kye

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.

The pixels all look terrible, but you can capture so many of them per frame, with so many frames per second, from such a small size and in such a convenient way! All you can eat gravel is still eating gravel.

Strange questions. Why no nuance? I've bought cameras and lenses new because they were just released, or because there wasn't much discount, or because the risk of something being damaged in a non-obvious way was higher and maybe I wouldn't know until I got it or maybe I wouldn't know until it proved unreliable, or because I didn't have time to wait for a deal and shipping before I needed them. I've bought cameras and lenses second-hand because they ceased manufacture before I was born, because they're not made any more, because buying them was quite safe, because there was a significant discount from new, or because they weren't worth it for the value I would get from them if I paid new prices, or because I knew and trusted the person selling and shipping them to me. It depends heavily on what you're buying. My Helios 44 lens was built like a tank and I think it wouldn't have noticed that it got shipped from the eastern block to me in Australia. Part of my gets a little nervous about shipping fragile OIS lenses or IBIS mechanisms if they're not being shipped in their original packaging.

The aspect of this that might be cumbersome (selecting images from huge bursts) will really depend on the features that are provided to the user. For example, Nikon could easily implement a feature on the camera itself to detect that images were part of a burst and show them like a video being scrolled through. The user selects one or more images to keep, and maybe there's a button that says "Delete all non-kept images". Maybe from that burst, maybe from all bursts that have one or more "Kept" images. You might hit a button for the camera to show you the bursts that haven't got anything Kept yet, so you knew you hadn't cleaned those ones up. With a slick interface design, the right button allocations, and a bit of practice, the process of culling your bursts might be quite an easy and straight-forward process. This would be instead of having to transfer all images from the card, select ones on the computer, carefully and manually remove the ones you didn't want, probably all in a program that doesn't know where one burst stops and the next one starts. Just something to keep in mind.

A thing that wasn't promised at a specific time and isn't needed for ongoing creativity still isn't here. OMFG!!!

One of the key things that is in play here, and I haven't heard @SRV1981 really comment on, is having a deep understanding of what is about to happen and being able to be ready for it so that it can be captured. Weddings, as spontaneous and magical as they may look in the photos, are often rigidly planned and highly controlled methodical events where a good wedding photographer will be able to list every angle, every shot, every focal length, and every challenge they will have on a given day after having only done a quick walk-through at each venue So in that case, yeah, a good wedding photographer who has shot 500 weddings could probably anticipate the key moments enough to magically frame with a prime. Weddings are also a relatively malleable event too, where the photographer can direct or otherwise control a lot of the shots. While sports have a certain degree of predictability to them, they have rules after all, there is no malleability or doing it again. Events may or may not be quite so predictable and/or malleable. This is where the skill comes together with experience to take up any shortcomings in flexibility that the equipment offers. Mostly, the better the images are coming out of a piece of equipment, the more of a PITA that equipment is to work with, and the more that it expects you to revolve around it rather than it being flexible with what is happening.

Some posts back I made the comment that people only share the images that look good, or situations that paint them in the best possible light. I got a little bit of that from those two videos. The first video was a guy standing next to a volleyball court on one side of the net and taking shots that are all within the width of a volleyball court. This is great, and if you're only ever going to be shooting full-height or mid-shots of people playing volleyball then that video shows it's all good. However, if you will ever: shoot something other than volleyball shoot something other than those compositions (full or mid shots) stand anywhere other than right next to the court Then the video doesn't really cover what happens then. You might find that this guy went out and shot 2000 images that were all terrible for a variety of reasons, but managed to scrape together a dozen or so nice images and then tell a story of success in order to make himself appear like a pro, get paid work, drive people to subscribe, or use his affiliate link (or whatever motivation he has). Sadly, these things happen and it pays to be skeptical. The other guy took some nice shots, but think of all the other compositions he could have taken. I don't know about your role in shooting, but there are two kinds of shooting situations. The first is where you shoot what you shoot and you get what you get and you enjoy that. The second is that you must capture what happens. I would imagine that if you're shooting sports in any systematic way, then each player will want a selection of shots of them doing cool things, and it's not acceptable to deliver spectacular shots of some players and crappy shots of other players, regardless of where they were standing. Nice shallow DOF looks great, but if it comes at the expense of the composition or coverage you get of the other players, or that great moment that happened, then it's too high a price to pay. Renting is a great way to get quick feedback, but don't rent the good ones. If you rent a 24-70/2.8 and 70-200/2.8, take them and use them, then you'll get great results but probably won't have learned anything. Only by actually shooting with limitations will you understand what impacts that limitation has, what options you have to overcome it, and if you can live with that. Every equipment purchase I have made has been based upon trying to go without, trying a lesser solution, trying a workaround, and only buying the expensive things when I tried to shoot real projects with lesser equipment.

