kye

Looks like there are lots of considerations and it also looks like this conversation isn't clear because we don't understand what your requirements are. Questions: Why do you care about the aperture? Is it because you want a shallower DoF for separation? or is it because of exposure? If it's because of exposure, then you must also factor in ISO performance - for example the A7iii might have better low-light with an F4 than a GH5 with an F2.8 Also, an F2.8 on MFT has a DoF equivalent to F5.6 on FF, so a FF camera with F4 would have more separation than the MFT/2.8 combo What about AF? If you're on a gimbal, are you going to have a follow-focus? If so, what cameras support that function? If you need AF then you have to match the DoF to the cameras AF ability.. an A7iii will be better at f2.8 than a GH5 might be at F4 (I'm just guessing here) but an OOF shot is probably a wasted shot How many shots do you HAVE to get (eg, you have to include certain specific moments) vs is it a quantity thing where you just need enough good shots for a 4 minute highlight reel If there are certain key moments you have to get (eg, at a wedding you have to get the kiss, but you can afford to miss part of the first dance due to AF issues) then how are you going to make sure you nail them? If it's follow-focus or AF or deep DoF then you need to think about these. If you have to get key moments then having a longer zoom will mean you have framing flexibility and don't have to swap lenses and re-balance gimbals etc. Reliability and speed to get the key shots might be more important to you than having a lovely lens that misses the key moments. What shots do you get? You should be able to tell us that you need a super-wide, a mid, and you need close-ups but at a different time when there's time to change lenses. If you don't have clarity about what shots you need, when you need them, and how much time you have to setup for them then you don't know enough to buy a camera/lens combo for this work yet. What format and resolution are you delivering in? If you're delivering 4K then you'll need a 4K camera. If 4K, how many shots can you get away with including of 1080? maybe if there's a few quick inserts in 1080 scaled up you can get away with it? Do you need slow-motion? What frame rate? 4K60? Do you need 120p? If you need vertical video then you need a portrait camera rig, or you need to shoot 4K landscape to crop out a 1080 vertical slice If you're shooting 4K for 1080 delivery, then this impacts your lens choice as you can engage a crop mode on a 4K camera to get extra range. A GH5 can give a >2x digital zoom in 1080 ETC mode, which means a 12-35mm can deliver 1080 in a FF equivalent from 24mm to around 200mm. If you need to deliver 4K and can't include any 1080 shots then you're limited to FF 70mm equiv with that lens More likely is you can afford the odd 1080 shot (just extra sharpening in post) so could get shots in the FF 70-200mm range in 1080, but are the shots you need the extra zoom on the ones you can afford to deliver in 1080? Maybe not. Tell us what you're trying to achieve, what final video you need to deliver, how you shoot it, and what your style is and we'll tell you what equipment you need.

I disagree. The future is 360 VR and 3D, and depending on the potato, it can have multiple eyes on all sides!!

