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True! I thought the Micro matched pretty well to the Alexa? Unless you're talking about 4K+ Alexas and shooting a hyper-modern look with the latest high-end cine lenses? This is a slight aside, but I've been seeing the promo videos they have for their new Signature Zoom lenses and dear god are they going for a sharp look with those videos! I understand why of course, everyone who can afford to use ARRI knows you can soften lenses up in post of course, but I was thinking how I wasn't really a fan of that particular treatment! If it was Christmas and my birthday and I won lotto too, I'd wish for a BM Pocket Cine Camera in the P2K form factor with an updated 2.8K sensor with the same colour science, and set to the global shutter mode rather than rolling shutter. Still, the P2K and M2K (Micro) are pretty amazing for what they cost and how big they are.

How do you hold the camera when you're using touch-AF? You could hold the camera in your fingers and use your thumb on the touchscreen to focus, but that's not a very ergonomic approach. Typically the manual focus approach is like the below, only with the bottom hand slid further forwards and the other hand holding the other side of the camera. The below is a slightly unusual rig, as normally I'd use my left hand to hold the weight and focus and my right on the camera grip.

That doesn't sound right. I'd maybe reach out to some experts, like on the LiftGammaGain forums perhaps (colourists used to do a lot of DI stuff before everything went digital) and confirm. I hear those guys talking about the older digital formats and there were so many gotchas in there that it's almost amazing that anyone got a good result! Yeah, because it's a personal project you can really take your time and let your subconscious process the footage in the background as you do other things. I'm always amazed at how a good editor can put little moments together that aren't related, but compose a thread that wasn't literally there, but somehow captures the feeling more than a 'correct' version. Like when Herzog said “Facts do not constitute the truth. There is a deeper stratum.” In a way, you're lucky that it's miniDV because you're less likely to get swayed by things that look good but aren't meaningful. I'm sure that if I had a 1DX2 and fast primes I'd be tempted to include too much 120p B-roll in my edits like McKinnon does, so you've side-stepped these challenges! Perhaps calling it degradation was misrepresenting it. Think of it like this... reality doesn't have compression artefacts, it's not 'sharp', it's not grainy, and smooth surfaces are not featureless, but the miniDV footage has introduced these things due to its limitations. Your job is to make the footage look the most like reality was, or the most how it felt. You've definitely got license to take some creative liberties to make it more like poetry and less like prose! If you don't blur the footage at all, you get all the nasties and all the content in the footage. If you blur it a lot then you get no nasties and very little of the content, but there will be a little sweet spot where each effect hides much more of the nasties than the original footage, and that's what you're aiming for. I'd suggest setting up a bunch of effects and going through them one by one at a sensible viewing distance and fine-tuning their parameters and opacity by eye, trying to make the footage look the most like a window to being there, or of a Hollywood film of being there (or whichever aesthetic you prefer!). By adjusting those parameters by looking at the monitor and not the control panel you may find that effects that aren't worthy get set to the sweet spot of zero opacity. Make sure you're always turning each effect on/off to make sure you're improving the image, as it's easy to get lost and get used to something, but when watching things we can also easily get used to quite strong looks as well, so don't shy from making it stylised. I'd make a few passes through each effect to optimise each one in combination with the others. A cool point of reference is to look from the screen to the other objects in the room, so effectively using reality as a reference. Comparing to reality will quickly sort out how sharp/unsharp things should be etc. Save that as a preset, reset them all and do the same exercise a few days later. Do it a few times. Then you can compare them and see which you liked, and maybe blend them together. You are trying to create a look that looks 'right' and the original footage looks awful in comparison. When I've done this (like in the example I posted above) I got to a point where the final grade seemed like footage from a Super-16 film camera and the original footage seemed like someone had applied a bunch of awful distortions for some reason. That's a good place to end up. It's useful to review some older film captures as a reference too. They were blurrier than you think, but never looked offensive, so it's a good look to go for. It could be due to the interlacing, but it could also be due to any capture issues you're experiencing. Once you confirm your capture then just see what's least offensive.

Upgrade your A cams!