I'm not really sure that those are the best combinations of lenses. For sports, it will depend on where you sit, but there is likely to be a large difference in distance between someone being on your side/end of the ground and the other side/end of the ground, and you'll need to zoom to compensate for this (as you can't walk onto the court/field). In this sense, I'd suggest a 70-200, or perhaps even 100-400, but you'll know better what you're shooting and what focal lengths work best for that. For non-sports, you are likely to have more flexibility in where you can walk, so you can zoom with your feet a lot more, but there are compromises here too. I shoot with a 35mm prime for my travel and events coverage, and find it's in the sweet spot, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't get a better shot if I was able to go wider or longer. In this sense a 24-105 would be the best range of focal lengths and would give you the focal length you'd want for most situations. Now, the question is you can afford. Ideally you'd buy a 24-70/2.8 and a 70-200/2.8, but I'm guessing that's not in your budget. So, the question is what can you compromise? You could compromise the wider zoom and go for a cheaper prime, but you're sacrificing flexibility for docs / events. You could compromise the sports zoom and go for a cheaper prime, but you're sacrificing flexibility for sports. You could compromise the speed of the wider zoom and go for a cheaper zoom (kit lens), but you're sacrificing the background blur and maybe a tiny bit of image quality (although kit lenses are actually very good these days). You could compromise the speed of the sports zoom and go for a cheaper one, but you're sacrificing the background blur and maybe a tiny bit of low light performance. Essentially these are things you'd have to try for yourself and find out. I have invested in very nice lenses but only did that over time and with much trial and error, mostly trying out cheaper alternatives and only buying really expensive glass once I had confirmed that the focal length was right and that the aperture was actually required. Perhaps the alternative is to buy a second hand 24-70/4 or 24-105/4 and a 75-300/4-5.6 and try them out and see what focal lengths you actually use. Then sell them and buy what you have actually used when filming real situations you find yourself in. For the wider lens, try and set it to a particular focal length and just use it like that without zooming, that will tell you if you can work around having a fixed focal length for that kind of work.

My comments aren't really about which body you should buy, they are more talking about why people in this thread have responded the way they have. You have to understand, the internet is full of people who want worlds-best-results, want to get them with a budget of basically nothing, and don't want to have to learn anything or do any work. This is an understandable perspective because film-making is hard and people don't always know that up-front, but what differentiates someone who is naive from someone who is deliberately trolling and wasting everyones time is how they respond when people suggest that the equation of expectations/budget/skill doesn't add up. Your responses, while civil and straight-forward, seem to have a reluctance to them that has made me question how sincere you are, and perhaps others might have questioned that as well. This thread is about helping you, but if the math doesn't add up then calling out these things actually is helping you, even if you'd rather not hear it. Perhaps rather than respond with comments such as "I need that" you'd take a few sentences to explain why you'd prefer that particular thing and what you might be willing to compromise elsewhere to get it. For example, I believe your most recent post is the first time you've acknowledged that learning any colour grading will be required. It really comes down the triangle of 1) excellent results, 2) budget friendly, and 3) easy and quick - pick one. You can't have two, and you definitely can't have all three. This discussion is about how to trade these off against each other, and is not about trying to break the math of the proposition.

