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LOL.. Although the time I had an issue was that we were going into one entrance of a historic site and out another with a tour group, so when they offered to put it in a locker for me to collect it on my way out it didn't help. Of course, saying it's a sex toy probably also wouldn't have helped because that historic site was...... the Vatican! Honestly though, I'm currently on holiday and am just using the XC10 / Rode VMP+ combo and it's working great. Here's a lightly graded XC10 shot I took the other day.... Greetings from Italy!

I hesitated to reply to this thread because what I do isn't really Run and Gun but I figure some others may benefit. I shoot family videos, travel videos, my kids sports games, and the odd party video. I video what is happening as it happens, rather than making things happen for the camera, so my setups have to be able to get the shot very quickly with basically no warning. I also film completely without permission anywhere so they need to blend in and not attract attention. I currently have 4 setups, none of which I'm that happy with TBH!! However, I've had some successes which are worth sharing. My first setup is my XC10, Rode VideoMic Pro Plus, Tiffen 4-stop ND, and Gorillapod 5K (the largest one). I sometimes use the gorillapod but I don't take it everywhere as it's heavy and for some reason the tourist attractions that don't let tripods in also have a problem with this. I can hand-hold and get steady shots with the IS up to about 100-150mm but getting stable shots at 240mm (the limit of the fixed zoom) or getting smooth pans requires the gorillapod. The XC10 is a cinema camera and so has a limited range of ISO and shutter speed so I use the 4-stop ND in combination with the built-in 3-stop ND to be able to shoot in full-sun, and the combination allows me to have the sun in frame and still not blow out much of the sky. The Rode VMP+ is great, it charges over USB, has a battery life that lasts for days and the mode where one channel has heaps less gain as a safety track has saved me more than once. The XC10 is a wonderful camera to use, but I'm probably going to replace it as I want a shallower DoF to get a bit more depth in my shots, the AF is slow and MF ring is awful, and the high ISO performance isn't anything to write home about. My second setup is my Canon 700D (running ML), Rode VideoMicro, also with the Gorillapod. I only use this setup for my kids sports because the crop mode in ML makes the long kit zoom into a ~260mm-1200mm equivalent lens. Unfortunately I've found ML RAW, and even ML 3X quality mode to be unreliable, even though the card hack is well developed for this camera and I have a semi-fast card. I own a 50mm 1.8 and the Sigma 18-35 1.8 both of which are lovely lenses, and even if ML RAW worked reliably neither of them have IS and I work handheld but don't like the traditional hand-held look with the sharp camera shake. It's unfortunate because ML RAW gives wonderful looking footage the combination of 18-35 and crop mode make this setup a complete walk-around setup. My third setup is my iPhone 8, VideoMic Me, and DJI Osmo Mobile 2. I had the Rode VideoMic Me for previous setups which worked well and I think I'll have to look at the VideoMic Me-L which has the lightening connector, although I'm not sure if it will fit the case I have on the phone. This setup is great, it's unassuming, does 4K60, 1080p240, both of which look great with enough light, has loads of battery life, charges over USB, has IS, phase-detect face-recognition AF, a large bright screen, and doesn't crash or have other fiddly aspects. This is my A-cam (A for Always-with-me) and when I take a real camera (ha ha) it's my second camera. iPhones are hugely underrated in terms of how useful they are. When my kid got his award for playing his 50th game my wife and I both filmed on our phones giving me two angles to cut up in the edit, and at my wife's 40th my daughter filmed a lot of cool footage with her phone that also made it to the edit. The Osmo Mobile is very new and I got it to add a gimbal into my arsenal, thinking that I'd only want gimbal shots that are wide-angle with deep DoF, so the phone would be fine. This is for things like slow pans or tilts at scenic lookouts, the "house tour" style videos, getting time lapses from moving vehicles (useful to show a change of location), time lapses that pan/tilt, or "wow this stuff is all so beautiful". The reality is that it's cumbersome to carry around and flops about when turned off, isn't quick to setup despite being already balanced, and loses the horizon quite a bit. It's also a bit much considering this is mostly for my second setup. My fourth setup is my GoPro Hero 3, either paired with waterproof housing and "bobber" mount (a handle that floats) or an open cage potentially with the Rode VideoMicro and a handle. This is my underwater camera, and my main party camera, which makes sense because all the design challenges of filming action also apply to filming parties. I really tried to like the 700D + ML setup because if I did then I would have replaced it with the Pocket4K which would have been better in almost every way, but I just don't think I can do that shake for every video. I have my eye on the A7III to replace the XC10 and 700D because I can get the shallower DoF I want without compromising much else, but I'll wait until the dust settles with all the recent camera announcements and rumours. The XC10 is a very hard act to follow in terms of ease of use and ergonomics, and if I have any doubts about upgrading I'll just keep it and wait for another year or two. I'd also consider getting a gimbal for my main camera instead of for the phone. The iPhone needs an external mic to get directional sound, so it's a good setup. The GoPro doesn't shoot 4K and doesn't have OIS, and ideally an action camera would have both but if I had to choose I'd go with IS first because you can't stabilise the blur on an individual frame in post. 4K is useful in that you can stabilise and crop in post, but I've got my eye on the Sony X3000 which seems like it will fit the bill nicely, despite being a bit older now and still a premium price. I'll wait and see what this xmas season brings. I hope this helps someone

