kye

2 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Mics definitely do have self noise, my Sennheiser MKH60 for instance is much cleaner than my AKG Blueline HC

When I say microphone, I mean the transducer component, not the entire appliance.  The problem is that I've designed and built audio equipment, so I find the way that other people talk about it to be vague and imprecise.

Any mic that doesn't require phantom power wouldn't have self-noise because it's essentially glad wrap, two magnets and some coiled wire in a tube

18 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

I feel like through this conversation you've been getting confused by various terms / points / aspects. 

I'll try to clear up a few things:

Mic self noise is not the same as mic pre amp self noise. 

The inherent self noise from either a mic or a pre amp is going to be the same when a person is whispering or shouting, BUT when a person whispers we're going to crank the gain up. Thus we're hearing  more of the self noise due to the gain being cranked up.  (the reverse is of course true when a person shouts, and you hear relatively less noise)

This does NOT mean there is inherently more self noise in a system when a person is whispering, because of course what an actor does (be him/her shouting or whispering!) has no impact whatsoever over the electronics. It is what the sound mixer does which matters.

The Zoom F6 is proposing that all these operations can be done in post, and you the operator doesn't need to touch the F6 at all. 

Thus it logically follows if your recorder is already good enough to record someone whispering or someone shouting (which the F4/F8 can easily do with even moderately good technique) then the F6 can do it without you needing to actively babysit the F6. Or so Zoom is claiming, and when you think through it like I have just done here explaining it to you, then you can see this isn't a totally unreasonable claim to make. And I'm looking forward to the reviews to see if they've pulled it off in all the details, if I was a betting man I'd say yes.  

The problems / exceptions to this only arise in scenarios when even if you're actively running your recorder then you still can't record the sound, which would be truly extreme examples like a flea farting or a space shuttle taking off. 

Again, look at camera examples if it helps you understand it:

Realistically speaking if you're filming in a tunnel or a outdoors in summer, then they don't change what is inherently noisy in the image. But rather it is you as the camera operator who is responding to your external surroundings which leads to that noise seen. When in the tunnel you choose 12,800 ISO which makes the image noisy. But being in the tunnel itself doesn't mean the image is noisy. It was you choosing that ISO which made it noisy. Ok, I'm probably sounding weirdly philosophical at the moment, but maybe you're catching my drift?

Imagine you could record ISO 100 / 200 / 400 / 800 / 1600 / 3200 / 6400 / 12800 / 25600 all at once?? Then you can choose which ISO you want in post. Thus like the F6 you wouldn't need to set your gain while shooting. And the end result would be just as good as if you had selected the right ISO on the day. (of course at any extreme, like filming on the surface of the sun, TOO BRIGHT, or filming next to a black hole, TOO DARK, then you'll have problems)

This is kinda why some people have compared the F6 to doing "raw audio"

 

I hadn't originally considered that the mic capsule and maybe mic circuitry exist prior to any attenuation, so that might be the missing piece.  

I see a couple of different signal paths..  

Setup #1:

• "microphone" (which is a microphone capsule, feeding into an internal amplifier circuit of some kind)
  v
• Zoom F6 (which is likely to be an adjustable resistor -> the rest of the circuitry)

Setup #2:

• "microphone" (which is a microphone capsule, feeding into an internal amplifier circuit of some kind)
  v
• "mic preamp" (which is likely to be: an adjustable resistor -> fixed gain circuit -> adjustable resistor -> fixed gain circuit)
  v
• Zoom F6 (which is likely to be an adjustable resistor -> the rest of the circuitry)

If we assume that we adjust all the controls so that the microphone capsule on the edge of clipping physically aligns with every fixed gain circuit on the edge of clipping electronically, and we call this 0db, and we assume that every gain circuit has a self-noise figure of -100dB.  Then we assume that we put the microphone near something very loud, and let's imagine that it has 15dB of head room above the average level, and we record, then we'll get noise in the recording at 85dB below our loud sound, which is a SNR of 85dB.  Now we take that setup and go inside to record something very quiet, which is 80dB below the loud thing.  The loud thing was averaging -15dB, so that means this thing averages -95dB.  Our self-noise is still at -100dB, but that means that we only have a SNR of 5dB.  

