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No offence taken! I've played with shutter angle and waving my hand on front of my face and I've gotten a sense of how 24p is different to reality. The subjective experience for me is that 24p has a 'look' which is made to look the least un-natural by having a shutter angle somewhere in the 120-240 degree range, depending on your mood and if it's dark etc. But the thing is that 60p doesn't look more neutral to me, it looks like it has about the same amount of a 'look' in comparison to reality that 24p does, but the aesthetic of that look is very different. 24p seems to have a kind of 'heightened sense' aesthetic, like realty can have in moments of strong emotion. Kind of like the visual component of "time slowed down" and in a sense it's an effect that kind of increases the romance and emotion and depth and pain and very texture of experiencing the world as an emotional animal. 60p has an aesthetic that makes reality seem like every atom has been lubricated and everything is kind of slipping all over itself, kind of like everything is falling in slow-motion except that it's doing it at the speed of reality, and perhaps a little bit too fast for comfort. It has an aesthetic like the love child of slipping over in the bath, being scammed by a con artist that was so good the only warning that you got was that everything was happening slightly too easily, and what I imagine it would be like taking pills that make you smarter and give you superhero reflexes. In my mind, 24p has a more relatable aesthetic, it fits with things that I occasionally experience in my sober real-life, but it's also familiar from watching movies and TV, so that's an advantage too. 60p has an aesthetic that I have never experienced in sober real-life. 24p disappears but 60p never seems to fade-away into the background, it's like I've had my brain downloaded into a robot body and somehow they got the code wrong. My answer to your question about what to film for a simulation ride was 60p, but not because it mimics reality, but for two reasons - the first is that in motion-simulations it's been shown that lower frame rates make people nauseous and that it doesn't look like reality or like 24p. So people would come out of the ride having kept their lunch and having had an experience that they'd say "wow, it really was an experience" rather than say "I watched a movie and the seat moved". Talking about frame rate and shutter angle to mimic reality is like talking about drawing with crayons to mimic a moving sculpture - there's enough similarity to make it seem reasonable to ask the question but only good enough to choose between fundamental challenges that cannot all be met.

My first answer would be "find someone else to do this". My second answer would be "no really, I'm not the person for this task". My third answer would be 60p 360 shutter. But that's only because you said that the displays are limited to 60p. If I had access to a 24-240fps display that could do any frame rate in-between then I would test the 1080p VFR mode at 24/30/60/90/120 and 180fps. I would then downscale the whole lot to SD in order to eliminate the fact that the slower frame rates have more data per pixel than the higher frame rates. Based on that I would then look at the resolution/framerate/bitrate combinations that the camera could offer, and work out how to choose between them, shoot identical test materials, and do a blind test with an audience to determine which mode to use. Of course, it's a ridiculous question, along the lines of "if you needed to paint the ceiling but only had a drawer of cutlery to apply the paint, which utensil would you choose, and by the way you're limited to only a fork or spoon".

Yeah, creativity comes first, not second, or ninth, or last... but a DSLR form-factor operating at a high-SS and frame rate would be great for sniping shots from very high-risk angles, like holding it up above the people in front of you, holding it out a window from a moving vehicle, or trying to track an athlete or vehicle as they go screaming past you on a track. The upgrade from 20MP 10fps stills to 50MP 60fps slightly compressed stills would be an enormous upgrade in terms of getting the shot. I took my modified action camera out today to a nearby national park and filmed some stuff, and the shooting experience was completely different holding a camera the size of a matchbox compared to holding a full-size camera - people don't notice you in the same way, and you can throw it around in a different way too. My GH5 captures lovely images, but those images are different because the camera effects where you are, what you shoot and how the people you're pointing it at react to it being there. No IQ upgrade can make those changes, and why your RED got put back in its box.

Shoulda-woulda-coulda. I remember hearing about this funny thing called "bitcoin" that was a "virtual currency" and people were generating them with their home computers. I contemplated setting up my home PC to generate some. I was also contemplating SETI@home, but never got around to either of them. My thought was that if I did I'd just run it all night and all day when I was sleeping and at work. I genuinely have no idea when that was, but I remember when it hit the news that you could buy a pizza with bitcoin I had already heard of it, so it was even before the pizza buying days. Had I done it, not lost the digital wallet, not got robbed, and not had a ego-centric-rockstar-complex-related-breakdown from getting rich, I probably would have been a billionaire by now.

