kye

I thought that this was part 2?

Let's get this party started! Not the best thing I've ever made, but in the spirit of quantity over quality (and of making things and publishing even if they're not perfect), here it is. This is lens #1 - I may make more than one film with each lens. I think I followed all the rules.... someone made so many of them!! ???

There are a couple of phrases that are interesting here... "what gets measured gets managed" which can be a good thing (eg, number of car accidents on a piece of road) but then there's "a good middle manager will meet their targets even if they have to destroy the organisation to do so" which... isn't. Metrics cut both ways.

YouTubers have been promoting the new Gnarbox 2.0 which looks kind of cool. IIRC it has ability to plug in an external USB drive for storage, as well as a USB port for an external card reader, and can do cool things like backup a card to the internal and external drive at the same time.

You're right that it would be great if a manufacturer combined all the best bits. In my mind the GH5 was pretty close to this, apart from the AF people really don't complain about it in any major way, and even then the AF isn't so bad. I'd suggest that you re-think how you look at Instagram influencers though: they create original art and publish it on a daily basis (or more frequently) they are interacting with their audience, essentially having a conversation about the art form or about the content / concepts it depicts many of them are deriving an income from their art, and some derive their entire livelihood from this Yes, many of them are just attractive millennials living off product placement, but the vast majority of professional artists are catering to the whims of big brands and the superficialities of the public, so if we simply dismiss them as brand shills then we're also condemning most product, fashion, and lifestyle photographers and videographers, modelling agencies, photo and video re-touching houses, and advertising agencies, which is a very large chunk of the entire industry!

I don't think I agree. The traditional story arc is that there is some kind of stability which is broken by the inciting incident, and then the main characters spend the rest of the movie trying to recreate a new stability but they have to struggle and change to find it, which is where you mention embracing personal change. This kind of personal change does happen frequently in these movies - the love interest either doesn't think they're worthy or are too proud but there will eventually be some kind of kiss (or dancing), people will have their ideas challenged and will reframe them and become wiser through the process, etc. Where I think that we struggle with these things is that: They're not the focus of the movie - the focus of the movie is the fight with the external threat (as you say) so in a sense the movies are much more black and white than more human-centric films and in these films the characters spend comparatively much less time embracing personal change than they do fiercely rejecting it with a weapon of some kind, and They're cliche - we've seen these stories before and they're worn out and done to death. My teenage daughter can tell you the entire plot of an average Hollywood film after the first 5 minutes and get 80% of the plot points correct. Same with an entire TV series. She's not psychic - it's that Hollywood is unoriginal.

Well, I suppose that by the time you rig up many of these cameras with a full cine setup they're quite large, so maybe someone releasing a fridge into the cinema camera market might not be too out of place, but they'd be completely stupid to imply a hand-held run-n-gun in their promotional materials!!

Just set the preview window to 100% and make sure the timeline resolution matches the source clip resolution and that should eliminate any preview window scaling issues. It's worth checking this with known bad clips, and it's also worth checking the footage in another viewer. For example, VLC can take snapshots of single frames and you can zoom into those to really see what's going on.

If you can get your hands on one, I will allow it!

I was thoroughly enjoying Rise Of The Silver Surfer right up until the silver surfer spoke for the first time. I was thinking how cool it would be to have a plucky gang of heroes get so completely out-classed that their foe doesn't even acknowledge they exist. Having a complete action film occur and still be wondering WTF the bad guy was would be absolutely brilliant. Please, someone make that film.

If they got it open then maybe you should give it a go.. what's the worst that can happen? The only real specialist tool you need is a lens wrench, but you can make one by filing down the tips on an old pair of needle-nose pliers into a pair of flat blades. If you do, just take lots of photos (or a video) as you go so you keep track of which bits go where. It also helps to place the parts in a logical sequence (eg, left to right) when you remove them, so that working the opposite way (right-to-left) will be the right sequence to re-assemble it again. 135mm lenses are typically quite simple optically so shouldn't be prohibitively difficult to service. Look online for a service manual beforehand as that would be the best strategy, but I'd say give it a go anyway. I had good results working with a solution of tap-water and dish soap for cleaning, then distilled water for rinsing and a lens rocket blower to push the drops off the glass before they dry. A box of q-tips and those solutions worked well for me.

You might be right about single-person shoots. There's only so many hands (and neurons) available to get the job done as a solo-operator and no-one will give you a pass if the end result isn't quite right because it was only you. I'm an overly-enthusiastic amateur who shoots my families travels and the odd video for a friend. In this sense my shooting is guerrilla run-n-gun zero-impact kind of shooting where I document what happens, as it happens, where it happens, without making people do things differently or repeat anything. To this end, I shoot hand-held with a GH5, Rode VMP+, and a very minimal kit of MF primes, Sony X3000 action camera, and my iPhone (as required). I manually focus as I spent so much time being frustrated with poor AF and I also learned that I preferred the aesthetic of that more than AF, even very good AF like the Canon DPAF. Obviously I benefit from IBIS (as I'm hand-held, hate the super-8 home video micro-jitter aesthetic, and most places I go don't allow tripods), the higher DR and bit-depth of the GH5 (as I shoot in available-light and go where the action is), and the dual-gain setting on the Rode (as shoot in uncontrolled conditions and don't have a spare hand or spare mental CPU cycles to adjust audio gain). Having said all that I've produced a number of short films and I know my way around a set, so I'm familiar with the whole cycle from funding applications, grants, scripting, storyboarding, coverage, lighting, call-lists, extras, ADR, through to editing, grading, mixing, mastering, delivery, festival submissions, and promotion, etc. I also used to write my own music and ran a small recording studio for a decade or so, and have built a dozen or so hifi systems from the ground up (with wood, screws, wire, soldering iron, valves, transistors, resistors, capacitors, digital chips, transformers, etc), so I'm rather overqualified for the "dad with a handicam" role that I play most of the time

$40M USD at the box office cannot be wrong....

If only I shot on imaginary productions.. then I could use my imagination to get rid of all the problems!! Anyway, got home from my travels today and I'm inspecting my strategy for the Single Soviet Prime Lens Challenge... fun fun!

No idea about Promura, but I read something interesting about films inside lenses - someone said that you can get rid of them with a vacuum chamber. I think the idea is that whatever film is on there (assuming it was from the lens being heated or aging) got there by evaporating from somewhere and condensing on the glass. Therefore, if you put the lens in a vacuum then that stuff will evaporate again and the lens will become clear. I've never tried it but the logic seems sound.

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