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If you're using proxies then most modern HDDs should be fine - just buy the drive with the fastest sequential read speeds, the biggest cache, and the biggest overall capacity. RAW footage is huge and the size required really adds up. One thing to understand about video is that there is no amount of CPU speed, GPU speed, SSD speed, HDD speed, or storage capacity that will always be 'enough'. I remember in the late 90s editing video required you to render your SD timeline to watch it back real-time and computers are now thousands of times faster than they were then, but now we have 4K, RAW, plugins and effects, colour grading, and 3D compositing and titling workflows which use up all that extra performance, and although people are still struggling to get smooth 4K editing with single cam, let alone the people working with multicam editing, and we're soon to have 8K which will have 4x the data rates and will completely crunch everything available. Buy what you can afford and work within it - there will never be enough processing power or storage speed.

I must admit that I'm really liking the EVF on my GH5 - they should definitely have more attention than they do now.

Try recording in lots of different locations and see how it sounds.. cupboards, bathroom, toilet, outside (if it's quiet), in the roof, in the basement, sitting, standing, lying down, facing up, facing down, mic close to your mouth or far away, mic in front of your mouth, above your mouth, below your mouth, to the side, behind your head, it will all sound different. I read an article by a studio recording engineer who said he liked to imagine a big flame coming out of a singers mouth, and it was his job to put the microphone in the right place within that flame to get the best result. He said that the difference between something sounding disappointing and glorious might be a few inches of moving the microphone around

From a couple of mentions by Juan Melara I think that Film Convert is actually a really sophisticated colour engine and has all sorts of film profiles built-in, so while Philip may only apply it in a subtle way, I think the "it" that he's applying is complex and sophisticated. That's why I'm interested in trying to replicate it. Of course, the Osmo and EOS-R shots above were ungraded and they still have a lot of his look, so it doesn't look like he's heavily relying on it. I was in the train once and noticed that a woman was putting on her makeup and I'd noticed just as she started. Over the course of about 5 minutes she did about a dozen different things and ended up looking quite made-up. The interesting thing about it was that each time she'd pull something out and start applying it, it had such a subtle effect that I couldn't tell at first if it was doing anything. Her overall look was created through applying many subtle and almost imperceptible changes, and her final look was obviously something she'd spent a long time crafting such that each of the elements all worked together in the end. I think this is what quality film-making is about - pushing and pulling things very subtly all through the process in such a way that the end result is really great but nothing stands out as being the single reason behind that result. I think this is why we can watch 100 award winning films and still not be that aware of how to make one ourselves!

You've reminded me of something else I noticed - he quite often doesn't bother with the 180 degree shutter rule. The X-H1 image above contains a bird and if I compare the blur to the movement of the bird I estimate he's getting something like 30-60 degrees of shutter. It's not like he can't afford enough NDs, I think he just doesn't care enough to dial that in each time.