This idea comes up every so often, the first time it came up was when mere mortals could get their hands on 4K cameras. The results at the time were "sure" and (IIRC) Popular Electronics magazine featured a cover photo that was a still from a 4K camera, which obviously with 8K and hyper-datarates of todays cameras would be far higher IQ. One of the interesting counter arguments came from Peter Hurley, a headshot photographer who did a trial with a RAW-shooting cine camera, was that the benefit of always "getting the shot" by never missing the moment was more than offset by the work in post of having to find the frames you wanted, and all the media management that comes with the huge files. Obviously that was the perspective of a stills photographer, so if you're shooting video and stills, then pulling the stills out of the video would be a no-brainer, as even though it will take work to go through the footage and find the right frames, you're partly reviewing the footage during video editing anyway, you're colour correcting the footage anyway, you're managing your media anyway, plus you don't have to pay attention during the filming process to stills and video separately, and can capture both simultaneously using the one set of equipment. Plus it gives you the ability to reframe in post for the 4K(TM) that every client seems to want, despite not knowing WTF it even is, let alone knowing that resolution is the last thing that makes a video great. I'd suggest that you'd still want the old three-camera setup for the ceremony, reception speeches, reception dancing, although the ability to shoot wider and reframe in post might mean you can get away with not having a second shooter but still "simulating" one in post with things like getting close-up then getting a wide and maybe even a pan/tilt if your editing style warrants it.

Yeah, FF to MF is one "step"... just like MFT to APSC/S35 is 1.33, APSC/S35 to FF is 1.5, and FF to MF is either 1.27 or 1.56 depending on the sensor. Adding to @BTM_Pix comments below, MFT -> FF is very similar to APSC -> MF, with 2x and 1.89x or 2.3x. I just looked up 645 lenses and wow, I didn't realise that the 6x4.5 sensor has a crop factor of 0.58, which is even more extreme than the Phase One etc MF cameras. You're right about anamorphics, essentially increasing the sensor size through optical compression/decompression techniques. Although with the 'lesser' size increases in the MF cameras on offer, maybe we should be using those open-gate with anamorphic adapters on 645 lenses.. Why did I think of the Titanic when I read that? Anyway, moving on! You're right about the wow factor and feeling like you should be getting something impressive after re-buying all your equipment. Do we know what the new GFX100S image is likely to look like? If MFT was abandoned and I switched systems then a compact MF camera with a decent 1080p mode would certainly tempt me to just skip FF. Do you have any idea why MF should be fundamentally a nicer image than FF?

From where I sit, as a GH5 owner noting the year-on-year absence of a GH6, combined with Hollywood types having their own FF fanboi crush on the new "LF" cinema cameras, the future looks potentially like larger sensor sizes. In anticipating a FF future, and thinking of my love of vintage lenses, I had a period of a few days where I contemplated buying some FF lenses just to keep in case I'm forced to abandon MFT some years in the future. During the tumble down that particular rabbit hole I wondered if I should jump straight to Medium Format lenses, as potentially they've escaped the FF-fad-inflation-factor, and it would also mitigate me against a take-over of Medium Format cameras. I have since worked out that if that happens then I can just factor in the lenses to my system swap, and that with the plethora of new cheap fast glass coming from China, there will be acceptable options available when I make the change. I also realised that the 'look' of vintage primes is mostly due to some combination of simpler optical recipes, lower manufacturing tolerances and less sophisticated coatings. The fact that cheaper lenses typically have simpler optical recipes and lower manufacturing tolerances covers off those angles, and the less sophisticated coatings can be emulated with filters, which are widely available. This all made me curious... What is the current state of MF video? Resolutions, bitrates, bit-depths, codecs? Do you think that MF will overtake FF? Before you say it's not possible because of sensor read speeds and sensor size for IBIS motors, consider that the GH5 was miles ahead of the FF video offerings when it was released but the current crop of FF cameras have made up most/all of that ground in the subsequent years. I estimate this will continue and so having 6K120 and 5.5-stop IBIS on a Medium Format camera is simply a matter of time and market demand, not problems with the laws of physics. I have absolutely LOVED the video I have seen from medium format cameras in the past, and I'm not sure if that's the lenses (which are ridiculously high-quality) or the larger sensor capturing more light or the shallower aperture or the fact that the colour science of a 5-figure camera is potentially better than CaNikon is famous for, but the images were moving in a way seldom seen from other cameras, and almost all MF video had that glorious feel. Thoughts?