What kind of cinema camera lineup does Panasonic have? I'm wondering how protective they might be of those sales. It seems the new trend in mirrorless is to have two bodies - a lower priced one and a higher priced more full featured model. They could do something like 4k60 and 1080p240 on the lower GH6 and 4k60 RAW on the higher priced one perhaps. Assuming they can get their focussing system covered to phase-detect.

I feel the same way. I'm in the market for a new camera, but only plan to buy around xmas or afterwards. I'll be waiting until we have comparison videos based on real footage and full reviews and then we'll know what hidden warts each of them have and who each is really aimed at.

If anyone is comparing lenses, be aware that one of the advantages of having a fast lens is that you can stop down and get less distortion. For example, if you get a 50mm F1.4 and use it at 1.8 then it is likely to be optically superior to the 50mm 1.8 at 1.8. This is why people would buy a 1.2 lens in comparison to an 1.4 lens - it's not because they want to shoot a lot at 1.2, it's the performance at 1.4 or 1.8.

And for $1299 there do have to be some limitations, right?

That won't have been an accident!!

The answer doesn't specify if we'll be able to do uncompressed at 60 fps. If we can't, it might be write speed to the card that's the limitation. 4:1 should still be pretty good though?

Even if they are late, so what? Assuming you learned from history and didn't schedule any projects around it you should be ok to wait. and then once it's out, it's not going to be like the cameras from PaSoCaNikon where they become obsolete in a year or two. 4K60 RAW isn't going to be upstaged at any point in the near future - the Pocket 1 still looks gorgeous!

Yeah, @mercer that's parfocal, which is extremely useful. The XC10 tries to be parfocal by compensating electronically for the lens as you zoom, it's pretty good but only if you zoom slowly.

Depending on their implementation, this can be a very useful feature, both for lens compatibility, but also as a digital teleconverter that doesn't lose resolution.

These camera manufacturer conversations always make me roll my eyes. Cameras can be: well rounded and highly reliable, chock full of the latest tech, very flexible in design and application, or produced in enough volume to be affordable.. pick any two / three.

I've been playing with my Canon 700D, Magic Lantern 3x crop mode, and the 55-250 zoom lens (which is 264-1200mm equivalent in crop mode) and I've noticed a funny thing about it. If my kid is on the far side of the football field and I zoom all the way in to 1200mm and then manually focus (which is horrible at this distance on this lens BTW) then when my kid runs towards me and I naturally zoom out, the lens shifts its focus closer to me, effectively keeping my kid in focus, and actually helping me! I know about parfocal lenses that maintain the same focus distance throughout the zoom range, but do lens manufacturers deliberately design lenses so that zooming out helps you to maintain focus like this? Or is it just a random happy coincidence it zooms closer and not further away? Considering that the difference between focusing on players on the other side of the football field and focusing on the cars and houses on the other side of the field is a smaller tweak of the focus ring than there is free play in the focus ring, it's pretty difficult to adjust focus, and combined with the Canon screen and lack of good focus assists (that are fast and clear enough to keep up with sports) it would be nearly impossible to film at larger apertures without this lens behaviour!

Interesting. Probably the most interesting thing to me is that adding the second eGPU only seems to benefit the benchmarks and not any real-world results. I'm not sure if they'll end up optimising for multiple eGPUs or not. It's definitely harder to write software that uses a flexible number of processors, and IT these days is about replacing the one you have instead of adding a new one and still using last-years model too.

I know quite a few soccer mums who bought prime lenses. Apart from the nerds in forums like these, there are two customers I used to see all the time, the photography enthusiast who buys a 5DIII and an L series zoom and makes professional but mostly lifeless photos (all equipment no technique), and the clueless soccer mum who came and asked me for a camera to take pictures of the kids and nice holiday pictures. The problem with the soccer mum wanting to take pictures of the kids is that they want to take pictures of junior who is running around, inside, in poor lighting and they've found out that by the time their point and shoot has focused the kid is in another room, and if they manage to accidentally get one in focus the picture is blurry because it was a 1/10s exposure, and the ISO noise is shot to hell as well. They ask what the solution is, and it's a real camera (entry level DSLR) and so they buy that with the kit lens but often that's not enough for the low light conditions so they need a prime to get more light in the camera. I would always recommend Nikon because the 35mm 1.8 was affordable (Canon 35mm 1.8 was not) and on a APSC body the 50mm is 80mm and that's probably a bit too tight a focal length for indoor photography. The advice was pretty easy to give, prime lens for inside, zoom for outside, use the mode dial to choose the picture you're taking. After that I would sometimes get an odd question, but mostly the only feedback I would get from then on was nice pictures.