Not ad hominem. I think the challenge was that you did give the impression that your budget was limited, and I was also with @Mark Romero 2 in thinking that taking photographs of students likely meant you were a teacher and therefore on low pay. So the discussion was about what you could get the biggest value from, with the assumption that you'd probably not have enough to get what you needed at first, and it was about getting good basic coverage to get you up and running and then you could improve things down the line when you'd been able to set more money aside. To put it rather bluntly, your whole argument about Sony colours not being minimum standard combined with your lack of colour grading skill or knowledge really just points out that you don't have much experience in making the types of videos you're talking about making. One of the first videos I ever tried to grade was on a Canon 700D and it was a panning shot of my daughters birthday party with my wife carrying the cake about 4 meters from the kitchen to the table as we all sung happy birthday. What I didn't know at the time was the kitchen light and dining table light were different brands of compact fluorescents, and that even with that glorious Canon colour science (to be praised above all else!!!) the shot was unusable. I would have begged to even get Sony colours. I have been teaching myself colour grading in Resolve for about 5 years now, and I've only just recently gotten to the point where I can deal with difficult mixed lighting situations like that and get good results. So when you post saying you want recommendations, say things that indicate you're very budget constrained, indicate you want glorious Canon colours but don't know anything about colour grading in the real world and don't want to learn, and then turn around and insist that the fastest professional zoom lens is your minimum standard, well. I'd challenge that assertion. Someone else pointed out that f2.8 gives a level of background blur and that's a reasonable argument, but it's a nice-to-have with a limited budget, and I was talking about low-light performance in a low-light environment with faster shutter speeds, not about background blur. Maybe as Mark has suggested, if you could share your real budget then we'd be better able to help, although to be honest, the best equipment still makes images that look like crap if the person using them doesn't have the required levels of skill, and shooting in uncontrolled conditions requires more skill than grading Hollywood films.

Ah crap - I was taking about the GX9. Stupid typo! I'm half-way through reading the Cine-D GX85 thread. Funny how every time someone finds a hack there's someone who turns around and asks for 12K120 12-bit internal, like somehow once the genie is out of the bottle you can ask for whatever you want 🙂 I worked this out last night. Long story short, it's about edges. The world has infinite resolution, and therefore edges are 100% sharp. Everything in the real world, ie, physical processes, will only make edges softer. Film has limited grain size and thus blurs the edge slightly, lenses are imperfect and have blur, etc. If you shoot RAW you will get edges that are slightly blurred because of de-bayering and limited resolution (no camera is infinite resolution). If you get a nice compression algorithm and give it enough bandwidth you will also get edges that are slightly blurred. All good so far. Where it all goes wrong is when you have compression that makes the edges more sharp than reality. ie, the pixels on the darker side of the edge are darker than the object itself, and the pixels on the edge of the lighter side are lighter than the object itself. This NEVER happens in the physical world. It never happens with film, it never happens shooting RAW, it is a completely artificial process. This is why some footage looks "organic" (ie, of the physical world) and some looks "digital" (ie, not of the physical world). Note the "halos" around this image I found on the web: You either like footage to look natural, or you want it to be hyper-real. It's a matter of taste.

Yeah, that's a huge amount of data to put down a cable. That's the same data rates as 4K240 externally.

Sounds like you're trying to buy skill. Or are letting "just in case" push to beyond a reasonable spec. The reason that I say that is that there are almost no other telephoto lenses faster than f2.8, and there are almost no other cameras with better high ISO performance than the A73. What this means is that the A73 + f2.8 zoom combo is better than the state of the art for the entire history of photography up until a handful of years ago. Let that sink in.... People have been taking photos and video in exactly the same situation you're in, with *far* worse equipment, for decades, and yet you can't even sacrifice a single stop of light? I understand that maybe that setup would be better for you, and maybe it's a tradeoff worth making with your budget, but "needed" is a pretty strong word. I need to breathe to live, but even clothing isn't technically "needed". I mean, don't get me wrong - it's your money and you can spend it however you want to. But, if I said that I can't possibly make a film without an Alexa 65, a full set of Anamorphic Master Primes, and a $100K dolly crane, you'd take that assumption, you'd think about the fact that basically every movie ever made got made on inferior equipment, often on DRASTICALLY inferior equipment, and you'd realise that I might be overstating what is truly required. You say you're an amateur, and yet, equipment that most pros don't have is the minimum?