Human vision is fundamentally different to the way that video works, so there is no frame-rate & shutter angle combination that makes sense. To expand on this, imagine you have a fan with only one fan blade, and imagine that it's spinning quite quickly. We would see the fan blade as a blur between (let's say) the 12-oclock position and the 6-oclock position. Then a tiny bit of time passes, and now we see the fan blade as a blur between 1-oclock and 7-oclock. etc. To put it into traditional video terms, the shutter angle is much much more than a 360 degree shutter. There have been attempts to actually simulate this. They filmed scenes with a very high frame rate and using a 360 shutter, and then you can combine many frames together, let's say that output frame #1 has capture frames 1-100, then output frame #2 has capture frames 11-110, etc. In this way, you can have a shutter angle that is larger than 360 degrees. You could also do things like have the motion blur be a fade rather than all parts of the motion blur be the same. I think this might be what we're running into when we talk about 24p vs 60p. Maybe 24p has the right motion-blur, but 60p has the right refresh rate, but can't have a shutter angle more than 360 degrees. I believe that computer games have worked out that the human eye can't detect anything more than a certain frame rate, ie, 120fps or 240fps or something, so in that instance there's no point rendering a game at faster than that. So what we need is a frame rate at that pace, but with motion blur around 1/50th of a second (corresponding to 24p 180 shutter) which with current technology isn't possible. Thus, the 24p 60p debate will never be resolved because the technology isn't the right kind of design. Actually, it's that 24p is a problem because people who do video use equipment designed for computer gaming, but don't know that that's what they're doing. Do you recall my earlier post where I said that film-making is deceptively simple and that people don't know what they don't know? This is one of the things I was talking about. There's no real effort required to get great 24p - just buy equipment designed for film-making and not for computer games. There are a huge number of external display adapters that are available for purchase, and they're very affordable too. BlackMagic sells a bunch of them here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products including the Decklink which is $145 for 1080p and $195 for the 4K version. I suspect these only work with Resolve, but there would be others that work with other NLEs. These will also give you support for 10-bit, HDR, and SDI if you have SDI monitoring equipment, and perhaps best of all is that they are a completely managed colour pipeline, so the operating system and display drivers and all the crap can't stuff up your colour calibration, giving you a completely calibrated display to work from. Most monitors will happily display a 1080 or 4K signal at 24p if that's what the hardware is giving them, so all you need is one of these interfaces and all the problems you're facing will go away. You could make the argument that this gives you a great 24p pipeline but it doesn't solve it for everyone viewing your videos, and that's true. For them, it will be a mixture of watching on computers designed for gaming, phones, and smart TVs. People watching on computers probably aren't going to have good 24p playback, but as has already been mentioned, will they even notice? I'm not sure about phones, but smart TVs may do this happily, considering they're designed for media consumption, not for gaming, but it might well be a patchy. I remember setting up my media boxes to be PAL and not NTSC (before I had a completely smart TV) so they were definitely broadcast focused rather than PC/gaming mentality. Also, you'd be surprised at how many people can spot the 50p "soap opera effect". I doubt that many would spot the difference between 24p and 30p, but you never know. If you ever sort out your equipment to give you proper 24p (or 25p) playback you could test your friends and family and see if they can tell. You might be surprised.

As promised... Shot on the mighty SJ4000 with replacement 8mm M12 lens. I brought the footage into Resolve and pounded it with a hammer until it no longer looked like a cheap modern camera, but reminded me of an expensive older camera. I might have been a little heavy-handed with the film-grain though, I thought YT would compress it slightly more, anyway, enjoy.

