kye

No no no @kaylee..  your style as a film-maker, not as a forum-user ???

44 minutes ago, Shirozina said:

Yes at around 5'36" he shows the effect of increasing ISO but says 'everything steps up' when he increases ISO but if you follow the scopes it's only the mid and shadows that increase and the highlights stay the same. Notice the highlights do move BUT the max IRE available at each ISO is not fixed and starts at about 80% at 100 iso (which will be normalised to 100IRE during grading) and increases up to 100% at 1000 ISO . His other tests are misleading as he's changing exposure to compensate for ISO changes which is not required as the digital ISO changes are a log curve adjustment where black and white points are fixed. This is certainly a different approach to ISO and shows the problem with the concept of ISO when applied to a LOG capture. ISO was and is a legacy from the days of film when the response curve of film was not log and the ISO was rated at a midpoint ( mid grey) along the middle flat part of the graph. With LOG the mid point is elevated and bears no relation to a mid point ISO hence why Native ISO for camera shooting LOG is always much higher than standard picture profiles.

This sure is a pretty complicated topic.

I get that if you shoot in Prores it is applying a log curve of some kind which shifts the middle point more than the highlights and shadows.  A variant of BMD Film perhaps.

But i'm still confused about RAW - is the RAW signal still in Linear?  Sensors see in linear, so if they're somehow changing it then surely that's no longer RAW?

2 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Youtubers are similar to phtographers, and wedding videographers. Usually 1 guy doing stuff. Used-to-be-photographers-now-doing-video-because-is-just-so-easy-to-press-rec and youtubers and wedding videographers are producing a lot of video and they are the most common to see around because they mostly share their work through social media, and are willing to play the social media game, and they do because that is what they do.

I met a few of those on a couple amateurish sets I helped the last couple of years (though, I am avoiding such places lately - such a waste of time and just a hopeless situation that drains a lot of energy for no particular reason at all). Iif they were on a real professional production would have started crying from the pressure and the lack of knowledge and incompetance.

Also, noone hires a "youtuber" to be part of a crew, the industry works differently. I do not even have a social media presence (do not even have any social media account) and I am feeding a whole family, barely, but still..!!

Yeah, I've been on maybe a dozen no-budget film sets, probably all 6-12 people crews, and it's nothing like making films by yourself.  Being a Youtuber might half-qualify you for being a runner, but that's barely a qualified position anyway, so....  

16 minutes ago, User said:

Nice one Kye. Introspection seems a healthy place to start. More soon.

Yeah, and let's talk about something other than equipment

3 hours ago, User said:

Can someone please start another thread that is actually interesting? Pretty please?  

Done.

If you showed your entire catalogue to a bunch of strangers, what defining characteristics would they identify in your work?
Do you like your style?
What makes you do things like that?  
How did you learn?

And for bonus points, what one characteristic would you want to add to your style if you could just snap your fingers and have it?

For me, I don't think I have a good answer as my style is still changing and developing, but I think I have pretty good composition, both in terms of framing but also moving the camera around to get the best angles.  I make home videos and they are mostly set to music without much dialogue, kind of like moving photographs, and I think I do a good job of editing with music and incorporating that rhythmical element.  I like my style broadly, but I'm still working on defining and refining it and each project gets better quite substantially I think.

I learned composition from doing stills photography for years, starting as a way to document my vacations and then incorporating street photography as a way to "practice" while at home.  In terms of editing to music I have written electronic music for many years, and so in a way I am familiar with how to break down a song in a rhythmic sense and kind of program the visuals like a beat, with some shots lasting a single beat, some two beats, some four, and also knowing when to go off the beat, how to shake things up from looking mechanical, in the way that you might perform a solo over the top of some rhythm elements and not always stick rigidly to tempo or timing.

If I could learn a style I think it would be making dialogue-driven films, as in a way I'm kind of afraid of using dialogue because I'm not as comfortable with it, especially as my videos are kind of highlight reels and dialogue snippets might not make sense when edited back-to-back with each other, and so not being as familiar with that is kind of limiting.  Even things like narrating would be good to learn how to do.

Your turn!

1 hour ago, OliKMIA said:

Yeah, it's nice. I use it sometime, useful to reframe during interview. Gives you a lot of extra room but you must attach a very sharp lens otherwise you gonna loose resolution (something like the Sigma ART 18-35mm f1.8 will do)

If my memory serves me well, the 5k mode is h265 whereas all the 4k modes are only in h264.
The 5k is 10 bits 420 instead of 10 bits 422 in 4k so it might not be the best option for keying on green screen.

5k is limited to 30p max.

I haven't found much downside except the codec that will put most computers under stress. But I use proxy so it doesn't matter much for me.

Thanks.

