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While the lines between videography and cinematography are continuing to blur, there are a number of aspects where the two differ greatly. AF being one, and resolution being another. The responses on almost all Internet forums quickly reveal that the membership are videographers, not cinematographers. This makes sense, as the sheer quantity of video content (social media, weddings, corporates, marketing, most of TV productions, etc) overwhelms the amount of content created for cinematic release, probably by a factor of thousands or millions to one.

A few weeks ago I took a scenic helicopter flight, and naturally I took the opportunity to shoot it as best I could, sitting in the back and shooting out of the open door. As I was limited to hand-holding and knew that getting stable shots at 200kph / 120mph with the door wide open was going to be a huge challenge I used my Sony X3000 action camera (which has impressive OIS) and the GH5 + 12-35mm f2.8 combo for the dual-IS. The GH5 worked really well, benefitting from the three points of contact (two hands and face while using EVF) and being shot from within the aircraft..... .....but the X3000 didn't fare nearly as well. Due to its very wide angle lens, I held it further out the door (to avoid getting the doorway in shot) and limited to only two points of contact (two hands), where it was buffeted by the wind much more (in a rolling motion as I was holding it from below). As such, I have footage that is very shaky. Normal stabilisation in Resolve works to eliminate the shaking, but the edges of the frame wobble around like a sheet of plexiglass in the wind. I tried applying lens correction before stabilisation, which helped, but the footage is still pretty wobbly. I'm sure there are pieces of software out there that can do this. I don't know if I can afford them, but I'm sure they're out there. Does anyone know of anything or can anyone recommend anything? I probably should have asked before the recent sales, but didn't get to this point in the edit until now. TIA... and here are some shots (ungraded), just to make my request slightly more interesting 🙂 The X3000 is great at getting wide scenery shots: The GH5 could then be used for detail shots: X3000 wide: GH5 detail: The combo works really well, and actually the X3000 did great, but most of the movement was in rotation of the camera, which OIS can't really help with, and holding it out the door of a fast-moving aircraft was probably outside its design brief!!

Thanks, and yes, I had figured out the battery similarities - what a happy surprise! IIRC I got a genuine battery with the GF3 and two third-party ones, which died a long time ago I think and are now gone, but to my surprise the genuine one still goes strong and so is enjoying renewed use. Of course, I've been playing with the GF3 from time to time as well, so it's not like it was gathering dust. I will have a look through that thread, thanks for pointing it out. Have you investigated using an external recorder with the GX85? If so, how did it go? I would imagine that you're already aware of this, so this is more of a PSA than a reply as such. It's always good to test resolution and lens characteristics by shooting RAW stills, as well as in every codec you intend to shoot with the camera, plus the post-processing you are likely to do. This is because although a RAW still might reveal a softness to a lens, that might not be visible using the cameras 4K mode which might downscale the image, or the 1080p mode if you use that, and of course the NR / sharpening / processing / compression will obscure considerable fine detail or softness as well. I also suggest that you grade the test clips, render a timeline in your normal delivery format, and if you self-publish (eg, streaming platforms) then upload the output for that site to re-compress your footage as well. Then view it sitting at a normal distance in a slightly darkened environment and see what is visible then. Literally no-one has ever said "I spent the extra $2K getting the top-end glass and even though the difference is completely obscured by YouTube compression so none of my viewers will ever be able to tell the difference I still think it was completely worth it"!

Great stuff! I'm especially heartened to hear you're not in a hurry and will rent equipment before you buy. I've used the Manfrotto Xume magnetic adapters before and they make working with filters really convenient, so I'd suggest that a system based on magnetic attachment is likely to be a positive experience that you'll really enjoy and benefit from.

LOL. There are always people that only take photos of brick walls ready to pounce with bad reviews on things they don't understand! "The A7S3 is a terrible product because it easily breaks when I'm pounding in nails with it to extend my house. I prefer a $5 hammer. Sony are idiots!!" -- Typical internet moron The challenge with photo lenses is that the internet is full of pixel-peeing photographers, and now is also full of pixel-peeing videographers, who have very different needs and priorities to those of us who are interested in cinema, rather than prints.

@Matt James Smith ? I have several pieces of advice.. they're a little controversial, but well intended. Firstly, don't believe ANYONE on the internet, even me, when discussing "quality". Only trust your own ears by listening to samples taken by competent people in real situations similar to what you will do. I produced music as a hobby for over a decade, and have been into hifi ($250k+ systems) for over two decades and made a lot of components from scratch (DACs, preamps, amps, speakers, acoustic treatments, etc), so I have a solid basis in the technical aspects of what is going on as well as understanding theory vs practice vs snake oil vs psychoacoustics. I went through a phase of researching microphones and while I watched/listened to dozens of video "reviews" of various products, I didn't find a single review where the person understood even the first thing about audio, or what is important. Secondly, don't confuse audio quality with audio frequency response. This seems to be a common thing with "reviewers". They compare two microphones, they like the EQ on one better than the other, and declare that the quality is better on that one. This is bullshit. EQ is so easily adjusted in post that it's practically a non factor. Judging the sound from a mic without processing it is like saying the iPhone has better quality than an Alexa because the Alexa footage looked all grey and dull-looking. Understand what matters for your context. If you are making recordings that will be used within a larger mix, processed, and will only form the background to a visually driven piece then obviously you won't need (or be able to appreciate) as much quality as if you are producing nature videos with long sections of straight binaural audio. Best of luck!

Damn - those are great looking shots! Thanks for the feedback on the 12-60/2.8-4. The reviews and sample footage were all quite positive too. One of the main drivers for buying my 12-35/2.8 was as a walk-around lens for the P2K (OG BMPCC), but I've since worked out that the screen is polarised the wrong way for my sunglasses, making it completely black, so the idea of that as a tiny setup has fallen flat. Now I have the GX85 for the tiny setup I'll likely sell the P2K but might keep the Micro, I'll see. I think those kind of shots, walking from one place to another, is really the challenge for AWB. If that shot was critical then it's likely to be salvageable, but it would probably take real work. It might be worth saying explicitly just for the record, I'm not a fan of AWB or manual WB, they're just settings that each have an application, and each definitely have their pros and cons which should be understood to get the best results. I can only speak from my experience, but everyones is likely to be different. I'm also definitely an amateur and remembering everything while out shooting is a real challenge - there are so many things to think about simultaneously. Part of the reason that on commercial sets there are so many crew! Nice. That lens actually has quite a nice balance between modern and vintage characteristics. Plus it's so darn small!

Latest random internet purchase arrived today... Everyone, meet Miranda: Miranda is an M42 28mm F2.8 lens made in Japan, pictured on the M42 speed booster, with the GX85. No clue about anything else about her. Here are some test images, all taken wide open, with 4K CineD profile and SOOC on a 1080p timeline. It looks like the corners are crazily soft. They are soft, but the focal plane is actually very curved, so an object to the side of the frame has to be quite a lot further back to be in focus than something in the middle of the frame in focus. Maybe I can take nice footage of curved buildings, or beachballs. Flares are nicely controlled but aren't too modern... shaded vs unshaded from direct sun: I'm really happy that she's sharp wide open in the centre, which my only other m42 28mm F2.8 lens, a Yashica Yashinon, was most definitely not. This matters as I often use the 2X digital zoom in-camera to punch in for close-ups. I am, however, a little nervous about how 'vintage' she is. I do have a number of other more modern options for similar focal lengths though, so I'm not locked into the look and so it'll be a fun process. I'm also not that familiar with shooting on the 44mm equivalent focal length.

Damn.. I had just talked myself out of wanting one, but now your glowing review has me searching for them again! I don't know what it is about vintage lenses, but it's definitely something... 😆😆😆

@PannySVHS I heard that you have the GX85 and Fujinon 12.5mm f1.4 lens. Is this right? Does the fuji cover the GX85 in 4K mode? I'm eying off an eBay auction, but want to confirm it's a good option before buying one.

Being able to import view LUTs and bake one in would be spectacular, on any camera. I really see the C70 as a Get It Done camera for people who are quietly pumping out projects one after another.

and this is why matching only on charts is fraught with peril.... CineD: Broken image: I've played with the little tweak that makes the light yellow go light pink and there isn't a combination that smooths it out and doesn't impact the other hues, so that's not possible to make using this method. Also, that little tweak isn't our only problem.... This is why there are 50,000 ways to do something in Resolve. Some of them simply don't work! The path forward from here is to go back to the drawing board and see if there are other ways to approach this that don't break the grade in this way. Otherwise, we start by applying gentle adjustments and see how far we can get towards the "spirit" of the Alexas image before we start breaking things. My prediction is that we'll end up with a relatively loose match that will be in the general direction and that'll be the best we can do (or I can do).

I meant that WideDR seemed like a good choice for an 8-bit codec as it wasn't as flat as C-Log, and would use more of the bits available. I don't think it was due to the sensor size. The sensor had great performance at low ISOs in other profiles, but the WideDR profile was hugely noisy, even at its base ISO. I suspect the profile was designed on other more capable cameras and when they ported it across they would have had to sacrifice compatibility in order to get the most out of it. Canon were certainly pushing the compatibility of C-Log on the XC10 when it first came out. What it meant in practice was that in C-Log the XC10 would clip at lower than 100IRE because that extra headroom was only used by cameras with more DR. It meant you could configure an XC10 and other Canon camera with the same settings, then put the files from both cameras onto the same timeline and base grade and get the same grade out, without having to adjust levels etc. In practice it meant that performance was sacrificed for that camera, which sucked considering that it was aimed at low-budget solo shooters trying to quickly record small pieces, not as a C-camera for larger productions. It's not like anyone shooting with multiple Canon cameras couldn't have put a different LUT or CST on it for heavens sake!

Attempt #3 Added in some Luma adjustments. We're starting to get into pretty tricky territory here, as you'll see from the curves, so this is where I start saying near enough is good enough. Plus, with a checker we're still firmly in theory-land and who knows what will happen with real footage. Alexa: CineD: This was accomplished with this Hue vs Luma curve: There are still some challenges though, like the olive green is way too dark, but bringing it up with a Hue curve will bring up the other greens, or if I make the curve specific to the olive patch then is likely to break real footage, especially 8-bit footage. It's a similar story with the brown patch. I could go on to soft qualifiers etc etc, but you literally have no idea what colours that aren't on the chart you're severely messing up, and this is where the brain starts having problems thinking about subtle shifts within a 3D space. Plus, to get this match, I had to apply a luma curve to the CineD footage that matched the levels, which would mean that using this on real footage would darken everything, but that's not sensible in a real-world situation. Time for real footage.

Attempt #2. This time I used a more sophisticated approach, and matched on all the patches in the colour checker. Alexa: CineD: This is almost a perfect match.......if all you ever film is colour charts! To get this I started again, and used the Colour Warper but with the highest number of points it allows, and ended up with this: Things to note: The points with black outlines are points I've adjusted The white patches below the spiderweb is the image data There are entire radial arms with no image data below it to match - this is the challenge of having a colour checker with limited numbers of points... if this were a real matching then I would need thousands of points to compare. For the sake of this process, I simply took the areas that had no data and spaced them out relatively smoothly This spider curve only adjusts hue and saturation, but ignores luminance, and was mis-matching the skin tone next to the brown patch. For this, I did a qualifier and adjusted hue and saturation to match, making the qualifier as soft as possible while not messing up the other points. This was the qualifier: In plain English, this takes lighter skin tone hues on the brown side and shifts them towards pink. Without this adjustment, instead of getting this: You get this: I still haven't matched the WB or Luma...

It's laughable in terms of how crude it is when you look at colour science and colouring as a whole. I have re-watched every Juan Melara video a dozen times or more and I've gotten to the point of understanding (almost?) everything that's going on in those videos. I had to watch, rewatch, follow along and recreate them, and even research techniques and terminology to get to this point, so it was literally studying. I say that not to brag, but as context for the following: I regularly see content on the colourist forums that is significantly more complex than anything Juan has included in his videos I see colour grading issues with a lot of online content, and am starting to see it in lower-budget TV shows now too I regularly see colourists talking about differences in looks that are so subtle I can't even tell the difference, and yet they are having a nuanced and productive conversation about it, so not only can they see it, but they're able to break it down and discuss it However, here's the rub - getting great colour is 95% the basics and 5% the complicated stuff. You can literally get 80% of the results of a high-end show by: Use any RAW-shooting camera Light well and within the limits of your camera Expose it properly, and shoot a grey-card Applying the manufacturers 709 conversion Grade using only the RAW controls, the Contrast/Pivot/Offset and the LGG controls That's it And if you are willing to compromise even further, to get maybe 50% of the results of a high-end show, all you have to do is: pick a camera released in the last decade point it at something interesting

Anamorphic flares - built in! Suggest it's deliberate, charge the client more, and declare victory!! When I got the XC10 I read about the various colour profiles and WideDR seemed to be the profile with the best reputation so I was excited to use it, especially with the 8-bit codec of the camera, but yeah, it had huge noise problems and wasn't up to it. Sounds like you're across the saturation situations then. I think it's one of those things that's really personal, and there's no doubt that RAW has more potential for sharpness than compressed codecs. Or, at least, for sharpness that doesn't just look like emphasised compression artefacts. You're right about the operator being the limiting factor in most camera content that's posted online. I've been hammering away at this stuff for years now and I know enough to know that I may never know enough to be "better" than my GH5, OG BMPCC or BMMCC - even as long as I live. Enjoy your Komodo when it arrives 🙂

My GX85 cost me about 30% of what my GH5 cost, but the more I use it the more impressed I am by it. If I didn't have a GH5 for some reason, I could get by with just this camera, and would enjoy the process too.

You're not missing the point at all - the "conversion" I've done above is scratching the surface so little that my post is practically a stand-up comedy routine. The vector scope does ignore luminance, so you're right there, but it's more complicated than that. Here's a few thoughts: Firstly, it's not possible to do a "real" match between two cameras unless you know where middle grey is, as that's the luminance level that you will be using these cameras at for exposing skin-tones and so camera profiles typically leave this luma at the set WB but are free to push the balance of everything brighter and darker than this point (e.g., warmer highlights and cooler shadows are very common) and as you're meant to use a colour checker by having the brightest square just under clipping and the cameras have different dynamic ranges the middle grey will be different and might not even be on that scale LUTs are most often 3D LUTs because the transformation is in 3D, meaning across hue / saturation / luminance (HSL). This means that while I've matched the hues at those levels of S and L, the same H could be different at literally every other combination of S and L. Colour profiles and colour science are hugely subtle things, relying on very small tweaks all across the HSL 3D space. To match cameras truly you need to point the cameras at all the combinations of H S and L and then make a transformation that pushes one 3D lattice to the values of the other one. This is what @Sage did in his GHAlex work. I have a theory that even this isn't enough because it sits on top of the cameras WB, but that's a different story. The practical concern of the above is that I have matched a few strongly saturated hues but haven't matched the less saturated ones, which is where the skintones sit. The charts do have some of these, so there's another level I can go to with what I have. As I mentioned above in my reply to @BTM_Pix I also forgot to match the greyscales, but that's subject to middle-grey considerations, so not sure how well I could do that. Having said all that though, I've done simple hue matching (Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Sat, Hue vs Lum) to "match" radically lesser cameras to greater ones before (GF3 to P2K) and as crude as these adjustments are (and they are so tremendously crude as to basically be a joke) the resulting images certainly benefit considerably from that treatment. The spirit of this is really that doing a "conversion" is impossible, my approach is laughably inaccurate, but there are still benefits to be had. Both from learning along the way as well as getting something useful to use afterwards.

Yes, I was surprised how similar the GX85 profiles were to the Alexa in terms of overall look. Obviously the Alexa has hugely more dynamic range and codec quality, but colour profiles are something that a manufacturer has to implement into their cameras (unless they're RAW only) and because they're basically just a LUT you can put whatever sophistication into them that you like, and Panasonic seems to have done a great job in this aspect.

I'd imagine they might be quite close. After all, same profile from same manufacturer, and the GX85 however budget and physically small is still a high-performing camera - to put it in perspective 4K 8-bit 100Mbps is the same as the Sony A7SII. If you have any tests comparing the cameras it would be interesting to see them.

It's early days for this work for me, but I might want to dial something in further in future, in which case that setup looks spectacular! TBH I've *almost* reached my limits (skill/patience/motivation..) with what I've done above, so I probably wouldn't go that much further in terms of matching them. My goal, after all, is "good colour", not to mix the footage between cameras or anything. One thing that I thought of afterwards was that when I said I applied a WB to the Alexa footage, I actually adjusted WB on the Gain and Lift controls, because what was neutral for the highlight square wasn't neutral for the shadow square. I realised afterwards that step 1 for colour matching is to match the greyscales, which I forgot and skipped in the above. My overall impression was that: I was surprised how similar the Alexa, Natural, and CineD profiles are. On the scopes at least - I haven't tried applying it to real-world footage yet. I would have thought that the Neutral would have been more "correct" I would have thought that CineD would have been stronger of a look (which was my impression from looking at footage from it) I was also surprised that the P2K look was so different to the Alexa, and also that it was stronger, but I'd already digested that surprise in the BMMCC thread, so wasn't new 🙂

Great looking images! Have you tried playing with sharpening on the C70 footage? I feel like sharpening is a whole skill unto itself, but because all the cameras that YouTubers use are over sharpened, no-one talks about it in those "how-to make your coffee look cinematic" ads tutorials. I'd suggest working out all the ways your NLE can sharpen (of which there are many) and then pull a few test shots into a timeline and apply every type of sharpening at, say, 10 different strengths, making sure to go higher than what you think looks reasonable. Then export it to whatever resolution / codec you deliver in and then sit back and from a sensible viewing distance compare it to whatever you think is natural. A test like that will be some work to do, maybe a couple of hours, but it will answer the question about what method and strength to apply to get your preference. A few hours spent doing a real test will save you dozens of hours farting around here and there and not being happy with the results. I suspect the C70 is one of those workhorse cameras that will be churning out images for low-budget TV and movies, and doing marketing, corporate and wedding gigs too. It's a quieter camera. No-one is making those "I shot a corporate on a C70" videos because they're not noteworthy, like say, shooting a wedding on an iPhone.

The WideDR profile was unusable on the XC10. Maybe there's some problem with implementing it on lesser cameras (technical, appetite, politics inside Canon, etc).

Now for reference, and thanks to the beauty of standard colour checkers, let's review what the P2K and Alexa look like. From this rather handy video: I pulled various scopes. It's likely to be relatively pointless (and depressing) to compare the GX85 Dynamic Range with these, so I'll skip that and focus on the hues. P2K Primaries: Alexa primaries: Things to note here are: Both these cameras have strong looks Orange and Teal directions are much more saturated than the Green / Magenta directions Hues in the Orange and Teal quadrants are rotated closer to the mid-point, with the Teal quadrant more compressed Both the P2K and Alexa pull the Magenta towards Red and leave the Green mostly untouched The P2K is stronger than the Alexa even, with its Magenta being almost on top of the Red, and with lowered Yellow saturation it's really skewing the colours to the Red / Cyan line, rather than the Orange / Teal line Personally, I think the P2K profile is a little too strong a look for me (you might disagree which is fine) but it's useful to see that the P2K and Alexa are both in the same direction from a "correct" look (with the colours in the reference boxes). As such, I'll proceed to compare the GX85 with the Alexa colours. GX85 Natural: Alexa: GX85 CineD We can't compare absolute levels of saturation because I didn't perform the P2K test, which has also been put through YouTube compression, but we can look at the relative hue and sat of the hues. What I'm seeing: Alexa has similar saturation between Red and Yellow, Natural has Red>Yellow and CineD has Red<Yellow, but these are always adjustable Natural has similar Magenta to Alexa, with CineD giving it more saturation and it being less rotated towards Red Green in CineD seems to match better with Alexa CineD representation of Blue and Cyan is too saturated (comparing to Red as reference) but Natural is also too saturated and with a less accurate match In terms of which one to choose when grading to match the Alexa, I think you could use either profile. The challenge is that you're capturing in 8-bit so you want to match in-camera as much as possible. For this: Both CineD and Natural have the highest shadows of any of the GX85 profiles I tested, so are more likely to contain the whole DR from the camera Levels of saturation are a balancing act, too much sat in camera and you'll clip strong colours, but too little in-camera and you'll be amplifying noise when you boost saturation in post Now to match the CineD to the Alexa. Unmodified CineD Alexa - with colour balance and sat GX85 - "Alexa conversion" (ha ha ha) Just for fun I used the new spiderweb tool thingy in Resolve to match them: Next is to test it on real footage.