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Nice low angle ??? Last year I spent about three months abroad in tourist spots through various countries and was keeping a lookout on what cameras I was seeing around the place. What surprised me was that I think I saw three Canon sightings amongst the literally hundreds of Nikon sightings. Most of the cameras I saw were those fixed lens super-zoom cameras that look like a DSLR but are smaller. Either I didn't know that Nikon is killing it in the fancy family camera category, or that I just happened to go where they're popular, but considering I went to places like Rome / Pompeii / Tokyo // HK // Singapore you'd think that the tourists would be pretty international. It got to be so predictable that I did full double-takes the few times I saw a Canon logo.

It's a pity they don't allow more flexibility. I'd suggest that they just include a menu called Don't Go In Here that allows the user to turn everything on and off etc, but there are people that just can't keep their hands to themselves. My dad used to work for a large company managing all the PCs and there was a staff member who would call the Helpdesk about every week or so with some strange problem. At first they tried fixing it but couldn't work out what had happened so they erased it completely and reinstalled everything. Some other problem a week later, same answer. A third problem and they noticed the pattern and replaced his whole computer, another problem a week later. Dad got involved and did some digging on his machine and worked out he spent about an hour a day screwing with random settings in the registry, which is a database deep inside Windows that has probably millions of variables that control all sorts of strange things. The point is that he was changing things that weren't labelled, there was no mention of on the internet, or anything. They tried everything, talking to him about it, his manager got involved, it went for months and they couldn't work out how to stop it happening. It got worse and was taking up hours of IT time every week, he was going around the company badmouthing IT and causing big problems. In the end they had to change the IT policies for the whole business to enable them to lock him out of the program and not be able to screw with things anymore. There were a few other people who worked there that needed that access and they ended up having to change a bunch of things to allow them to continue to do their jobs. He obviously had some kind of mental issue that meant he couldn't stop doing it, and couldn't accept that he was causing his own problems. Imagine if you're Canon or Fuji or Nikon and you give the entire world access to settings where people like this will screw with all of them and then when they don't like how things have turned out will go online and post criticisms relentlessly forever. You might be thinking "it's only sharpening or NR" but think about how much photographers or YouTubers talk about cameras being "sharp" or about ISO performance. It's unfortunate, but I think the only reason that some manufacturers can put real settings on everything is that either that these people can't afford these cameras, or when these people play with them the image will still look good, or that when they screw with things and they look bad and complain the other users are educated enough that either they can see it's user-error or no-one else cares about it.

And it's smooth to edit with? That's pretty nice. Are the standard flavours of RAW also fine to edit with, or just BRAW?

Which NLE are you using and do you render proxy media? I'm not sure of the workflow, but prores had the advantage of being a dream to edit with.

Nice. I think that pilot isn't something you'd normally go into unless you have an interest in aviation, so (assuming that he does) then that's really awesome to hear. So many people are into aviation and don't really get to spend much time in the industry, let alone in the air. I get motion sickness so an aviation career is definitely not on my radar, but I've been on a couple of aerial sight-seeing tours, one in a helicopter and one in a small plane, and I can really see the appeal, it feels like you're completely free.

That is an interesting video. And when I say interesting, I mean interesting because it's so boring. And when I say boring, I mean his findings, not the video itself. And when I say his findings are boring, it's because when he compares the two, he finds that both have pros and cons, like we'd expect, the BM has less features, the RED costs both legs and a kidney. Possibly the biggest point of commentary in the video was that when he took the BM to the teachers protests in the rain, he said that he didn't take the RED because it's just not practical. I'm watching that section and just thinking "of course you've taken the BM, there's no way you'd take the RED out handheld in the rain".

lol...

I'd imagine so. There's a thing in the fashion industry (and others too I'd imagine) where to get a job you need to work as an unpaid intern for long periods of time. The fact that you have to work long hours and these offices are in the middle of big and expensive cities means that you can't work a second job to pay rent, so these opportunities are basically only available to people with money. Considering that to make money in film you must do a lot of work up-front as well as make contacts and build your network, if you didn't have pressure to put food on the table it would really make a large difference. Not as much as working in downtown NY 15 hours a day, but some at least.

This isn't really my area, but if you want a flat bar that has multiple points with 1/4-20 screws then search in bay for "flash bracket" and look for these things.. They come in various sizes and the cheap ones are aluminium but I've also got a larger one that is steel, so sturdy enough. Not sure if they're useful, but just in case you weren't aware of them Nice setup! There is a certain satisfaction in building something highly functional that is also simple and light-weight. Maybe I should start a "Rig porn" thread!!

The XC10 had a fan and it was quite a small body. but you're right that there are thermal limitations. For Panasonic to warn about overheating really is a sign! Yeah. I suspect it's a mixture of things. I saw an interesting video talking about shooting portraits with slower wider angle lenses instead of more traditional fast portrait lenses, and there were some comments about how the wider and deeper-DOF look seems more authentic to consumers now, considering that what we see shot with mobile phones almost always lacks clever editing and what we see with "real cameras" is almost always heavily produced and edited, so consumers tend to believe the mobile phone look more. This combined with the reality-tv style of shooting has changed the way we experience and interpret video content. Gimbals or Run-n-gun can be faster to shoot with, better ISO performance and higher DR it would mean that you can shoot with less lights, and potentially light a whole room then just move setups within it instead of having to reset lighting for every setup. Combined with face-detect AF (which isn't really there for cinema cameras but will be soon) would mean that you can move faster and miss less shots due to focus issues, and either de-skill your focus puller or eliminate them entirely, saving more money.