I'm not a fan of the additional crop, but I compared the GX85 and G9, and the G9 is heavier, larger, slower burst rate (not that I care about that), and considerably more expensive. The decision to buy a GX85 over a G9 was not that difficult to make! Seriously though, the image quality is more than enough for my purposes. It will either be filming Go Shoot projects close to home, where IQ is a disadvantage as I will start to take these projects too seriously and throw away shots where I missed focus instead of focusing on content etc. Or it'll be doing time-lapse duties on a 'real' trip where it'll be recording RAW images, or taking video on a real trip or outing only as a very infrequent second angle or backup because the GH5 has met its maker for some reason. I was originally considering a GH3 the the backup camera as it had the same batteries as the GH5 and had an internal time-lapse mode (the GH2 didn't have both of those) and have been looking at high(er) quality Go Shoot cameras for ages, but nothing really hit the mark. I bought a BM Micro Cinema Camera as a reference for colour grading, and tried shooting stealth with it, but the requirement of a monitor and HDMI cable and (borderline) requirement of external audio made it huge and not stealth. I bought the OG BMPCC and found that the screen wasn't bright enough, and, get this - was polarised so the screen was black when viewed through my polarised sunglasses! How ridiculous! Anyway, I found it to be too slow to work with quickly. Then the GX85 came to my attention and I realised I could kill two birds with one stone, and so it was a no-brainer. If Panasonic hated us they'd be called "Canon", and every camera from now until the end of time would have the same spec as the GH3, or would overheat when doing anything the GH4 couldn't do. The temptation of specs is real, but in all my testing I have come to realise that I prefer better colour science, lower compression, and lower resolution images over the alternative. To borrow a phrase heard elsewhere: if I didn't like the first 2 million pixels you gave me, why would I be happy that there are 14 million more? I'd actually prefer if the GX85 had a 200Mbps 1080p ALL-I mode downsampled from the whole sensor, rather than 4K, but it seems that the manufacturers steadfastly refuse to implement the higher bitrates from the higher resolutions at the lower resolutions. People fail to understand that image quality doesn't exist in a vacuum. For example, here's what filming a picnic in public looks like with a small camera: and here's what that scene looks like when filmed with a larger cinema camera: If people judge camera quality and "professionalism" by the size of the camera, then yeah, the pocket would be the perfect camera for stealth shooting! and apart from the fixed lens, it's a pretty darn good offering!

Just bought a GX85. It's purpose is to serve double-duty, as an inoffensive little camera that I can stealthily take anywhere, and as a 2nd / backup cam for travels. Travel is one of my great pleasures, and if COVID has taught me anything, it's that I need to get better at travel near home. This has resulted in my Go Shoot project, which essentially involves trying to have small, low-zero cost adventures close to home, and to film them as little videos to try things and make memories. The key thing for this kind of thing is having a small unassuming camera that doesn't attract attention. I've been using my GF3, due to its tiny size, but its lack of tilting screen or stabilisation are rather inconvenient and it 17Mbps 1080p is a little lacklustre to say the least. These projects are about story first and image second, and are finished on a 1080p timeline. This means that if I take the 100Mbps 4K image and crop 2x then it becomes a 1080p at 25Mbps image, which is still acceptable (and still better than the GF3!) so that means that the GX85 and 14mm f2.5 combo would be tiny, but with the 2.2x crop factor in 4K and cropping in post, would be 31-62mm equivalent, and the f2.5 combined with the downscaling in post should mean it'd have reasonable low-light ability too. GX85 with 14mm f2.5 for a tiny setup: If I want to work quickly and have a more doc-style of shooting, I can pair it with the 12-35/2.8 and get 26-154mm. In extreme low-light (like caves), I can take the Voigtlander 17.5/0.95 and get 39-78mm. If I want to go vintage, I can use the Cosmicar 12.5/1.9 for a 28-56mm range. Lots of cool options available. Once we get back to travel, which is likely to happen later here in Australia than elsewhere in the world it seems, I'll also use it for a 2nd / backup camera to my GH5. I find that often I will be on a balcony or terrace in golden hour (either dawn or dusk) looking at a spectacular view and wanting to record three things simultaneously: Time-lapse of the whole scene as the light changes - super wide-angle and deep DoF This will be my action camera, which by taking 8MP (in 16:9) Jpegs, which are around 3Mb each, gives about 600Mbps when put onto a timeline at 25fps. Not bad! Time-lapse of part of the scene - variable focal length required This will be what the GX85 will do, and can use any of the MFT lenses I have. Video of interesting things happening, probably with a wide-angle lens This is what the GH5 will be being used for. People walking, boats sailing, flags waving, etc etc. The GX85, by being able to share any of the lenses I have for the GH5, also makes a great backup camera in the instance that the GH5 is out of action. Is anyone else using a GX85? or small camera to fly under the radar?

