kye

I think it depends on how long you consider and how much you're investing. We all know that technology is a poor investment overall, but we seem to have the idea that lenses is the exception to this rule. In a sense it's true, but everyone who invested in the systems we now refer to as "cheap vintage" lenses made poor investments (eg, m42, etc). I've put under $2k into MFT system lenses, less even than the GH5 body cost me, so when I upgrade from the GH5 in a number of years I won't have a huge investment there. For me the investment is so little, and the life expectancy of my GH5 is so long, that it doesn't matter much to me if their value approaches zero. Had I put $25k into Canon L lenses it might be different... People make those kinds of investment over the course of their career and expect that lenses will last a whole career, which I think is riskier. In that sense, investing into a set of lenses that are already vintage might be the better way to go. Having a mirrorless future also means that there will always be adapters available for SLR lenses and you can swap systems whenever you want. The value of the Contax will be larger in 50 years than the MFT lenses for sure, but if you're talking which will give you the best overall return when you take into account the usability, results, and final sale price, then it really depends. MFT lenses have AF and lower weight, and all sorts of stuff that manual FF primes with adapters don't, and those things play a part.

Great video.. looks like a LOT of work! Well done! I haven't used Fusion yet, but it's on my list. It can do some truly impressive things if you know what you're doing and put the work in..

Good to hear you're making progress and getting good results Getting an estimated file size seems to be a bit of a challenge, but when you look at how compression works you realise that it's basically trying to guess the future. The bitrate controls in Resolve are based around maximum bitrate, not average bitrate or minimum bitrate. This is important because sometimes the video to be compressed might be very simple and not need much bitrate (eg, a mostly black screen with silhouettes, titles, very little motion, etc) or they could be very difficult and need lots of bitrate (eg, trees moving around in wind and rain) so the bitrate that will actually be used in the video export is dependent on what is in the video, so can't really be estimated accurately beforehand. You will find that if you compress a video to max bitrate of A it comes out as X Mb, but if you then export it with a max bitrate of A/2 the file size is almost certain to be more than X/2 because the video won't have been hitting the A bitrate limit the whole time. In fact, you can sometimes halve the max bitrate and only knock a few percentage off the export file size. This makes sense because sometimes there are big changes in what you see (a straight cut changes every pixel on the screen) but most of the time the changes are very small (people talking and only their faces moving) so most of the time the max bitrate isn't having any effect on the export bitrate at all. There are a few tricks you could do for longer edits though: Export a minute from the middle of a video and then estimate the total size from that Write down what file sizes you're getting with what settings to give a good starting point for future exports (I also include the bitrate in the filename eg "Cool video - 10k") You can also queue up a few exports with different bitrate settings and then hit go and let it render overnight, then choose the one with the right file size I have the same issue, but as I only make short videos I just re-render them. It also helps that for some reason I'm not completely critical of the video until I'm watching the exported video file so I often export, notice mistakes, then tweak and re-export anyway! I have also gotten a feel for which max bitrates I tend to end up using to upload so start with those numbers and tweak from there. I would imagine that you'll like Resolve even more when you get the P4K because the RAW stuff is included (and will be high priority for full support). One of the best things I find in Resolve is that you can adjust any part of the workflow at any time without having to re-render, re-export, or whatever. Half-way through colour grading you can change the edit, fix some sound, then grade a bit more, then change the edit, etc. I know that people often work in passes, doing edit first, then sound, etc, but a lot of my process is just noticing things that bother me and fixing them as I go. If I was round-tripping or had to make-do with the puny colour tools of other packages I think I would feel like I was working neck deep in mud with one arm tied behind my back.

Great link - I've seen power distributions before but not in a film-making context so the colour charts were a new addition. One of my favourite things about the science of colour is that there is no such colour as purple.. that one took a while to wrap my head around!

Thanks @leslie - Merry Christmas to you too (and everyone else!). May santa bring each of us a bit more skill in our craft, a bit more knowledge about how we like to work, and a bit more wisdom and restraint when it comes to buying new gear!

What is it about a 1000+ page manual that isn't quick and easy to read?? Lol. I saw they put out a bunch of videos but haven't looked at them yet. Great to hear they're useful How are you getting on with learning Resolve?

Fair points. I think that detail and sharpness are actually matters of taste and I like the image I'm getting out of my GH5 precisely because it doesn't have that digital sharpness that looks overdone to my eye. The look I'm getting looks more like film (to my un-refined eyes) and had a real timeless quality to it that I like. Of course I'm shooting with the settings all tweaked for this result. Perhaps the most important thing is knowing what you value and knowing what kind of image you like. All these cameras have tonnes of examples around so it's not hard to understand what they're all capable of.

