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Some time ago I looked at the skin tones from a range of demo videos from the camera manufacturers, including ARRI LF, Canon, etc and I found that the skin tones on those videos were almost always contained between the indicator line and the line of pure red. Canon was the most red, and ARRI had a few tones slightly to the left of the indicator line, but it wasn't that far, and their tones were very yellow. The profile above is very interesting to me because I can see that: skin tones are pretty good it's compressed in the G/M axis both through saturation as well as by rotating the colours towards those hues, which is common amongst film emulations that try and put more things on the orange/teal dimension it's shifted warm, which you can see by comparing how saturated the red and yellow points are compared to the cyan and blue points are Fun stuff, and great result I wonder if the client was happy with the results, I'd imagine so.

I guess we could put it another way by saying that film-making takes so long to learn and films take so long to create that lots of life stuff happens during the process lol. I didn't used to be that interested in lenses, focusing more on post, as it was infinitely adjustable under controlled and non-time-critical circumstances, but the thing that got me onto lenses was the realisation that film is 2D and all / most of the cool stuff that we like is in service of trying to put more of that third dimension back into it. We blur backgrounds, we try and have the subject lighter or darker than the background, we like sliders and camera movement as they add depth by parallax, even the old orange/teal helps there to be colour contrast between the talent and the non-talent parts of the image. And in this task, the lens is the adapter / converter between the 2D world that begins with the image sensor and the 3D world of everything that happens before the light goes through the lens. So if you want more 3D pop, the 3D to 2D converter (the lens) is an absolutely critical component, and even more than that, once that 3D information is lost, it's stupidly difficult to put it back in in post. I completely agree with you about the imperfections of a lens having a humanising effect over a very digital (and depending on the camera, sometimes very brittle and thin) image and processing pipeline. I guess this is where we start to look at the various distortions and their relative aesthetic qualities and if we like them or not. For example, people tend to like a slightly softer lower contrast image for skin tones and a softening to compensate for digititis, some like a lower resolution as an OLPF, field curvature and lens pincushioning, but then there are things like CA which I dislike intensely but others prefer, edge softening which is nice for some compositions but not for others, etc.

I disagree. When was the last time you spoke to someone wanting to get their first "real camera"? This keeps changing over time, but my experience out here in the suburbs is that people want to get their first real camera when they have their first kid. Having kids is the most significant life event for most people and increasingly we want to share nice photos with distant friends and family. Now, we all know that baby pics are easy - babies can sleep through a tornado once they're out (or the phrase "sleep like a baby" wouldn't mean anything..) so you can slowly take photos of a motionless well-lit infant. Unless you're arty, you take them looking down, so no messy backgrounds to contend with either. and then they learn to walk, and then run. Now, you're trying to take photos of a fast-moving target, often in interior lighting, and often with the messiness of a kid-trashed house in the background. The most common reason people have asked me about buying a camera is that the $100 P&S (or now their phone) can't keep up "the photos are blurry, or out of focus, and the background is all messy". I've had parents ask me about cameras that can take "a lot of photos at once" and then they can choose the best one. In reality, my first DSLR = my first high-end sports camera. The Canon entry-level camera will only meet this requirement when it's exceeded the specs of the 1DXmk3. Prores in more cameras is in licensing territory isn't it? In which case, as consumers, typically we lose. Beta vs VHS, BluRay vs HDDVD, SACD vs DVD-Audio......

Great write-up! I've heard bits of it before, but not the total picture. I have had a journey through film-making as well, with it being signposted with various equipment and tests, trials, and realisations. There's a huge debate over equipment and if it matters or not, and I think one element that doesn't get enough attention during these discussions is inspiration. If a piece of equipment is inspiring to use, then that can and does have a real impact on the creative process. Even if you could get an identical image out of two bits of equipment the one you like using will be the one that makes you pick it up and go shoot, and when you're shooting you'll be in a better headspace as you're looking at the images and using the equipment and enjoying the experience, and this will ripple through your directing, cinematography, and all the other creative aspects. Unfortunately sometimes the equipment that inspires us is expensive, or cumbersome, but so be it. We should all be so lucky to find a lens we love, and then have time to go shoot with it. ..and speaking of flawed but lovely vintage lenses, the Cosmicar is sitting and waiting patiently for some filter adapters - I haven't forgotten!

