kye

Damn, was hoping those cameras with enough pixels would be one destructive processing step less (which they might well be) and that it would be one of the ones that did the most damage (which it sounds like it isn't).

So, about the Pocket 2 then....

1 hour ago, tyger11 said:

Too bad about the lens selection, but that may change soon-ish if Canon really does jump head-first into the mirrorless market.

I also liked my EF-M 11-24 lens, back when I had it. It had IS, and was by far the best EF-M lens with IS.

There's no doubt that Canons huge lens catalog helps to keep customers from changing systems, and we definitely live in a time of ecosystems.

If they did decide to jump head-first into the mirrorless market how long would it take for them to build up a decent lens selection?  It would be interesting to know how long it took them to build previous lens systems - I'm assuming they happened slowly and steadily but I could be wrong.

Considering how important lenses are, it could be a huge factor in their business model in coming times, and if the rumours about an ILC XC20 eventuate then they'll need to have a decent collection for it.  Maybe that's why the first two had fixed lenses - they weren't ready to unveil their masterpiece EOS-M lens lineup!!  (Here's hoping!!)

4 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

And this is why the form factor itself is silly. They want to position it as a cinema camera but they have arbitrarily decided that it NEEDS to be so small that it can't include tech that would add minimal size that would be worth it for added features / functionality. 

I see your point, but the counter-argument is flexibility.  Specifically, the flexibility that comes from modularity.

Since John Brawley kindly shared the BM Micro Cinema Camera / BM Video Assist rig he uses handheld it got me thinking about cameras from a more modular perspective.  If they added an audio interface then it would be easier, but it would also be another point where people might not like the choice they made - was it good enough? was it too big?  is it now too heavy for drone usage?  what if you don't record audio in-camera?

It's flexibility vs the efficiency of including everything.

I have a theory about why Canon video quality is typically bad, and which models may be better than others.

We know from Magic Lantern that Canon uses every third pixel across the sensor to get 1920 x 1080.  The problem is that for most of their cameras there aren't quite enough pixels.

For my 18MP 700D, which is 5184x3456 that means the 3x3 resolution is 1728x1152 which cropped to 16:9 is 1728x972.  This then needs to be upscaled 111.11% to get 1920.  
We all know that upscaling video is not a nice thing to do, so despite Canon probably applying sharpening before compressing it, the recipe of RAW video -> upscaled -> processed -> compressed isn't a recipe for success!  
I suspect the combination of upscaling combined with the heavy ~56Mbps compression is the culprit as upscaling tends to soften detail and compression tends to crunch things that aren't sharp.  We know that sharp images can still survive a 50Mbps codec, and my ML RAW experiments seem to indicate that 1728x1152 isn't fundamentally terrible if treated nicely.

This leads me to question what the right recipe is.
If we start with 1920 and work backwards, we get 1920*3 = 5760.  This is how wide the sensor has to be for a 3x3 reduction to not need upscaling.  If the sensor is 3:2 then we need 5760x3840 which is 22.21MP.

Therefore, my theory is that all the Canon cameras with resolutions above 22.3MP should have superior 1080p quality.

According to this comparison table this would mean that the 5DIII, 5D4, 5DS, 6DII, 77D, 80D, 750D, 760D, 800D, 2000D, 200D, M3, M5, M6, M50 and M100 are the potential winners.

Does people's experience of these cameras back this up?

Of course, if any of the <22.3MP cameras took a higher resolution reading of the sensor and downscaled it then they would produce a nice 1080 image, but I don't know if any Canon DSLRs work in this way?

On 21/07/2017 at 8:54 PM, andrgl said:

Lots of pseudo bullshit in this thread...

Short and simple:

• YouTube reencodes EVERY (valid) file you upload.
• Uploading in 4K and above triggers YouTube to make VP9 (higher quality) streams almost immediately. (This is the key thing here as the MP4 stream is absolutely shit, turning your footage into macroblocking smears.)
• You don't have a corporate or partner account, your videos will always suffer from poor bitrate. 

Good summary.

I can verify the first two because I did some extensive tests...  anyone interested can read about them here (with bonus amusing comments!):

On 25/05/2018 at 10:05 AM, heathergillum said:

YouTube supports MP4 and AVI format, you'd better convert your video for YouTube uploads with a converter.

No need to convert if YT accepts your file format, every re-encode loses quality - like photocopying a photocopy of a photocopy...

Nice video Andrew - your work?

It definitely has a distinctive aesthetic, with the combination of distorted bokeh and chromatic aberration, which the emphasised colours in the video played up.

The lightweight combination of the M50 and C-mount lenses would be prone to camera shake (and the last shot shows some) so pairing the setup with some kind of folding stabiliser might yield benefits.  I shoot primarily hand-held and in my research have come upon a lot of products and some are quite innovative.

2 hours ago, kaylee said:

one word: laserdisc

that guy looks so cool!!!  look at his collar!

4 hours ago, John Brawley said:

I know plenty that feel IBIS is almost as good as a gimbal and therefore can be used in place of a dolly for tracking shots. 