There are lots of good software choices out there, and for simple stuff it probably doesn't matter which you choose. A little history lesson that may (or may not) be relevant to choosing a DAW.. I remember there being three major types of audio packages: Those designed to work with notes (MIDI at first, but samples later on too, eg Logic) Those designed to work with loops (eg, Ableton Live) Those designed to work with long tracks of audio (like recording an orchestra, eg ProTools) It's gotten to the point now where the big packages can probably do a respectable job at all three, but there may still be advantages to getting a package with the right 'heritage' because it might have more features you'd use. I would imagine you would be more likely to be working with loops, or working with the timing of drum samples, rather than creating tunes, and this is where loop based software can often have an advantage. For example, in a good loop based DAW you can change the speed of the song and it will slow down the loop samples, programmed elements, and perhaps the effects too, so that everything stays in sync, whereas other programs may just make a mess of things. In addition to this, Ableton Live has a performance mode where you can take pre-written sections of a song and kind of mix and match them live, allowing beat-matching and other cool stuff that DJs like. It depends on how you work and what is valuable to you. Logic might have similar functionality too, I'm not sure, but Ableton Live is just the one I'm familiar with. When you're making beats, you want access to enough different samples and you might also want velocity sensitivity (so it knows if you're hitting it hard or soft). You may want a keyboard (which has both) or you might find that something with pads is nicer. Pads are rubbery and softer to hit, and are therefore nicer on your fingers, but aren't that good for playing tunes. Something like the Arturia Beatstep: I bought this one and it's really solid, is powered by USB so is portable, and has the knobs which make mixing or effects programming so much nicer. The other thing is that you don't NEED anything except a computer, some software, and your microphone setup of choice. The rest just makes doing things easier. My advice is to remember that music is a creative pursuit, and you should only buy things that help you be creative. In general, technology is distracting for creativity (having to remember which button does what and how to change modes really kills the creative flow!) so buy things that let you be creative by getting out of your way.

Nice work! Couldn't understand a word but they can certainly sing very nicely, I watched it through to the end and that's rare for me with music video examples. The grade looks really nice and your lens choices seem nice also. It's a very professional looking outcome to my eyes

Shoot in slow-motion and you can slow it down and speed it up to match the tempo

I've found that sometimes skin tones can go too pink, but it's normally just a matter of lowering the saturation to fix it. I think of it like Canon footage which can sometimes have reds that are too saturated, so lowering the saturation of those colours after the conversion is a pretty standard way to treat a lot of footage from different cameras. I also shoot auto-WB and in mixed-lighting (against Sage's guidance of course!) and it definitely gives you trouble in post. Sometimes playing with the WB before the conversion can tidy things up nicely, and other times you have to do seperate adjustments to different parts of the image. For example in the wedding shot you could adjust skin tones on one person and not the other by using a combination of a key and a power-window. You might push the woman slightly toward pink and the man slightly towards yellow, or perhaps just desaturate him and adjust the woman to match him. Good luck - fixing these kinds of problems isn't easy!

Yeah, but will it be stable? Those moose tend to wriggle around..

My understanding is that most people currently use Resolve for grading, which means round-tripping to Resolve via the XML export, doing the grading, but then rendering out the graded individual clips which are then swapped into the original project in the editing software to replace the ungraded clips. In this sense, PP (or FCPX) won't be too worried or motivated to make sure that all the dissolves and effects make it out to a Resolve timeline. I'd suggest that BM would be very interested in making sure things import as well as possible, but BM is currently adding entirely new screens and hundreds of new features in each major release, so they definitely have their fair share of bugs too. I've heard that there's normally some work to get all the media linked in Resolve, but it has some quite good features for linking clips quite easily (something like highlight clips -> Relink media -> select "include sub-folders" and point it at a folder with all your footage in it) so if you do need to relink files it's not necessarily a big job. There's lots of advice around for solving strange importing problems so if you want to pursue it at some point then google can help. Ouch - I'd say that using contacts to circumvent their prioritisation of bugs is a bad idea, but considering how buggy people say it is, maybe that process isn't working so well! I remember when those colour features were added. I saw a bunch of Youtubers had released videos with exciting titles and I thought the added features must be really great - then I saw them and actually laughed out loud. If you double (or triple) the available features then it looks like a huge improvement, but to Resolve users they just went from having 1% of the features to 2%, so it's not so exciting from our perspective

I did a quick scan of the differences and I guess the 10-bit video is something I care about, considering how much I push the image around in post. Of course, for most people this is probably a much less important factor. Grading the 10-bit HLG files from the GH5 (even in the 150Mbit mode I shoot in) has been a wonderful experience so far.

