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Got back from my trip and the GX85 had arrived! (In fact, it was delivered about 45 minutes after I left, but all good). To greet it, all the trendy MFT gear had a welcome party, including: GH5 GF3 OG BMPCC BMMCC 7.5mm F2 12-35mm F2 12.5mm F1.9 14mm F2.5 14-42mm kit zoom (not really trendy, but came as the BMPCCs +1) 15mm F8 (also not really trendy, but came as the BMPCCs +1) 17.5mm F0.95 42.5mm F0.95 Helios 58mm F2 on M42 0.71x Speedbooster An honourable mention that also couldn't attend is the 28mm F2.8 m42 lens I've just ordered as it's still in the UK, but I'm hoping that combined with the M42 SB it will make a great compliment to the Helios. The FD70-210mm F4 got drunk early, fell over and rolled away - lucky it's tough as nails! All audio equipment declined, being too finicky and claiming it didn't want to be seen with any "vintage" equipment. It mumbled something disdainful about poor quality but all I heard was "8-track". So many great combinations here, but the most notable ones are: Standard travel kit: GH5 + 7.5mm + 17.5mm + 42.5mm (FF - 15mm/35mm/85mm) Combined with the 1080p 10-bit 24fps and 60fps modes and the 2x digital zoom function, this setup can work pretty quickly and in almost any environment (two days ago I was shooting wide open in a cave in torchlight) Low-fi pocket setup: GF3 + 14mm (FF - 28mm) The only video mode is "auto everything" and so it features very short shutters (which stabilises wonderfully in post), softer image quality (which looks very cinematic!), nicer colours that it has any right to have, and with AFS it's easy to use and was, at one time, the fastest (mirrorless?) AF available. It's also shooting with a single prime, so comes with all the artistic integrity that that brings. Most anticipated setup: GX85 + 12.5mm + 28mm/SB + 58mm/SB (FF - 28mm/43mm/90mm) Small and not attention-seeking, but a stabilised set of fast vintage primes with nice 4K which can be cropped into in post if required. It's a very appealing thought to be able to look through the viewfinder and be recording gorgeous, dare I say "cinematic" images, but just look like a happy-snapping touristy dorky-dad. I should buy a sling bag to keep the lenses in and to sell the whole tourist thing. Minimalist "nice" setup: GX85 + 7.5mm + 12-35mm (FF - 17mm/26-77mm) Small and not attention-seeking, the 12-35 will be very fast to work with and can get almost every shot, and the 7.5mm can get those grand wides when required. Setup will also be very small, with just GX85 + 12-35mm + wrist-strap, and only 7.5mm lens and a couple of spare batteries in the pockets. Very streamlined! Potentially I could put my Tiffen BPM 1/8 on the end as well and get a bit of flaring in there too! Thinking of camera and lens combos makes me much more excited that it really should 🙂

OOPS!

In case anyone was curious about the GF3 frames that @mercer mentioned, here they are. SOOC: and here's the same three after being tweaked and put through a Kodak 250D / Kodak 2393 emulation: Those are all screen grabs from the GF3's whopping 17Mbps 1080p. Whopping! Nice looking screen grabs! In terms of your logic, I've tended to hang out with people who were computer engineers, computer scientists, applied electronics experts, etc, and they routinely adopted new technology based upon sound engineering principles and solid judgement. This, of course, meant that I have watched quite a bit of Betamax, and quite a bit of Laserdisc too. As time went on I became less technical myself and so I missed HD-DVD, and I never ran into a DVD-Audio player of any repute, but I did listen to a collection of SACDs on a $150K hifi system and with a single exception all were inferior to the CD version of the same recording. I'll take your vote for CD-I as a vote of confidence on your technical abilities any day - just because the marketing department voted against you isn't anything to be judged by!

I've heard War and Peace should do the trick, assuming she can hold it up for that long. Maybe get a book stand.