Yeah, I'm curious to see what you're doing with it. I love shooting with small modest cameras so bring it on!

Most people live in areas that don't get very hot, so we're both in the minority. In the northern parts of Australia there are places that have daily average max of 107 deg, had a record heatwave of hitting over 100 deg for 170 consecutive days and has hit over 120 deg. I did a trip there once and had my iPhone overheat and had to submerge it in the river to cool it down enough to resume filming. No-one talks about iPhones overheating, but there are places it happens! When manufacturers test cameras at 75 degrees it's almost a practical joke.

Some people prefer a 24mm prime, but I think that's mainly as a prime for narrative work, and to be complimented by a 50mm or so. Also, when cinematographers talk about a 24mm prime, they're often talking about it on S35, so it's around 35mm FF equivalent. In terms of my lenses, I use the 35 as the default lens, and maybe 60% of final images are 35mm equivalent, maybe 25% of final images are 85mm equivalent, and the remaining 15% are the 16mm equivalent. If there was a fast enough 16-35 equivalent zoom then I'd be glad to use it, but not even close. I find 35mm the right FOV for getting environmental portraits, taken from a normal distance away from the person for a social situation, and lots of flexibility in taking a step forwards or backwards to "zoom". The 16mm wide, is as you say, WIDE and that's exactly what you want for those WOW shots like landscapes and buildings etc. Then 85mm is great for sniping little moments while the kids don't notice me etc. It's a powerful combination of focal lengths because it perfectly matches the types of shots that you want to take, at a focal length that you want to use. If you use a lens that's wide and get too close to someone you alter their face shape and it feels "too close" and uncomfortable, and if you use a lens that's long and stand a long way from the subject then it will enlarge the background and make the shot feel distant (at best) or voyeuristic (at worst). Far from it being a lack of ability to "think outside the box" - it's actually a sensible lens choice for the style of video you want to make.

@SRV1981 Another couple of points that @IronFilms post also reminds me of are: The particular colour peculiarities you will get with a camera will take years to truly understand, so having a single system will be much much better than having to learn how to colour correct and troubleshoot different cameras. The more you know, the less the equipment matters. All through my journey of learning to make videos the biggest limitation was me, and knowing what I know now, I can get pretty decent results from almost any camera. At the moment I'm having heaps of fun with my Panasonic GF3 from 2011 and the 14mm f2.5 lens that it came with when I bought it. I love this combo because it's small and light enough to take wherever I want and no-one bats an eyelid at it, and it's good enough (combined with my ability to process the footage in sophisticated ways in Resolve) to get results I think are usable but isn't too good which makes me think too much about the technical aspects of the image and lets my perfectionism get in the way of content and story.

