stills photography is so easy by comparison that comparing the two is almost impossible. I also came from taking RAW stills into doing video, so you're on a difficult but well-worn path. Of all of my advice, this is the most important... Don't believe anything you read - test as many things yourself as you can. I have done this over the years and I have routinely found that a third of what "everyone knows" is completely false, and another third on top of that is completely misunderstood. It shouldn't surprise anyone, but the misconceptions and outright lies will often push you in the direction of buying things that you don't actually need, and come from the manufacturers pushing very one-sided or suspect information and then it being "re-interpreted" by consumers who are too stupid or lazy or both to question it. Best of luck!
  3. kye

    Take the red pill...

    Indeed. It's a pity that reality doesn't fit in a sound-byte.
  4. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    No, TicoRAW is the brand name for an implementation of a particular compression algorithm. People don't really know this, and the manufacturers sure don't want to tell people, but there are only a few compression algorithms in use for video. Some manufacturers will tweak the algorithm to get better performance in some metrics, but it's still the same algorithm and still subject to the same limitations etc. This is from the page on the Discrete cosine transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform
  5. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    Ah, ok. I wonder what compression N-RAW is using.
  6. It's worth noting that this highlight clipping behaviour is a limitation with all LUTs, not just in this case. Increasingly, cameras are supporting "super-whites" which are values above 100%. My GX85 is one of them, and in my standard node tree I just have a curve with the white-point dropped down a bit to bring values back into range prior to all the subsequent adjustments, so I don't forget or accidentally clip anything that was available in the file SOOC.
  7. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    Assuming you're talking about h264 vs h265, the h265 is about the same quality as h264 but h265 only requires half the bitrate to accomplish that. The price is that h265 requires MUCH more processing power to encode and decode.
  8. I'll chime in with my usual advice about colour grading. The simple fact is that colour grading has a much more significant role in getting great looking images than the camera does. I'll also re-enforce the points above that what you point the camera at is more important than anything else. When we look at something shot on ARRI or RED or the high end Sony cameras, the reason they look great are 70% the scene, 25% the colour grading and 5% the camera. I know this is a bold statement, but I stand by it. Colour grading is the elephant in the room of all online discussions about cameras. Everyone is looking at sample videos and going "wow, this looks great - I want to get that look without doing any colour grading or work in post at all!" and it's just not true. If you need more convincing, here are a few things to look at: The BMPCC 4K can match the Alexa almost perfectly... So, why don't all P4K videos look as good as Netflix shows? It's not the camera! The image from the GX85 is more flexible in post than you think... @John Matthews I haven't forgotten about doing a follow-up with skin-tones in it. Simple colour grading > Camera colour science... I compare a few examples of the 709 version of some professional grade images with the final colour graded image, and it's pretty obvious that the 709 version looks quite plain - a lot like the images we get when us mere mortals shoot The best film-making advice I ever got was to do with colour grading, but it helped me improve my shooting, editing, sound design, etc etc, the whole lot. Here are a bunch of GX85 shots SOOC that I took in Korea last year.. this just goes to show you that not only is the GX85 a very capable camera, but that it's the subject that you put in front of it that really makes the difference. Of course, colour grading will elevate these beyond that level. High-end TV shows and movies look nothing like the standard images out of a camera... In this thread I compare some standard images from ARRI with real images from TV shows and movies and it's pretty obvious that not only are the colours significantly changed, the real images aren't sharp and clean like the videos that camera YT seems to idolise. The goal isn't technical purity, the goal is creativity, and this means taking your sharp and clean images and giving them some character. I could go on (many will wholeheartedly agree on this!) but long story short... the camera is a minor part of the journey that the image takes from finding / creating something cool to point it at, to all the work done in post. Also, learn to edit. Well edited bad-quality clips are better than boring high-quality images every time.
  9. kye

    Take the red pill...