Just found this, which is absolutely spectacular. If you think you need to shoot in 4K, think again. Simply wonderful.

So now instead of having a dedicated person to pull focus, or giving the job to the camera operator, you can have the camera automatically focus for you..... only, it just requires a dedicated person to tell the camera where to focus, or the camera operator has to do it. The only problem that solves is if you can't actually pull focus properly, which isn't that difficult a skill to have in most situations. Of course, if you're a run-n-gun operator then it also means you can't put the weight of the camera into your palm, wrapping your hand around the lens, which is the natural place for a manual focus ring, and steady the camera using the other hand on a hand-grip. Instead you have to carry the full weight of the camera with the hand-grip hand in order to touch the tiny little screen in the right place with a outstretched finger when you want to pull focus. Sure, if you're on a tripod then it's relatively easy, but then, so would just turning the focus control on the lens... It sounds like it solves the easy-to-solve part of focusing and works well when focusing wouldn't be difficult but doesn't help much in situations where focusing is actually more difficult. I think mostly you guys are missing the point with this tech stuff. PDAF is great at focusing perfectly, but can't reliably choose what to focus on. The times when focusing perfectly is difficult for manual focus is when subjects are moving, but that's actually the time when focusing perfectly matters least, because the subject is normally moving in frame and so there will be motion blur with 180 shutter, and often camera movement as well. TV shows and movies regularly have the focus catch up to the person when they come to a stop after running towards or away from the camera. In a way it's actually nice that for fast-paced movement they're in and out of focus for their transition because typically the composition of such a shot is that: you have the person in focus and their character is focusing on their world and something causes their reaction the person is now reacting and aren't in focus and their character is in the midst of moving and isn't seeing clearly either the person comes to a halt and then comes back into focus at the same time as the characters perception comes into focus and they reevaluate their position after having reacted That's actually a very common shot in narrative because it shows action and re-action, which having a focus puller not do it perfectly actually helps us identify with the character. I think it's the kind of thing that sounds much more useful in the design room, or lab, or in forums on the internet, than it does in real-life for lots of people. Sure, it's probably a great feature to have. But saying that a camera needs it as a feature is just buying into the marketing BS, or showing a lack of understanding about shooting, or both. I used to think AF was a must, and I was very vocal online about it too. But I challenged myself to manually focus and now I enjoy it more, get better results, and it gives me far more flexibility in equipment choice and aesthetic as well. and I'm just a guy who makes home videos, so if I can manually focus an f0.95 lens, surrounded by the real world where things happen without warning then really there's not much excuse! I think half the people online talking about AF as a critical feature must be shooting like this....

Oh yeah, and a nice highlight rolloff can hide clipped highlights, and if the footage is 30p you can slow it down to 24p and get a bit of slow-motion for free, which I also did on the above footage.

You will struggle to get anything that looks 'great', so I would suggest a three-pronged approach: Content. If ever there was a time to make the grade support the content rather than be a spectacle in itself, this is it. One trick that often works is to go carefully shot by shot and ensure that the viewers attention is on the right thing / person, and that is often done by raising the luma of the area so it stands out. Typically this is large and very soft oval power-windows the way that you'd simulate a vignette, and is often a combination of inside-outside effects where the subject is pulled up a bit and the outside is pulled down a bit. If you do it softly enough then it should be imperceptible, but will put the focus on where it needs to be, distracting from the grade entirely. As there's no chance of making a 'great' grade, make one that is the least offensive. Do this by working out the weakness of the footage and then compensating for that. For example, in low DR 8-bit footage, often the mid-tones are stretched apart, so you could try lowering the overall contrast and essentially pulling the bits closer together. This will raise the shadows, and maybe this will give a nice vintage look, but maybe not, and maybe you'd be better off actually pulling the levels down a bit and compressing the blacks (and whatever compression nasties are there). You'd have to play with the footage to see where the issues are. It's worth experimenting with reducing saturation, which makes all footage look higher end, but may not be the aesthetic you're looking for. Degrade the footage to hide its sins. I've shot lots of very low quality footage over the years, including SD, bad codec stuff, and have had a lot of mileage from upscaling it, blurring it and adding grain. Upscaling it gives you more pixels to work with, and your timeline should absolutely be higher resolution than the original footage. Blurring at very small radius' is designed to soften the jagged compression artefacts. Blurring at slightly larger radius' will smooth gradients, and much larger blurs (essentially adding diffusion in post) will smooth over the image the same way as diffusion filters do. I'd suggest the smallest blur be at 100%, and the larger ones be semi-transparent over the image. Adding grain will disguise the fact you've blurred the footage, and will give an analog feel, which is far more preferable than having an early-digital feel. For this step I'd encourage you to grade at a standard viewing distance rather than close-up / pixel-peeping as the effects are easy to over-do. If you're going to upload it, do a version specifically that takes into account the compression that will be applied, and you'll have to add lots more grain (for example) and probably experiment with multiple uploads to fine-tune it. Here's an example of my previous attempts at making the best of low quality footage. Final: Original: Best of luck - editing old footage can be fun and a trip down memory lane. Enjoy the process!