Sounds familiar, except the part about 8mm footage being available. I think there's a VHS tape with me on it when I was about 10, but I lack a VCR, so it'll sit in a box for a while I'd imagine. I seem to remember the tape wasn't that interesting lol. I do wonder if the footage would be interesting to our future selves and descendants, but if I ask the question of myself, the answer is that yes, I'd be very interested in seeing clips of my grandparents or great-grandparents, even if they were shot on a potato. But if it's not the case and one day my storage goes belly-up I'll have had enough fun along the way for it to have all been worthwhile! It makes sense that higher framerates might be more revealing and therefore make CGI imperfections more visible. Certainly HD and FHD had that effect - I heard that productions had to spend more money on makeup because little imperfections that didn't used to be visible became a problem and they had to work slower. Lots of stuff in here. I understand about BRAW, but wasn't explicitly aware that you could get lower resolution BRAW from the whole sensor. I'd be interested to know if it's downsampling or simply line-skipping / pixel-binning. If it's downsampling then that's a cool thing. The comparisons between RAW / BRAW / Prores and h265 / AVCHD performance in post is really about IPB vs ALL-I. Another example of something that the GH5 does right but no-one else is doing because they can sell you their own RAW flavour and make you buy their external recorder or their NLE. Tech companies are assholes sometimes. I understand that extra resolution in post has advantages and the more sophisticated your workflows then the more resolution is useful to you. I've kind of gone the other way with my workflow development. I started out wanting the highest quality capture (which meant 4K with sharp lenses) and was aiming to do all the hard work in post. Now I've worked out what look / aesthetic I want, I am aiming to get it right in camera as much as I can. I have moved away from shooting to crop, post-stabilisation, and shooting log to colour later. I've worked out that I have much more in common with film-makers rather than videographers. My client is me and I can make technical decisions in order to please myself and fulfil my vision and objectives, instead of having clients to please who change their minds after the shoot and don't know much but demand the most impractical but least relevant things, like 4K delivery for social media, or zooming into things in post etc. If I was a videographer I'd probably be shooting in 6K RAW, putting that on my business cards, and recycling my hard drives on a regular basis. It's not a job I envy, that's for sure!!

Very interesting and I understand the logic completely. 'Slow glass' is an interesting concept for sure. How do you edit your videos? or do you edit at all? One thing I had to work through for myself was how to edit, in terms of the philosophy of editing. For example, the real-life experience of travel is of there being yelling and stress before leaving because the kids left their packing to the last minute and then can't find things and didn't put their devices on charge (they're teenagers so we let them make their own mistakes lol) and then boredom and awkward conversation in the uber going to the airport and then stress at the airport followed by boredom waiting for the flight and then..... I had to work out if I wanted to put that stuff in there or not. Putting it in would be more like Slow Glass but it's not the kind of travel video that anyone wants to watch, and filming it certainly isn't something that would help the situation while it's happening! I concluded that I would only shoot when it didn't hinder the activity itself, and would only put things in the edit that my wife would accept or that the kids would be ok with when they are in their mid-twenties. I also realised that the process of editing (and by extension when you even pick up a camera and hit record) is editing of some kind, which is the process of sorting things according to some criteria, and your chances of that criteria not being hugely biassed is very low, especially with people you know or love. I do have a secret long-term project of sorts in that I sometimes shoot random test footage in the house for things like low-light performance and stuff, and that often includes little shots of the family watching TV or whatever happens to be happening, and the 'project' is that I don't delete it unless I'm made to do so on the spot. I won't be pulling that footage out and editing it, but it will be there when I'm old and I suspect that the family will be able to look back and not care that they were in their pyjamas and hadn't combed their hair or whatever.

One of the things that 24p gives me is a certain surrealist aesthetic. What I mean is that 24p isn't quite real, it's more like an impression of reality rather than an accurate representation of reality itself. Things that make video more realistic like 60fps, rec709 accurate colours, HDR, super high resolution, 3D, etc seem to make it less 'cinematic'. Of course, this is an aesthetic choice - if you want to make videos that seem very real then those things are great. Games or POV videos should be more realistic, so those things are benefits in that case. I shoot travel and events of my family and friends, so my videos are like a vignette of memory, and in alignment with that the aesthetic I want is fuzzy and impressionistic like memory. I also like the idea of giving the same larger-than-life aesthetic that feature films have when viewed in the cinema. I find that 24p is one of the things that helps generate that aesthetic.