    Just looking through some old threads and found this. Did anyone read it? Does anyone actually want to learn something? I wouldn't be surprised if not.. feel free to go back to blind capitalism discussing what camera to buy next 😂😂😂
  10. Gary W bought the GX850 when this thread was going strong, and he's just posted his 2 month review with it. He mostly takes stills so that's the focus of his review. TDLR; he really likes it and finds that it has an X-factor that he can't explain that makes him really enjoy using it. It's not going to replace his GX85, but it makes a great compliment to it.
  11. You'll have to overcome your modesty and post about it when it's released 🙂
  12. Best of luck! The ATEM models do seem to be great, especially considering the historic price of such things (which every review painstakingly explains to you at the start) but they do seem to be very "industry". ie, the answer to every question is to build a TV station and hire an army of people to do everything manually in the same way it was done in the 1980s. This is similar to when I ask a question to any pro who works in the studio system and their answer is to shoot my home videos how a studio shoots a feature film. When I look at the ATEM device, I see a few buttons that do a single thing, and a few buttons that run some hard-coded macros. Why there aren't buttons to run the user-defined macros until you buy the $1000 Extreme model is silly - the Mini has buttons I won't need, let alone the 500 buttons on the Extreme. What you really need are a few buttons where you can store and then recall configurations, so you can have Config 1 with HDMI 1 (showing yourself), and Config 2 with custom PiP settings (showing your slides with you in PiP with custom location etc), etc, then you could swap back and forth without having to punch a bunch of buttons each time to re-create the settings while also looking professional in front of your audience. The saving grace is that in the default setup you can swap from HDMI 1 (you) to HDM1 2 (the presentation) without looking, and then when you have to look down at the ATEM to find the stupid PiP button at least they can't see you fumbling around because you aren't currently visible. It's typical BM though. Like with the Speed Editor - the middle and largest section of the controller is for multi-cam only and can't be configured to do anything else. Anyway, rant over. Using an iPad to run the slides seems like an elegant solution. I find that when you're presenting to a group, you need two main things: To see what you're sharing to the group To see the people in the group For my day job I do this using MS Teams (the platform chosen by corporate) and having a triple monitor setup where I have the meeting on one screen and I share another screen, so I can just drag any window I want onto that monitor and it's shared. I share a lot of different things like Word documents, Excel sheets, web content, as well as Powerpoint, etc. Oddly, Powerpoint tries to be "smart" with Teams, and when you're in Teams and hit the Present button in Powerpoint they try to be clever and talk to each other but just screw everything up. My wife is just getting setup and her business hasn't gone live yet, but she'll be using Powerpoint and Zoom with a USB webcam, which our early tests show is a similar situation with them trying to be clever but screwing it up. I suspect the eventual setup will be a real camera and a laptop running Powerpoint going into the ATEM, then that plugged via USB into a second laptop that is running Zoom and controlling the call. The goal is to be able to fit the whole setup in a suitcase for travel, including camera / tripod / switcher / lights / stands / diffusers / etc, so we can operate from anywhere. The laptops would fly carry-on of course.
  13. Or even just the inclusion of their own RAW flavour perhaps, as that would have been much easier to copy straight across from the Z9?
  14. I watched a bunch of ATEM Mini reviews yesterday and it looks like that would be a great setup to upgrade to once we're up and running. A few minor questions, if you happen to know: If you enable picture-in-picture and have it so that the setting persists between inputs, and then switch to input 1 (the source of the PiP) does it give you input 1 with a PiP of input 1? or does it disable the PiP for that angle? and if it does disable it, does it re-enable it when you swap to another angle? Does it delay the audio inputs to match the audio delay on the HDMI inputs? Did it get upgraded to have a multi-screen view on the HDMI out? or is it still limited to either Program or Preview? Is there any way to run macros from the hardware device? Having a custom PiP would be great but the PiP buttons erase any custom settings apparently. Unfortunately the best reviews were the ones done when it came out, and they are obviously only of the initial firmware.
