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The irony is that family video isn't "JUST" anything. It's shooting uncontrolled scenes, in mixed and poor CRI lighting, with subjects in full-sun, with scenes involving direct sun and deep shadows, camera moving between interior and exterior, and compositions often include the sun in shot during sunrise and sunset but also need to render subjects. Subjects will often not be wearing make-up, will be tired or red with activity or sunburn, and aren't used to seeing themselves on video and may be sensitive about how they look, especially combined with non-flattering lighting and camera angles. The skillset required to edit and colour grade in post to mitigate these factors is likely to be absent in comparison to professional productions of all budgets. Family video is the single most technically difficult genre to shoot, bar none. .... and yet, the cameras to do it are the least capable of all types available.

Nice. The flexibility of a zoom for getting lots of interesting shots in a single location really is hard to beat - no other variable seems to make nearly as much difference. I'd assume it's the Kodak 500T and 2383 combination? This grade is quite accentuated. Do you / would you use the power grade on other work and give it a lighter touch? I recently came upon the 2014 Valvula Films Demo shared on CML which compares Arri Alexa XT, Sony F65 and Red Epic-X MX with real film scans (Vision3 200T 5213 and Vision3 250D 5207), and not only do they share the stills, but also a high-quality video file of the scenes with matching grade (1080p ~40Mbps) so you can see the motion and texture of the image. After watching all the YT film emulations which seem to only emulate 35mm from 1957 / 16mm from 1972 / 8mm film from 1986, I was surprised at how good the quality was. It's still unmistakably film, but it's waaaaaay better than you'd think.

I also noticed the differences because of the sharpness. There are three dimensions to images. 1) Colour and gamma Colour response and processing of it in post is sophisticated, almost everyone is aware of this, thousands of people are discussing this at any point in time. 2) Texture (sharpness, resolution, noise, etc) Tools for this are rudimentary in comparison, very few amateurs know anything beyond kindergarten-level "sharp=good" "in-camera sharpening = bad" statements, this is the current litmus test for knowing if someone has gotten serious about images yet. 3) Temporal aspects (how images depict movement) Tools for manipulating this are almost non-existent, discussions hardly ever get beyond frame-rate / shutter angle / in-camera NR / rolling-shutter, this is the current litmus test for if someone sees cameras as tools for creative expression or toys that have specifications. Ironically, the second and third aspects might be just as deep topics as the first, but the discussions are so focused on the first that with literally an hour of paying attention to the second or third categories in your NLE, a person could elevate their work well into emerging professional levels.

Cool edit - nice work! The grade is strong but doesn't break or have odd issues, which I see relatively regularly with these types of looks. The skin-tones also seemed really integrated but not over-done. What lenses did you use?

BMMCC has a fan and it was $995 only a few years ago when it went EOL. Plus it is like 30% of the size. The BM Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 is a current model, which is also $995, and tiny by comparison. It has been used for 24 hour races in ridiculous conditions and performed flawlessly. No excuses for overheating, except for significant/extreme weather and dust sealing requirements.

Ha.. Both of these are only available in the streaming platform we disabled literally a few days ago.

It's a subtle art for sure!

Ouch!

This is the trailer for the film - are the sections you're talking about in here? There are a few shots in here with lots of noise, but they're either a heavy film emulation or a video camera emulation, so are artistically relevant. and the other trailer doesn't have any noise I could see at all. Film Emulation is super hot right now, and heavy grain is a part of that. Both of these trailers look like they have considerable subtractive saturation, so that seems to align with film emulation.

Sounds expensive.

Feel the cinema!

