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Don't you find a 24 too narrow? When vloggers worked out that the 16-35 was the right lens then I think vlogs got a lot more comfortable. I found that a 24mm without using a long extender felt like having a casual conversation when the first phrase should be "dude, why so close?" Affiliate of course! On another note, I think that action cameras aren't taken as seriously as they should be taken for vlogging. They normally have a wider mode, now with linear lens corrections. Can have IBIS, detachable screens, mic inputs, and fixed focus (or at least small sensors that have large depth of field).

Tom posted a follow-up to the above, with the results, and also the under/over exposure tests. I did it blind and picked the P6K first, with the UMP second. Interestingly, I chose based upon the colours, and the strange green tint from the Alexa and the awful strange everything colours of the RED made them get third and last places, respectively. The more I grade, the more I care about good colour and the associated art department choices (which obviously aren't a factor here) and less about the resolution or whatever else of the camera. The sharpness of the P6K doesn't phase me as I know I could soften it in post, or on set with lenses and filters. Considering that the Alexa has been used by other people to get good colours once or twice before we know it's possible and the camera isn't fundamentally flawed... yes, I'm kidding of course. I don't even think he botched the WB. It's very odd how the colours were rendered, and strange that the RED also shared some of the bad colours from the Alexa. Regardless, seems the image from the P6K holds up pretty well, and the over exposure highlight rolloff didn't look too much worse than the Alexa, of course with the under-exposure shadows being much superior due to lower noise levels.

This recent video is interesting as the guy uses a ZCam and talks about how things like the 4k120 (or 4k100?) is great as it is slow motion but also allows a bit of digital reframing. I've also noticed a few people who seem to be shooting the same combo of ZCAM with the Vazen 40mm 1.8X T2 anamorphic. The guy in this video says they call it the "baby RED". For the money, this combo (or with the Vazen 28mm T2 1.8X anamorphic), with a Vmount / monitor / matte box, seems like the real deal.

Ignorance is bliss.. stop reading the internet and just go shoot! and yes, crop gets rid of some of the character, but not all of it - things like lens coatings apply equally across the whole frame. I would suggest that lens coatings and the sharpness and contrast of the lens are more sought-after properties of vintage lenses than what is happening on the edges of frame, the Helios 44 being an exception of course. Don't let my past failures prevent you from pursuing your own failures... I read somewhere online that bad decisions make for good stories. Presumably that you can tell other people online

That was my experience of the local festival circuit that I saw. One doc I saw was very entertaining and I don't begrudge it winning a few awards, but when it won Best Cinematography is was beyond surprising as not only was it badly shot and lit, there was even a moment when someone bumped the camera and you could clearly hear them say "oh sh*t". The panel was a bunch of industry people and successful indy film makers.

GH6 / GH6S perhaps? It would make sense for Panasonic to push people into their new mount, and as long as there are adapters available then the people with vintage glass won't complain.

I did a test of digitally reframing in post, comparing a 4K shot at 100% and a 4K shot digitally-zoomed at 148% (to match framing). The purpose of the test was to compare taking a 4K crop of 6K with simply filming 4K and digitally-cropping in the same amount. My impression was that it's pretty darn difficult to tell the difference once it's been compressed, but it was also pretty difficult to tell the difference looking at the files straight out of camera. You could tell that the upscale was a bit blurred but most lenses are also a bit blurred and codecs a bit blurred too, so in a practical sense I think you're fine. Using Clearimage zoom is also better than the test above as it is pre-compression, whereas the above is post-compression and is throwing away bitrate.

I edit in Resolve and am starting to out-grow my home-grown approaches. For example, I'm currently editing a project that has 37 scenes and (currently) 1500 clips. I'm at the start of my edit process and will cut this down severely, but am finding things un-wieldy. I'd google tips from documentary-makers on how they handle absolutely huge volumes of clips, but it seems that no-one is editing large projects in Resolve (and is admitting it online) so the advice typically revolves around PP or FCPX which have different editing features.