I wear dark sunglasses and I try not to smile... does that count?? ???

Doesn't the Z7 have an 8K time-lapse feature? Think of it as very low frame rate 8K! ????

People who are shooting on the go and uploading with short time frames are editing on battery. This is both YouTubers and perhaps mobile documentary makers on very short deadlines (not sure if this is a thing?). I've seen ENG people editing in the field, but the setups I've seen are laptops in vehicles, so they could have an inverter and be on charge, so this probably doesn't apply to them. I would also edit my travel and home videos on the train during my commute, and I shoot in 305Mbit 4K, but I realise I don't represent a huge percentage of the users out there!

This could have a real impact. When I watched both A7III videos by Matti Haapoja both had AF failures in them which other people don't have in theirs, but Matti mentioned using centre-focus(?) mode when other people use face-detect, so I think it does take a while for people to work out the quirks of a camera. I'll be waiting for the full reviews before making any real judgements.

This is sad, but not really a surprise to me. It's common practice for market leaders to make 'closed' systems to prevent their customers from escaping, and for market challengers to make 'open' systems as they have far less to lose and an open system is better for consumers. This is a big advantage of m43 for example, but at that point Panasonic and Olympus didn't have a huge customer base to protect. I think these new cameras are interesting, but there are many pros and cons in comparison to the other offerings. I'm not going to be able to make a decision until we start seeing full reviews of production models (not pre-production) and the reviewers have had a chance to discover their strengths and weaknesses. I've watched enough tests by cinematographers who film scenes at varying levels of exposure (-2, -1, 0, 1, 2 etc) and across various profiles and gamma curves to know that it'll be a while before anyone will be able to show what these cameras are really capable of. The full weather sealing is certainly an attractive feature if you're spending so much money on a camera system!

A quite critical review from Tony & Chelsea - based on the pre-production model.

Knowing how quickly BM release updates and how much effort they're putting into development, I wouldn't be surprised if the Windows version of Resolve gets a big performance bump at some point soon. The performance differences in that video can't be explained by the hardware differences so I think they must be software optimisations. If the OP has a preference for PC then I wouldn't use those test results to recommend a complete change in computer platform. @mojo43 sorry to hear about your laptop getting taken! I keep my carry-on under the seat in front of me but I have a soft backpack and I guess if yours is har-shelled or too big it might not work.

Thanks @webrunner5.. @Mokara Never underestimate what very smart people can do with digital signal processing. In audio, where CD and the standard delivery formats are 16-bit audio but very common sources of sound are hugely more dynamic and have to be crazily processed before recording (eg, an orchestra), audio engineers have managed to develop very sophisticated ways to dither and add noise so that the performance of 16-bit is stretched considerably. It's almost a black art in some ways, but the results speak for themselves on a good system. I'm not sure how much of that body of knowledge is applicable to video but there's definitely a lot of experience to draw from.

Interesting video. The way that these results seem to be jumping around between Max's videos seem to indicate that he's gradually working stuff out, like the XPS on charge vs battery, but I think there's also an element of moving goalposts as things change with software and firmware updates too. The fact that Resolve is much better on the MBP than XPS may be short lived if the Resolve Windows team just haven't released their optimisations yet. These computers are relatively similar in performance (the video card being the main difference) so it looks like optimisation differences, which could be improved at any time. I'm glad I'm not in the market for a new computer, there's a lot of opportunity for buyers regret if an update comes along and changes things!

A 360 camera may be a much better second camera than a GoPro actually, so I think that's actually a good idea. A 360 camera will probably control exposure via shutter speed and you won't be able to put NDs on it, and will therefore have very short exposures. This combined with the fact it's 360 means that you can stabilise in post and it will probably be completely fine even if someone bumps the setup. The ability to choose framing after the fact also means you not only have the variety of shots to choose from but you can ensure that the camera and operator never get in frame. My recommendation would then be to put it up higher so that the angle that the camera/operator will be included in will be a lot less and you'll be able to use wider shots. You only have to hold a camera a tiny bit above head level and it looks like drone footage, so there's that too. Low bit-rate 4K spread across 360 degrees makes footage pretty grainy so you want to use the widest shots you can, so the further away from the operator it is the more unobstructed field of view you will have to play with. Best of luck - it sounds like it would actually make a pretty flexible B-cam. I hadn't thought about it in this way either, so this conversation is useful to me too.