I wonder about this too. A few mitigating factors come to mind: Lots of the worlds population lives in areas that don't exceed 33C for 28 minutes a year, so they're automatically in the clear Lots of the worlds population in warmer parts don't go out, especially adventuring, during the middle of the day, so those folks will only be bringing it out on those balmy evenings when it's cocktail hour (besides, golden hour is better for that glam lifestyle image) Lots of people who do experience overheating might experience it on holiday, and potentially not until some time has elapsed since purchase, which combined with apathy or warranty limits or social anxiety might just put it in a drawer or sell second hand rather than return it Lots of the more informed buyers would just avoid buying it in the first place, such as myself, simply because I want a tool to be reliable and it's worth something to me to have a camera that's 100% not going to overheat, rather than one that is almost 100% not going to overheat, even if in reality that might be twice a year It might be that these factors alone mean that the shops aren't overwhelmed. The violent outrage about such things, even from people who might not buy one, is useful to encourage manufacturers not to gradually slide into giving us cameras that overheat in 1 minute in temps over 12C. It also 'encourages' the very shop-keepers who might sell a thing like this to mention this during the sales process, and upsell the FX30, for example.

Absolutely. I once overheated an iPhone shooting in direct sun in probably 40-43C (104-110F), and considering that iPhones overheating is something that is practically unheard of, overheating is something I pay a lot of attention to.

This debate has been solved already by the art world when faced with what to do about forgeries. The answer, and I think what @Benjamin Hilton was potentially referring to, is provenance. The art world has established very clearly that humans value the original creative item, even if the forgeries are perfect and made by humans. The idea that the Mona Lisa will have no value because robots can just paint you a perfect replica, or can make their own portraits of women with ambiguous facial expressions is silly. I expect that a very large percentage of the content (and art) consumed will be from AI and robots, but I think that an authentic object will always have some extra value because it has the provenance, even when compared with an identical copy made by assembling individual atoms into a perfect replica.

There sure is.. and the music people are freaking out more than the film-making people.

Maturity level 1: specs are everything Maturity level 2: specs don't matter Maturity level 3: let's talk about specs in a nuanced way Let's try and elevate the discussion, shall we?

Seriously impressive stuff.. I wish the camera manufacturers were even remotely interested in incorporating this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, online all these bozos reduce the discussion to PDAF = GOOD / DFD = CDAF = BAD and so there is no knowledge or demand for it from consumers.

This is true, but you're forgetting the bigger picture. One of them: has intermittent subject-recognition failures occasionally focuses on the background instead of the subject focuses on the wrong part of the subject focuses on the wrong subject can be blinded by flares can be completely clueless when a new subject is introduced and is meant to be the new focus, etc and can track a subject for AF-C in the right conditions. The other: has intermittent subject-recognition failures occasionally focuses on the background instead of the subject focuses on the wrong part of the subject focuses on the wrong subject can be blinded by flares can be completely clueless when a new subject is introduced and is meant to be the new focus, etc and can't track a subject for AF-C in the right conditions Like I said several posts ago. Apart from the pulsing of DFD, by far the most common focus issues I see have nothing to do with that last bullet point, and are a variety of examples of PDAF systems having issues from the other bullet points. Only the other day did I see a beautiful slow-motion follow-shot of a model running and turning to smile at the camera and the golden light from the sunset behind her bathing the whole scene and then she just slightly went to one side and the AF-C quickly racked focus to the background and then back again when she moved closer to the middle of frame again. Shot ruined. A long conversation ensued about how to use it in the edit and cover up the AF failure. PDAF not for the win... not even slightly. I wonder if future devices will have a little fisheye camera on the back that does a facial recognition on the operator and detects a variety of facial movements and can map them to controls. This isn't about to happen any time soon, but maybe. In IT systems design the general idea is that you work out all the things that need to happen and then work out how to make the humans do the things that humans are better at, and the machine do the things that machines are better at. It might take a completely different approach, like having a button next to the focal ring of the lens that will engage AF and you can manually focus and when you're almost there just press the button in and it will do the rest to fine-tune and hold the focus. Maybe the button just finds the part of the frame closest to being in focus and chooses that, so no issues with it choosing the wrong thing.