Its an extreme example, but so is having 5dB SNR, so I think it remains relevant even if the difference in volume is less.

Did I mess up the math?

If that's the case, then it won't matter if the F6 is clean down to -200dB, the noise from the active circuitry in the microphone (which we know is there because it requires phantom power) will already be mixed into the signal before it gets to the F6.

Microphone capsules are a passive transducer that are used the exact opposite way to a loudspeaker (which incidentally is why you can use headphones as a microphone) and therefore have no noise floor or self-noise, so the only setup where the F6 is the only active device and you plug a passive microphone straight into the F6.  Then your recording will only be limited by the clipping of the microphone capsule and the F6s internal components.

The camera analogy isn't a good one because in a camera the sensor is the first electronic component, whereas in an audio setup the recorder is likely preceded by multiple other electronic circuits that have their own limitations independent to the recorder.

21 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

I do not remember the scene, but they could just took an artistic decision. Not everything has to be technical and I do not believe anything random allowed to be broadcasted from that show. It is too good for that.

Which episode is that you said?

Maybe it was an artistic decision.  When I was investigating using video as a way to grab still frames as photos I did a bunch of reading about different shutter angles, and there was a great explanation about how one of those war movies (Saving Private Ryan IIRC) used 90 degree and 45 degree angles to make the horror seem less stylised and kind of blurred over.  They spoke about how in 180 degree angle explosions are just big blurs, whereas if you shorten the shutter time then you can see the bits of things (and people) flying and it makes it much more visceral.  

In a sense the cinematic look is a pleasant style, and they didn't want it to be pleasant, they wanted it to be graphic and awful.  Maybe Peaky Blinders make similar choices, it would certainly fit with their subject matter and storylines!

The one I noticed was S4E2 at the 48 minute mark, with the shot looking up at a balcony with a ceiling fan above that.  Just looking at it now the shutter angle is very short indeed, but it's not a graphic moment in itself, so who knows.

4 hours ago, kaylee said:

Zach, since you started this thread, I created a brand new short, wrote it, storyboarded it, did the costume designs for 12 characters, found a new DP near me (yay!), found a killer location for that shoot, AND, i WROTE A 24-PAGE CHILDRENS BOOK WHICH I AM NOW ILLUSTRATING

and i STILL managed to study for my biology test~! ?

3 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Kinda odd, why didn't they whack in an ND filter? They're indoors, so it is not like the light is so strong they'd run out of NDs.

I have no idea - the level of production design on the show is exceptional, unless they had an accident and broke their only ND, or a logistics error of some kind.  Probably one of those 'X happened and we thought no-one would notice' kind of things..  Strange though!

4 hours ago, Zach Goodwin2 said:

Someone on Youtube suggested that I should make another Sammy the Sock episode. He said to do with stuffed animals this time. He also suggested to do it on an iPhone. Probably also told me to repeat making the short. I don't know what to do. What do you all think I should do. I don't have an iPhone and I like using my T2i. All I have avaliable as a phone is flip phone.

Use whatever you have, shoot edit and publish, then do it again..  and again..

Almost every successful YouTuber has early videos that are awful (they may have deleted them but they were there) and every successful Hollywood film director has a box of awkward short films somewhere.  You get better by making films, not talking about equipment on forums.

9 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Which is why I was saying under extremely extreme scenarios the only "gotcha" you likely need to then worry about is the max SPL of the mic, but if you're worrying about the SPL rating of your mic then you've playing in some very rarefied exotic circumstances here when it comes to doing sound effects recordings! Not a problem people need to ever usually worry about. (for example: I'm a professional sound recordist and in the last few years I've never come across a scenario in which the max SPL of my mic was a problem for me, you really need to be some kind of specialist SFX recordist for this to be a big concern for you)

Well, holy sh*t, if the DR and self-noise of a mic preamp is sufficient for recording everything you've come across then I guess it might actually work.  What mic do you use?  I'm curious about the SNR.  