I think the video mentioned Jaws. It does make sense though, considering that at sunrise and sunset the sun is warm and the shadows are cool, so we've probably learned that at those times of day dark things are bluer, so logically (and incorrectly) we'd assume that night would be very blue B&W is great. For one thing, you don't lose resolution in de-bayering, which is great if you're shooting on 1080 or lower. It's also great for bad quality codecs. and any camera that has chroma noise. I found the luma noise on my 700D with ML RAW was terrible, but when you de-noise only the chroma the remaining luma noise was very nice. In a sense, I have. I decided early on that I wanted to get a high quality but neutral capture, and then I want to process it heavily in post. In a sense I'm implementing a kind of human-based computational photography. As I shoot available everything and try to exert as little influence over what I shoot as possible, it's just about capturing it in the most nimble way possible, and spending the limited skill and attention I have on what matters, which was composition and artistic elements. I very quickly realised that lenses can't be simulated in post, and also that AF is stupid, which is why I went manual. It's also why I chose Resolve. Resolve was (at v 12 when I bought it) a very basic editor, but it had advanced features for processing the image. The colour engine is good, the stabilisation was great, and the slow-motion was world-class. It also cost less than the standard stabilisation plugins and the slow-motion plugins at the time too. My adventures in Micro-land are primarily to learn how to make the GH5 look as good as possible, which feeds into learning to grade, which feeds into my pursuit of post-processing. The Micro and P2K are a reference image second only to the Alexas (and five-figure cinema cameras) of this world, so this is my main goal. Everyone knows that a well-edited film is a joy to watch. If I had to choose between a solidly-shot and beautifully edited (including sound design, music, grading, etc) piece and one shot on an Alexa but edited by a first-year film student, I know which I'd choose. Anyone who has shot anything on a GoPro and tried to make it look good in post knows that the footage SOOC is garbage unless you're doing something with huge insurance premiums. Anyone who has downloaded the sample clips from RED and tried to grade them also knows they don't immediately spring to life in post either. Of course, if you own a Micro and light well, then you can set a few settings in the RAW panel and get a lovely image out, which means that with some basic editing and sound and music you can end up with a very nice final product, which makes it easier. My approach is to try and get more convenience when I shoot for less convenience in post, but to get broadly the same result. I'm optimistic

Absolutely. The camera market is still moving quickly. We only have to look at: RAW availability coming down in price Resolutions steadily increasing (which has advantages beyond IQ, such as over capture) 360 cameras becoming feasible for over capture etc.. ..and all of these are only to create 2D media. 3D formats are gradually getting more standardised and available and there will come a time when the interface to everyones smartphone will be a wearable augmented reality setup. It's not close, and it won't look like google glasses (thank goodness!), but it will come, and people will take it up because it will be fundamentally more useful than having your window to the online world limited to the size of a letterbox and stuck to a shiny brick in your pocket. I think such a thing as peak camera does exist, but we're probably a century away from "the 5000MP RAW AI processed 180 degree wide-band vision capture from every nano-wearable is good enough for anything that anyone wants to do - we've hit peak optic".

I saw an amusing video that talked about how people always grade moonlight as being blue but in reality it isn't, it's just kind of grey, but it's like a cinematic trope that we all just kind of know what it means I didn't realise there were tropes in colour grading, but it makes sense that symbolism would be everywhere! I do get colour shifts with the GH5. It's pretty good, but I spend a lot of time and effort on correcting them, and even then, I'm still nowhere near as good as I could be. I've posted a couple of problem images to the LGG forums and those guys post back images with it nailed and I couldn't even replicate them after an hour or so directly copying. I think it might be one of the most critical part of colour grading TBH, I'm sure we've all experienced shots where we just add contrast and saturation and it's glorious, but when the WB is off, you can spend hours on a single shot and not even get in the ballpark of the 5s grade of something perfectly shot. The tricky thing about shooting in available light is that there is so much fluorescent / cheap LED and other poor quality lights that the magenta/green balance is off, which was never a problem before when all we had was incandescent lights. You can even get the WB a bit off and it just looks warm or cool, but get the green/magenta even a little bit off and things look absolutely awful!

Ah, yes. This makes sense now. Coming from shooting available light this is pretty much an alien concept, but of course. I've heard how cinematographers speak about the various looks from different WB and lighting setups, it's all completely known and they can nail a look first try without having to test anything because they just know. I'm yet to test RAW vs the compressed modes, but the fact that big productions often render RAW to Prores then just use that as the master footage and never go back to the RAW suggests the quality involved, so it makes sense. Thinking about all the people that shoot in h264 as their master when prores is of higher quality puts it back in perspective I know it's good for me, but I'm not sure that manual is better than auto for everything... with my limited cognitive CPU power the less time I spend on doing things the camera can do the more time I spend on the things that the camera can't do, like composition, camera position and movement, focusing, etc

Thanks. I thought of that, but then you're at the mercy of your judgement on the monitor. I thought that the monitor might have some sort of helpful feature, which it does, kind of, but not directly. There's a channel view where it shows you only the Red, then Green, then Blue, then luma in greyscale, then back to normal view. You could use that to see true B&W on the monitor, make an adjustment, then cycle through again but it's not ideal I even thought of using the GH5 to do a custom WB and then check what it set it to, but it doesn't tell you! Then I worked out that for RAW it doesn't matter, and if I do a custom WB on the GH5 then I'll know the GH5 is set properly and with RAW I can set the Micro properly in post, which should be fine. It's an interesting idea though, and I guess the Micro is really just a 'shoot RAW or why did you buy this thing' kind of camera!

