kye

I think you nailed it by calling it 'elegant'. So simple, especially colouring the face-detect with green, but very powerful. I can imagine future updates having another colour for the other faces detected in the scene and showing them as well, which would be great for focus pulls during dialogue scenes. What do you think of the ergonomics and image? Do you think that there would be people willing to use this on a set that could afford a cine camera and a gimbal / steadicam? I have no idea how DJI is regarded at the ARRI level of film-making. I'm assuming that if you wanted to fly an Alexa Mini or Komodo you'd be using one of the high-end DJI drones?

I think we're mostly talking about the same things, but the terminology is letting us down. Sadly, I find that the level of knowledge out there about cameras is woefully inadequate, which means that things are actually named incorrectly (or at least misleadingly), which then gets in the way of even knowledgeable people talking. The "bounce" I'm talking about isn't when the IBIS hits its limits, its when the person can't do the ninja walk and the vertical height of the camera goes up and down. Anyway, this isn't a camera aimed at people who shoot handheld relying on IBIS, this is a camera for people who shoot with a gimbal attached to a z-axis stabiliser.

Canon: we've released dozens of cinema cameras over the decades, with hundreds of firmware updates - we're really innovative! DJI: releases first cinema camera ever, and first version of the firmware includes LiDAR Waveform, including colour coding the points identified as a face.... Comatose. The rest of the industry is comatose.

Embargo has lifted so heaps of reviews all now on YT..... I have 10 reviews of it in my subscriber feed lol.

You didn't get my point. The problem with IBIS and any stabilised footage is parallax error. This is where the IBIS stabilises the rotation of the camera but not the position. This gives the 'gimbal bounce' when walking, but also means that any time you have something in the foreground it will bounce around while the background is completely stable. This camera has a Z-axis stabiliser built-in, which would be a huge upgrade to anyone using just a normal gimbal. The more I think about it, the more that stabilised rotation and unstabilised location is the Achilles heel of the amateur. Of course, I see it a lot in YouTuber content, but you could argue that professional you tubers are professional entertainers rather than professional film-makers.

I was thinking about the GH6 last week. End of the day a GH6 is a relatively small prosumer camera which, although it produces a wonderful image from a small package was designed for people who don't have much money and with a MFT mount is losing ground now. I use a GH5 and it's pretty good, and the GH6 is unlikely to offer an enormous upgrade for what I do. So TBH I think the GH6 should completely violate the laws of supply and demand and be released at $299.

Here in Australia the top M1Max 16" is about two-thirds the price of the cheapest brand new car. I deliberately bought an Intel MBP in 2020 because I didn't want to beta-test the new M1 and everyones first software releases for a new chipset, and now it looks like things are right on schedule for when I upgrade in ~2022/23 for the tech to be solid and the applications to be ironed out. At that point the prices will have calmed down a little too. I wonder how often they'll be upgrading the chipset.. ie when the M2 will be out.

I completely disagree. Unless it's got poor IQ (which we haven't seen yet) or you're talking about brand anxiety and status on set, it's actually a superior option in many cases, because its competitor is not a shoulder rig, it's competition is a ronin / easyrig combo because it has a z-axis stabiliser: or perhaps even a ronin / steadicam, depending on how easy it is to do big vertical moves: Amusingly, Hollywood seems to be voting against you, as the default approach for high-end cinema appears to be stabilised unless otherwise required, rather than the other way around, which seems to be your preference. I find that one of the fastest ways to make footage look amateur is to have the cameras location (not rotation) shake. ie, IBIS and gimbals stabilise the cameras rotation so the image doesn't move around, but the cameras position often shakes giving that terrible effect of having the background stay stable and the items in the foreground shake due to the parallax error. Hollywood doesn't do parallax shake because the camera is on sticks / crane / slider which controls the cameras location, or on the shoulder of someone standing still which provides more rotational movement than location movement, or on a steadicam where the cameras location is very fluidly controlled. The only exception is when "hand held" was in the brief, in which case it's appropriate. I film exclusively hand-held for all my projects using IBIS, which is appropriate to their aesthetic, but I try and avoid moving the camera at all while filming to avoid the shaky parallax error. Tragically, this level of innovation is not remarkable. In any other tech sector, this would be normal. The only reason this stands out is because the rest of the industry is lazy and complacent. I include companies like Panasonic in this comment. The industry has lowered our expectations dramatically to the point where the only ones we actually complain about (eg, Canon) are, when compared to other tech sectors, positively comatose. Imagine an app developer coming out with a big release - "here's version 48 or our app - it's got 25% more resolution than v47 but as usual the 16 most significant issues are unchanged, just like every other release since the first version of our app over a decade ago". The camera industry will get eaten by tech companies eventually, and it can't happen soon enough TBH!