You're thinking about colour all wrong. I don't blame you for it - I think most of the internet thinks about colour wrong and you'd be forgiven for adopting that kind of thinking. I did at first, and now several years later, have come out the other side and now understand what things are truly like. @Mark Romero 2 was 100% right when he said: So, how long will it take? It will take a few hours, and it will take many years. Let me explain - there's good news and bad news. The good news: When you shoot with anything other than rec709, you're going to need to convert from whatever colour space and gamma you shot in to rec 709. This could be via a conversion, or a LUT, or some combination of both. The level of sophistication that goes into creating these things is absolutely huge (when done by people who know WTF they're doing - which is almost no-one on the internet by the way) and so your job is just to work out which conversion or LUT you will use. From that point on you just apply that to all your footage and that's it - you've learned to colour grade. If you find a conversion that gets great colours from Sony, which will be out there I can assure you, then job done. The bad news: The above method will only work on maybe 10% of shots, if you're lucky. The reality of shooting events and travel and other uncontrolled situations is that the vast majority of your shots will look like garbage straight out of the camera. This will be true regardless of what camera you have, and will completely overwhelm whatever advantages one brand has over another. This is because the real world doesn't use lighting with matching colour temperatures, and even worse, with remotely acceptable CRI performance. Colours will be *awful*. An example. Last week my wife and I went to get some food from some food trucks and I took a tiny camera to shoot a little test video with a very vintage soviet lens. Let's look at some of the shots as they came out of the camera. All of these are on auto-WB so the camera will have been trying to adjust as best as it could. Notice how the sky looks normal, the people in the foreground look brown/purple, and the various trucks look different in the background. Too orange for the camera to compensate using auto-WB: Interior of the truck is fine, and the outside is quite green: BUT, you say, that's a cheap camera! OK, here's a few shots from the XC10 - a Canon Cinema Camera shooting in C-LOG. Background is fine, foreground is muddy purple: A small statue that no-one has ever heard of - colour temp of interior lighting vs natural lighting coming from the skylight: So far so good. Let's look at some event photography. The pub that hosted this bull-ride decided to buy a mixture of purple and green floodlights. Take note that to the naked eye this was COMPLETELY INVISIBLE. This shot is ungraded HLG too, if you convert to 709 then you've got a circus on your hands. It was because of things like this that I have taken years to be able to get colour I'm happy with from my footage. I've been shooting family trips and outings for years and the footage has been piling up waiting for my skill in colour grading to be good enough to colour grade the material I've captured to a standard that I can even live with, let alone love. So, why aren't people talking about this? It's simple. Professionals mostly have control of their lighting and make sure it's done right, documentary shooters will hire a colourist to troubleshoot difficult sections they can't colour grade themselves, and amateurs who can't control the lighting and can't troubleshoot their own footage simply don't post their shitty footage to YouTube. You, however, will be looking at the critical shot of whatever it was that happened, and wondering what the hell you do with it to make it even usable. Screw the difference between Canon and Sony colours, your shot will look like your camera was broken and needs to be repaired. Another example. Recently my daughter graduated high-school. I took my GH5 and 12-35/2.8 as I thought it would be long enough, would mean I could quickly take a wide or mid-shot if required, would have AF for quick compositions, and I thought I'd value the stabilisation from the camera and lens. I contemplated taking my Voigtlander 42.5/0.95 prime, but decided against it. Turned out that for the critical moment of her walking across the stage and receiving her certificate, the 12-35 at 35mm wasn't long enough so I cropped in 2X (which the GH5 can do without a loss of quality). This is fine, but at 2.8, which was needed as it was indoor and stage lights aren't that bright, the lens is quite soft. I should have taken the Voigtlander, which is sharp as hell when stopped down a couple of stops to f2, and would have been longer. Oh well, I got what I got and content is king right? This is the real world. Almost all cameras can get great colour, but none will look good in difficult conditions and all will require some skill in post to colour grade. Also, if you're colour corrected still photos before, but not video, then this is where having RAW makes a huge difference. If you have WB challenges with mixed lighting or clips that need more correction and you've shot anything other than RAW or Prores, you will adjust the sliders and what you expect to happen (and happens on RAW / Prores footage) will not happen, instead you will be greeted with bizarre mush and strange tints and all manner of other challenges.