  15. I re-read this thread out of curiosity and I have to say that I think things have changed a little over the last 4 years - streamers seem to have gotten a bit more organised and are less likely to be fumbling around and having lots of dead time. I have also noticed that there are new approaches to streaming too. One I particularly enjoy is where the female streamers do a live review of the people that have been banned and then appealed, which is normally absolutely hilarious and also has no dead time, despite not requiring any preparation. Have people been doing a lot of live-streaming for clients etc? or themselves? My wife is just starting an online training business, so there will be lots of streaming in my future...
  16. +1 for having a consistent methodology. It might not be exactly what each person will get in their own setup, but it allows direct comparison between brands. The parallel is DR, which has so many nuances in testing that you can't compare measurements that come from different sources, making the data almost completely useless unless it's part of a large database all from the same source and methodology.
  17. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    This is true, but it is mostly offset by the increase in resolution. 1080p was ~2MP and I remember the data rates and processing requirements being huge at the time. Now we have 8K ~36MP and the data rates and processing requirements are huge for todays computers. It's tempting to say that we won't go past 8K and computers will keep up, but people have been saying this since 1080p and it's gone up 18X since then. The next shifts will be into VR, where you need to shoot in a huge amount more than your delivery resolution so I see no end in sight to the increases.
  18. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    Check the other threads.... they're still alive and well.
  19. Yeah, the ergonomics (and grip especially) on the XC10 was second to none.
  20. Greater resolution comes at the expense of every other spec.
  21. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    Announcements like this are just wonderful... All it took was a pair of press-releases and all of a sudden dozens of people with no training or experience instantly turn into patent attorneys and corporate lawyers specialising in mergers and acquisitions and market strategists etc, and not only that, they also instantly gained insider knowledge about market caps, sales figures, product strategies, etc, and just when you'd think that it couldn't get any better they also become R&D experts in both hardware and software design! With a shift so radical in capability, even the hardened skeptic must believe there is a higher power involved.
  22. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    Not always, but sadly it's hard to do. The challenge is that for synergies to emerge the management from the more powerful company needs to have the humility to recognise that they don't know all the answers and that there are better ways of doing things. Unfortunately, "not invented here" is a very common mindset and different is eradicated rather than celebrated.
  23. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    It's definitely cute, but I think it's probably not good. I couldn't find any reviews or sample images, so I suspect it might even be a low-res sensor that just upscales to 44M in software. It's probably the same sensor and firmware as those first generation 40+MP smartphones. If retro is in, then a bit of blur is part of the style, not a failure of lens design or MTF curves!
  24. kye

    Nikon buys Red?

    I've stopped trying to understand the younger generations in terms of tastes etc.. The other day we went out to a nearby community event and my daughter (20) came, and was rocking one of these: I couldn't find anything online about it other than online stores and Reddit comments telling people "you're in the wrong place - you have a digital camera".
  25. Thinking about this more after posting, and after going down a small and enjoyable rabbit hole of watching video of rock bands play live, I think the majority of the effort is getting good angles and then putting in the work in the edit. I think the camera work during recording is good when you've got lots of good roaming cameras, but you don't need them. If you were doing stills and just setup a bunch of static cameras and hit record, then took stills during the concert, then took all the static footage and edited it together, applying creative filters, cutting as much as the style of music permitted (cutting frenetically for a smooth jazz performance wouldn't work, for example..), and cropping with motion in post (push-in zooms, push-out, pans, and even cropping in on someone and following them like it was shot that way live), could all be combined into a decent end result, despite there being no active cameras during the concert. But, adding my usual disclaimer, time is money and that stuff all takes time, so if the budget doesn't permit it then that might be out of reach financially even if it's possible artistically and logistically. I keep thinking that it might be fun to edit music videos, but then I remember that would involve clients and deadlines, and then it doesn't sound like fun anymore!
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