I disagree. I'm a dad who makes travel videos of my family while we're on holiday and shoots my kids sports games - I'm about as video as it gets! I've found that some aspects of what cinematographers do fits with how I shoot, and some really doesn't at all, like, AT ALL. However, I've never seen another YouTube reviewer who reviews "hybrid cameras" get it so wrong as they did on the XC10 review. I've since moved on from that camera, and I found that actually it didn't suit my needs at all, so I don't have rose-coloured glasses about it in the slightest. I know this because before I watched their review I had watched literally hundreds of camera reviews online from dozens and dozens of YouTubers (gotta have a hobby!), but when I watched their XC10 review a strange thing happened. They said some things that made me double-take. My reaction wasn't like "oh, that seems plausible but I don't care" and it wasn't "that doesn't apply to how I shoot" which is common in other reviews.. it was "they're describing exactly how I shoot, and they're reviewing the camera that I own, and they're saying that this feature won't work for me, and yet, I've used exactly that camera in that situation (or worse) and found it fine - WTF is going on with this review". It stood out as being so fundamentally wrong that at first I didn't know what to make of it. I re-watched it the next day to make sure I didn't mis-interpret them, or to look for signs that it got messed up in editing (which I would imagine can happen when you're churning out videos), but there were no signs of that. I began to think about it, trying to understand why they'd think such a strange thing, and then when I was reading an article about cinema cameras from a cinematography site I realised that they said what they said because they had a fundamental misunderstanding about cinematography and what shooting on a set is like. I realised they only understand film-making from the perspective of filming a YT video. Then I re-watched their review and everything fit, that they'd get most things right but the critical thing so wrong. Mostly YT and shooting a controlled production would be basically the same, but there are things about the equipment that differ, for example cine cameras not needing very good high-ISO performance because everything can be lit or catered for with crazy fast primes because the set revolves around the camera and not the other way around. If you only learned about making YT videos you would get most of what happens on set correct and only a few specific things wrong, but you would get them spectacularly diametrically wrong which they did. So I am actually very appreciative they made that video. I learned a lot from it. I learned that not everyone who makes videos knows about film-making (I was involved in film-making before I got into shooting video myself, so that wasn't something I anticipated). I learned that my shooting style was actually a mixture of how you'd shoot a narrative, how you'd shoot a doc, and how you'd shoot a guerrilla available light run-n-gun home video. .....and I learned that Chris and Jordan didn't know enough about film-making to be able to provide reliable advice to a guy who makes home videos. And no-one else involved in their entire corporate channel knew or cared! You know that you're in trouble when your cine camera review isn't informed enough for the home video dad! Anyone can say anything online, and popularity certainly doesn't indicate reliability of information, which is definitely the case here.