Interesting. We periodically buy or rent content here in Australia. The only way to get Game of Thrones here (legally) is to pay for an extortionate Foxtel subscription or just buy GOT. We compared buying it on disc vs iTunes and iTunes was cheaper. We don't care about 4K, or even HD sometimes, so we're not paying top dollar. Good SD looks fine on our modest sized LCD TV. We also rent movies from Telstra on occasion to watch for family movie night. The kids go to the movies with their friends sometimes, and if there's a big movie that I really want to watch on the big screen (like Star Wars) then we'll go to the movies, but otherwise we don't go to the movies with the kids. Instead we rent a movie from Telstra Bigpond for about $5 or so for the SD version. We all watch Netflix and YT but the newer release movies aren't available through streaming. Apple is great at making platforms and locking people into them, so I think they have a real chance to dethrone Netflix if they are smart about it. Considering that Apple operate other platforms (apps, books, podcasts, music, etc) which have far less barriers to entry, might mean that its a successful middle-ground between the media conglomerate world (that Netflix is really part of) and the open-to-everyone world (that YouTube is part of). Assuming low barriers to entry, this is kind of what YouTube RED was meant to be. We subscribe to YouTube, mostly because it gives offline viewing and no ads, but now that most good YT creators have ads for sponsors within their videos it's kind of getting annoying to me now. I'd pay decently for something where we get a mixture of Netflix type content as well as sponsor-free content from professional YT creators. There's lots of talk amongst YT creators about having all their eggs in one basket with YT as a platform too, so having a competitor would be very interesting to creators too I think. Damn, that was one we were watching ???

I think you got auto-corrected - didn't you mean to say "standard marketing"...? It's basic economics. Companies will push and push until certain limits are met, and the phrase for this is "what the market can bear" - not "what the market gets mildly annoyed at" or "what the market would like if it's Christmas". Saying "what the market can bear" is basically like saying "what you can get away with before the average person goes completely f*cking nuts". We talk about these companies like they're people, and that's fine. The problem is that we don't analyse them like people. There was a great documentary series called The Corporation in which an psychology professor who consults for the FBI "compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically diagnosed psychopath". (link) Besides, I called it September last year when I said "The best new camera purchase in 2018 is... Don't!" ???

There's some confusion online around HLG and conversions. HLG is actually a delivery format, so if you shoot in HLG and are going to display it as HLG, you just hook it up to a HLG monitor and grade the way you want, no LUTs required HLG isn't the technical term - it's more of a non-specific marketing term, and there's conflicting information online about whether HLG is Rec.2020 or Rec.2100, but if you're looking for conversion LUTs then those are what to look for I did some experiments with my GH5 and I don't believe that HLG on the GH5 is either Rec.2020 or Rec.2100, but in the end I concluded that it's close enough to Rec.2100 that I don't care about the slight differences It's complicated stuff. I tell people that using Resolve is like flying the space shuttle, and to extend that analogy, navigating different colour spaces and gammas is like knowing how to be a pilot. To get to where you want to go you must know how and where to fly and know what controls to adjust to do so. Resolve, HLG capable cameras, and HLG capable TVs are all cheap now and available to the general public, but it's like making the space shuttle cheap and available, being able to afford it doesn't mean you will know how to fly it

I know.. I wrote that to try and cut through the continual "new camera" discussions on here so that people didn't think Levi was just another YouTuber who only talked about new cameras. It's us amateurs who are buying the new equipment all the time!! In terms of pen and paper, I remember talking to an amateur screen writer who wrote feature films once, and he said that the writer was the only person without a budget. He was referring to the idea that he can write space battles or car chases or battle scenes with thousands of people just as easily as he can write two people talking in a room, but for every other person involved in making a film there are huge cost differences of filming those different types of scenes. IIRC that's why we get the strange budget sizes for films, like No Budget which is actually a large amount of money - it's because the cost to develop the film for a movie was a cost that couldn't be lowered below a certain point. Even if you only shot a 1:1 shooting ratio, you would still have to buy and develop 90 minutes of film, which cost a lot of money. Nowadays for that same amount of money you can buy a modest camera setup, have a small budget for expenses, and pay everyone to make a film and still have money left over. It wouldn't be a great film, but the idea you can make a feature film for less than a "no budget" film is amusing from a language perspective It depends on the camera ML is running on, and what you're shooting. If you are shooting something without exotic camera movement, are shooting manual lenses (where the focus will stay put), and have the time on-set to fuss with focus etc, then ML can be great. It's when you need to work quickly, need to be able to monitor real-time to change focus and framing on the fly that some ML setups aren't so good. Andrews post about the EOS-M shooting 5K shows what is possible, and yes the monitoring is abysmal, but if you were to only shoot for a 1080 delivery then the camera is under hugely less strain and all the monitoring and performance potentially improve significantly. If you have a set of lenses and are shooting drama or interviews where people are sitting around talking then ML is a gift from the gods!