Or the GH5 using the ETC mode in 1080 gives a 1:1 crop, which I think is something like 2.8x crop of the 2x MFT crop, making it a crop factor of 5.6 and making the 210mm + 2xTC something like 2350mm! Of course, focal lengths this long are basically unusable because any source of movement, even a slight breeze or people walking, will blur the image. That thing is pretty cool. The wheels make sense in how it would allow weight onto a moving part, unfortunately the FD 70-210 is one of those push/pull to zoom lenses (pump action lenses? if they're not called that they totally should be!). It's less of a problem really, as the lens is MF I'm kind of taking some of the weight of the lens while holding it anyway. I use a monopod with it, but that's more for stability during shooting. I'll see how I go. It's been so long since the young fella played last season that I've forgotten what's what!

I haven't, although I haven't used it as much as I had anticipated. Even when I put that on my GH5 for sports, which is a setup I actually use in real-life, I get a little concerned about weight on the mount. I've wondered about retrofitting some kind of lens mount onto the zoom, unfortunately there isn't room on the lens for anything to be strapped around it as it would obscure the control rings. I could put something around the TC though - it's just a cylinder on the outside, although I don't always use the TC, so it wouldn't always suit. 1200mm is quite useful though, recording sunsets where the sun is huge in frame is a good example of that kind of focal length.

And here is my entry for most ridiculous Micro rig, the competition that no-one asked for and no-one will find useful. Micro, FD-MFT adapter, Canon 2x TC, Canon FD 70-210 f4. Might be one of the cheapest ways to get 1210mm 60p RAW that exists. Beyond that, not so useful!

Great stuff... and of course, mixing alcohol and explosives is always a great idea!!!* *No, it's not.

Cool product. It would be good if the dual-mono mode just using the front mic could also be used where one of the channels attenuated so it was a safety track, but I guess for the average user it makes sense this way so it's plug and play for fast delivery. It certainly fixes a number of issues with existing offerings. Also, @Dave Maze is hilarious! Nice work on the review

Part 2 is up. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2020/06/the-great-flange-to-sensor-distance-article-part-ii-photo-cameras/

Hahaha... that's great! Very nicely done! Can you tell us more about the process?

Good discussion. I guess this is the aspect that I am more interested in, as the limits of the current box office seem to be more related to audience sophistication rather than the progress in cinema. How do you see that "voting with a click", as you elegantly summarise it, has pushed things? What else do you think hasn't yet been done? Or, to ask a less impossible question, what are the directions you think still have fertile ground for exploration? I remember watching Russian Ark attend home, that was fun! Cool film.

Unfortunately that logic doesn't quite work. Take dynamic range for example, if I make my monitoring setup the best it can be then it will naturally be able to hit huge dynamic peaks with zero distortion, and so I will then write / record / mix / master to use whatever dynamic range I feel is applicable to my artistic vision. Then I publish that music and people listen to it on systems where the dynamic range isn't nearly as capable and the quiet parts are too quiet and so they turn it up and now the loud parts are a mess of clipping and tonally-related distortion. Take the below image of a studio setup, it has four pairs of monitors, including the small black cubes in the centre. If it was simply a matter of choosing the best monitors then they'd only need one (or maybe two, if one set had different strengths and weaknesses). or this one.. their main monitors are hugely expensive and built into the wall, so they can obviously afford to have very high quality monitors, yet there's also a pair of NS10s on the mixer as well. Same here: Here's an article from Musicradar on how to make your music sound good on small speakers. https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/10-ways-to-make-your-mixes-sound-good-on-smaller-speakers-635899 In the pursuit of bass, this is another excellent example of how bigger more capable systems can give you leeway that the average home system cannot provide. In fact, for this application there are excellent plugins that use psychacoustic principles to give the illusion of bass on small speakers, one example being Maxxbass. According to SOS, "The Waves Maxxbass plug-in, which I reviewed back in SOS February 1998, enabled smaller loudspeakers to produce a greater sense of bass depth without requiring any more amplifier power or stressing the speakers." If the logic is to just get the best monitoring possible, then why not just mix on headphones? The answer is that headphones are vastly superior to speakers, they have very flat frequency response, they don't get exposed to the acoustics of the room so give a much more faithful rendition of the audio, they can go much louder without distortion, and they are lighter, cheaper, can be used in any situation, and can be taken with you everywhere. For exactly this reason they are too good a source. I've written and mixed tracks on headphones and they sounded great, but then I listened to them on speakers and they sounded awful, and so I then spent days of extra effort to get them to sound good on the speakers as well as the headphones. The difference between colour grading and audio mixing/mastering is that in colour grading the state of your consumers replication is going to be relatively known, in the sense that they'll likely conform to one of only a few video standards (which essentially provides standardisation on DR), and is also going to be quite unpredictable in terms of the colour shifts, or the brightness contrast and other settings, which means there's no point in trying to anticipate their playback experience. Audio on the other hand, has no standards of things like DR or frequency response, with consumption ranging from an iPhone speaker with poor DR and FR, to high quality bookshelf speakers with high DR and low FR, poor quality floor-standing ported speakers with low DR and high FR, and people who have put money into it and have a better setup than most recording studios. However, you can be pretty sure that there will be correlations between your audio and who is listening and what kind of system they have. The latest pop music is more likely to be heard on a bluetooth speaker than a huge system, whereas classical may be heard on basically anything. However, putting effort into making the audio good on a set of small bookshelf speakers while not being completely crippled on a larger system is likely to pay off, as anyone with a set lesser than that is likely not going to complain because they're used to their setup being sub-optimal. This isn't the way to go....