I thought the world was a much more dynamic place...  you know, with orchestras being so loud they are a health and safety hazard and all that stuff.  It makes me wonder why equipment that has a safety track only drops it by 20db - which as a person that doesn't adjust levels because I'm thinking about too many other things I routinely find isn't enough latitude and you clip both tracks.  I figured that audio techs had to use attenuators at various points in the signal path to keep levels within range.

4 hours ago, wyrlyn said:

 

As someone who already owns a 0.95 lens for low light performance, this was hardly a surprise, but it's nice that there are at least two people on the planet that don't think fast apertures are only for bokeh whores..!

4 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Anyway, what you're describing is a truly extreme example which falls under specialist SFX recording scenarios. A more reasonable "extreme" scenario is a NYC street vs bedroom pillow talk. And yes, Zoom seems to think the F6 can handle this and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until reviews come out to prove them otherwise. 

What about the microphone?

I mean, if you set it up so you can record the NY city street then when you get inside then are you simply going to be getting a great recording of the noise floor of the mic preamps?  

You might be right about the Zoom being able to have that low a noise floor, which means the lawyers will be happy, but that's kind of like saying that you can jump off a building without any issues when technically that's true because it's the landing that's the problem - it might be true but it's practically impossible and could therefore be classed as misleading.

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

I don't think the Zoom spokesperson (Samuel Greene) is outright lying at all. 

So when he said that apart from selecting line/mic you will never have to set levels that will work in the real world in all cases?  I can record on the tarmac of an aircraft carrier while planes are landing with a boom mic with the same settings as the interview with the captain in controlled conditions with the same mic?

2 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

"Traditional System", as in back during the bad old days of 16bit recordings? Or even longer ago than that? 

Back then you had a relatively narrow range you could record in, without either getting issues from the noise floor below or hitting the limiters above. That is no longer the case with modern pro equipment, you have a much larger "sweet spot" to aim for. 

Traditional, in the sense that these people claim that you don't ever need to adjust levels again, which if you take their claims seriously, means every other system where you did need to adjust levels to get a good result

I guess my entire point in this thread is that either in 24 or 16-bit digital, or analog before that, either cassette tape or 2-inch machine, levels were important, and they claim they're not for this new machine, but it doesn't seem to be true.

It's kind of like selling a car and saying you don't need to wear seatbelts anymore, when in reality there is a small percentage of the time in very specific situations when not doing so will end badly, which is the same here.  I hate it when marketing people simplify and hype something to the point of out-right lies, and this is that.

3 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

I don't know the 1DC has a hell of a good bit rate for a camera. Well actually for storage it is terrible but.. It is possible the 1Dx mk II could match it I guess. But way out of my price range. I admit maybe a Fuji X-T3 might do it? But for as old as they are the Canon sure is special. Canon was on a roll back then if you had the money to buy what they had. They were leaders than, not so much now.

I don't know... compared to the P4K, every other camera has a completely bone-head-stupid-ridiculous-waste-of-time-pure-BS-almost-zero-practically-no-data-at-all bitrate

1 hour ago, newfoundmass said:

If you're looking for the best value you can't beat Sony

It depends on what you value, as different people prioritise things very differently to each other.

It might be that when you look at what Sony provide and compare that to what you value there is a strong match.  That strong match will likely not be the same for the next person who shoots different films in different situations with a different style, edits and grades them in different software on different hardware, likes a different final look, and all the time is using their eyes that see framing, DR, colour, resolution, sharpness, and contrast differently to the way your eyes do.

27 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

You should still try to budget for what is half the film..... sound! 

....or more than half

13 hours ago, heart0less said:

Did anyone notice any performance issues in 16 compared to 15.3.1?

