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I liked the shot in Russian Ark. In case you're unfamiliar with it, the whole film was one continuous steadicam shot. IIRC it was filmed in three sections and stitched together in post to look like one shot, but it's invisible so it looks like one shot. The film was very good too, not for everyone, but I got into it and it created an immersive experience. Plus, I had no idea what the hell the camera was, sometimes people would talk to camera like it was a person, other times it would just be ignored and the people who talked to it were also mostly ignored so it wasn't clear if they actually existed either, and it didn't really fit or make sense, so that was intriguing too.

......straight out of camera.... BUT, this thread is about what can be done IN POST to make P4K / P6K look like the BMMCC. Any chance you can share the footage you have taken and let us have a go at matching it?

Ah! That makes more sense I'm thinking this might deserve more investigation. Hmmm.

Minimalism! I love it That's the ultimate way to get around matching of shots... I'm not familiar with that lens in particular, but I'm imagining it's not perfect when wide open, so do you specifically shoot a film at the same aperture settings to keep the look consistent? As I've said before, my main lens (maybe 75% of screen-time in final edit) is my 17.5 and I love that focal length. I'm also curious to know what you shoot and how you get around the challenge of only having one focal length. It would be logical for Panasonic to release a longer companion lens to the 10-25, similar to how the Sigma 18-35 has the longer companion zoom. I wouldn't hold your breath for a f0.95 zoom - even if they could figure out how to do it I suspect almost no-one could lift it! Lots of good points here. I subscribe to the 3 lenses will cover MOST of what you want strategy, and I just deal with the times when they won't - you rarely have to go wider than 16 and you can digitally zoom quite a bit before adding additional sharpening won't match the footage. Getting a fast lens set while keeping the price down is a real challenge - one thing I've noticed is that the fastest lenses are the ones coveted by collectors and the slower ones seem to be far less in demand, so knowing what you shoot can possibly save you huge amounts of money if you're able to compromise. I also pay attention to bokeh, at least to the extent that I'm very interested in a bokeh that's not distracting. Therefore I'm absolutely not a fan of any bokeh that attracts attention, for example star-shaped bokeh / 'bubble bokeh' / swirly bokeh etc are not desirable. However if you get a bokeh that is unremarkable then matching the things like aperture blades becomes a non-issue for me, as it's not something that will get much critical attention. [Edit: shooting on a cropped sensor also helps with this as the bokeh, and also lens issues in general, tend to be worse at the edges of the image circle which gets cropped by the smaller sensor]

Hahaha... He who goes first makes the rules! Yeah, the swirly bokeh isn't my favourite either, but on a cropped sensor it isn't so bad as you're only looking at the middle of the image circle. The CZ's are super nice, so you'd do well to start there and not go any further.

Do you know which lenses you're likely to get? I'm tempted (for almost no reason lol) to make a Russian kit for that vintage look. I totally agree. Once I worked out the focal lengths I use and why I use them and how they suit my shooting style I felt so much more free. Being able to go and shoot and not have doubt in the back of my mind about if I was messing up the situation and later on would curse myself for not having chosen different lenses. Of course, I still stuff up and curse myself later on, but it's now mostly for which settings I've used or for artistic aspects! At this point for me it's about taking things I know in my brain and baking-them-in as habit so I do them reliably and don't have to think about it, so the learning journey continues. I have a Minolta 200mm F4 and it's a really nice lens, and gets great reviews. I'd suggest having a look at it, as it will be the same look as your 135 so should be a drop-in replacement for going slightly longer. I sympathise.. I bought my 18-35 to use with my 700D + ML setup and I'm selling it because it is so ridiculously heavy!

I know it was mentioned before, but the Z-Cam E2 seems to be a very serious competitor to the BMPCC cameras, and the reviews by Kai and Look were very favourable without many real down-sides. There's a newer model IIRC called the E2-C which is cheaper, and may be similar to the P4K? If you haven't already, maybe have a look at the spec sheet and a few reviews?

We all talk about lenses on an individual basis, but what is your strategy for putting multiple lenses together into a kit? How many lens kits do you have? How close are the focal lengths? What aspects do you think matter when matching lenses? I've heard on reduser that people often want a modern kit for some projects and a more vintage looking kit for other projects. My personal strategy is: I have about a 2.3x ratio - so FF equivalents of 16mm, (16mm x 2.2) = 35mm, and (35mm x 2.3) = 80mm. I used to have a 116mm instead of the 80, and it was too far apart at 3.3x the 35mm They are 8mm F4, 17.5mm F0.95, and 40mm F1.8 and I'll be upgrading the 8mm to a 7.5mm F2 lens this year, so they'll all be under F2 for use in low-light if required They're all full-manual lenses, so I can have full control and also nice MF with decent focus-throw. This combined with IBIS gives me the perfect combination of stabilised manual lenses I chose a 35mm equivalent as I like how the 35 is wider than a 50mm and longer than a 28mm, both focal lengths I don't think I like that much What is your style? Why have you chosen the lenses you use?

That makes sense, thanks. I'm always interested in wedding photography / videography as it's often a single-shooter making a polished product by getting coverage and variety of an event that is unpredictable and on which they have very low degrees of control over, which is relatively similar to how I shoot. I mention lots of times that I have a problem with X and people suggest that I hire a sound guy with a boom mic or carry a lighting rig or just get people to do something again, but wedding photogs understand that not everything is a controlled movie set and that people sometimes shoot in situations where those things aren't an option and so we have to work around these limitations

5K isn't yet enough for reframing. Think about it - if you have 5K over 360 degrees, and want to crop in to a hFOV of 90 degrees (FF equivalent of 18mm) then you're cropping in 4x to the footage, which if you keep the same aspect ratio will be 1/16th of the bitrate. So, a 5K 100Mbps would work out to be a 1.2K image at 6.25Mbps. and this example is cropping in to FF 18mm which is still very very wide!! Crop in to a 28mm and it's 900pixels wide at 0.02Mbps. This is why I maintain that the MP wars aren't anywhere near over when it comes to capturing for VR - an 8K image doesn't fair that much better in that sense. If you want to capture an image that simulates retina resolution, it will probably be 100K+ image.