As usual your logic is impeccable. This is why it frustrates me that cameras often make you choose between a flat log profile, with it's noise and quantisation errors amplified in post, or a 709 profile with limited dynamic range. The XC10 was interesting in that it's standard profile didn't clip the highlights, just rolled them off rather heavily. Kind of like a HLG profile does with a hybrid 709 and log gamma - the secret was in the name... Who knew! In a sense you'd actually want a profile that was like film - linear in the middle and shoulders in the highlights and shadows, but also with a saturation curve that is maybe a log of saturation and boosted significantly, which would ensure no clipping occurred and would capture more subtleties in lower saturation areas and lose resolution in the higher saturation areas where less sensitive colour reproduction is fine. Then a colour profile / LUT could be used in post to reverse the saturation curve, or, you could just pull it down linearly and would end up nicely desaturating the strongest colours, which is an effect that I use quite a bit and have a power grade specifically for.

Absolutely - I'm right there with you. I think that family videography (at home or out and about) is as different and distinct a genre as basically anything else in film-making. Unfortunately, there is little around that takes it seriously, and there's almost no work publicly available so there's not much to reference either. That definitely applied to me. I was coming from a stills background where resolution and sharpness is a religion, and not to be even questioned! My first video experiences from ILC's were the ultra-soft 17Mbps GF3 video files and then the ultra-soft 1080p from my Canon 700D. Not knowing that these were both tremendously bad examples of 1080p, I assumed that I needed 4K and went all in with that, buying a 4K camera, new computer to play the files, and 4K monitor to view the footage on. If only I knew..... Steve Yedlin makes a comment in his resolution demo saying that when SD was the format having more resolution was absolutely the right goal. The problem was that we kept going.... I hadn't really considered the idea of how valuable my equipment is, but rather how noticeable it is, which is likely to predict the risk of theft, amongst other things such as your own behaviour. Thanks, that's useful. How is the 45-150mm lens? I've got a Canon FD 70-210/4, but it's older and designed for FF so isn't so sharp, and I'd wondered about getting a longer MFT zoom. Having OIS on top of IBIS would also be beneficial. I'm not that fussed about how fast it is as I'm not filming things far away in low light, and with the long focal length even a "slow" lens has good background separation. I have the SLR Magic 8mm but found it fiddly to use so upgraded to the 7.5mm F2 which is a really nice lens. If you end up selling your surplus lenses then I'd suggest considering that as an upgrade. I have the 12-35mm F2.8 so that might be a good match for the GX85 when it arrives.

That's why I called you out.

