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I thing that learning about ourselves as filmmakers is the ultimate challenge, as no amount of fancy/big/small/lightweight/Hollywood equipment will make shooting an easier process if we don't know who we are, what we're shooting and why we're doing it in the first place. I'm not sure about you, but a good amount of my indecision comes from my curiosity about all the new and shiny things that are around... we have 70+ years of cinematic history to explore, and even if the vintage stuff doesn't peak our interest, we have manufacturers in a perpetual deathmatch trying to create new equipment that will give Hollywood results for pocket-change budgets, and there are many hidden gems to be explored. Of course, this curiosity for equipment is really curiosity to learn about ourselves, and the people who are top of their game will have their go-to setup that they've worked out suits their own methods and goals and are pushing forward on other creative pursuits rather than technical ones, but the battle for perfection in creativity is a journey with no end

So, if it's a 1.33x adapter on a 24mm equiv FOV then would it have the same horizontal FOV as an 18mm then? That's pretty freaking wide, which (IMHO) is pretty awesome. My 16mm equiv wide angle gives great perspective when the subject calls for it...

Here's a general question that will show my ignorance of anamorphics... if the lens on an iPhone has a particular FOV, what happens when you put the anamorphic lens onto it? Does it the horizontal angle of view get wider? Does the vertical get less? Both? Making the default lens wider would be worth something - I much prefer a 16mm FOV over a 24 or 28mm FOV.

A little late to this conversation, but firstly congrats on buying the Micro!! ??? We've spoken about this before and I know how cool this is and what it means for your projects! I was reading through your posts and kept thinking C-mount (or even D-mount) would be the way to go considering your fondness for a wide prime and the crop factor, and then boom....! My advice would be to start with this bad-boy and only replace it if you've found it lacking from real use. When you say that it's not that sharp wide-open I'd encourage you to think about it the way I think of my fast primes - as two lenses. A soft and emotive lens wide open, and a sharper more vanilla lens when stopped down a bit. Almost like the aperture dial is a defocus control. Rig it up, take it out, shoot the shit out of it. Make lots of videos like people are making in the $200 camera challenge - kind of little test-shot montages. The Micro sensor won't be that sharp anyway (1080 RAW), so you might find that the lens makes less difference than it would on a 4K h264 camera. Also, you might be able to make that sharpness back with slightly more Midtone Detail on those shots than on the other ones. Alternatively, you could apply a small blur to the sharper shots and just go for 100% vibes over straight-out resolution. I'll say more on this later, but blurring footage can work magic if done right Man, a tiny Micro + C-mount setup is almost making me jealous!

@mercer Cool shots! I like the colour as well as the B&W versions. One of the things that makes the colour shots nice is the contrast of warm/cool tones, a kind of orange/teal grade but done in real life rather than in post (which is 1000% better than doing it in post IMHO). One thing lacking from the "shot-by-shot" decision making that photographers have is that its typical to have the whole film graded in the same look, so we're making one decision for all of our shots in the design phase instead of in post. Making the decision in production design gives an advantage as we can shoot for colour or shoot for B&W, giving us the chance to get things better in-camera. I think ML has a B&W preview mode doesn't it? That might be useful as you'll get a better sense of what the finished product will be like.

Maybe that's what prompted the discussion about exposure.. We all make mistakes, it's about learning from them that is what is important

This is EOSHD. We tangent pretty hard around here.

If this doesn't say "film-making is about marketing, reputation, customer service more than it is about the end result" then I don't know what will! Good luck to him, the Hunter S Thompson lifestyle isn't for everyone

Just paste the URL into the message window, hit enter/return and after a few seconds it should expand out to embed the video

I'm happy for it to get extended a couple of days.. It would be nice to see a few more entries

Yeah, gimbal work is a different thing altogether. Unless you have a follow-focus with wireless monitoring, then it's pretty much AF-only.

Nice work! I'm also ready for round two.. this was fun, and I still have an outstanding experiment I wanted to try ???