Have you shot these things, or other things, before? If so, what did you shoot, what gear did you use and how did it work for you?

Any footage out yet?

...and the average forum poster also has very different needs than wants!!

Laowa made a 9mm f/2.8 ZERO-D Lens for that mount, but I couldn't find any adapters. These were drone lenses up until this camera so adapter-related shenanigans makes a lot less sense when your camera is a mile away and you're pretty much only filming landscapes. This page has some MTF charts that show the lens performance. Buyer beware as they're from the manufacturer, but they seem reasonable and making a S35 f2.8 prime isn't a major challenge if you're a huge Chinese camera company these days. https://www.dji.com/au/zenmuse-x7 (you have to scroll down to the lenses) Making a S35 cinema camera without support for existing lenses (even just a single other format like EF) would be product suicide, so I can't imagine them not doing that. If they went the way that Canon did with the C70 and provided an offical speed booster then it could adapt to any EF mount FF lens then that would be a pretty good way to provide that flexibility. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that it's probably not going to have PL support. I know. I'm making big calls today!

It's a mount used on their X7 with is a S35 camera. Looks like it's a proprietary mount though so not sure about compatibility, although it's likely to have a short flange distance so maybe they'll provide adapters?

I don't think it looks like a fixed lens... That looks to me like a 24mm focal length, in fact, it looks like the 24mm in this set... Which is here: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1373413-REG/dji_cp_bx_00000039_01_zenmuse_x7_part_14.html Certainly, they have lots of other ILC cameras, so it's not a new thing for them.

Aren't their drones (the big ones at least) completely modular? You can buy the X3 and X5 and X5R separately, right? So, maybe this thing might be compatible in some way that isn't obvious? If they could make it so that as a wedding photographer or adventure photographer or event photographer you could buy all your equipment from DJI, that would be a pretty sweet kind of lock-in. In this new world where every brand wants you to get locked into their eco-system, DJI are the natural choice to go first. Much more likely than Canon or Panasonic or Blackmagic are to release a drone... DJI have been in the camera business for a long time already, and already make cameras and lenses. This includes: the X5S which is an interchangeable MFT camera which shoot 5.2K 12-bit RAW CinemaDNG and Prores internally the X7 which is a S35 sensor and shoots 6K CinemaDNG and claims 14 stops of DR the Z30 which is a 1/2.8" with fixed lens with a 30x optical zoom These are not specs to be dismissed, and if they go all-out then there's no reason they couldn't make an impressive camera, and with a 30X zoom drone camera already released then maybe it could also have stabilisation that no-one could touch.

I'm in a number of FB camera groups across a few different camera brands/models, and every one of them gets a post every week about which gimbal camera X fits on, and which lenses will balance. FB group posts typically last about that length before they're buried, so I suspect that this conversation is continuously being had, probably for every camera, probably in every language, around the world. For contrast, I don't think I can recall a single thread about sliders, cranes, easy-rigs, or dollys in those groups. Gimbals, for whatever reason, are a big deal. Yeah, it doesn't look particularly ergonomic!

All these are relevant, but there is much more to something looking cinematic than just 24p with 180 shutter with a bit of background defocus. To elaborate on my comment about resolution, the answer is that videographers tend to think in simplistic terms (eg more is better) and film-makers have a much more nuanced perspective that quickly moves from talking about resolution to sharpness and texture, and how to adjust all the various parameters through the signal chain to hit an optimal look. Videographers who are obsessed with higher and higher resolutions typically don't talk about texture or 'looks' (other than talking about LUTs), and would NEVER talk about deliberately lowering the sharpness of the image with lower-sharpness lenses.