I also got the impression that the 5K mode are h265 and the 4K modes are h264.  This is a big deal for me, from what I read h265 gets similar image quality at about heal the bitrate of h264, so going from 150Mbps h264 to 200Mbps h265 is more like the quality of 400Mbps h264.  In terms of the 422 vs 420 it's definitely a down-side, but it's offset by the extra bitrate, codec efficiency, and slightly extra resolution, so it should result in a net gain overall.

I'll have to do some trials with it.

30p limit doesn't phase me, I'm shooting mostly in 25p now unless something is obvious slow-motion material.  Apart from the benefit of HLG, it also helps in low-light.

Once you've cropped and downscaled the image, is the overall "look" the same as the 4K modes?

I've been reading about the 5K Open Gate mode and wondering if I should be using that instead of normal UHD?

I'm currently shooting the 4K 10-bit 150Mbps mode in HLG (I only have a Sandisk 95MBs UHS-I card so can't shoot 400Mbps).  I understand that the 200Mbps 5K mode will give an increase in resolution, bitrate, and will allow me to re-frame in post, which are all desirable features, but are there any hidden downsides to using this mode?  What hassles or catches are there?

I read that the 5K mode is h265, but is the 4K mode h264, or h265?

8 hours ago, Shirozina said:

I need to photograph a stepped density chart from black to white using the same exposure but different ISO to show the change in the response curves.

Isn't that what John does in the original video?

6 hours ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

It's not like people are coming into set with a YouTube degree and messings things up.

I don't know about messing things up, but I recall someone on other forums saying that sometimes YT people get hired on a film set and IIRC they said that they are pretty useless overall because YT is just so different to a large set and how it works.

10 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Well the 8K guy is back, alive and well. Interesting results.

Interesting.  Not really surprising, but still good to see.

Discussions of sensor sizes is a fun one - anyone who thinks bigger is better should see the Large Format photography guys struggling to nail focus on their landscape detail shots because their depth of field is so ridiculously thin and stopping down sufficiently means diffraction and longer exposure times, both of which soften image sharpness as well.

7 hours ago, canonlyme said:

It seems you know what you are talking about from a technical perspective. I do not agree from a marketing perspective. I generally would expect a camera manufacturer to market every single innovation they can make. And from a cost perspective, why bother innovating the stabilization system without need? Each innovation has some amount of fixed costs to it. 

You're probably right in terms of marketing a better IBIS because that would be something that people care about and would help to sell cameras.

More generally, I still don't think you can rely on marketing.  Firstly, there are potentially large numbers of individual changes from model to model of a camera line, not all of which will get attention.  Marketing treads a delicate balance between saying the new camera is awesome because it is so much better than the other ones on offer, and implying that the other ones are so much worse than the new one, especially when an improvement can be seen as fixing some kind of deficiency instead of just adding on awesomeness.  
Someone recently started a thread about the IBIS noise being picked up by the internal microphones in the G/GX ranges (IIRC) and someone else pointed out that the GH5 has added internal microphones to cancel out that noise from the internal mics, which was a feature that some people hadn't heard about.  My guess was that this kind of thing probably wouldn't be marketed because it's fixing a flaw in other models that they really don't want to highlight, despite the fix costing money and being of some benefit to customers.

In terms of why they might innovate without a need, it could be that they buy parts in huge volumes to get sustainable prices and after running out of the IBIS motors or controllers or whatever and when they did the next bulk purchase they could only buy the next model up because the old one was discontinued, so the decision to upgrade was made for them.  Or the new features were available in a newer firmware in that chipset (and they hadn't allowed updating of that chipset in the previous models).  Or they had to upgrade a part due to physical size, power consumption, pin layout (to enable different circuitboard layouts) or any number of other reasons.

People tend to underestimate how complicated technology actually is.  If we were to take the drive-train of a car (without the computer chips) and draw it out in a kind of functional diagram, you could fit it on a large sheet of paper, if we included all the switches and controls for indicators and heated seats and power windows in a luxury car then it might be the size of a small wall in your house.  If we did the same for something like a laptop computer or digital camera (they're going to look roughly the same) the writing would be so small that it probably wouldn't be readable even if you made the diagram the size of the field in a sports stadium.