There are many professional DOPs out there and I believe there is much we can learn from studying their work. However, it can be difficult to gain insights if you can only study their work when each project has been created in partnership with a different team of people each time - lighting, shot design, camera and lens choices, grading, etc are all aspects that the DOP doesn't have full control over and makes it hard to 'see through' to the commonalities that the DOP provides. There is one notable exception to this, and that is Philip Bloom, who regularly creates videos as a one-man operation and shares them on YouTube. I'm not suggesting that he's the best DOP in the world, or that we should copy him, or anything like that, but he is a career professional, and I'm not afraid to admit that he knows more about this stuff than I will ever know, so I believe there is a lot we can learn. He recently published his annual Best Camera Gear video, and I made a number of interesting observations from watching it. Here are a bunch of frame-grabs from the video. A7RIII with SLR Magic A7III with Sony 55mm Parrot Anafi drone DJI Magic Pro Fuji X-H1 EOS-R (ungraded) Insta360 One X Osmo Pocket (ungraded) Kinefinity Terra 4K BMPCC4K Kinefinity Mavo LF Here are some observations from the above shots: There is a look that is relatively consistent across the shots. It's not applied so heavily that every shot looks the same, but people familiar with his work would have a good chance of recognising that these were shot by him. Something that is worth noting is that he's managed to get this consistency from a hugely varied selection of equipment, including different brands, different focal-lengths, different apertures, hugely different price ranges, and from different levels of image quality and codecs, across different locations within different countries, at different times of day, in different seasons, and shooting different things. He's not able to get that look in all cases. One notable exception is the Insta One X that doesn't seem to fit the look, everyone has limits on what they can achieve. Equipment doesn't matter as much as the skill of the operator, but it still matters to a certain degree, and especially if the equipment is below a certain level of quality or capability. The look that he's creating is quite pleasing. It won't be liked by everyone (no looks are universal) but on the whole he manages to get good looking results from whatever equipment he's using. Anyone who has picked up an even half-decent camera and not been able to get good results from it knows that this is not something that just happens - you have to know what you're doing. So, what are the ingredients of this look? (note that not every shot includes every ingredient, but the more you can include the more consistent your results will be) The images have a warm colour balance. There are two main contributors to this that I see, the first is the grading he does which often warms the images overall, pushing greens towards yellow, pushing blues towards aquas. The second is that he's very often shooting into the sun in golden hour. The shots also tend to have fewer hues in each shot - making them more likely to be harmonious and pleasing. The images have a kind of controlled level of contrast to them. You don't look at them and find them flat looking, but they don't look super contrasty either. This look probably comes from paying attention to the blacks and almost blacks, which are slightly lifted and don't ever appear to hit absolute black, let alone crushed. This look seems to come from shooting directly into the light and having camera flare lift the blacks, but is also controlled in grading. His images have a kind of controlled level of saturation to them. Colours are bold but not electric, skin tones are very well controlled looking soft but not desaturated and are neither too yellow nor too pink. Considering all the talk about colour science and skin tones, this is noteworthy. His compositions are strong. I chose nice frames for these frame-grabs but there were no shortage of frames to choose from. Composition is hugely important and is free with every camera - even with the Insta360 which struggles in most other ways. He uses great lenses. This is perhaps something that people easily mis-interpret. Great lenses is a relative term, and is about the combination of the lens, the subject, the conditions, and the desired end result. It's tempting to think that you'll get great results from super expensive cinema lenses that he often uses, but the smooth rendering and polished look of these lenses is a terrible choice if you want to shoot something that needs a more realistic / edgy / gritty image, and besides, if it was all about cost, then how do we account for the image that he gets out of the Osmo Pocket with its fixed budget lens, or the Parrot and DJI drone shots? The answer is that he uses high quality glass when he can, and when the glass has limitations he adjusts the subject and the conditions to get the best out of that lens. In a sense, these videos are cheating. He is able to shoot whatever will look good and not include the shots that don't. If you don't believe me then go have a look at the lovely images he got from the iPhone 5s at 120fps and notice that he only shot images looking straight into the sun near sunset, this is because a camera with bad ISO performance, a small sensor, in HFR modes needs a huge amount of light to get good results, then see that he tended to shoot with things very close to the camera which is the only way to give some defocussing and depth, and shooting into the warm setting sun also makes sure that the colours will be nice and the colour range will be simpler. He uses great glass by making sure that he only shoots what the available glass is great at. Not visible in the frame-grabs, but he also shoots a lot of slow-motion. It is totally cheating and is completely over-used, but these shots are about making nice images, so why not. Im sure there is lots more, but this is what stands out to me. Let me know what I missed. As there is a graded shot of the BMPCC4K in the video and he posted the RAW file from the same shot earlier in the year, it gives a unique opportunity to try and copy the grade and see what is actually going on, so if I get time I might try and reverse-engineer the grade. If so, I'll share the results. Thanks to Philip Bloom for continuing to share with us.