Perhaps a somewhat basic question, but how do I do a custom WB on the Micro? Google isn't forthcoming. I know if you shoot RAW it doesn't matter, but it does for prores, and also for the tests i'm doing. I have a grey card, and I can get into the menus and adjust things, but I can't figure out how to know what WB settings are the right ones? Thanks

Hmmm.... street photography is a topic where I get a little rant-y. I will however resist this urge and simply offer my one frustration, which is that there is a double standard in place. If you are a private citizen and want to take photographs of people in public then you get all kinds of reactions about privacy and related concerns, but large corporations are not subject to the same scrutiny. Walk down an average out-door shopping mall and see how many security cameras you can see that cover the street. Think about the CCTV systems that governments put in place for logging vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and also consider the number-plate and facial recognition that they are running on these 24/7. I can understand the government ones are for our safety, and the private ones aren't positioned to take eye-level portraits, but the "right to privacy" argument should also extend to them. To say nothing of the various forms of universally applied but highly targeted electronic surveillance that have been exposed in recent years. His technique was interesting, and the end results were definitely impressive artistically. ...and for anyone that hasn't done it themselves, it's actually more uncomfortable to do in real life than it appears!

Our favourite camera youtuber recently compared the C500mk2 with EOS-R which was interesting. Pity they didn't do a proper WB though. I'm surprised that the 1080 quality was so different, although maybe that's processing power?

Guess who just joined the BMMCC club.....

When we pick up the camera we have and leave the house Which a few of us do, but many more do not!

8K smartphones! Mark my words!!

@Video Hummus I agree and it just depends on what your processes are. To me, the ideal setup is about being able to get from the equipment being stored properly to hitting record in the shortest possible time. To this end, I keep my GH5 in its drawer, fully charged, with cards downloaded and in the camera, with the 17.5mm lens on it. This means that if "omg - come quickly!" happens, I can just grab the camera and run through the house to see (and possibly record) whatever is going on. If I had a deeper drawer I'd keep the mic on it too, but alas..

Wow, those Zeiss m42 lenses aren't that expensive... you look at the other types and the prices are all in the "WTF... they're having a go surely" category! You could do far worse than an S1(h) and a set of those.

This video is especially interesting - it's Peter McKinnon basically explaining how he would lay out a smaller studio for Chris Hau who just moved into his first studio. It's really practical and is surprisingly specific and mentions things to mount lighting or cameras to the ceiling, how to put up curtains / blankets to keep sight-lines clear and for Chris and his SO to be able to both be able to film at the same time and not get in each others way, as well as other practical things like a bench for people to come into the space and take their shoes off, where art might be great to hang, etc.

Write it up in your native language and we can put it through google translate? Language isn't the barrier it used to be and shouldn't get in the way of talking about what matters.

Yeah, AF isn't the strong suit, and I agree about the focusing - I MF and the focus peaking is pretty average. I worked out that the peaking is calculated on the display resolution and not the source resolution, so if you have fine detail that is in focus but the display resolution is too low for that detail then it gets smoothed out in the downscale and therefore doesn't show in the peaking. I've had situations where the talent was in focus but the peaking highlighted high contrast areas in the background and didn't highlight the talent at all - completely misleading.

Good write-up, thanks I'm on the GH5 and have wanted to buy an 85mm for a long time as there are a couple of them that are glorious, but the focal length is very much a 'only in a few situations' kind of lens, so I can't justify it. I was looking at the Sigma and also an old Jupiter-9. Yeah, tough call. Having a zoom is a really flexible option and it's also a backup of every other lens in your kit, so if tragedy strikes then you're not short a focal length. My favourite lens is a FF equivalent of 35mm f2 and it's great for the environmental portrait where you want to see the person and also the occasion and location. If my setup was half the size and half the price then I'd be tempted to carry a second setup like you do, and have played with things like that before too. Two Fuji XT-4s with those primes would be a pretty hard setup to beat, Fujis have a great reputation and the images are just lovely. It sounds like a pretty good recipe for happy days!

Yeah, me too. What lenses? I'm starting to notice a correlation between how many lenses people say they need and how much they actually shoot, with the active shooters needing less lenses, not more.

Hooray for things getting out of hand and being as useful as possible!

@BrunoCH looks pretty good to me! Why is the boom operator in your short? Maybe @IronFilm can be a movie star after all!!

Of course... I knew I was doing something wrong! Here, this is how to do it.....