How they build electronic devices is also a strange process.  People think of it like they start designing a product, then they work out all the features, then they buy the bits and put them al together to do that.  It's not like that.  It's a massive shit fight between the marketing and design departments who want to offer every new feature imaginable requiring new parts and redesigns, the engineering department who want to add no new features but make it robust and reliable requiring better parts without a redesign, the accounting department who wants to make it the cheapest possible by buying older cheaper parts in bulk, senior management who are concerned with how their product is or isn't compatible with competitors products, all in an environment where the companies who make products are trying to do secret deals with the parts manufacturers to give them great deals on new parts but block the other companies from buying the best and latest chips.  Add onto that the football-pitch sized complexity of what they're building and the ripple-effect of how changing one part can mean that other parts also need to be changed, potentially then needing further changes in other parts.  This includes interconnectedness of other products which might already be on sale like lenses and memory cards and flashes etc.
And after all that, companies like Nikon are known for implementing support for features well ahead of the time of launch.  IIRC they released some kind of lens functionality which was previously unavailable but it was supported on camera bodies that had been selling for years - so those camera bodies had features that were sitting there waiting for the lenses to be released, so you not only have to ensure compatibility with current features but perhaps future features as well.  It's a huge mess basically, so marketing isn't really a reliable source for all that stuff.

2 hours ago, canonlyme said:

And if this was the case, they would market it.

IBIS and OIS exist in a realm that we have very little insight into, and may never have.

From an engineering perspective, stabilisation is a very simple concept: you put vibrations into a camera from the outside and the stabilisation system attempts to perfectly compensate for them such that the optical operation is immune to their effects.

This type of feedback circuit is like any other, and will have a percentage of vibration removal across a frequency range across the 6 axises of potential vibration up to certain limits of amplitude.  Ideally, the manufacturers would publish these curves and let us as consumers understand which system performs best overall, or in the case of strengths varying among manufacturers, which is best for a given task.  Instead we get a single number - "stops".  It is so overly simplified a specification as to both be completely useless, and also, quite frankly, extremely insulting to the consumer.

Marketing is also equally unreliable.  "if this was the case they would market it" suggests that the job of marketing is to communicate everything about a product regardless of what is trendy, what a particular market segment uses for purchasing decisions, etc.  Obviously this is not the case, so you can't say that if they didn't market it that it doesn't exist.

Instead we get YouTubers who do completely uncontrolled tests and then proclaim conclusions that not only violate the scientific method, but often the test footage that they publish along side their judgements.  I've seen more than one test where the person declared a winner and I compared the footage and couldn't see any real difference in performance at all.

Our own experience of using a camera for a long time is perhaps the most reliable, but even then, our technique changes, our projects change, the weather changes, our blood-sugar changes, etc etc etc.

Unless we design a machine that we mount a camera to that puts the camera through a completely controlled and repeatable set of vibrations and then compare the results from different cameras with identical fields-of-view, shutter angles, and both centre and distribution of mass, then we will never really know how different systems compare.

I think making something cinematic occurs on every level within film-making.

The purely creative elements such as narrative and story structure, layering, complexity, poetry, and world can captivate the viewer and take them to another place.
The artistic elements of film-making such as lighting, composition, casting and dramatic performances, wardrobe, art-department, sound design, music, editing and grading etc can create the texture of the world, matching the visual aesthetic with the conceptual elements previously mentioned.
The technical elements such as camera movement, 180 degree shutter, etc.

The YouTuber "how to be cinematic" focuses on the technical elements because they're easy to talk about, unfortunately the above categories are in descending-order of importance.

It's like how most YouTubers fill their vlogs with cinematic b-roll sequences, when instead they should fill them full of interesting and useful content instead  

6 hours ago, Mako Sports said:

Decided to buy it. I mean what's $10??

With tools like this, quite a bit, apparently!

3 hours ago, Mako Sports said:

A good wake up call for everyone. As someone that shoots video for a living and consumes a lot of YT content the word "cinematic" is almost triggering at times. I encourage everyone to watch this and possibly start a discussion. 

Good video - I thought the soundtrack made it quite cinematic.

4 hours ago, leslie said:

odd that you mention that just now.... i just bought an el nikor 63mm enlarger lens. been waiting for one of these to turn up at a reasonable price for awhile now. i guess my lens addiction is off to a good start this year?

Nice!

There are some interesting projector lenses around, but the lack of a standard mount or adapters means they're a little too out-there for me, at least at the moment.  Plus them having no ability to stop down does limit their use in a creative sense.  Still, considering that adapting FF vintage lenses seems pretty mainstream now, they're probably where the real bargains are

57 minutes ago, billdoubleu said:

I'm so glad this amazing film was done with native lenses. I'm so bored with people perpetuating the lie that a speed booster is required equipment with m43, as opposed to just another tool in the tool box.

Hang out on these forums more often...  People here use native lenses, speed-boosters, non-speed-booster adapters, vintage stills lenses, vintage cinema lenses, and even free-lensing of lenses! I don't remember anyone using non-camera lenses like projector or enlarger lenses, but someone probably has..

Welcome!

Personally, my m43 kit has both native and vintage lenses in it.  I do own a m42 to m43 0.7x focal reducer which I might use with a ~50mm to fill in the 80-100mm equivalent spot in my kit, but I might end up just using a 35-50mm lens without a focal reducer and therefore not end up using it at all.