Using laptop speakers as a reference for how consumers might be hearing your audio makes sense. Recording studios used to have a small speaker with an in-line compressor to simulate what the audio would sound like over the radio. Beyond that though, yeah, you need decent speakers. .....or horrible speakers to go with the old "if it sounds great on this it will sound great on anything" approach of things like the original NS10 monitors.

Almost from the beginning of cinema history there were established rules / conventions / approaches that were simultaneously being used to commercial effect and also being rallied against by innovators who felt stifled by the mainstream and were looking to innovate and push things forward. Bringing that logic to the current day, what does that look like? What are the 'rules' and who is breaking them? Are the rules so broad now that breaking them can remain watchable? Experimental art is always possible, but often it is so far from the mainstream that it's not applicable in a more widely consumable context. For example, the French New Wave managed to break the rules in a way that was still palatable to audiences, thus having a lasting impact on cinema more broadly. Is that possible today?

Let's see how the sample footage looks. The C100 video specs don't look nearly as good as the footage does, so maybe this will be similar.

@heart0less I guess the other piece of advice is to either do it mid-morning or mid-afternoon on either a day with no clouds or a day with flat/consistent cloud cover. That way variations in the light direction and intensity are likely to be minimised. Of course, having a model and being prepared with everything setup before-hand will probably also contribute heavily to having consistent lighting conditions from beginning to end.

Cool idea. If you can put some xmas lights in the background it will help show the qualities of the bokeh, in terms of shape and also if they have soft/harsh edges or if they have the 'bubble bokeh' that many love but I find very distracting. If it's too bright for xmas lights then maybe a couple of laps with naked bulbs might do the trick? Getting a good way to nail focus when you are in the shot is a challenge - I suggest something like a stand with a target on it that you can swap in to focus and out again when you're shooting. In the absence of a colour chart, getting a range of colours in there would be useful - if you have some ornamentation or some bright clothes or even just buy a packet of balloons and blow up one of each. Anything so that colour shifts and saturation can be seen.

Yes, but put the SB on and it will bring some of the corners back into frame. So you'll see the corners aren't so great, and you'll be wondering if it was a perfect SB that just 'un cropped' the bad lens performance or if the lens was perfect but got screwed up by the SB. The only way is to test the lens on a S35 or FF camera without the SB, then compare on the P4K with the SB.

I did some tests myself previously and confirmed that 4k was better, but one test I never did was to upload the same video in 1080 and 4k but then compare the quality when the viewer watches them in 1080. To be thorough, if anyone actually does this test they should do it twice, once where the video is a 4k video exported in 1080 and also in 4k, and the other time when a 1080 video is exported in 1080 and also 4k. These two might be the same result but you never know.

Absolutely. In all my research on lenses the Lensrentals blog was by far the best resource I found. What I found most interesting is how the data they have publisher on lenses is so often counter to the common-knowledge out there, so in that sense it is even more valuable because it is adding to our understanding and dispelling myths. I'm really looking forward to part 2.