I'm getting this pop-up every now and then, which never bothered me before:

 

I'm not doing anything crazy - just color grading 8 bit H264 video files from my Panasonic G85 in a 2560x1280 timeline.
Four nodes, no denoising, no sharpening, no qualifiers.

They've pushed a lot of things from CPU to GPU so that may have an impact in comparison to previous versions.

17 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

XC15 ergonomics (with a little improvement) are excellent in my opinion and a good basis for a killer small video camera. 

My XC10 was great in every way except I needed faster lenses for shallow DoF and low-light performance.  Ergonomics are spectacular.  

6 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

My opinion of making documentaries follows similar principles. 

My first goal is to interact with my subjects as naturally and chill as possible.  Gear selection is a part of that.  It's a process that has led to a certain style and result that's hard to quantify, but definitely makes a difference.  When I walk away with my shots and the subject telling me, "That was easier than I thought."  I feel like I'm on the right track.  Now, for a lot of what I do, that means I don't necessarily get the most dramatic shots --as I constantly have to improvise by giving the subject more freedom, but that freedom creates a certain feeling that might go uncaptured otherwise.  I'm an unnatural interloper in moments that demand naturalness, so minimize that unnaturalness, you know?

Anyway, if you follow stuff I type here on EOSHD, you'll see I'm a fan of Olympus and smaller LUMIX cameras.  The single most important decision I ever made, for me, was to decide to minimize my gear footprint with a camera like the EM5II, do things handheld that would otherwise require insane amounts of gear, and just learn how to "ghost" while still directing what needs directed.

On the other hand, I have an old-school colleague that can't seem to enter a room without bringing three tons of crap into it, making sure it gets all unpacked, and then spending 2 hours to capture what I'd, more or less, grab on the fly in two minutes.  What he creates is often legit and prettier than what I get, it's just rarely reads as authentic to me. 

So, what's the end game?  That's where you gotta decide what you want to be as a filmmaker.  I'm making a deliberate effort to shore up my storytelling skills rather than chasing technical achievement.  I didn't always use to be this way. 

As for IQ?  Man, I've just not cared a lot about that recently as the gear gets me to the threshold I'm happy with, and has done so for awhile now.  Just speaking for myself and how I'm approaching things, I'm more excited of where my career in motion pictures is going than where it used to be.

(so much for saying I would shut up) 

I think you captured it brilliantly with your interloper statement, and I completely understand.

I've gone the same gear route as you - my workhorse rig is GH5, Rode VMP+, 8mm / 17.5mm / 40mm lenses, and a wrist strap.  My second setup is a GoPro Hero 3, waterproof case, and a floaty handle that I use for wet locations.  I also have a Gorillapod 5K and a Manfrotto Pocket with me but neither gets much use.  I'm great at the point-camera-at-other-people-doing-things shots, and getting good at travelling shots as b-roll between scenes, but not so good with establishing shots, time lapses, or basically the shots where I'm doing something other than filming, such as shots where I'm in them.  I need to learn how to expand my repertoire.  

In terms of video quality, I'm still exploring the potential of my GH5, but it's way better than I am, and my limitation is my skill level.  I'm a little bit disappointed with the Hero 3, but considering that it's many generations old, that's probably to be expected.  My equipment is not the limiting factor any more.

38 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Just go out and buy a old Canon 1DC and a box of C Fast cards lol. They are getting pretty cheap. Probably all I would need. I still can't get out of my head this frame

 grab someone posted on here from one.

Nice grab.  I wonder how much of it is the set design, lighting, and grading, as opposed to the camera.  No doubt that the 1DC makes lovely images, but I'd be surprised if there aren't more modern options that could get close enough so no-one could pick them apart.

12 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

 

Honestly, I look at that and think, "It looks very nice and well crafted... and he would shoot something incredibly similar on just about any camera these days."  Even more honestly, an old 5DII has more visual character in what it produces than what this does. But I like like soft and imperfect images, especially for something romantic and purposefully dreamy like a wedding.  Then again, that's me.  I suppose I have my own style.