A few thoughts for consideration: I did a test where I zoomed into 4K footage by 150% and then matched it to a 4K shot with similar framing by putting on some sharpening, and it didn't take much sharpening at all to match, so taking a vertical slice from a C100 (without rotating the camera) would give you 608x1080 and scaling it up to 1.77x would give you a 1080x1920 and adding sharpening might be quite usable, especially after the client gets you to over-process it and then it goes through the compression algorithms of the various social media sites. You could do a test with your 1DX where you take a shot vertically in 4K, then go horizontally and frame it up with the same vertical FOV. Downscale both to 1080, then take the horizontal one and crop/scale/sharpen it to match visually, then upload both to YT, Insta, FB, etc and then play them on an iPhone, iPad, iPad Pro and see if you can tell any difference. It's a laborious test, but it will give you certainty on how flexible the resolution is. Following on from @Djangos comment about an external 1080 recorder, that might give you a high-quality screen and choice over bitrates and codecs that gives you the right quality and file sizes in post. Shooting directly to Prores (for example) may mean you can get high-quality files that you can edit directly without needing a powerful computer or to render proxies or render cache files etc. Also, if you're shooting Prores HQ for example, it would mean that your quality from the vertical-crop/scale/sharpen would be much better, as well as ability to pull and push the image in post. The variety of rigs you can use to help you cradle or hand-hold a setup is almost infinite, and by thinking about how to keep three points-of-contact but keeping the range of motion you want for your shooting style, you will be able to customise one (or more) rigs that will work for you, even if you have a monitor or external EVF rigged up on the camera. In terms of where to go when you want 4K, I'd leave that to the future, considering: We don't know what Canon will do (although we can guess, they are still guesses) Scaling up video is a thing that people are working on - Resolve has an algorithm that people speak well of and there is now talk of AI-based upscaling (and Resolve already has AI-based time-stretching algorithms so they're already in the AI game), which means that you may get extra life out of a good 1080 setup before you feel the need to go 4K I suspect the business model of video vs stills is still changing, which means that when you get there there might be other considerations or other business models that become feasible due to market changes. VR, 3D, interactivity, and the disposability and shelf-life of media may change what is required or in demand, and you may find that the position within the market of your business, your clientele, or the range of products/services/market-sectors you work in may have changed. All this could not only influence if you go 4K with your existing lenses or not, but also what type of camera, who you work with, and perhaps even your business may be different by this time. I think a C100ii (with external recording if that's going to be of benefit) is a safe option for the moment. The equipment will hold most of its value over the next few years, you'll learn a bunch, and the market will develop somewhat, so it's hard to see how this would be a bad move for you. Even if in 6-months you realise you need to go bigger then it won't have cost you that much really.

Just thinking out loud here, but could you run two audio setups? One that goes into a recorder and one that goes into the camera? If the camera one is wired and doesn't require external power then the camera one would be a reliable backup that should always capture audio regardless of you remembering something, that way you have a backup? Bad camera audio (with some processing in post) would be far better than not getting any audio at all.

Buying the mot expensive camera in the price bracket and then trying to buy the rest of your kit with the change.

Happy to be of service!!

The GH5 has many many modes with different frame rates and bit depths, those are just the ones I chose. The 200Mbps 1080 is great because it's ALL-I so is much better to edit with. The GH5 also offers a 400Mbps 4K ALL-I mode, but it requires UHS-II SD cards that are ridiculously expensive, so I don't bother with that mode. But as you say, 200Mbps 1080 is overkill, and for what I do so are many of the modes. I guess that's like RAW for most people as well. I know that getting a C100mkII wasn't what you really wanted, but given Canons market strategy, it's probably your best bet. I think that you may end up changing to Sony or Panasonic in a few years time when your needs are likely still not met, but you can cross that bridge when you come to it, and a C100 is a good interim option. You may have to experiment with how well the 1080 scales up for vertical video for social media (and what resolution is required for vertical video - 1080 x 600 might be sufficient). Should you still want to get a higher resolution and need to rotate the camera I would suggest that you invest in Area-Swiss style QR plates and have them on the bottom of every piece of equipment and on top of every mount so they are all interchangeable. By doing this, you can get an L bracket and put two QR mounts on it and you will quickly be able to take the camera off the tripod, put the L-bracket on the camera and put the L-bracket onto the tripod and quickly be able to rotate the camera for any vertical video shots that you need for social media. I'd also suggest hiring one and doing a mock shoot and see how well it goes and how the footage grades for you. C100 footage is fine but if you want to push-pull it a lot then it might require a change in how you light in order to get it closer in-camera to how you do things now with RAW image processing with your stills work.

Small LED lights like the Aputure AL-M9 aren't expensive and put out a high CRI light, so maybe a few of those might be good if you need to stay ultra-portable. Obviously wall powered lights would be better though.

Yeah, and me becoming the Kardashians is an outcome that I think we can all agree that nobody wants!!! ???

Both of these are really useful and will be really great.. my GH5 isn't that wonderful in low light, so better NR would be great. and of course the GH5 needs AI superscaling because it's only 5K and everyone knows you need FF 8K, so that probably means that I need MFT 16K to not be completely kicked off the internet!! ???