Those examples are just how I described.. PDAF knows where to go and CDAF doesn't.. No new information here 🙂 But you're right, there are a great many things I don't understand... Cameras over 4K that aren't needed for VFX Seeing that high-end movies and TV shows have been softened using filters, vintage lenses, and softened in post, but then pixel peeping the sharpest lenses and highest resolution cameras Trying to compare cameras without discussing what they're being used for Making decisions on the aesthetic of an imaging system without considering the emotional impact it has on the viewer Not understanding that the purpose of an imaging system is having an emotional impact on the viewer People perpetuating myth after myth when each one can be easily proven to be false with a smartphone and an hour of work etc etc... I mean, I also don't understand why people insist on shooting interviews with a 135mm F0.8 lens, then blaming their AF mechanism for not being able to track the subject, but maybe secretly I'm the dull one when they are deliberately going for that "talking head in a sea of blurry confusion and it seems like I've been drugged and the background is growing and shrinking" aesthetic.

LiDAR really is the future isn't it! It's an interesting question, how to get the benefits of AF without losing the expression of MF. Some cameras have that thing where they look at where your eye is pointing in the EVF and can set that as the focus point, which is intuitive and great. I wonder if maybe we need a pressure sensor to press on where the harder you press the faster it moves the focus towards where you're looking. That way you could lift off for no focus changes, press slightly to really ease in, or press lightly-firmly-lightly to ease out of focus and then ease in again at the destination, capturing the need for focus adjustments that are not only smooth but faster or slower depending on context, and with all the precision of the computer in focusing on the eye and not eyelashes or nose.

It's like this: AF step 1: analyse the frame and choose a thing to focus on AF step 2: adjust the focus motor until that thing is in focus PDAF and CDAF are in step 2. The pulsing is a symptom of CDAF in step 2, because it goes back and forth looking for the point where the thing is least blurry. All the subject recognition such as person-AF, eye-AF, animal-eye-AF, etc are all part of step 1. I suspect that CDAF systems are using a lot of processor time to do the CDAF analysis, and that takes processor time away from the subject recognition that happens in step 1. This would explain why CDAF tends to move the focus point slower than PDAF. I suspect that if you had a dedicated processor for step 1 then the overall differences in performances would be greatly reduced, which would mean that the majority of issues are economics, not CDAF vs PDAF. Don't get me wrong, we should be choosing the best focus system, which is LiDAR > PDAF > CDAF, but saying that the differences in real use are CDAF vs PDAF is about as correct as saying that the differences between 13Mbps 4K on YT and 3Mbps 1080p on YT is because of the resolution difference.

In a contrast detect camera, the camera can tell how in or out of focus an area of the sensor is, but not which direction is more in focus (closer or further). In a phase detect camera, the camera CAN tell which direction is more in focus. A CDAF focus system picks a direction randomly (nearer or further), and goes the whole way looking for focus, and often it would pick the wrong way, and that's why that old P&S camera from 2010 would spend 3 seconds racking the whole focus range before zero-ing in on the focus, despite the fact it was only a little bit off. That's it. That's the ONLY difference between the two. What you are talking about is differences in the mechanism that CHOOSES what to focus on. A PDAF system can randomly choose to focus on the background just as easily as a CDAF system can - the PDAF system will just do it slightly more confidently because it knows exactly how to get there and roughly how far away it is. Apart from the Panasonic DFD pulsing issue (which is a side-effect of CDAF), I have not seen a focus error that was CDAF related in probably years. The issues with focus today are that it chooses to focus on the wrong thing, or on nothing at all. This has nothing to do with CDAF or PDAF. It's a whole other thing. Sure, PDAF cameras focus much better overall, but it's not the PDAF, it's something else in the AF implementation. CDAF and PDAF are a very minor part of the whole AF mechanism.

Absolutely. Priority 1 is getting the shot. Priority 2 is making the shot that you get a better one. You can't edit what you didn't capture.

I totally agree that BM cameras are really good for the small budget production / owner-operators - great image quality for modest investment. As soon as you get into the world where you're paying people minimum award wages then camera rental costs become insignificant and you're better off going with whatever the standard is for your genre (Alexa for narrative / studio, and Sony or Canon for doc work) either because the people that are involved will be familiar with them or that getting familiar with them would be a plus for getting chosen for larger projects.