Who really knows with this stuff?  The couple may have seen his reel and love the clinical and high-res look of his previous videos.  

Still, what are directors of these sorts of productions exactly reaching for?  Shooting a compelling film or using expensive and cool gear?  I'd like to shoot on medium format too just for the fun factor of playing with neat-o technical stuff, but the more important question comes down to, what actually works and looks best?  

If I'm being really nit-picky, I'd say that many of the shots are stagey and the couple don't look wholly relaxed.  Now, is that a factor of their personalities?  --or are they a little awkward because this guy was doing a bunch of gear rigging for his Hasselblad shots?  Is he demanding precision for his scene direction?  Is he missing a chance to put his couple at ease by prioritizing his gear selection and his image creation?  What's happening on the other side of that lens?

You know, having a good relaxed relationship with your subjects is so exponentially more important than equipment.  Anyway, I'm off on my typical "gear-not-so-important" rant again.  At the end of the day, the new IQ era we're in is great.  I'll shut up now.

Well said.

Advancements in technical aspects like resolution and DR etc can contribute to a higher production quality, but if they come at the expense of something else that is more valuable, like talent comfort, shot design and camera moves, ability to improvise, etc then it works out to be a net loss.  In a sense the big high-end cameras aren't that well suited to weddings and other situations where the camera needs to follow the action, rather than the action following the camera.  This is why when I'm making holiday videos of my family I want a flexible setup that can get the shot the first time, because I don't want to ruin the holiday by making my family act in a video rather than have a holiday.  Also, the magic is very difficult to repeat, especially for non-actors.  They say that your wedding day goes by so fast, if the photographer and videographer were to slow that down to "I thought the day would last forever because it seemed like the posing for photos and video would never end" I don't think that would be success!

9 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

So I'm just trying out the new Resolve 16 because I wanted to see what all the fuss is about with the new 'Cut' panel. 

I know it's early beta, but unless I'm missing something, the Cut page is incredibly annoying to use. When you remove a clip, the whole timeline closes up the gap, but instead of starting at the next clip, the playhead stays at the same point in time relative to your starting point. Say I have Clips A, B, C, D, E and they're all various lengths. I delete all of clip B and keep expecting to see the first frame of clip C, but instead, it'll show me Clip D since they've all been pushed back to close the gap. Can I turn this off?

Also, the whole moving the timeline, while the playhead stays in the middle of my screen is really annoying for me too. When I click on the timecode part, I want to see the frame that's there, not have to drag that part under my playhead.

I've read a lot about how useful the Clip page is for laptops and smaller screens... Well, simply, you can just hide all the stuff you don't want to see on the 'Edit' page and you're essentially working with the same layout, but with a timeline that responds and reacts in a more reasonable (to me) way, and you have more control over each clip and the audio etc.

I'm all for more options, and sure it has some benefits to some users. Maybe with more development from BMD and practice from me I'll understand why it's there, but for now and for me, it seems like a pretty useless page.

I haven't used v16 yet, but I did have a thought that the playhead behaviour you describe might be related to the mode?  In the old Edit page IIRC the playhead behaved differently depending on if you were in different modes, like the Select mode, Trim mode, Insert mode, etc, so maybe there's an equivalent to that?

I know that different people think in different ways and although I didn't understand all the different modes or why you would want them, I was definitely impressed by how many there were.

7 hours ago, stephen said:

Agree with you on the point that deleting a clip and moving the play head the same length ahead is annoying. This is something they should definitely think about and fix.

But other than that, like the new cut page. Did some edits on the weekend  - a short 2 minute video composed from approximately 30-40 smaller clips. And a bigger one assembled from 150-200 clips. The two timelines approach, with whole thing on the top and detailed clips at the bottom really helps me cut faster. Guess it all depends on our editing habits. Was able to almost finish the two small projects (total length of 7 min) in one day. Usually it takes much longer and this is the most difficult part for me - choosing the clips, or parts of the clips, figuring out the way to arrange them, composing the whole video. Now this whole process was easier, faster and even fun. 