Yes, the promise of greener grass tempts us all from time to time! What were you filming and what lenses were you using? I have a vague memory of someone shooting with a compact camera and Voigtlander MFT primes - was this you? I'm keen to hear more about which lenses you were using and how you were using them? I think it depends on the quality of the in-camera processing. I've compared my GH5 in 5K vs 4K vs 1080p modes across a range of lenses and apertures and found that: In most tests the resolution of the lens (eg, when at wider apertures) or my (unreliable) ability to nail focus was the limiting factor I couldn't tell any difference in resolution between the 5K and 4K when put onto a 4K timeline (it's an unfair test but no-one watches 5K files so it's a real-world advantage) The differences between the 5/4K and the 1080p were only visible by pixel-peeping a single frame where there was no motion, but when viewed full-screen at a sensible viewing distance no differences were apparent, even on the clips where the pixel-peeping revealed differences Addition of almost imperceptible amount of sharpening in post easily overwhelmed any differences in resolution between the modes I'll likely be using the GX85 in the 4K mode to get the higher bitrate so it's a moot point for here, but an interesting technical side-note nonetheless. What are you shooting with it and what lenses are you using? I'm keen to hear how people are using these little cameras. I've been having an ongoing conversation with @mercer about the DSLR revolution and the promise vs reality of what technology has done for film-making. The view that I've come to is that: 35mm film cameras and film stock used to be hugely expensive and impractical, only studios could afford to make films, and the size/weight/loudness of the camera meant that films were managed like production-lines with specialised technicians in every role, and traditional "coverage" became the standard Super-16 film stock became good enough for cinema and cameras light enough to enable filming handheld in available light, which opened up film-making to those outside the studio system, and this spawned the French New Wave and the radical innovation that came with it The DSLR revolution happened, effectively providing the camera and unlimited film stock for free (compared to celluloid). People predicted that this would revolutionise cinema yet again, like the French New Wave had done. This didn't happen. At this point the camera / media had become a minor component of a feature film and it made no appreciable difference to the extraordinary logistics required to produce a quality piece of cinema - writing, production design, locations, art department, hair/makeup, cast, crew, grip, time in post, negotiating the maze of distribution, and challenge of monetising, etc. It did, however, create a revolution in video. Instead of the "Digital New Wave of Artistic Cinema" we got the "Digital Video Explosion", including Wedding Videography, Engagement Videography, Stealth Marriage Proposal Videography (bring your camo and long lenses!), Vlogs, Social Media "stories", memes, viral videos, "Influencer" as a profession, the sharing of a thousand trillion instances of someone saying "this video is sponsored by", and the sharing of one trillion instances of someone saying "burnout". I'm not really sure what the role of something like Dogme 21 would be. Curious to hear your thoughts though! Have you tried shooting slightly wider and stabilising in post? It dissociates the motion blur from the movement in the frame but for shots without much movement it can be quite effective. I've been shooting with my GF3 and 14mm lens. It has a rather soft 17Mbps 1080p image and is auto-everything so in bright light has short exposures and this no motion blur. However, when I stabilise the footage the combination of the wide lens and the low-resolution codec mean that it's indistinguishable from a properly shot clip as any motion blur would have been so small in the frame that it would have been obscured by the resolution anyway. To this end, the lower quality frees me to shoot more rough-and-ready and to process more heavily in post and "get away with it", so my inner camera nerd can just put IQ to one side and the creative parts of my can proceed unaffected. I'm planning on using mine with many of my vintage lenses, so I'm really looking forward to that. I have a strange fascination with vintage primes that I can't quite define, and TBH I don't actually understand. For example, I have a Voigtlander 42.5mm f0.95 lens, which actually has significant vintage-like qualities in vignetting edge softness and softening at wider apertures, BUT I still gravitate to the Helios / SB combination whenever I pass my lens collection. The Helios is inferior in basically every way to the Voigtlander, but there's something there that I can't explain. The entire principle of Go Shoot is that I can pick up the camera and whatever lens(es) I am curious about and go shoot some footage and then edit it up into a little project. I frequently use these opportunities for lens testing or other "research" purposes. I expect that will continue - and maybe even expand! I keep sharing screengrabs with some forum members from my GF3, which was released around the time of the GH2, and the feedback has been universally "that camera is so small/cheap that it almost doesn't deserve to have an image that nice come from it"! There is something enticing about getting great images from a cheap setup.

LOL.. You're pulling rank? Normally when someone does the old "Don't you know who I am" argument it means that talking about the subject isn't working so they try to regain credibility via other channels. Hilarious!

Yes, if you're convincing an athlete to wear something then it's a different story I guess. Although I could make the argument that you could get those shots with heavier cameras, it's just that the talent doesn't want to lol. But even then, your point just strengthens the better codec argument. If you can't get those shots with anything else then why don't these companies offer a nicer codec, considering they've cornered the market. For film-making the quality of GoPro / etc was so awful that RED made an entire product to replace them: https://ymcinema.com/2020/06/08/reds-baby-dragon-komodo-an-action-cinema-camera/