I was referring to taking already heavily compressed data like H264 and reconstituting it to make a signal that is like it was never compressed in the first place, and how that isn't possible. To put the challenge in different words, how do you write the least data to a file such that you can decode it later to get as close to the original data as possible, which is the goal of every codec. And if you think about it, they're doing a spectacular job. No-one is complaining about the quality of 4:1 RAW, which only a tiny bit different to full RAW, only they did it with only 25% of the data. Then if we look at the common H264 bitrates, they're mostly operating with less than 10% of the bitrate available. And we evaluate all of this via YouTube, which at 35Mbps is around 2% of the original image data. Just think about how crazily good that is - the 4K stream from YouTube is decoded to make a signal 170X the size, and that's what's displayed on your monitor when you watch it. If most other things were made to work with only 0.6% then they'd be so bad you'd have problems with things like recognition and being able to tell what's going on. 128kbps MP3 for example is only 11:1 compression. If audio had 170:1 compression it would be 8kbps, which is in the lower end of VOIP bitrates, hardly what anyone would use for music. The challenge of taking the older cameras and trying to make them look like the P4K is attempting to do better than the people that made YT quality video at 170:1 compression. That's what I mean [Edit, original post had some wrong numbers, so I just fixed them] You're not really a true technician unless you've fixed something by just hitting it on the side. I used to be an IT tech and sometimes you'd just give a computer a thump and that would fix it. We always used to call it "percussive maintenance" ???

Agreed. If there were a magical way to get compressed footage to look like RAW footage then we'd all be in heaven and be rich from not having to buy external recorders and fast media! much greater minds than ours have been contemplating such things for a long time. However, these much greater minds have probably been interested in recreating the least distorted reproductions, rather than the glorified Mojo of previous generation RAW cameras! We'll probably still fail, but it will be fun learning how not to do it ???

Some types of compression can also cause halos around things, that's very common in poor quality Jpegs for example. I'm not saying that it isn't using sharpening, but the halos won't be 100% caused by that. However, my understanding of sharpening is that it's basically the mathematical opposite to blurring, so in theory we should be able to eliminate it somewhat. However, blurring won't counteract any compression artefacts, so we'll probably have limited success. Still, let's see how we get on when we can start prodding at the footage

We talk about earning money making films, but there isn't a thread for it, so I thought I'd start one. Contribute anything you think is useful! Levi Allen just posted his year-in-review video and it's got a bunch of useful content that might be valuable to people. For those of you who don't know Levi, he runs a one-person production company and runs a 100k follower YT channel (that's taken 8 years to grow) that he hasn't monetised. He talks a lot in this video about building his business and some strategies he's implementing, how to balance passion projects with client work, and reflecting on his journey so far. It's good content for anyone just starting their own production company or looking to do that. There's an index available so you can skip around easily, but he's a great communicator so it's a good listen. One of the things I thought was interesting was that he hasn't bought new filming equipment in the last year (although he did spend over $10K on new editing gear!).

Absolutely. It would be a wonderful signal coming off the sensor. I was thinking more about what the output file would be, as if you have the same bit-depth but greater DR than the existing gamma curve is designed to handle then you need to compress more DR into the same number of bits and you risk the banding problems that 8-bit Log can suffer from. But after doing a bit more reading I figure they could probably get away with it without huge issues, even if it was still 10-bit.

Actually, done a bit more reading about how log profiles use bit-depth and 12-bit would be fine for 20 stops of DR. If it was only 10-bit then there would be less bits-per-stop than other 10-bit profiles, although they could probably re-arrange how many bits each stop gets and get away with it - the extreme highlights and shadows wouldn't need as many bits.

That's true, but it's always useful for those who can't afford to walk in the woods, or don't have time or the right shoes for it, to be able to go for a walk in the city and then fix it in post

Sorry to hear things weren't going well for you. We all have times like that, and it's great that you actually did something about it, which is more than most do (or can manage to do) under those circumstances. If there's anything we can do to help, just ask!

I'm also looking forward to what everyone else does with these clips. If we unlock the right settings it's more likely to be someone else that figures it out lol So, to be clear, the plan is to shoot both RAW in max resolution and Prores 1080 on all cameras? That makes sense to me. Partly it's a good comparison between those modes for anyone that doesn't (yet) have the cameras and can't try it for themselves, but also all that discussion about v3 vs v4 colour science and how the colours are hard to match kind makes me a little nervous, so also having the RAW without different things baked in would be good I agree, and that's the beauty of a well executed camera test, you can do anything in post that you like. I'm sure we'll be feeding off this footage for some time to come, trying various things and seeing how they work.

Very nice! We already know - she's becoming a rapper! Step One: get that million dollar contract Step Two: we'll all be waiting for your hot track ???

20dB would be just fantastic! What bit depths are they talking? No point having 20 stops of DR and then only having 10 or 12 bits - by the time you convert back to a standard gamma curve it would be banding central. Could you post a link to your source?