The crop factor makes it a spectacular choice for longer zooms too, for sports or for wildlife.  A 135/150/200mm vintage FF lens will set you back less than dinner and a movie, and combined with a $10 dumb-adapter you get a fast, high quality and solidly built manual telephoto lens, plus because you're cropping into the lens with the sensor size you don't get all the CA and soft-focus of the corners of those lenses so they're even better than when they were new!

15 hours ago, JurijTurnsek said:

The only downside that I can think of now is that if pixel binning is done by the CPU itself it would limit the ability of phones to offer 4K at 60p.

Maybe that's an incentive to not downscale.. Assuming that the compression is done in hardware maybe it's easier to just output 8K?

6 hours ago, majoraxis said:

For those who are on a tight budget and would like de-noise, de-clip, de-hum, de-click, BH Photo has IZOTOPE RX Elements Audio Restoration and Enhancement Software (Download) on sale for $10 (regularly $130) in the deal zone for 9 more hours.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1356812-REG/izotope_10_rxe_rx_elements_audio.html

Thanks!  I was reading through what it does thinking "this is probably another thing I don't need" until I remembered that one clip where I clipped the audio really badly but really wanted to use the shot...  

9 hours ago, majoraxis said:

My understanding is that ProRes on the black magic pocket 4K  has the sensor debayering of B-RAW already, so if you nail exposure and white balance in the camera Pro Res is great and probably very similar to what you will get with B-RAW if little color grading is required.  For those who would like to work with 12 bit files,  all be it compressed, would benefit from B-RAW.  Once B-RAW is available, if the files sizes are similar to ProRes, then I think most will think they “need” B- RAW when available, but we shall see.

Philip Bloom released a prores file he shot and I played with it, and you could really push that file around.

Am I right in thinking that was 10-bit?  If so, 12-bit would be absolutely spectacular!

3 hours ago, AlexTrinder96 said:

This film was posted on the P4k FB group earlier. WOW.

By DAVE HILL

Thanks for sharing that, what a wonderful piece.

Lots of great things to say about it, the thing I liked most about it is that it really had a strong and coherent style, fun and whimsical but also tender and genuine too.  But perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay it is that despite it being shot on a significant camera, and being shared in the thread discussing that camera, when I watched it I stopped thinking about the camera and just enjoyed it as a creative work and all thoughts of equipment dropped away.

This is the point of art, to take us to another place, right?

4 hours ago, drm said:

The exposure changes that he discussed in the video are clearly visible in the BMPCC4K footage, *if* you are not shooting RAW. It is the case that a lower ISO in the 100-1000 range and a lower ISO in the 1250-6400 range shows more details in the shadows. The ISOs in the higher end of each range do a better job preserving detail in the highlight areas. There is also a very dramatic change in the exposure from 1000 to 1250 as the camera changes from the low gain to the high gain circuit. ISO 1250 is substantially less noisy than 1000. I will have to compare again, but 1250 might even be less noisy than 800, but 800 would preserve bright details much better than 1250.

I guess that my point is that you do need to learn the subtle differences in this camera with regard to proper ISO selection for your scene, if you are not shooting RAW. I have not noticed the dramatic difference on my GH5 or GH5s cameras, despite their being dual native ISO cameras. It is fun to get to explore these

Just a small thing but the GH5 isn't dual ISO, only the GH5S has that.

I wish my GH5 did have it, but sadly, no

18 hours ago, Adam Kuźniar said:

I wish all these cameras started at 16mm on the wide end. I always lack the wide angle for shooting in tight rooms and I almost never go all the way to 500mm or whatever the long end is

Yeah, after having the XC10 (with it's 24-240mm equivalent fixed lens) and my iPhone (and it's fixed lens around 24-28mm equivalent) I switched to the GH5 and bought 16mm and 35mm equivalent primes for my main lenses (as well as some longer ones).  I thought about the 24-240 range and I realised I was sick of the 24-28 range.  I shoot travel and home videos and so mostly my shots are about people in a location, which is 35mm territory when you factor in the practical distance I am from people, and the other main shot is really wide for those grand landscapes, or interior shots.  With the ETC 1.4x crop the 35mm becomes a 50mm, so that adds a bit of reach, and the 16 becomes a 22mm but I hardly ever use that length.  I'm so much happier with 16mm as my wide end.

4 minutes ago, mercer said:

Thanks @kye !!! I am going for this “look” due to the film I’m working on. Great tips for Resolve... of course some of it was Greek to me, but I will look into this. The JM method required a lot of nodes and transfers from Linear to Log. Since ML Raw is linear, IDK if that method helped with that shot or not. Prepare yourself for a PM, if you don’t mind?

Ah, Linear - of course.

PM away, happy to help.