Battery monitoring isn't very reliable. So I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on a 1% change in battery level.

@IronFilm can tell you the cheapest way to hook up the mic to your computer. In terms of making a sound booth, you want to pad it out with as much absorbent material as possible, blankets and foam mattresses work well, but use whatever you have. The heavier the fabric is the more likely it is to absorb sound. Of course, rappers have recorded in all sorts of circumstances and on all sorts of equipment, including their iPhone in a walk-in-robe, so experimentation is the key. Remember that music is creative so it's not about quality so much as getting the sound you like, so experiment with everything you can think of. Also, performance is more important than the sound, so if you don't perform well squatting in a wardrobe covered in blankets then change it up. Best of luck!! I wrote electronic music as a hobby for about ten years and when you make something that sounds great there's no better feeling!

I can't speak to the G80/85 but as a recent GH5 buyer I can confidently say that the lenses are the other half of the picture, and if you have to stick to a budget then put some aside for great glass. I've just done a couple of trips with the GH5, Voitlander 17.5mm f0.95, Helios 44-4, and SLR-Magic 8mm, and the stand out aspects to me are the DR, the 10-bit capture, and the three lenses. The 8mm has that WOW factor for scenery and landscapes, the f0.95 gives that lovely DOF on the MFT sensor and great low light performance (better than the human eye), and the Helios gives a soft rendering that really looks like film and without a speed booster gives a 116mm equivalent and rounds out the lens kit. I have no idea how much you sacrifice from the GH5 with the G80/85 but I get the impression it's not so much? Edit: I shoot hand-held and the IBIS worked spectacularly well, at 58mm in gusty winds on a small boat the locked-off mode gave rock solid landscape shots even with the ETC digital zoom mode making it something like 160mm equivalent, it was just incredible.

There are a ton of cool stuff you can do with basic stuff if you know what you're doing. A lot of them don't work so well for video though if things are moving. You can get a lot of cool tips for this stuff by watching those "5 photography hacks for under $5" videos / articles.

It might be interesting to do a Resolve stress test to see if it can handle big projects. Maybe someone who finishes a big project can pull it into Resolve and render it out and give their impressions? I'd do one but I don't have a real project that's big enough to be a genuine test.

If you're on Mac then I think there are big colour problems with QuickTime and I think VLC is regarded as more trustworthy than anything else, it's certainly what I use to view exports. I haven't noticed any differences between Resolve, VLC and watching YT but I might not be as demanding with colour as you. I'd suggest asking the question over at liftgammagain.com, those guys will definitely be able to help.

Have you tried exporting from Resolve and then pulling the export back into Resolve and seeing if it looks different? If it's different to what the graded shots look like then it's a problem with the export function of Resolve, otherwise it might be that Resolve isn't calibrated properly. Resolve has its own independent colour calibration and profiles capabilities so maybe they've gotten screwed up somehow. For what it's worth I've edited, graded, exported, and uploaded a couple of dozen videos and they look fine to me, except for the usual browser and media player colour issues.

The scaling happens automatically. Resolve handles almost anything you throw at it. Resolutions, framerates, bit-depths, gamma or colour spaces, the whole lot, and it does it so transparently that when I hear that other software doesn't it just makes me confused why anyone would write software any other way. I also have photoshop as well as Resolve, they're good for different things.

Almost everyone is completely outclassed by all their equipment, at least from an artistic point of view (those guys who film walls and then blog about it are safe) so it seems to me that either you didn't like the aesthetic, or you're just aware of something that other people aren't. I could be wrong of course and it might be something else I haven't come across.. I'm shooting home videos with a GH5, Voitlander 17.5mm f0.95 and Rode video mic pro plus. Talk to me about equipment that is too good for the operator, I might be at the epicentre of that scenario!

@Dustin The list of key differences would fill pages. I'd suggest searching for a few "going from premier pro to resolve" videos on YouTube and see what you can find. In terms of what's missing, I have no idea, but I've made dozens of short home videos with it (complete work flow within resolve) and I haven't found it lacking. Welcome to the club!

That's a pity, and it's also interesting to me. When I find something surprising that normally means there is something that I can learn. I'm about to be out of internet range for a couple of weeks so I might play with it and see how it works and what it does