I would phrase it differently. I know a few people who do real research before making large purchases, and I think it's more like being able to read through the reviews to see the truth. In that sense, we practically cover everything in salt rather than just a small amount of seasoning... Basically, you want to know the strengths and weaknesses of the product. The approach seems to be: If a review is emotional, either good or bad, ignore them. They obviously either have an axe to grind, or are euphoric, in either case they're not solely focused on seeing the truth, so although they might believe what they say, they won't be seeing clearly. Look for known reference points. If someone has reviewed something you don't like positively, then that's a warning, or vice-versa. It might be an issue with their bias, or a lack of intelligence, lack of thoroughness, or simply a misalignment of what they value compared to what you value. Taste comes in here. I look for music reviewers who share common taste - if you don't like the taste of whiskey then it doesn't matter if it's the best whiskey in the world, you still won't like it. Look for meaningful criticisms. No product is perfect (you can't please all the people all the time), look for criticisms in a review, and only accept real ones, rather than token or BS ones. If a review is level-headed and detailed, maybe you can take the criticisms as true, otherwise, get more opinions. Look for patterns. If lots of reviewers, who all make it through the above criteria, say similar things about the products weaknesses then they're probably true. Smell out marketing. If you're looking for the benefits or strengths of something and you've seen a pattern of positive comments from level-headed people who also made criticisms, then look for specificity. If the pros of something are generic then it's more likely to be marketing talking-points, but if they're specific then that's more likely to be true. Also, look for how people say things, and if there are patterns in the phrasing, or if they seem natural. Even unconscious positive bias (be it to the brand, product, or just an agreeable personality) will be influenced by marketing, so a manufacturer can shape the way you think about something with their PR statements and framing, so that when you get the real product you 'see' it in those terms, regardless of how objective you actually want to be. It's a tricky thing. I think that's why people like Gerald Undone are so useful. He's level-headed, speaks in specific terms rather than marketing fluff, and mentions things that others don't. Does he have huge film-making pedigree? Probably not. But if he says that I can't film in 10-bit 4K at more than 30p then I am inclined to believe him. It's also why I unsubscribed to Chris and Jordan. After watching their savage review of the XC10, which was a flawed product to be sure, I realised something - they don't understand film-making. Sure, they mentioned the weaknesses of that camera, which I had verified with other sources and the specs, but they also ripped into aspects of the camera that weren't weaknesses at all. When I watched their review I was completely puzzled, because I was simultaneously watching videos on how people use cine cameras, which was saying the completely opposite to what they were saying and it was then that I realised that they might understand video, but not film-making. Reviewing a cine camera and criticising aspects that all cine cameras share is just silly. Unsub. Having said all that, the whole thing is fraught with peril as I have ended up on many occasions with products that were poorly reviewed and yet worked great for me for years of real use, and also with products that I did the research on and were terrible in ways that no-one mentioned at all. I think of a small part of my budget as R&D purely for writing off stuff that doesn't work out, or for buying things that seem ok but I can't be sure of. Sometimes things work out and other times they don't, but thinking about it like that makes me feel better about it. Certainty is an illusion after all.

According to wikipedia, that's 33 stops of DR. I realise that this spec probably doesn't directly relate to the DR the way that we would normally think of it, so we probably can't compare directly. How does that compare with other sensors? (assuming they measure the same thing?) Or does it directly compare? In which case, 33 stops of DR is A LOT more than an Alexa!!

I couldn't agree more about size and form-factor, and how smaller setups are more fun and, in a way, more spontaneous than larger more serious setups. This is why, despite owning a BMMCC, I bought an OG BMPCC (the P2K!). Paired with the 7.5/2 (giving a 22mm FOV) or 14/2.5 (giving a 40mm FOV) and the obligatory IR cut + vND + diffusion filter stack, it's a fun setup that still fits into the "tourist with camera - nothing to see here - move along" category. Combined with the (much larger) 12-35/2.8 lens gives you great OIS and a 35-100mm FOV. Both combinations give a handheld setup that rivals the best cinema cameras that amateurs who haven't inherited could buy, even up until a handful of years ago. Just for fun, here's a video from the OG BMPCC: and even a full cine-sized rig is getting smaller and smaller these days if you want to rig it up "properly": (courtesy of Tommy Do on FB)

Not sure if it's useful, but this video talks about getting hard shadows with a Nanlight Forza 500, which I think is the same type of light you're talking about?