Think about it like this, to get the 200Mbps 1080 file, what happens is: Camera captures a 5K image Camera downscales the 5K image to 1080 Camera compresses 1080 to 200Mbps That's not that different to this workflow: Camera captures a 5K image Camera downscales the 5K image to 4K Camera compresses 4K to 200Mbps Person downscales the 4K to 1080 in post Both of these image pipelines start with 5K, both are limited to broadly similar levels of compression. We know that a 200Mbps 4K image won't be as great at 100% as a 200Mbps 1080 image at 100%, but when you downscale the 4K to 1080, it takes 4 pixels from the 4K image to make 1 pixel in the 1080 image, so the amount of data per 1080 pixel is broadly the same. There's also the point of diminishing returns with this stuff - try encoding a h264 file at something decent and then try at double or triple that bitrate and see what differences there are. You may find they're less than you think.

You might be right about RAW export. if there's some kind of feature already built-into the camera then all BM have to do is implement the manufacturers RAW export format and then they can compress with BRAW and it's done. That's pretty awesome!! and why I own a f0.95 lens for my GH5

I think it depends. Partly because the compression may not treat each mode equally (4K has 4x the number of pixels as 2K, but may not have 4x the bitrate), plus other factors. I shoot with the GH5, which downsamples everything from a 5K signal, so I've played in this space and recently did a resolution/detail comparison on that camera between the 5K 200Mbps h265, the 4K 150Mbps h264, and the 1080 200Mbps ALL-I h264 modes (all 25fps and 10-bit) and I found that there was no visible differences between the 5K and 4K, and when downsampled to 1080 there was no visible differences between the three modes. This test was with real-world lenses and wasn't in lab conditions, so it was imperfect, but it was of a real person in real conditions so it was applicable to what I do. In the end I chose to shoot 4K because h264 is easier to edit than the h265 codec (my main computer is a laptop), the framing on the 4K is easier to use for me in-camera, and even if posted in 1080, it would still be advantageous to me to shoot in 4K because I do a lot of stabilisation in post, so the extra resolution can help with this. Also, if I'm recording in 4K and processing in 4K then I might as well publish in 4K so that I'm kind of future-proofing my projects. As I record my family history there is a chance that these videos will still have some usefulness in years or decades, when 25K-3D-VR-AI-recreation-immersion-whatever will be a thing, so 4K won't be a "but can you see any difference" question anymore. I'd suggest just trying them and seeing what you see.

I record my families travels and adventures, and my setup is a handheld GH5 / Rode VMP combo and an action camera combo. I'd look completely ridiculous bringing a film crew on my holidays and days out, and there's no way I'd get to film in all the private places like art galleries, amusement parks, historical locations, tours, etc that don't allow commercial photographers... not to mention that it would take all the fun out of everything we do. People seriously underestimate how different other peoples film-making actually is.

The HDMI specification allows different bandwidths for different versions, as well as different resolutions, bit-depths, refresh rates, and colour subsampling. So to get 4K60 4:4:4 at 12-bit the HDMI version would have to support 4K at 60p, 12-bit colour, 4:4:4, and also have enough bandwidth to transmit all that data. This should be pretty evident (that the camera has to be able to pump out what you want to record), but there might be another aspect to it. It might be that you can use the HDMI as a data link and do whatever you like with it (there's a feature listed on the HDMI wikipedia page called Ethernet Link) that might allow the camera and recorder to use their own format to transmit data, in which case you would need to program the firmware of the camera to process the video stream somehow then pump it out the HDMI port for the recorder. This might be the camera compressing the video to BRAW and then the recorder just recording it, or it could be that there's a middle step where the camera does a certain number of things to process it and the recorder does the remaining processing. This would mean that the video stream could potentially exceed the bandwidth of the HDMI connection because the data has already been compressed before pumping it out the HDMI port. Compression of data is a horrifically complicated thing and there are advancements being made all the time and BRAW is one of those advancements, so it might be that some cameras can be programmed to compress the signal and get a higher quality video out than the HDMI specification would support (without that level of compression). Of course, this is all speculation but it makes sense logically, and seems to explain what we've seen so far. So it would be down to the capabilities of each cameras HDMI spec, and also the manufacturers willingness to re-write firmware as well as each cameras specific hardware and processing capabilities that would be required to get BRAW over the HDMI connection. You should be able to record anything the camera can pump out the HDMI port now, but in terms of which cameras can support BRAW over HDMI I'd suggest to assume that it's not possible unless proven otherwise.