@herein2020 raises an excellent point about shooting with a potential crop mode in your camera to gain a new focal length. Does the R6 have such a mode? In terms of the wide end, how experienced are you with using a 24mm prime? The reason I ask is that 24mm has a certain look that you would effectively be stuck with unless you changed to the 70-200 which is much much longer and huge and conspicuous. If you've filmed many different events with just a 24mm then you'll know what you're getting into and that's fine, but I'd be cautious about that. In my own personal work I use a 35mm equivalent lens as the default walk-around one on the camera, which combined with a 2X digital zoom feature (which doesn't lose resolution or quality) gives pretty good flexibility, and I don't have to change lenses much. However, I also carry a 15mm equivalent for landscapes/vistas/interiors, and an 85mm equivalent for portraits and details, which suits the travel work that I normally do. I'd suggest that keeping your options open on the wide end might be a good idea, for example leaving enough budget to add a 35mm or 50mm prime later on if you find that the 24mm is too wide. Certainly, I find it too wide for people shots because as soon as you want a shot tighter than a mid-shot and step forward to reframe then the width of the lens starts dominating the image. Have you filmed entire events on your phone? it's an easy way to trial having a single 24mm (or 28mm) prime. Considering the price difference between a 70-200/2.8 and 70-200/4 I'd suggest @SRV1981 confirms that the extra stop is required under the typical lighting. I'd make sure to include tests about raising the ISO and using noise-reduction in post too, which can have more of an impact than you'd think. This is actually a really significant point - cinema cameras are often very noisy, even at their base ISO, and professional colourists often have NR as their first node in the colour correction. It's regarded as normal and a base-level skill in post for professional cinema and TV, yet amateurs act like noise will escape from their images and kill their family, so seem to spend thousands of dollars buying cameras that can see in the dark and lenses that look like mechanical owls, and cart around huge cases of equipment in order to avoid the slightest noise which could be eliminated in post for free in 2 minutes. Dropping a stop on the zoom, would save a huge amount of money and free up more funds for more compact primes at the wider end. It's definitely worth confirming that you *really* need that 2.8 aperture.

Traditional logic is that you can have gaps in your lens lineup without issues, and in-fact, you should because it gives you greater range from the lenses you do carry. The traditional question is 24-70 + 70-200, and the answer is 16-35 + 70-200 or 24-70 + 100-400 and you can crop a bit in post if you need to cover that gap. That was about stills images, and now is true for video too as cropping in-post for video is now completely fine (add a bit of sharpening to match the look). In terms of primes vs zoom, think about the total experience. You've answered the speed consideration, but do you need to get shots that are in-between 16 and 35? A normal prime set would include a 24 in there to cover that space. Also think about apertures - primes can obviously be faster and that's great, but think about how much aperture you DON'T need. For example, if you aren't shooting in low light, then maybe 2.8 is fast enough (not a lot of bokeh at the wider focal lengths normally anyway), and that would mean that for the same financial cost and weight cost, you might be able to get 16, 24 and 35 f2.8 primes rather than the 16-35/2.8 or 16/1.4 + 35/1.4 primes. The key thing is really understanding what you shoot. I have gaps in my focal lengths and my "everyday" lens collection mixes primes with zooms based on what and how I like to shoot.

Don't forget that there are tradeoffs with switching lenses as well. A 24-105 or other zoom lens might not be the "best" in a direct comparison (not the sharpest, not the lightest, not the fastest, not the nicest bokeh, etc etc), but if you're shooting an event and have just taken a portrait and something suddenly happens that requires a wide, the zoom will give you an average quality benign wide shot and a dedicated portrait lens won't give you any usable shot at all, and a photo from an average lens beats no photo from the best lens every single time.

Just curious.. what are the purposes of these three bodies? ie, why do you need three? Getting specific might help people understand - the devil is in the detail after all.

I fundamentally disagree with the entire premise of having one body for stills and one for video. Instead, I suggest you have two bodies, that are each good for both video and stills, and use complimentary lenses on them to give you better coverage. This has the advantages of: having shared support and accessories, such as only having a single type of battery to charge, and all accessories will be compatible having only one set of lenses required each body can act as the backup for the other one, or if you want a backup to keep two bodies at all times (even after a failure) then you can have a single backup body, rather than requiring two media is guaranteed to be interchangeable colour science and post-processing is all interchangeable and compatible There's a reason that stills shooters have two bodies with different lenses and why video shooters also often have two bodies, this combines those real-world factors. Ultimately, who easy and fast and streamlined you work will make a much greater impact into how good your results are than having a stills camera with slightly better photo resolution and a video camera with slightly better codec or whatever.