As as opposed to me in a car tracking someone, the example I gave.

Thats two different types of tracking shots. 

I shoot almost exclusively hand-held and IS is wonderful, but you are right that it doesn't replace a dolly or slider for camera moves.

IS only smooths out camera rotation, not camera movement.  Which is why I try and do a dolly shot by hand it looks terrible because instead of the foreground moving smoothly in front of the background the two planes move around shakily in relation to each other because I can't move the camera at a fixed speed horizontally, and I can't eliminate me moving it vertically!

I think this is one of the key reasons that all the cool kids on YouTube shooting hand-held always use slow motion for their shallow depth-of-field B-Roll shots because when you slow things down you also slow down their jerky camera movement.

3 hours ago, Liam said:

Maybe an alright alternative?

A travelling filmmaker passed through here a little while ago with his merch and made a decent haul and has a good following from it. Not sure how he gets a "gig" though.

Logistics? Arts festivals? Flea markets? Is it pretty pointless since there's Vimeo?

Was he selling the DVDs?  or using the DVDs as a business card for getting film-making work?

In the eyes of business owners who might hire someone being able to "make a DVD" might be completely different to "upload a video" (which their kids can do).  Perhaps similar to having a big and professional looking camera...

27 minutes ago, DaveAltizer said:

The speed booster and the C-Mount lenses came in today! The speed booster is fishy. Using my all manual CONTAX Zeiss, the image displayed on the M50 is super choppy. Almost like the video card in the camera cant handle it or something. Really weird. But when I put an actual EF lens with electronic contacts on it, it works fine. I assume this has something to do with my Leitax mount CONTAX glass. 

When those lenses are mounted do they touch any electrical contacts that connect to the camera?

It sounds to me like the camera might be frantically trying to talk to the lens and it's interfering with the cameras ability to function smoothly.  Perhaps a bit of sticky-tape over any pins or contacts might stop it?  It may not work but is cheap and worth a try

Or, maybe there's a mode in the camera for shooting without a lens?  Also worth trying perhaps.

On 23/05/2018 at 5:49 AM, Don Kotlos said:

That being said, even if a lens does not resolve the 4K resolution, it can still create a very nice filmic image since you won't notice any aliasing artifacts and there is going to be a gradual decrease in amplitude of the higher spatial frequencies.  

Isn't the technical term "optical low pass filter" ??? 

Just like the early days of Microsoft...  it's not a bug - it's a FEATURE!

5 hours ago, Grumble said:

The problem hasn't been so much in the delay but in the massive lack of communication, which despite the rather sporadic updates and all the complaints about communication it never seems to improve.

Communication is a pretty typical weakness for the kind of people that are capable of designing a product.  It's also something people avoid if they feel guilty about not keeping to schedule or having to admit there are problems that you haven't managed to overcome yet.

Which is why it's rare to mistake the engineering department for the marketing department, or vice versa.  

There are exceptions of course..  

I remember when I used to work it IT tech support there was a joke.  "What's the first thing you do when the server goes down?"  "Take the phone off the hook.  You can't fix the problem while answering the phone....".  Of course, with social media you don't have to talk to people individually, but it was pretty indicative of the culture.

My impression was that kickstarter and similar sites were all high-risk medium-reward investments, because you're betting that the people involved can get a product through a complete development and release cycle, which is no small feat.  
IIRC, in his review of the Digital Bolex Philip Bloom mentioned that despite the success of the product and the demand for other variants from customers that the process had been so difficult that the people who made it declined to repeat it.  

My take on it is that the vast majority of people that start a campaign like this have genuine intentions, and they fail because of their inability to solve the hundred squillion issues that are involved, rather than having sinister intentions.  There are lots of companies that release products with significant flaws, and many that work away for months/years on products that never see the light of day (and we might never know even existed), so if they can't do it reliably then a few enthusiasts attempting simply makes success improbable.

It's a real pity because a $1000+ device that we all regularly upgrade every year or three that is exactly the right size and shape would make a brilliant monitor.

I guess there's a chance that it will eventuate, but with each passing month I think the odds reduce.

4 hours ago, Nathan Gabriel said:

I think you're right to emphasize incredibly low budget films. Given the amount of excitement that the gx85 generated on this forum I think a lot of people here work on productions well below a $50k budget. Casey Neistat is a great name drop for a situation D filmmaker because his work is definitely cinematic, whatever that means. His frequent user of time lapse allows him to inject high quality images, in terms of MP and dynamic range, into his vlog. I also think there are many situation D/C filmmakers who are not vloggers. I have a friend who primary produces music videos. While he likes to control everything, he often works with artists who have limited availability and don't have the patience or control of actual actors. Because of these and other factors he adopts a situation D style of filming. Likewise in some documentary settings I've felt that using a larger camera or additional lighting would have really changed the behavior of the people I was filming.