In relation to the Voigts being soft at f0.95, that's definitely true, but I would still choose to have them be able to do f0.95 rather than only be something like f1.4 but remain sharp. The advantage of the extra aperture is useful for multiple reasons. I shoot in completely uncontrolled conditions, and so have to make do with whatever lighting is available, and in low-light there's many times I looked into the viewfinder and saw a dark image with muddy lifeless colours and the focus peaking highlighting the auto-ISO noise in the shadows, but then I start opening the aperture dial and the ISO noise goes away, the image lightens up, the colours clean up, and by the time that I hit the limit at 0.95 I am so happy that the lens can gather that much light that I don't care that the focal plane will be a little soft. I like to be able to use aperture to control the attention of the viewer by focusing on what is important in the shot and to slightly blur the things that aren't important in the shot. This is a fundamental of composition I think. It also helps to create some depth in the image and escape that flat video look that people don't like (otherwise we'd all be using handicams and this forum wouldn't exist). Any lens is capable of blurring the background if the subject is quite close to the camera and the background is much further away, but in my travels I sometimes want to blur the background a bit when the subject is a bit farther away from the camera and closer to the background. In normal circumstances you might just ask people to move, you might move the camera closer, or you might put on a longer focal length lens, but often I don't have the luxury of being able to do any of these, but I can just move the lens past the 1.7 or 1.4 maximum aperture of other lenses and get the job done with a simple adjustment. There are also rare occasions where you want a greater than normal background blur for artistic effect. This goes beyond the blur you would want just to control attention or to add some depth to the scene. This could be used for highly emotional scenes, scenes depicting a POV with altered perception (half-asleep, drugged, the view of a baby, etc), but normally this is a night shot where you want to have pretty lights in the background. This shot that I took a few weeks ago is a combination of all of the above - low-light, subject further away, no time to change lenses or move closer, and I wanted the background Christmas lights to look wonderful. It's basically ungraded, but illustrates the points I think.

Welcome to the forums!

I skimmed this video and it looks pretty good as an intro to grading in Resolve. I know most of what is mentioned already so it's hard to sit through 2 hours to get a few snippets of new info, but for people unfamiliar with it, this is a well structured and thorough video. Interestingly, the presenter Daria is the same presenter as the dozens of Resolve guides from Goats Eye View that stopped after v12.5. Those were also excellent so it's great to see Daria back again Haven't watched it yet, but if it's anything like the colour grading one it should be really good. In addition to those, here are a few more from BM. The second video is for 3D work and assumes you've watched the first one which explains how Fusion works in 2D. I'm really looking forward to watching these. When they added Fairlight I did a bunch of googling to try and find free guides or tutorials and found almost nothing. I have a background in audio so I figured out how to use it pretty quickly (as would anyone who understands multi-track DAWs) but my impression was that there was a lot more to it because it was hugely expensive previously. Resolve has a media management function that's pretty well hidden that can do cool stuff like move, copy, and transcode media. It can also do those things for all media in the project, only the clips that appear on the timeline, or things like the parts of the clips that are on the timeline plus a specifiable number of seconds on each end of the clip so you have some room to adjust edit points afterwards. I've used this module transcode H264 to low res Prores files for an online/offline editing workflow in the past, so it's really useful.

Considering that the infinity stop is past infinity and there is no focus lock, and f16 is the FF equivalent of f32 and quite soft due to diffraction, I'd say that's a terrible idea! ??? If you compare them to photo lenses then they sound like they're not worth it, but if you set them to de-click the aperture and think of them as cine lenses then it's a whole different price bracket altogether where they're an absolute steal! One thing you can't tell about these lenses until you get them is the build quality, which is through the roof. They are completely solid, and the focus and aperture controls are silky smooth, and overall they're absolutely wonderful to use. I'm a technically inclined dreamer, and I'm always noticing the shortcomings of things and dreaming about what improvements I might want to make, and after shooting with it as my default lens for about 20 days now, I have had exactly zero thoughts about what I could improve with the Voigt I have (17.5mm). I never want it to be faster, or nicer to use, or whatever. The only downside I'm aware of is that they're quite soft wide open, but they are a lot faster than the competition and I think are sharper than the cheaper MFT lenses at the apertures that they max out at. For me, ultimate sharpness isn't something I care about, and lenses like the Helios that both I and the OP have are pretty soft too, so it's not a problem for me. As everyone on the planet knows, AF isn't the reason you get a GH5, so manual focus fits with that system, and if you use the 4X digital zoom and focus peaking to help you set focus each shot then it's relatively fast and pretty accurate working with it. Interesting to hear you prefer the Voits over the Leica / Contax lenses. What is it about them that you prefer? I completely agree with you about talent vs equipment. Not only with the Hollywood crowd pumping out unimaginative and formulaic action movies with gorgeous equipment, but also my decidedly clumsy and amateurish film-making combined with the lovely equipment I am making it with!

Shouldn't a camera like that have available parts? (although you wouldn't want to pay the bill to replace the sensor I'd imagine..)

I thought the OP was referring to the 25 f0.95 lens which is manual focus? (This one: https://www.voigtlaender.de/lenses/mft/25-mm-10-95-nokton-ii/?lang=en ) If AF is available on those lenses then I've been using my 17.5mm lens wrong!!

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