I'm not shooting the messenger - if a person opens their mouth and strange content comes out then questioning it isn't "shooting" anything, and your opinions are your own, so you're also not a "messenger". I routinely see dramatic contradictions in what you say, which you can frame as "filling the cup for both" but I see a lot of logical error and internal inconsistencies. Saying, for example, that you don't know of any differences between cinema and video cameras, and then when I take a good amount of time to list a number of them, replying with a dismissive "I know" comment. Well, either you do know what the differences are or you don't, but there is no "cup" that includes knowing something and also not knowing it at the same time. Or, at least, there isn't room in conversations about cameras, and these comments should be relegated to the philosophy forums where people can endlessly debate if cameras exist or if they don't, along with the entire world and each other. To try and return to the actual point, in terms of the BM cameras being divas, I'll grant that the IU is very nice to use, sure. I'll also grant that the P6K Pro is far more self-contained than the P6K or P4K. However, you still need to use an IR filter on them. You still need external media to get the high-resolution modes when shooting RAW. You still need a rig or OIS lenses to get relatively stable footage. If you are talking about the P6K and P4K, then there are huge additional challenges such as needing an external monitor in most situations, needing external power setups, etc. The S1, and cameras like it, do not have these challenges, and are much more self-contained. I can pick up my GH5, put in two SD cards, a battery (and a spare one in my pocket), put on a vintage prime lens, and then go out and shoot for an entire day, in the highest quality mode it allows (5K 10-bit 422 or 4K 10-bit 422 ALL-I) and get great footage. BUT, let's talk about the user experience. I haven't used a S1 or equivalent, but I'd imagine they have similar features to the GH5. I have my GH5 setup so that: C1 is: 1080p / 200Mbps / ALL-I / HLG 24p, A-mode, with 17.5mm / 42.5mm / 7.5mm as the present IBIS focal lengths C2 is: 1080p / 200Mbps / ALL-I / HLG 60p, A-mode, with 17.5mm / 42.5mm / 7.5mm as the present IBIS focal lengths C3 is: 1080p / 150Mbps / Long-GOP / Cine-D 120p, A-mode, with 135mm / 200mm / 42.5mm as the present IBIS focal lengths C4 is 4K / 150Mbps / Long-GOP / HLG 24p, A-mode, with 17.5mm / 42.5mm / 7.5mm as the present IBIS focal lengths C4 is 5K / 200Mbps? / Long-GOP / HLG 24p, M-mode, with 17.5mm / 42.5mm / 7.5mm as the present IBIS focal lengths I can change the frame rate, bitrate, codec type, and preset IBIS modes in under a second. I can do that and guarantee I'm not going to forget one and end up with a combination that doesn't make any sense. I can do that without even looking. Yes, I had to read the manual to learn how to do that. I realise that not everyone has the capacity to do such a thing, so if that's something that you're trying to avoid due to some sort of personal barrier then I sympathise, maybe you can get a friend to assist you with this. Luckily it only has to be set once and is then saved by the camera. Taking my comment about the "BM cameras" and reducing it down to one line, when it's obvious you haven't actually considered how these things get used in the field doesn't actually help these conversations, and worse, people who aren't experts and come here looking for help will mistakenly believe that your dismissing one-liners come from a place of wisdom and knowledge, when instead they come from a place of shallow consideration and having multiple opinions that disagree with each other set to random.

There's more to a camera than the user interface. The more posts I read from you the more I wonder if you're just trolling and missing the point on purpose....

I'd make sure a P4K / P6K would work better for what you do than an S1 - the S1 is likely to be a much more user-friendly camera than the BM cameras, which are basically divas. In terms of colour and image, nothing beats RAW, and nothing beats a colour matching scheme that works on RAW. In terms of @austinchimp comment around colour matching, I've found the GHa LUTs to be extremely finicky to use in practice, and they only really work when conditions are basically perfect. This is because they don't completely reverse the colour science back to what the sensor reads out, so some of the colour science in the Pana cameras remains. This is why there are two separate LUTs for different white balances. Alternatively, Juan Melara did some excellent work replicating ARRI RAW from an Alexa from the BM cameras, which works on the RAW from the P4K or P6K (they're different LUTs IIRC) which is likely to be a much more robust emulation of the colour. I can understand if you're not loving the texture of a compressed file, but if you're not getting good colour out of your S1 then I'd say you're expecting too much at your skill level. As a reality check, I'd suggest going and downloading a bunch of Alexa clips and grading them to see what they're like. Alexa footage looks great when shot by a serious pro and once a professional colourist has done their magic, but looking at the RAW footage taken in less-than-ideal situations is a great way to "add some perspective" about how much of a great image is the camera, and how much is the colourist. *hint - it's the colourist*