I'd be surprised if they weren't working on these. Resolve has already got pretty good capability already and AI is where it's at for this stuff now (and 16 has it already included so we know it's where they're going) so I would say it's just a matter of time.

This sentence is rich with things to ponder... EOSHD forums are The Pub, but now I hear there's a couch recliner?? and that it's possible to leave here as a better adjusted member of society??? I guess you learn something every day!

I completely agree. It's only about if it's appropriate for the project or not. We wouldn't say that any other creative choice was cheating - it's a good choice if it helps the creative vision of the project and it's a bad choice if it doesn't. Everything is an artistic choice. [Edit: I will say that if you think it's being overused, then it's that you're not a fan of the type of aesthetic it makes, or people are using it badly and you're reacting to that]

Video files are just data. Every operating system has a software tool that you can enter in any machine language data you like. So according to your logic, I don't need a camera, crew, lighting, sound equipment or anything - I should just start typing away, then hit save on Masterpiece.MOV and I'm done! What's that? Having to understand and memorise the MOV container is cramping your ability to get convincing dialogue? Understanding the header flags on codec container formats in HEX when converting from long_integer binary encoded data shells distracting you from getting good wardrobe? You said it yourself.... You are forgetting that film-making isn't just about using a camera. It's about many many many things, and if the camera can do something for me then maybe that means that I can take my finite capacity and concentrate on something I wasn't able to put my attention to. I understand your sentiment, but randomly assuming that limitations you're able to compensate for should be accepted by other people just because you say so is pretty arrogant, and also pretty ignorant and just tells me you don't know shit about real film-making or how other people do it.

It shouldn't be Resolve 17. BM have a pretty predictable announcement/release schedule and this is way outside it.

When you down convert 4K 8-bit down to 1080 you get 4:4:4 colour space and depending on a bunch of different factors, you will get a result that is somewhere between 8-bit and 10-bit. Going into the technicalities of why this occurs will derail the thread somewhat so I'd suggest looking it up and reading about it to anyone that questions this.

We've all been there! You might have noticed the vitriol earlier in the thread about Canon crippling it's lineup. I don't know if you've ever seen the RAW footage from a Canon camera with the Magic Lantern hack, but it really is something quite special, so there is no technical reason that Canon couldn't have taken a good quality 1080 readout (at 10 or even 12-bit) and put it through a nice h264 compression to give a lovely image. Of course, is having an 80D with DPAF in video, great CS and a wonderful and robust image a good business idea for them? Well.... I own a Canon XC10 and it outputs the kind of image the C100 gives, only it does it in 4K at 305Mbps. It's a wonderful camera, except for the fixed lens which limits creative choice in that department.

The T2i codec was probably better quality than the YT 1080 level of compression, so maybe it would be more similar than you might think!! ???

Your proving my point. Imagine what the bmpcc would look like if instead of "upgrading" to the p6k you bought all the stuff and made a great bmpcc rig instead. Which would win between a p6k with only a cheap lens and a bmpcc with lenses and a rig to the value of the p6k retail price. And also don't think badly about vintage lenses, the absolute legendary vintage lenses are worth more now than they were new, but everything else is worth a tiny fraction of how much it cost new because demand has plummeted. Vintage lenses aren't 'cheap' they are spectacular bargains

Is anyone here shooting with a lens that is more expensive than their camera body? I think that might be a threshold of some kind... sadly, I'm not. I take your point but disagree.. Although motion is very important (along with sound, acting, storyline, etc), stills show: colour, DoF, grading, composition, and do so without the YT compression crunch that obliterates much of the subtlety, so it's not meaningless.... Yes, Vimeo is nicer than YT but I have never been able to play anything on it without it pausing to buffer (and many others were similar when Andrew polled this some time ago). and people posting images from the photography mode of their camera is just cheating! (unless it's just to talk about the lens of course)