I would imagine that mirrors could be quite useful, depending on the geometry of your set of course. The sharpness of a shadow is related to the ratio of cookie-to-surface distance with light-to-cookie-distance, if that makes sense. ie, if you have a light and a wall, putting the cookie closer to the wall gives a sharper shadow, and putting the cookie touching the wall would give an infinitely sharp shadow. Use of a mirror could mean using a light with a narrow beam to go the entire width of the set, hit the mirror / cookie (in either order) and then go into the FOV. This would mean that you drastically increase the distance from the light to the cookie, even if the space isn't big enough to let you back up. It does mean that the cookie would have to be bigger though. Having said all that, it's pretty messy and wouldn't work if the there was haze and the path of the light went near the FOV. It's also worth exploring how sharp you want the shadow to be. Your example shots weren't all super sharp.

As a GH5 owner, I've watched Panasonic gradually improve the colour bit-by-bit with every new camera they've released, and they've really taken it to a nice place now I must say. The GH5 still gives spectacular images, but I must say that with the colour science improvements of the newer models that the grass is getting greener. If I didn't have to spend thousands and/or buy all new glass then I'd be tempted. Of course, considering I haven't shot anything in the last 18 months due to covid, it'd be hard to justify upgrading from a camera which is ageing rather than wearing out. I bought the Voigtlander 42.5mm f0.95 and Laowa 7.5mm F2 lenses in 2019 and haven't used them on a trip yet!

No surprises here, but I'd say it's the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera. A modular cinema camera under $1000 brand new, uncompressed Cinema DNG RAW at 60p, and a beautiful image. The image doesn't look like that second generation iPhone or camcorder that Canon love to imitate when clipped either.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMb6CR781Kc With Resolve it superscales to 4K beautifully too. You don't actually want 4K, you just got trained by the camera brands that 1080 is bad because they compress the absolute living crap out of their images - no-one is rejecting the Alexa 1080p because it's not 4K! With great quality RAW images you can push and pull them in post and they keep on giving and this is pretty darn close to that... Plus it's the easiest camera to grade that I have ever seen. Great images just appear when you drop a LUT or CST onto them, rather than struggling for hours to get good colours.

Auto-ISO would be a tricky thing if it had to transition between LUTs, or other ISO profile adjustments, but for a cine-camera it would be a safe bet that no-one would do that, and maybe these cameras don't offer auto-ISO at all (I very much doubt the Alexa would). Certainly, cinematographers pay a lot of attention to how a camera reacts when under or over exposed, and the relative differences are very subtle, so if they did make custom profiles that evened out the response it would be a meaningful thing that people pay attention to.

Interesting to see, and makes me wonder if the next step would be for camera manufacturers to implement a custom LUT for each ISO setting, which would get rid of the green in those high ISOs. I've dealt with footage that was underexposed and had colour that looked like that and let's just say it's not fun to try and fix in post. I think I was about half-way to getting a physical reaction from that footage just thinking about trying to fix it in post!

I agree. Of course, a 2-year old is practically the same as extreme sports for an AF system! Especially if it's indoors under artificial lighting where ISO performance comes into play. I just hope we're not contributing that much to that marketing purposes. After all, "we need AF because the internet is full of people saying that the market wants AF" would be a pretty logical outcome of "I commented on the forums that the market wants AF because that's all that seems to be talked about". Personally, I think the less we talk about how we "need 4K" or "need AF" or Whatever-T-F the manufacturers are pedalling this month, the better. I'd rather not be part of the problem, and I suspect that a bunch of people hanging out and saying things because they think that's what everyone else wants is a pretty good way to play right into the GAS issues. After all, what role do forums like this play? New people want a "big camera" to get "blurry backgrounds" and forums like this teach them it's called "bokeh" and that they need 4K and FF and AF etc, so then they go and buy that Sony FF camera and there you go - the market has spoken, unfortunately it said what we told it to say by talking about how all these things are "needed", which mostly just isn't true.

