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What if there is a shock discovery that our GH5 and MFT gear doesn't all stop working after a certain date? What if my 14mm f2.5 pancake lens isn't watching the Panasonic website and gradually counting down to oblivion? What if I could keep using the 5K 4:3 anamorphic de-squeezing, downsampled 4K60, high-bitrate 10-bit ALL-I, IBIS, reliable, long-battery life, ergonomic, battle-tested camera that I already own? Well.... that would mean, in that crazy reality, if we even dare to contemplate, the other half of this thread is moot. Now excuse me while I go complain on the cutlery forums that I'm about to starve to death because my spoons haven't been upgraded in 1000 years and still don't automatically extend to 'focus' on my food and I still have to do it manually!

I've heard about that, but haven't read up on it enough to understand it. Wasn't it a vocabulary thing?

Found this... it looks like the full specs. https://www.43rumors.com/leaked-the-full-gh5ii-specs/ Some interesting things in there, like 4K60 with 10-bit, but I suspect the aftertaste will be bitter for most people reading this.

You wouldn't catch me hoping that a 60k investment in a rapidly changing technological industry was still good in a decade! I think the entire film and photography industry grew up in a little fantasy bubble about the way the world works because they started with film. Film was standardised and so that meant that any advancements were compatible with your camera and you were going to have to buy new film as you used it anyway. Cost of upgrading image quality = 0. Film was standardised and so that meant that your old camera was still good, basically forever, and was (almost) immune to obsolescence through innovation. I say almost immune because stills camera manufacturers started inventing automatic features like auto-exposure and auto-focus which made people buy their cameras and lenses over and over and over again, but the film industry was immune even to this due to the manual workflows that the industry was based around (and still is). Obsolescence of old equipment = 0. These two things disguised the fact that buying cameras and lenses are investments in technology and technology is the most fertile ground for planned obsolescence that exists. No, ARRI aren't deliberately driving the value of your investments into the dirt, but every manufacturer that makes TVs certainly is. The evidence of this is the slow-motion car accident that is happening which is slowly bankrupting cinema chains, a computer company getting into the telephone industry and sending photography companies bankrupt, and the rise of online streaming services and decline of TV, etc.

What are the specs on the current GH5 sensor? I'm wondering if they went all-out and implemented everything the sensor could do, would it give any new modes etc, or does the current GH5 utilise the sensor completely?

Good points, although there is the odd production that takes place outside of course. In terms of the ALEXA Mini LF not being worth much to the industry in 10 years, I'm not so sure. The real push in the industry for more than 2.5K (2K after debayering) is the move to VFX where more resolution is useful, but we reach the limits of human vision (for normal viewing situations anyway) around 2K, so the 6K capture for VFX to deliver in 4K should be fine as long as human vision doesn't radically improve. The 'gotcha' with that statement though is alternative formats, like VR, which are viewed by the eye at a much wider FOV and therefore require a lot more resolution in the area being viewed to keep the same FOV for each pixel. This is the current limit of 360 cameras - they sound great at 4K but when you punch in to view a 90degree FOV (roughly a 24mm lens) then you're now looking at a 1K image. So yeah, if we're strapping two cameras back to back with fisheye lenses then you'd be wanting that UMP12K rather than a 4K camera for sure. Of course, you'll also want deep DOF and the image planes to be as close together as possible (or you'll want three cameras 120 degrees apart) and so this leads to a very different case where the cinema camera form-factor is no longer the one you'd prefer, going in favour of the 'eye on a stick' form factor.

There may be a third factor at play, although it would be invisible to film-makers. That would be where clients have a keen sense of what the image they want looks like, and they learn that all the examples of the shows they like were shot on the Alexa, so they just know to ask for that. Sure, they wouldn't know what the letters "DR" are as an acronym, and they wouldn't know what "Dynamic Range" means as a pairing of two words, but they might know what it looks like. One example of that is how women have more refined perception of colour than men, meaning they see clearer than men do, but mostly won't know the technical terms. Most of the people I run into in real life that have a honed sense of taste / aesthetic such as visual artists, interior designers, etc have very astute perception but lack the technical vocabulary to explain it.

For a 2s shot, yeah, use a GoPro, or someones phone for that matter. Absolutely. Reliability is critical when you have so much at stake. The cost of running a real set is many/tens/hundreds thousands of dollars an hour. Ironically, once again it's something other than image quality coming into the picture. This time I can understand, but when it's marketing, or the extra pixels that aren't really that visible, then it's a source of greater frustration 🙂

Nice work, that's a convincing film grade with the lens aberrations, the grain, the unstabilised motion, and the colours pushed to that level of saturation. Also, totally normal behaviour for people just chilling in the park lol.

This is my problem. Whichever pocket I check, it's in the other one. With it being so hard to find it's practically like I don't even own one at all! 🙄🙄🙄

It's not even 4K. I mean hellooooooo... 2012 called and wants it's camera back!

What a great video! Cool song and nice skating, it's like a California groove video but in a slightly different direction. The image is really nice too. I don't look at it and think it's lacking, which seems to happen with less and less cameras as time goes on 🙂

The C500ii gets 13.1 stops, also not that far behind: https://www.cined.com/canon-c500-markii-lab-test-dynamic-range-latitude-rolling-shutter/ Of course, combined with the Alexas colour science and that incredible latitude, the total package is really something else. Perhaps the biggest challenge in the camera market is that each camera that has a significant strength is marred by being absolutely terrible in four other ways. It's rare for a camera to be the best, or even in the top-tier, in every category. Although I suppose that the Alexa has its share of flaws - size, weight, and price being a few that quickly come to mind!