I understand the attraction of codecs like BRAW, but going back to my original point - it's the bit-depth and DR that is the main attraction for them. The only reason you can WB in post is because of the extra bit-depth, and the extra DR is just that they haven't clipped the DR from the sensor, but both of those can easily be matched by other codecs, Prores 4444 and XQ for example, if implemented correctly. The downsides of any RAW/semi-RAW format are that you're either getting the full-sensor resolution or you're getting a cropped image. The full sensor resolution option requires more processing power in post to decode that resolution, then downscale/upscale it to whatever timeline resolution you're running, and only then can you process it at your timeline resolution. This gives you the benefits of oversampling, but it makes your computer do the work in post, every time you hit play. The other issue is getting a cropped image. This has three downsides: you don't retain the FOV of your lens, and you lose the oversampling, which causes both a loss of colour subsampling resolution (a 3840x2160 / 1920x1080 sensor readout is only what - 420 colour?) and the other thing you lose is the noise reduction effect of downsampling from many pixels. A proper implementation of Prores 4444 / XQ or even a 12-bit h265 ALL-I file with sufficient bitrate that was downsampled from the whole sensor would side-step all of these issues. It's why I shoot with the 200Mbps 10-bit 422 ALL-I 1080p mode on the GH5 - it gives me all the things I'm talking about except the 12-bit. The GH5 was released in 2017. Things have only gotten worse. I predict that in 3 years two-thirds the 4K devotees here will be tearing their hair out because the $4000 cameras will be offering 2500Mbps 8K and 80Mbps 4K and 20Mbps 1080 and everyone will be crying at how much it costs to have a computer that can edit 10-bit 8K h265 files. Then everyone will make the investment, and a couple of years after that..... h266. Any time you mix those two frame-rates you're going to have the 8/16 minute problem. 24/25p is a whole different thing. 23.976 vs 24p has a frame rate difference of 0.004 fps. 24 vs 25 has a 1 fps difference. I'll let you do the math 🙂 With drones it doesn't really matter anyway - no audio to sync to and I doubt you're doing much stuff where the timing is critical.

I've also found that most of the times Resolve went a bit funny (ie, something wasn't doing what I expected) then I just save and restart Resolve and re-open the project and it goes back to working fine. It may not fix your issue, but it's worth a try if you hit an issue while you're in an edit.

Not all cameras from then were 420.

I've thought a few times about what a GH6 would have to have to be better than the GH5 for me, and there's not many things TBH. Of course, I'm not the kind of person who these 24K - 300 FPS - internal RAW - 48fps burst - eyelash AF - 8kg - $12599 cameras seem to be aimed at. I have stuff invested in MFT too, but would happily re-buy a GH5 if mine broke and if I felt the need to change platforms then it would be far enough in the future that the FF camera I would buy with enough features for me wouldn't be that expensive and the lenses available are just getting more and more available and affordable. I had a burst of FOMO around FF just recently, thinking that if I even change to FF then the lenses that I'd want might be vintage primes and might all be too expensive at that point and I'd have missed out, but I kind of realised that there are enough good FF lenses available new that I could get a 'good enough' set, and partially compensate with filters. Still, if someone gave me one of these new A1 cameras then it would be great - I'd sell it and buy more interesting vintage lenses 🙂

I kind of include that in your personal decision-making process, but it's true that you can't decide on features individually, you pick the camera that has the best offering for your particular situation, which obviously includes your budget as well. One of the things that I really see as fundamentally ridiculous in modern cameras is the absolutely atrocious codecs for the lower resolutions. Many cameras have 100Mbps 4K but 25Mbps 1080p. The logic is ridiculous.... let's make a camera that can process 260Mpps (Million pixels per second - 4K at 30p), can compress 260Mpps, and can write 100Mbps to the card, then we'll take the 1080p video mode and write to the card at one-quarter of the cameras capacity! It's not like they're protecting their cine line by crippling the 1080p mode. I think poor 1080p codecs are one of the main reasons that 1080 has such a bad reputation online, people compare their 4K mode with their 1080p mode and think that's a fair comparison. Of course, in your case you could shoot 1080p in Prores HQ, which I understand is downsampled from the whole sensor. You might be a huge fan of RAW, which I understand the benefits of for some applications, and this leads me to another annoyance, and that is why they haven't implemented higher bit-depths. Prores 4444 or Prores XQ have 12-bit and higher bitrates than HQ, so might be a sensible half-step between HQ and RAW, and it allows all the benefits of a downsampled image. If you're putting 24p onto a 23.976 (or vice-versa) then it will cause a skipped / jumped frame every 16 minutes, but because it's a rounding situation, the first frame would happen around the 8 minute mark. However, every time you cut from one clip to another you're effectively resetting the clock, so you'd have to have a clip longer than 8 minutes on the not-matching timeline, or you'd have one frame error per 16 minutes (with the first error around the 8 minute mark) if your master was being broadcast on the wrong framerate. I don't think that's a real problem in practice.

