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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.

CA is awful and just reminds me of the horrific edges of people against a digitally clipped sky from a low-DR low-bitrate digital camera. I don't have issues with corner softness or vignetting, but wow does CA make an image scream cheap amateur video to me!

If someone wanted something smaller than an Alexa, cheap enough to crash and better image quality than a gopro then they could have just bought a BMPCC or BMMCC. Sounds like they set out to build a camera for a specific task without first phoning up the camera store to see if one existed already.

I have a few m42 lenses and an m42 0.7x speedbooster and have done comparisons between the speedbooster and the lenses with a non-SB adapter. It's definitely worth doing with your own setup, but I found that the speedbooster didn't really add any perceptible difference when compared to the distortions of the lenses I tried. One thing to pay attention to is that the speedboosted image may have softer corners but that could be that you're just seeing the lens further away from the centre.

Filters and processing in post (as others have previously stated) can get the job done pretty well. Here's a quick attempt to match a Samyang to a Lomo in Resolve - IIRC it was only a few minutes work. Filters would be even better as they emulate flaring from off-camera light sources better, which can't really be done easily in post. Before: After:

hopefully you'll find an adapter in-country. ebay and shipping times from china for accessories and adapters has significantly improved my strategic and long-term planning skills. I've bought new equipment ahead of a big trip and had to sit and very slowly and methodically go through and identify all the adapters and accessories I'd need to buy so that they all arrive in time. I've previously drawn pictures of the setup in order to identify things.... camera body... ordered... <draw a picture of a camera body> .... does setup work yet? No, I need a lens. camera lens... ordered... <draw camera lens next to camera body>... does lens connect to camera body? No, I need adapter. lens adapter... ordered... <draw a picture of a lens adapter joining lens to camera> .... does setup work yet? No, I need a battery. ..... then at the end... I pick up the camera, put the wrist strap around my wrist, turn on camera, it powers on. OK. Light goes from scene through adapter into lens, then through adapter, then onto sensor. I hit record, camera writes, files to memory card.. <ok.. google if my memory card will work with camera. good. what about for the specific mode I'm recording in? excellent. What about a backup plan if card doesn't arrive in time...> etc etc etc I replaced my XC10 with GH5 with only weeks to go until a major trip. Requiring all new lenses, batteries, media, adapters, etc... I had to get a lens shipped to a pickup point near the first hotel we were staying in! Ah, those were the days.

Do RED provide good profiles for ACES and RCM or conversion LUTs? If so, maybe they can be matched in post easily? Things like easy and accurate colour matching is one of the things you pay for when buying an established brand name, and is worth money when shooting with multiple models from one manufacturer, so I'd anticipate that they'd be onto it.

Some months ago I switched from focusing on new cameras to understanding lenses and colour science, and you'd be surprised how many times I was looking for compatibility between some lens format and some other camera and EOSHD links kept coming up in google. If you put in "bmpcc c-mount" into google the EOSHD thread talking about compatibility and vignetting is not only the top hit, but also by far the most useful. It seems that EOSHD is the centre of the internet for a number of very specific things in video-making, especially topics that focus on the benefits and modern use of vintage or older technology rather than just the relentless regurgitation of specs of new cameras. When I post here, I am often thinking of these threads as a panel discussion where there is an audience of people who don't post or aren't registered who are looking for information on the topic.

@Amro Othman yes, the differences in those two images are significant, for lens tint at least. One thing I would caution on is that colour shifts can often occur in camera (or in colour profiles / conversions when processing in post). I have tried replicating colour science across cameras on many occasions and it is very common to process different luminance values in different ways. For example, the old orange/teal grade pushes mids and highlights warmer and shadows cooler, but also many film-look processes desaturate extreme highlights and shadows to create clean and blacks. The list of common processing tricks goes on and on. To indicate how prevalent it is, someone did a colour accuracy comparison and Sony cameras were the most accurate and yet many other brands with less accurate colours are perceived to have nicer colours, so effectively, distortion of colour accuracy is not only common but desirable by the market. Doing a direct comparison with identical exposure would be very interesting to see.

I saw the image above and thought how nice an image it was, then clicked through to the post and saw it was a Minolta 55/1.7 and thought it was even better, then I read the cost.... these old lenses really are something! Nice images

The GH5 shoots 4K 10-bit 422 h265 and 6K 10-bit 420 h265. I also use a laptop for this purpose, despite having a GH5 and shooting the above mentioned h265 modes.... I feel your pain.

Yeah. I've noticed a pattern of cinematographers saying that they got the mini to do a few action shots or whatever and then in doing testing they discovered the mini was really great and ended up using it for the whole production. These comments made me wonder why you wouldn't just do that as kind of a default, and only go for a larger model if there was a specific reason.

Is this file format a new format? I got in touch with BM about getting better performance with playing 10-bit 5K h265 files from the GH5 and they said that AMD hardware acceleration for h265 was newly implemented (at that time) and may not have been optimised yet, so maybe there is further optimisation that might be done?

Yeah, to me the main price is the size and form-factor, not the $$$$, but it depends on what you shoot.

I was going to say that the reviews I saw of the a73 said it had as good low light performance as the a7s2, but I guess if you're going external then they're not equivalent.

There's definitely a use-case for having a camera to capture a signal as evidence, but I'd suggest that one with a wireless connection that is continuously uploading would also be handy. People that do the wrong thing aren't afraid to confiscate the evidence of it. What's that saying... once you've crossed the line it's hard not to go all the way.

You didn't, I was just having a little fun while also making a point. I think that the RAW vs compressed comparison doesn't align with still images at all because of the way that compressed stills handle DR. Compressed stills clip the DR of the camera, which is why many people shoot RAW. Personally I think that's blindingly stupid when it's just as easy to make a JPG from the whole DR of the RAW image, like any free image editor can do but somehow cameras costing thousands of dollars can't do. If shooting log h264/h265 cut off a couple of stops of DR then we'd all be lusting over RAW and having t-shirts printed about it as well, but thankfully, we're not.

That reminds me of (IIRC) National Geographic which doesn't permit any manipulation of the content of an image. To verify this you would submit your final images (with all the cool colour grading, cropping, etc you did) and also the RAW file and they would compare the RAW file with the edit to ensure you didn't photoshop out powerlines or whatever. It makes sense that the edited version would be the one published but the RAW capture would be retained to prove the content of the output. I definitely agree that digital video will gradually descend into fakery, in much the same way that photography has done with things like Mariah Carey being photoshopped to basically be a different person. The only difference between still images and video is processing power, and things like Resolves Face Refinement is just the beginning. It's interesting to use film as the proof, although if digital is the source then the manipulation could be done before printing to the film, so tech like @KnightsFan mentions would be required.