I've posted this before, but it's worth posting again. For the people who actually make cinematic images, high resolution is desirable on capture, and undesirable on delivery. I think the quickest way to see if someone is a film-maker or videographer is to ask about resolution.

Can you share any examples? Either by yourself or things you've found? It would be great to see something, anything, other than that video in a thread about the 'cinematic' look!

This is a thread about an Apple device, and the video posted was an example of that product, so that's where I'm focussing my comments. You're absolutely right that cinematic is much more than just the image out of the camera, but the video was very VIDEO in almost every other way as well, perhaps besides composition. The movement wasn't on a slider or large rig, so bobbed around, there was no lighting beyond just whatever was happening while the person happened to be there, I didn't get much sense of story, of drama, of journey, and the music was just a nice song from a music library. I would know, I make exactly these videos all the time when I'm travelling - they're not that interesting unless you know the people in them. In terms of this video making the new iPhone look cinematic, older phones look more cinematic than this video as they had lower resolution, more flare when pointed into the sun, and people making "cinematic" videos put them on sliders, heavy rigs, used lighting, filters, and didn't sharpen the living daylights out of them. I'm not saying you can't like the image in that video, taste is personal, but don't confuse it with something that looks like what gets shown on the big screen.

In a sense, yes, and we acclimatise over time. At one point colour film wouldn't have been "cinematic" because none of its predecessors were, and the same with movies with sound. But the transition from film to digital is 20 years in, and high-budget productions destined for the cinema (as opposed to high-end corporate work) still go to great lengths to emulate film. I heard one professional colourist make a comment that a huge amount (IIRC it was half or more) of films are graded with a Print Film Emulation LUT, and the Alexa image processing that occurs in-camera is known to be very film-like. So yes, your point has merit, but 20 years on, digitally shot productions destined the the cinema are most likely using one or more of the below: Shot on a camera with proprietary image processing to emulate film Graded with a Print Film Emulation LUT, or employing many many techniques that mimic film Distributed in 2K to theatres, despite being shot on cameras up to 12K Plus, people still shoot features on film, despite digital being better in practically every way except the authenticity of the film look, which is still almost impossible for colourists to match. The below links might be of interest: http://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/ http://www.yedlin.net/NerdyFilmTechStuff/ReplyToRecipeRequests.html I suspect that even in 40 years time, the only people making images that look like the iPhone video posted earlier will be doing so to emulate footage taken by a phone. If you're still not sure, I suggest you find a movie (or the trailer) of a movie shot on film, one shot on digital where the cinematography won more than one award, and then watch the above iPhone video again, and play a game of "one of these things is not like the other...."

BMMCC is small until you mount a monitor on it, then it's the size of a FF DSLR. I know, I've tried. The OG BMPCC was my next attempt and discovered that the screen is polarised so it's not compatible with polarised sunglasses. *sigh* The FP would be a great candidate for Prores XQ which is 12-bit 4:4:4 and 396Mbps FHD / 1591Mbps UHD, compared to the FP RAW 12-bit 610Mbps FHD / 2400Mbps UHD. The FP can do 1670Mbps internally (UHD 8-bit 25fps) so XQ would mean it could get UHD 12-bit 4:4:4 internal recording. It could also open up the possibility of recording in a LOG format, giving 12-bit LOG which (if downscaling in-camera) could be superior to 12-bit Linear. You'd have to learn how to grade the FP images, but with that much data getting any look you want is a matter of skill in post, not opportunity from the equipment.

I'm not really sure what you're saying, but I can't imagine a universe where "cinematic" means anything like "it looks like someone filmed this with a phone". If, one day, someone makes a phone that does look cinematic, then it will be described as "it looks like the images from larger, better, nicer cameras". I think people have forgotten what cinematic images actually look like.

Yes, the FP is one of the closest contenders, along with the OG BMPCC, and GH5. How I wish I could pick and choose aspects from each into a single perfect package!

Marvel looks nothing like an iPhone test video on YT. Unless you're saying something different?