I'm planning on shooting some stuff soon. I may even make the project B&W - here's that last still with a straight B&W conversion (and none of the other grading I would also do to it): The modding process was super-easy, so if anyone is curious then I'd recommend trying it. The only thing to watch is that you get a genuine SJ4000 as there are heaps of fakes on Ebay. I previously bought the cheapest one I could find, for the cheap camera challenge, and it was definitely a fake and the 640x480 video it captured was truly truly awful. There are a few easily google-able sites about how to spot a fake from the genuine one so it's not that hard.

Luckily it's an opt-in situation... 🙂 Indeed! GH6 for the win!! Seriously, a GH6 is the only camera that I would contemplate upgrading my GH5 for. Film-making is like any other technical field, there are people who are interested in what the equipment can do, and others who are interested in using it for bragging rights. You forgot the 1080p specs. Ah, don't bother. The GH5 has been killing it for many years now and releases since mostly can't touch it, and this camera is only US$6500 so......

I agree with the sentiment about shooting what you're happy with. I'd also add the caveat of forming your own opinions by doing real testing in controlled conditions and making sure you're getting the tech right. I used to read lots of stuff, and was that "confused mess" that you mentioned, and the way I got out of it was to actually test things myself and see what the effect actually was. All technical choices result in an aesthetic of some kind, and film is a creative pursuit, so it's creating a finished product with the intended aesthetic. If there was no aesthetic component then scripts would be technical manuals or lists of facts about a situation, and there would be no need to show anything other than diagrams on the screen, everything else is about the aesthetic. So when I see someone criticising a technical choice I just see someone who doesn't understand something. We criticise what we don't understand. I think film/video is especially prone to that because there is such a depth of knowledge required and it's deceptively simple, so people don't know that they don't know things. As an example, shooting 1080p and upscaling to 4K has much merit and I do it. I shoot 1080p because I have a GH5 which shoots 1080p in 200Mbps 10-bit 422 ALL-I in both 24p and 60p. I like the 'look' of 1080p and I can edit / colour those files on my laptop without having to transcode, so it doesn't cost me rendering time or money to buy a new computer. I upscale to 4K because YouTube compression is less-worse at 4K than at 1080p. You might think that it's a case of shooting in a 'worse' codec than YT, but it's not, I'm shooting 200Mbps and 4K YT is something like 10Mbps. I've done A/B tests and you can tell which is the 4K master and which is the 2K master upscaled to 4K for YT, but you have to pixel peep and you have to know where to look. For my purposes shooting 1080p gives me almost as many benefits as shooting 4K with a very significant advantage in post-production. That will be a different equation for other people, and I don't criticise everyone for shooting 4K, everyone has to make their own judgements. These judgements also include non-camera stuff and even non-filmmaking things.

This topic contains two very distinct and completely separate topics that people are mashing together - one is filming in 24p and the other is getting smooth playback of 24p through the whole image pipeline. One is an aesthetic choice and the other is a technical configuration issue. Most computers aren't setup for a 24fps refresh rate, and so when you play back a video it will be doing its own horrible things to it. That's on top of all the other horrible things that amateurs do to the frame rates already. It's very easy to see what is going on with your playback - set your smartphone to its super-slow-motion mode and then play a video and film your screen with your phone. Import the footage from your phone and then count the frames that each frame of video is displayed on your computer. There's a reason that Resolve is designed to work with BMs hardware interface cards - it means that Resolve can run your reference monitor at the right settings without the OS getting in the way and doing horrible things to the colour, bit-depth and frame rate. Until anyone has confirmed with a high-speed camera that their display is actually showing 24p (or any other frame rate) with an equal amount of time per frame then they can't speak with any credibility about the aesthetics of that frame-rate.