You make fair points, but then ask why the discussion is so binary - just look at the statement you make above. What is fascinating is that you use the word reliable - no camera has a reliable AF system. None. There are literally no cameras available on earth that you could use to 100% get the AF right. The GH5 isn't 100%, but neither is the Sony A7S3, or the Canon R5 either. I've seen multiple shots in recent vlogs where the camera focuses on the background, or on the foreground, or just stops, and these are shots that are making it into the final edit. Think of how many out of focus shots the GH5 created and how few ended up in the edits of YouTubers, then apply that to the PDAF/DPAF cameras and so even they are screwing up on a semi-regular basis. The GH5 was a roaring success without good AF, and lots of people buy it, even now, despite the millions (billions?) of comments online about how the AF is not reliable. Would the GH6 be a better selling camera if it had PDAF? Absolutely. Will PDAF give it "a good and reliablish AF system"? Hell no. Does it "need" a "reliable" AF system? No, because such a thing doesn't exist.

The challenge is that the camera must know who to focus on and when. This is essentially an impossible thing, especially for narrative. Imagine a shot with a composition like this, but where only one character is in focus at a time: The background character starts in focus... BG: You've screwed everything up....... I can never trust you again pause FG: I'm sorry When should the AF change focus from the BG character to the FG character? The answer is, it depends on the director. It could change during the pause in 1, before 2, after 2, in reaction to 3, or not at all. If the answer is anything before 3 starts speaking then how the hell could a camera know that this was the moment to transition focus???? This is the fundamental challenge of AF. Anyone who doesn't understand this doesn't understand how to use focus as a creative tool in a film. Lots of people don't need to know this of course, but I find that even in making videos of my family this stuff becomes relevant, which is hardly the pinnacle of the art form.

I just substitute the phrase "robot that doesn't know the foreground from the background" whenever I read AF. It makes phrases like "The GH6 won't be successful until it has the DPAF from Canon or PDAF from Sony" sound ridiculous, but also more accurate: "The GH6 won't be successful until it has the Dual Pixel robot that doesn't know the foreground from the background from Canon or Phase Detect robot that doesn't know the foreground from the background from Sony" I think most people here that talk about AF are either wedding shooters thinking that their films will be better if they can get shallow DOF on their circling-the-couple-gimbal-shot (they won't be) or tech nerds that don't shoot at all. I came on this board thinking that Canon colour science was the best, 4K was required to get a good image, and that AF was a critical feature. Now I know that most of the manufacturers have great colour science, but that magic is created on-set and in post not in the cameras internal LUTs (even if it's an ARRI), I shoot manual focus, I shoot 1080p, and I think possibly the largest weakness in current cameras for image quality is dynamic range. How did I progress on that journey? I shot stuff and looked at it and worked out how to make it look better. I learned about what actually makes a nice image vs just reading the marketing BS that manufacturers spew at us constantly. Guess why? Older cameras can potentially make nicer images than newer ones - no wonder that's not on the marketing talking points!

I won't be. I use manual lenses and although my ability to manually focus doesn't track subjects with the same accuracy, I have never ever ever mistakenly focused on the background instead of the subject. I also film in the real world where my subject is surrounded by other faces and objects that there's no way the camera could distinguish between. Little pocket cameras have the ability to set VIPs and actually take photos of the people you want it to focus on and they will detect faces and then analyse them for the VIPs, and be sure to focus on the VIPs instead of the other random people of less importance. I don't have that option on any interchangeable lens camera I own, so there's no way that the camera can tell who I know and who I don't. Then there's situations like this - how well do you think face-detect is going to work here? Sure, PDAF with face-detection is great for vloggers against a plain background, and it's great if you're shooting a wedding on a gimbal as a one-person operator, but for more complicated stuff it's still a very long way from solving the AF issue. Besides, why settle for second best? My P2K, M2K, and GH5 have the same focusing system as an Alexa 🙂

Interesting test, but that shot at 0:11s really falls apart... not sure if it's the compression or what, but the right-hand edge of the figures practically fades in over a few frames as they walk in front of the background. Maybe have a look at the A7Sii videos people did in ultra low light and see how they got the results they got. IIRC they also used faster lenses.

It looked like the foam cover on it was on the large side, which would cushion it if it moved around a bit, so that's worth paying attention to as well. ADR is an option, but it can be pretty fiddly to do and if you haven't done it before it's not as easy as it might seem, especially for some talent.