@Michi Very nice!! and a great idea too

Very nice! Absolutely! @Jonesy Jones you should actually consider that! Moment is a lens company that makes clip-on lenses for smartphones and the like. They make some anamorphic lenses that you should be able to use with your iPad. They're not free, but they're probably under 10% of what it costs (in time and money) to get the next cheapest anamorphic setup

AF is beyond human abilities now to maintain focus on an item. In terms of selecting which item and giving the right kind of seeking behaviour to match the style and creative intent, it may never exceed human beings for that. DMF would have to get a lot better in terms of usability and physical control interfaces before I'd give up MF from dedicated MF lenses. Any time you rotate the focus ring you encounter what makes a nice MF experience: long focus throws, linear response, heft and weight and smoothness to the ring itself, and it will be a long time before you can buy a camera and set of lenses that suit your other preferences and all support DMF as well as having a nice ergonomic MF experience. My only experience of DMF was a "flick the plastic ring in the general direction, no linear response or focus peaking to know where you are, and hope it guesses the rest the way you want it to" which is a bad MF experience in almost every way. A touchscreen is fine if you're inside and shooting on a tripod, but any time you are outside and using the EVF or are shooting hand-held then the ergonomics are just awful. There's a broader issue for shooting hand-held using the EVF and that is that you can use one eye to look at the image through the EVF and the other eye to keep watch over what is happening outside the frame. The famous street photographers all used to do this to aid composition, but it's still a useful skill to have when shooting sports, anything live, or any kind of action that you'd like to capture on the first take. MF is part of a film-making ecosystem that must be considered in context rather than simply being thought of as a dial that gets operated by either you or the camera.

It depends on how good the AF is to begin with. I've lost more shots waiting for CDAF to work out that a portrait shot isn't a macro shot, or that the focus point wasn't on the train window but on the scenery outside it, that I could MF for the rest of my life and still come out ahead. MF doesn't always nail focus but it always knows what to focus on. It also depends on how out of focus you're comfortable with. Movies and TV spend more time out of focus than you'd think.

No worries! Cool B&W frame. There's richness and depth in the subtle shading that is very nice After messing around with B&W in the cheap camera challenge I've gained a new appreciation for it. I recall a famous photographer once saying that things should always be B&W unless they're better in colour, and that that's the logic that should be used when deciding which way to go. Interesting perspective.

Very nice!! Cool song / concept too

Welcome..

Yeah, I'm on the ~$10pm photography plan which gives you PS and LR. The LR panels are pretty optimised I think. Their target users are people who do weddings and need to process images really quickly and efficiently. By the time you go through the sliders, and setup local adjustment brushes for things like under-eyes (lighten shadows, reduce clarity), brighten eyes (increase vibrance, sharpen), flattering skin (reduced clarity), and a couple of dodge/burn presets, you can process images at a pretty quick pace.

The more I pay attention to TV and films, the more that I see that things don't have perfect focal control. In shots where the subject-to-camera distance decreases, I see many more shots that go out of focus and then regain focus again for the closeup than shots that keep focus on the character the whole time. I agree. With properly designed lenses it's a completely different experience than with focus-by-wire or with short-throw lenses designed for AF use that still have a physical MF ring.

Great shots @mercer - I do enjoy the 35mm framing. Are you playing with the colours before you convert to B&W? You probably are but just in case you're not it can really create great contrast

I pointed Lightroom to a folder containing an image sequence of CDNG files and it sees all of them, and seems to import them fine. I then made edits, copied those edits and pasted to a bunch of images (in one click - not one-by-one) and went to the export window (but stopped short of actually exporting) and it seemed to be fine with all of that. Does that answer your question? [Edit: the CDNG files were extracted from an ML clip, so should be the right format]

Not sure on the best settings, but one way to get some insight is to run the activity monitor to show you the CPU/GPU load during rendering so you can see what's going on. I think Resolve puts more emphasis on the GPU than CPU compared to other NLEs, and I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that DR16 moves a lot of processing to the GPU to make this even moreso. In which case what you're after is a maxed out GPU. You may also consider some third party monitoring applications that will show you CPU and GPU temperatures as well, as that will tell you if there is throttling going on, which obviously can impact things considerably. Good luck - I'll be joining you when I get my RX 5700 card.. just waiting on Apple to release drivers, which history suggests will be a few months unfortunately.

I used to be a champion for AF and was looking at buying an A7III because of its AF until I discovered that I actually like the aesthetic of MF. This lead me down the path of GH5 with manual lenses and I've never looked back. I particularly like the very human and analog feel of MF, and its imperfections (which are especially prevalent when I do it!). I am completely in love with the aesthetic I get from the GH5 and I think the imperfect MF is a real contributor to that, as I think it suits the emotional/nostalgic feeling I want for the home videos that I make. The fact that I stopped being frustrated by poor AF is also a bonus, the number of times I was just standing there holding the camera watching the moment go by while silently screaming "focus you @#$@#$" probably had a measurable impact on my average blood pressure...