Following on from the Shane Hurlbut lens comparison, I'm interested in hearing about which lenses have desirable rendering properties, like a 3D quality, or a more flattering rendering of faces, etc. Some stills from the test I linked above: It seems that somehow the older optical properties of the Cooke give more depth to the image. I've also encountered this in my own tests with the Takumars, which seemed very flat in comparison to other equivalent lenses at identical apertures. Another strange example is this comparison of two 35mm lenses at the same distance and aperture: The K35 looks like it has more wide-angle distortion, almost like it is a wider lens that's closer to the subject, but that isn't the case. Of the more affordable lenses around, what are the ones that stand out? and why?

Yeah, I just watched the second part (the two hour one) and Chris said that he's trying to work a couple of years ahead of what he's shooting, so doesn't want to talk about what he's looking into because as soon as he talks about a particular vintage lens then the prices go through the roof, so he doesn't want to disclose that until he's already bought the lenses he needs to build his own set. I feel like some of these vintage lenses are already too expensive to own, and that time is running out for other series.

While watching the latest @Tito Ferradans anamorphic video, he references a great conversation about lenses and especially vintage vs modern glass. The video is 1-hour and they present screen grabs from lens tests as well as talk about lots of interesting stuff, especially K35s. @Andrew Reid - there was even some stuff mentioned in here about them that Media Division didn't include in their excellent video on the FD vs K35 lenses. There's also a part 2 that is 2-hours that I am yet to watch: In the first part above they make reference to a comparison that Shane Hurlbut made between the modern and optically excellent Leica Summilux-C and the vintage and less perfect Cooke S4, including some side-by-sides that really show a difference in how 3D the lenses are. Spoiler, the Cooke is the more 3-dimensional of the two. Going back to Jay Holben and Christopher Probst, apparently they're working on The Cine Lens Manual which is a book and has been in development for many years now and is up to 1000 pages. Apparently it's taking so long because of the extensive testing of various lenses that they have done in researching the book, so it seems like it might be an encyclopaedia when it's finally done. I'll be keeping and eye out for it, although with the work they've put in it'll probably cost more than what I'd be willing to invest! The other thing that they mentioned in the test is the previous tests done by Sharegrid. Their site is here: https://www.sharegrid.com/learn and it features a quad player feature where you can load up four lenses and play their studio test from the four of them simultaneously, which is fantastic for comparing lenses, or even the modern vs more vintage lenses. It's just a pity there aren't more affordable lenses in there!

@BTM_Pix @gt3rs thanks for the suggestions. I now understand WTF is going on. I swear that half the handrails I use are larger than 2 inches in diameter, and I was beginning to think that everyone had gone crazy making tiny undersized clamps. I looked up the standards for handrail design, and found https://www.stepform.com.au/as1675-2018/handrail-guardrail-detail.html which outlines AUSTRALIAN STANDARD AS1657 HANDRAIL / GUARDRAIL: So, handrails will be 1.18-2.56 inches in diameter.....BUT, now I get it. The US, UK and EU standards all place an upper limit on handrail diameter of 2 inches / 50mm. FFS. So now I am wondering what I do. Buy one of the many handy and affordable things that will work in almost every other place in the world except where I live which will be a crapshoot if it happens to fit or not, or go the custom rigging that's heavier, much more expensive, but will definitely fit any handrail I come across? And if I get it wrong then I'm basically screwed as there's nothing I can do. *sigh* More research reveals that https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_id=10924&p_table=STANDARDS says "For wood railings: Wood components shall be minimum 1500 lb-ft/in(2) fiber (stress grade) construction grade lumber; the posts shall be at least 2-inch by 4-inch (5 cm x 10 cm) lumber spaced not more than 8 feet (2.4 m) apart on centers; the top rail shall be at least 2-inch by 4-inch (5 cm x 10 cm) lumber, the intermediate rail shall be at least 1-inch by 6-inch (2.5 cm x 15 cm) lumber. All lumber dimensions are nominal sizes as provided by the American Softwood Lumber Standards, dated January 1970." This picture clearly shows a guardrail that is oval in shape and waaaay larger than 2" in diameter: