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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.

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?