I'm really looking forward to this part too, as this is also a bottleneck for me and although I got good at various hotkeys for making an assembly it wasn't completely optimised, and definitely wasn't fun!  Good to hear it's working for you and has made a decent improvement.  

14 hours ago, dbp said:

Youtubers are an interesting lot.

There's alot to be said about presentation, editing, etc.

But for me, the biggest variable is the intangible camera presence someone has. There are some how just have that natural charisma that make them pleasant to listen to. Others are a chore to get through, no matter how they present their videos.

It's definitely a talent. I could never be a popular youtuber, that's for sure.

You're right, but I think there is something to be said for content too, which the OP indirectly acknowledges.

I believe that charisma, beauty, video production skills, and content are all valuable and can be traded off against each other.  There are people that have charisma alone and are successful, there are those with video production skills alone (cinematic B-roll!!!), and content too.  If you don't believe me about content, then start a channel that gives out the winning lottery numbers but isn't nicely edited or with charisma and you'll still rocket to the top.  You could encode them and make the videos private and people would hack your account to get the opportunity to try and decode them and you'd still win.  In a realistic sense, it pays to have all three.

YouTube is good because it fosters experimentation and immediate feedback - it is the Petri dish of video production......  and like Petri dishes, they contain traces of huge evolution and adaptation, but are mostly filled with smelly rotting awfulness.  

3 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

@kye Oh, okay, I must have misunderstood what you were getting at when you said:

...since the F6's 32 bit mode should be useful in pretty much any scenario that dual channel is--which, as you say, is "all the time."

But yeah, the F6's dynamic range doesn't increase the microphone's dynamic range. You still can't get leaves rustling and a jet engine 50m away in the same file with the same mic, unfortunately.

I use dual level recording all the time because I never know when I will occasionally need it.  That's not to say it's useful all the time.

I am skeptical of their "you never need to change levels again" claim, which is why I explained about DR and SNR.  The extra bit depth is useful even if you're recording within normal parameters.

I think there are three situations:

1. you manage gain structure and levels and are fine with current bit-depths
2. you don't manage gain structure and record outside of the current DR for 16-bit audio but still function within the DR of your microphone and other equipment
3. you don't manage gain and record DR ranges outside the limits of your worst piece of equipment in the signal path

This unit only helps people in situation #2, and is a net loss for people in situation #1 (as @IronFilm explained).  They claim it helps all three, which is quite obviously false.  

I'm all for advancing the tech, but don't have your PR department lie about it to sell more units to people who don't have enough understanding to know you've stretched the truth past breaking point.

1 hour ago, KnightsFan said:

@kye Have you ever used dual channel recording? How is what you are explaining different from dual channel recording and using the peaks from the lower track to replace the clipped portions of the higher track? Because I do it all the time and it works, especially when mixed in (surprise) 32 bit space, because then you can match the relative levels of the two tracks without distortion.

I don't know all the maths, but I know from experience that dual channel recording is a life saver at times. I assume the F6 basically does the same thing, combining two input gains based on peaks, but automatically and internally, saving time and file space (1x 32 bit file is smaller than 2x 24 bit files).

I use dual channel recording all the time.

The problem isn't that the F6 isn't great, it's that by comparison, everything else is shit.  The F6 could have 4000 bit recording, but if you have a bad signal source then your 4000 bits won't help, because the limitation will be elsewhere in the signal path.

Unfortunately, in comparison to the F6, everything is a bad signal source.

9 hours ago, Snowfun said:

Any ideas why I’m struggling to record anything (voice overs) in Fairlight? I’m thinking my own incompetence primarily but other factors might also be relevant.