I should also add that we almost never see Alexa footage that hasn't been shot with hit-end glass, and hasn't been professionally lit, directed, and colour graded. The RAW footage I have seen often shares some of the tendencies that other cameras have, like the notorious green tint that it's famous for with colourists, but that you never see in final footage.

No offence meant, nor taken 🙂 I just find the current camera market to be rather odd. It seems to be that people assess cameras based on size, cost, and resolution rather than image quality. To me, the BMMCC has an image that is, let's say, 80% of an Alexa Classic (maybe it's less, but let's go with that as a point of comparison). Compared to the BMPCC at 80%, the GoPro has an image, let's say, 20% of an Alexa Classic due to its poor DR, brittle codec, garish colour science, and fixed lens. To put that in context, I think perhaps no camera under the $1K retail price of the Micro gets over, maybe, 50% of an Alexa Classic, maybe less. So that said, if the BMMCC was $3K and the size of an FS5 no-one would compare it to anything other than cinema cameras. I just find it odd that people judge every camera based on specifications, except the Alexa which gets a pass because it looks so glorious, but then the BMMCC and the OG BMPCC somehow don't qualify for being judged on image quality and get classified as small, cheap, 1080p only relics, when the image should speak for itself. Or maybe the GoPro look is the future and I'm just lingering in denial. Although that doesn't explain why the cheapest functioning Alexa Classic is still more expensive second-hand than a brand new Komodo, Canon R5, Zcam E2-F6, Canon C70, etc.

I don't think it does. I own a BMMCC and wanted to buy an all-in-one RAW 1080p camera and narrowed it down to the EOS-M and the OG BMPCC (P2K). I binge watched Zeeks channel, which shows off the camera really well, but the impression I got from the EOS-M footage is that it has low-DR and clips hard, just like the Canon video modes that most Canon cameras have. Despite the EOS-M shooting a higher resolution and being half the cost, I went with the P2K.

How does the DR compare between them? If you're shooting RAW at lower ISOs then DR is one of the biggest contributors to IQ I find.

Cool to hear it's working for you. It makes me laugh that you say Sony have improved their colour science a lot since the A7III. The A7III was much improved compared to the ones before, and those were much improved compared to the ones before that, and the ones before that.....

It would be nice if a YouTuber knew how to use a dictionary.... Unless Smallrig somehow found out that he was doing something nefarious....? Like not using a dictionary 😉

Here's my subjective opinion... NO. 🙂 Relating this back to the subject of the thread, I couldn't possibly think of a better example of why the BMMCC still matters, because the GoPro is perhaps the best example of what is wrong with modern cameras - it has more pixels than the BMMCC but looks worse in every way, even in an unfair situation such as being put on a 4K timeline. The BMMCC matters because it has a nicer image than almost all of the current cameras, regardless of resolution and including cameras many times the purchase price. The fact that a GoPro is a real competitor for the form factor is laughable. The BMMCC intercuts with an Alexa without much trouble or issue, but studios create contractual clauses specifying the maximum length and number of shots that a GoPro can be used for on real productions. There couldn't be a more stark comparison than that surely!

I bought a P2K (OG BMPCC) purely because it had a screen. The M2K (BMMCC) is tiny, and some lenses are tiny, but once you add a monitor it instantly becomes the size of a 1DC or larger. They did make a 4K version, it was called the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/blackmagicmicrostudiocamera4k It has a group of loyal fans, but it truly is a studio camera and doesn't perform well outside of studio conditions, plus it's discontinued and there aren't many out there in the wild so is hard to get hold of. It will be interesting to see what happens to GoPro, both the camera line and also the company. The camera line seems to be a YT mainstay as it's a tiny camera that with its wide fixed-focus lens and excellent in-camera stabilisation is perfect for vlogging on the go, but the image quality is always a disappointment with DR issues / plastic colours outside and bad ISO noise and drab colours inside. Many YT channels were built on a single GoPro, often used without any accessories whatsoever, just literally holding the camera between thumb and finger and relying on the stabilisation to work magic, or putting it on a shelf or on top of a bottle as a temporary tripod to do a talk-to-camera section. I'm not sure what pressure there is for BM to update the Micro, but maybe there is with increasing VFX prevalence.

It's been about a decade since the GoPro Hero 3 camera was released. Over that time, GoPro have released cameras that are roughly the same size, weight, battery life, price, and target market, but of course the specs got better, so they're a good benchmark to set a benchmark for the pace of technological progress. Here's a comparison of the data rates over that time... The Hero 3 Black (2012) could do 4K15 (124MP/s) and the Hero 6 Black (2017) could do 4K60 (500MP/s), a 4X increase over 5 years, or a 32% increase per year. Therefore, we can either expect a 32% reduction in size and weight per year to keep the same performance, or we get that in a performance bump each year. Taking the BMMCC, released in 2015, and extrapolating it to today would mean we could expect a camera with 7X the throughput, which if we round it up to an 8X increase would be full uncompressed RAW at 4K120, 2.7K240, or 1080p480... at the same size, weight, and battery life. I don't really think I need a camera that can do 4K120 or 2.7K240, but one that could do 2.7K60 and 1080p120 and was 66% of its current height and width and depth and 25% the weight, well, that would be something to have!! Not only would that be spectacular for drone users, but also great for those who are using these as crash cams, dash cams, and other tight-installation applications.

Are there any other cinema cameras you could fly on a drone this size?

and had 24p support for many years IIRC

Beautiful! Well done on filming the bees like this - I've tried and it's no easy task. Also, don't apologise for posting your own stuff, assuming it's relevant to the conversation.. It separates you from the people here who don't shoot anything and just talk about film-making without actually doing it 🙂