Very nice! I like the overall production - shots, editing, music, colour. It's hard to make a "silent" (no dialogue) edit but this is quite engaging. Walking is always a challenge. I find walking with a cup of water to be a good exercise, and if you're not allowed to spill anything, you can just have a bottle with some water in it and try to keep the surface calm. I find it's the moment that your foot hits the ground that sends the biggest shock through your body, which is what the "ninja walk" mostly concentrates on, a sort-of placing your foot and then rolling onto it instead of just putting it directly down with your weight at the same time. An alternative is to walk on your toes, which adds another joint into the cushioning process (the ankle). I've heard from runners that we're not meant to run on our heels, and certainly if you look at other animals and compare bones structure and contact points they are basically walking on their toes too. My approach for minimal run-n-gun (shooting with just camera and lens and nothing else - I wish there was a word for this) is to either shoot with 180 shutter and ND and try to be stable, or to expose with SS and stabilise in post. If you do the latter then there will be no motion blur when objects move, but also no blur when you walk as the short SS will create crisp frames and the stabilisation will arrange those crisp images so that one frame doesn't move that far from the previous one. It's a matter of taste and of situation and subject matter. If your subjects aren't moving much then there would be very little blur anyway, so it doesn't matter so much. The batteries for my GX85 arrived today, but the camera itself is remarkably close to the exact opposite side of the planet from me!

For those that use fixed NDs, I'm curious how you dial in the right exposure. What I mean is, the reason to use an ND at all is to have a set shutter speed for nicer motion / movement. Aesthetically there is a LARGE difference between, say, 180 shutter and 90 shutter, and 45 shutter is much closer aesthetically to no shutter than to 180. This means that you'll set your SS, then have to adjust exposure either in post, using ISO, or using Aperture. I'm thinking most codecs are ok to adjust <1 stops, so you could be using that to fine-tune, but that means that you're either changing the amount of noise / colour rendering by changing ISO away from base ISO, or you're adjusting aperture, which impacts your background defocusing. Are you carrying a set of 1 stop, 2 stop, 4 stop, and 8 stop NDs? If not, you'll have to work out what to adjust to fine-tune, and none of the other things come without a creative cost. If you are carrying a full set of fixed NDs, how fast do you find it is to adjust exposure when setting up a shot?

I've heard that anamorphics can vary the squeeze factor depending on where the object is in the frame, and perhaps also depending on focus distance (ie, focussing far or near). There are several ways to design an anamorphic lens and IIRC the better designs are also far larger / heavier / more expensive, so it's definitely a thing. Anything round should be a good reference - I'd suggest mucking around with your crystal ball and seeing how you go. If you find that it's giving you the lottery numbers then PM me - happy to share the profits of the idea I helped inspire!! Have you seen the excellent series on YT by Anamorphic On A Budget? Great Stuff.

Cherries are red, but not everything that is red is a cherry.

Totally agree about your comments that it's an "action" camera and that "action" is often best filmed with a fisheye. I've watched enough skateboarding / skiing / surfing videos to know that it's definitely the right tool for the job. The thing that bothers me about these cameras is that they don't have a way of turning down / off the ridiculous sharpening levels, or writing a higher bitrate / bit-depth. For example, offering an unsharpened 130Mbps 10-bit 4K in a straight log curve would be great. In terms of not getting that kind of footage any other way, it depends on what the situation is. Sure, if you want to get footage by attaching a camera to the brim of your hat then yeah, you're not getting that with any other camera, but you don't have to compromise size or weight that much before you can get spectacularly better footage. For example the BMMCC shoots 1080p RAW and is very small: or the ZCam E1, which is barely bigger than the GoPro: Both are MFT mounts and can take lenses of 7.5mm or 6mm (and some even wider if you dig far enough into C-mount history and industrial lenses) that offer seriously wide FOVs. The 7.5mm lens is FF equivalent to a 15mm on FF and is about the same as most GoPros. It's always a challenge of overheating vs features, and camera manufacturers have ALWAYS released cameras that work in some conditions and not others. It's funny that most cameras don't work for people in the hot countries but when the people in the cold countries in the northern hemisphere are effected then it's all tears and forum fist shaking! 😂😂😂

Cool footage. Have you dialled in the right squeeze factor? It looked a little stretched horizontally to me? A good way to do this is to take a shot of a billiard/pool ball, then make it perfectly round in post. That's not peak camera!! If you're on FB there's a group called "terrible blackmagic rigs"... there you will find examples of peak camera!