My Rode AI1 is plugged in and appears as an input option. It is set to 48k as required (I think). I add a track. The record button (“R”) activates and the red line appears on “record”. But it records a blank. Nothing. The meters stay zeroed. It’s not the Rode because switching to GarageBand (“B” not “L” - The Clash) is fine. 

Any ideas?

I think you have to patch the input to the track so that when you hit record it knows which input you want to record from.

It sounds like you might have already done that, but if so then I'm not sure.

This might help?

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

@SR It's absolutely a big deal, but primarily for non-pros. I believe what @kye is saying is that Zoom didn't do anything particularly difficult--it's not like they completely redesigned how the circuitry works. It's similar to the dual channel recording feature many recorders have had for years, except that it merges the two files automatically into a 32 bit file, instead of giving you two 24 bit files that you can manually splice if you so desire.

But it's absolutely a useful feature, especially for one man bands who don't have enough eyes to watch the camera and the audio meters at the same time, or for ultra low budget projects (like mine) who employ non-pros without much experience.

The dynamic range of the audio file should increase dramatically.

 

32 bit 48kHz is exactly twice the file size of 16 bit 48kHz, not including the negligibly small amount for metadata.

Good summary.

I'm a bit skeptical about the usefulness of it.  Not to say that it won't be more useful than a normal device, but my question is how much more useful.  I think that noise may play a big part in limiting how much extra dynamic range there is.  The idea is that in traditional system you want to keep the levels in the sweet spot where they are below the clipping point, but above the point where the noise starts to become audible.

An audio engineer will adjust their equipment so that the signal is in that sweet spot through every piece of equipment in the signal path.

The problem comes if we don't adjust the levels when we go from one situation to another.  Here is how different situations can be from one-another:

So, if you set the gain for a noisy street scene where the levels were in the 80-90dB range and then didn't adjust it when you shot the two people talking quietly in bed scene, the bedroom scene would be 60db quieter than what an engineer would set it to.

We set the street scene so that the peaks are at -20dB, and we're good to record 70dB of dynamic range because the normal system is fine to about -90dB.  We probably don't need the full 70dB, so there's some wiggle room in there.  But now were in the bedroom scene and the peaks are at -80dB (because 60dB quieter than our -20dB peaks is -80dB) and with a normal system this means we have less than 20dB of dynamic range there, assuming that at -100dB is where the noise floor is.  A normal 16-bit system would be awful quality here, but let's put that aside, because we're now talking about the F6.

The Zoom F6 may very well be able to go down to (let's say) -200dB.  This is my estimate, but if 16 bits can do -96, 24 bits can do -144, 32 bits should be around -200dB.  The problem we're going to have is noise.  I'm not sure that the F6 will have input circuitry that has a noise floor of -200dB (that is very very very low noise levels), but let's assume that it does.

The problem is that your microphone probably doesn't.  Anything that needs phantom power requires it precisely to run its own internal amplifier circuitry, and every microphone on the planet is built for the -96dB levels of 16-bit.  For example the Sennheiser 416 has a signal-to-noise ratio of 81dB.  If you used this mic then your lovely F6 would be making a very high quality recording of your actors mixed with a very high recording of the microphone noise, and both your actors and the microphone noise would be at the same volume level!

Win!!

I don't know if the 416 is that good a microphone, but even if we had a mic with SNR of 100, or 120dB, that's still only putting your noise floor of the bedroom scene 20dB or 40dB lower than your actors, and that's not a great end result.

If I've done some maths wrong in here please sing out, but I believe the logic stands.  And if anyone thinks that my example is extreme, just imagine a shot of two people walking in the doors of their NY apartment, up the stairs, into their apartment, getting undressed and then into bed.  Not only might you have level problems in one scene, you might have it IN ONE SHOT!

5 hours ago, Video Hummus said:

If I had a YouTube channel I would be making as many resolve tutorial videos as possible right now. There will be a demand for it soon I think. 

True, but the videos have a shelf-life because BM pumps out new versions all the time and you'd have to re-make all your videos!