What kind of shots do you use the OSMO Action for in a wedding setting? I don't hear much about action cameras being used for weddings, by professional film-makers at least! I did see one video where the couple put a gopro on a bottle of expensive spirits and had everyone take a sip straight out of the bottle. The video was interesting as it captured some video of almost everyone there, and got some funny moments. I'm curious how you use it.... I smell creativity

A couple of very interesting reviews from Lok and Kai. Kai struggled to think of any real problems with the $2K one and especially liked the 709 profile and the 4k160 mode.

Voigtlander makes a few different ranges of lenses. This might help: https://www.voigtlaender.de/

I'm not sure if you already know this, but one of the key aspects of lighting is how well it renders colour (bad lighting will distort colours and make things look strange) and it called CRI with 100 being perfect. They recommend that you get a light about 90 or so. I mention this because the CRI of cheap LED lights is typically lower than 90, so they are not recommended. I can recommend the Aputure brand for their smaller LED lights, they're small, light-weight, and charge from USB, and have high CRI ratings. I'm not sure that this meets your needs though as they are more like a video light rather than a spot-light. Maybe someone else knows of something that might help?

West Wing. Shot on film, with early episodes in 4:3 and only going wide-screen in later seasons. Content is king and West Wing is one of the rare shows that doesn't dumb down the content for the sake of the lowest IQ in the audience

When someone no longer has anything rational to say as part of a discussion it is common to make the conversation personal instead of keeping on topic. I used to think that you were above these kinds of petty contributions, but obviously not. I'll be around here on the forums if you guys want to talk about cameras but I'm not interested in being part of a discussion that you're no longer willing to speak rationally about.

Your seem to be under the impression that people would decide between buying the new iPhone and hiring a camera. I would suggest that the situation is more like "I want to make a film but I have no money for hiring a camera" and the next statement is either going to be something like "crap, it don't know anyone with a camera I can borrow that's good enough" or "wow, the new iPhone has the three lenses I really need.. Someone we know must have it! Right, we're in business!" You're right that anyone could have made a film with the last iPhone, but the improvements in this one are taking the video quality past a threshold that makes things look palatable on a big screen (previous smartphones have produced footage that was borderline and so fragile it almost couldn't be graded, especially the 50mm camera) and it also adds a super-wide which makes it more flexible again. I'll agree that the differences aren't night and day, but small differences at threshold points (FOV options, IQ, and perception) can make more difference than you might think.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

Exactly. So why take money from those things and put it into the camera dept?

Who will shoot on a phone and not the BM Pocket? Someone who owns a phone but doesn't own a BM Pocket. I know film-making is complicated, but I wouldn't have thought this part of it was particularly difficult to understand! They won't. But they might revolutionise who gets to shoot films because they didn't previously have enough money for a "proper camera".

I think it depends on how much you have to spend. People have made feature films from people working for free, borrowing equipment and under $50 in cash. I think it's easy for people like us who have come a long way to forget what it's like being absolutely broke, owning basically no equipment and not knowing anyone with equipment but having all the time and enthusiasm in the world. Or maybe we got jobs first and were never in that situation. Saying that everyone can make their film with a DSLR or MILC because it's a small part of the budget is the same as a big time Hollywood producer coming on here and telling all of us that we have no excuse not to film with an Alexa because it's a tiny fraction of the catering budget on a real film. They don't understand our world in exactly the same way we probably don't understand the world of a no-budget film maker who might benefit from using their phone.

Werner doesn't care about happiness.... Be more like Werner.

I think Noams article was talking about the very ragged edge where people who want to make films will basically live off instant ramen if they could do it and be a professional film-maker. For this segment of the market the phone will be the tool of choice, representing the biggest cost saving a project can have. Imagine being a poor student or recent film school graduate and being able to get together a group of friends and shoot an entire film on phones, spending basically no money on lighting, sound, camera, wardrobe, art dept, etc. You could literally make a film for the cost of a few lav mics running into each actors phone as an on-talent wired lav setup. Sure, you can buy an old Canon DSLR for almost nothing, but that's money, and it's also 720p at best. A smartphone setup would be free, 4K or higher, capable of slow-motion, and has a set of lenses included. Sure, you don't get DoF but storytellers don't care about such things, especially when your phone can get you onto Netflix and the old Canon cannot. Noams other articles talk about film-makers stripping out every expense to basically make films with no out-of-pocket expenses at all, as the less you spend the less money you have to make from a film in order to stay in business as a professional film-maker, which is the goal of many many people.

True, but some people are after better low-light rather than shallow DoF. In this sense, MFT is better than FF because an MFT lens at F1.4 will have an exposure around T1.4 and the DoF equivalent of a FF F2.8 lens, whereas the FF lens at F1.4 will have an exposure around T1.4 and the DoF of an F1.4 lens. This means that (ISO performance being equal, which is another whole topic) the MFT lens will have a deeper DoF than the FF equivalent lens at the same exposure, or you can stop down the FF lens to match the DoF but now you need a higher ISO on the camera. This is why people say that FF lenses are harder to focus manually, it's because if you match exposure values then the FF lens has a much thinner DoF than cropped sensors. In low-light this is an advantage of MFT lenses over FF.