Ah, I didn't realise they'd previously said it would be this year. No problem from me about people talking about it. I guess I'm just over it when people talk like they're owed something by a manufacturer. Not sure if you're on the FB groups, but there are some people going absolutely mental - like Panasonic has just gone back on a promise to release hostages or something! There's a thing in psychology where the brain deals with loss differently than failure to gain.. ie, imagine you play a game with people where you toss a coin and if it's heads they get $1. There are two ways to do it. The first is where you show them the money, toss the coin, and give them the money if they win. The second is where you give the person the money, toss the coin, and they give the money back if they lose. These are treated VERY differently by the brain, the one where they held the money is a loss and the other isn't. The brain REALLY doesn't like to lose. People seem to act like the manufacturer has handed them the camera, so when it's not delivered, it's like they're reacting to a loss event. Personally, it's not real until it's real.

I wonder if there were photographers poised to shoot him when he crossed the finish line and handed over the SD card to the editor! Yes, there are a few advantages to modern technology like that. A camera attached to a device that runs Android that can control the camera and access the images would open up a whole new world of automation and image processing. Yeah, that makes sense. Muscle memory would mean that entering the code directly wouldn't be that onerous I guess. 😂😂😂

Two minutes sounds about right, and is truly impressive for an entire end-to-end media production pipeline. My (vague) memories were that the camera would push images to a nearby computer, which would then automatically sync those images to a remote server. The remote editors would have an automated process that would download the images from the remote server, then they'd colour (if required - as you say default profiles are useful) and perhaps crop, then either they or a social media person would write some copy, get it reviewed and approved by the social media manager and upload to social media. I recall that the process was rehearsed and everyone was in-place in preparation to ensure no delays occurred. I have (also vague) memories of a process where the "remote" editors were actually onsite but in a building somewhere else that had lots of internet connectivity, and would do the work from there. Anyway, the pipeline is very well thought-out and there weren't any things that came to mind that could improve things much. This, of course, is contrary to our experience with video where one look at an iPhone makes most cameras look archaic and like the people making them don't know about modern technology or care about the people that do! Maybe voice recognition might be a shortcut to tagging images? It's something you could do intuitively without taking your hands/eyes off the camera. Sometimes I wish that I was still taking still images instead of video. My little GF3 shoots 12MP RAW stills, my 700D has PDAF and Canon colours and the 24MP RAW stills look great. No choosing between things that no-one wants to give you all of simultaneously!

Cool to hear it's working for you, I would imagine that it would be quite flexible with those lenses. I shot a fair amount with the XC10 with it's 24-240mm equivalent lens, and the framing potential for quickly grabbing shots was really good. Interesting about the sound. I haven't heard any reviews of that yet, but I'm not worried. I find that for travel I'm typically interested in having location audio but typically keep it low and underneath music to give a sense of ambience rather than it being used for proper dialogue. I'm also relatively unfused about audio quality. Well, I've been playing with hifi for about 25 years and am actually super-critical of audio, so critical in fact that below a certain level of quality my brain simply turns that critical part off, kind of like how food critics wouldn't be critical of fast food in the same way they're critical of fine dining. So naturally, that makes all audio basically under that threshold and so I pretty much don't care. It's quite a useful thing actually 🙂

No, but has it been delayed? They didn't mention a release date before did they? or did I miss one?

Good stuff and makes sense. It's not as fast (exposure time to published time) as the method @BTM_Pix outlined (which I was guessing at) but would definitely work. Perfect! I genuinely had no knowledge of these features, but makes complete sense. I'd imagine that if you were doing time-critical things then the laptop you were sending the images to would be accessible to by on-site or remote editors who can then do final selects, grade the image, maybe write some blurb, and push out to social media. I'm reminded of an article from some important event (was it the 100m at the Olympics?) that showed how the photo of the winner crossing the finish line was published to social media some incredibly short time after the race had been run. I can't find the article now, but IIRC it was only minutes (or seconds?) from taking the photo for it to be shared on social media. The article was great as it described the whole process from camera to publication. I knew from reading that article that they'd be on top of it, as "first to publish" is a big deal sometimes. We sometimes get pretty irritable because the incumbents don't take video very seriously and aren't very innovative, so it's easy to lose sight of how cutting edge they are for their target customers, which are people like the photographers at the olympics etc.