With respect to situation A, I think it's easy to find examples of people working with budgets less than $50k. The classic example is Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, which was shot on a $7000 budget. My favorite director, Maya Deren worked with relatively small budgets. Both of these directors shot film rather than digital, but these are very dated references. Personally I still get the impression that most indie situation A folks prefer film over digital, but I'm also fairly out of the game at this point. @IronFilm made a good point because the second I hear someone's shooting digital on a budget I assume they are in situation D/C, but they may very well be in situation A from your perspective. I like the idea of developing different categories of filmmakers' needs, but the more I think about it, it seems impossible. Maybe we can make relative assessments such as: person 1 works more in situation A-like settings than person 2. These relativistic claims could be made without committing to person 1 being considered a situation A filmmaker in all contexts... Have you ever read Wittgenstein? Trying to reduce a concept or phenomenon to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions is almost always problematic.

I've really got to find a way to write shorter responses. Sorry again.

My reference to $5M was actually about camera equipment, and was around the point that anyone using a >$5M camera setup would think of the entire DSLR revolution in the same way that this board seems to talk about vloggers..  basically as spoilt whiney teenagers 

You're right that the situations I describe don't have anything to do with budget.  You can shoot in a highly controlled environment with a phone, a couple of desk lamps and a wired lav mic if you wanted to.  On low budget films as soon as you don't pay people minimum wage you can get away with spending almost nothing (except lots of social capital!).  I co-produced films at $2K and $5K that were absolutely situation A with months of pre-production, >20 cast/crew, and one of them had >10,000 person-hours in it (I didn't estimate the other).

I understand that my post is a huge simplification, but I think the principle stands.

As someone who shoots at the C/D end of things its amusing/frustrating when I mention a challenge I have in shooting my home videos and the reply is to add crew (take extra people on my holiday), to multiply the weight of my rig by three (or more!), or to get my family to repeat parts of the holiday over and over until I get a shot with the right lighting!  

This topic is an attempt to get people to understand that there is a huge variety in film-making outside of the niches they seem to live in.

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

Nope, not even high end productions in my country get shot on film. 

Indie? Forget about it!

I was going to say this!  Film is too slow for most commercial shoots, and for indie it is too expensive!!!

I think I heard somewhere that it's cheaper to rent a RED than to shoot on film these days?

Yeah, 4K at only 15p is a bit rough.

That's what my GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition had, but I don't think they advertised it as 4K...  

4 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Quite easy to reach $50K of gear in total even when just shooting with GH5/a7Smk2/BMD cameras.

I'm 100% certain the feature film I just finished up working on had greater than $50K worth of gear used on it, and this was an ultra low budget film shot with Panasonic GH5

$1M?

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

$50K?! That is nothing. I've been on shoots where just a single lens costs that. 

And yeah, some folks coming from that world might do shoots they call "Situation D / C" yet from your perspective it very much "Situation A". So even simply classifying different types of shoots isn't always straight forward. 

And even within "Situation A" there is a tonne of variety, from shoots which might want to get a couple of dozen pages of dialogue done in a single day, vs others which are only aiming to complete a couple of pages worth per day. 

Absolutely

I mention $50K because I thought that was expensive enough to distance it from what we're talking about (mainly GH5 / GH5s / BMPCC4K / A7 series) which aren't anywhere near $50K.  Also, a production that large is outside my experience

I watched the ARRI Academy HDR Masterclass series and just about had to poke myself with pins to stay awake, the pace of the guy running it was so slow that I would consider him a fire risk - ie, if the place caught on fire I'm not sure he would be capable of leaving the premises fast enough to make it to safety!  During a real shoot he might move faster, but it's hard to drive a Ferrari at walking pace so...

I'm aware that one metric is 2 minutes of final footage a day for a feature film and that's not a case of going fast by rushing, it's a case of going fast by being thorough and doing things right the first time, so that pace is understandable and I'm not criticising it at all.  However, if you compare a big film set like that where a squillion people worked a 12+ hour day to capture 2 minutes of final footage with a production like event or documentary shooting where a single operator captures 2-10+ minutes of final footage in a day the ratio of speed is huge....  (maybe 50-100 times?) .....Let alone a vlogger like Casey Neistat who captured, edited and published videos 5-15 minutes long every day without a break (with no gaps for planning) for months at a stretch then the ratios may as well be in parallel universes because you have to include all of pre and post-production person-hours.

In terms of people thinking their situation in C or D but it's really situation A, yeah, that's inevitable.  Film-making is an industry so big that people can be involved in part of it but be completely unaware that other parts of it even exist.  One of the challenges I have with home video stuff is that because it's mostly kept private there's very little visibility of it.  Just like how many people use fancy DSLRs to take pics of their kids - it's hard to understand how many are doing it because people don't publish photos of their kids much - it's an iceberg where only a little of it is visible from the surface.

I should also add that in a sense the people operating in a faster environment need to demand more from their equipment rather than less, high DR is useful when you're not in controlled lighting, higher resolutions / bit-rates are useful when you want to punch-in digitally in post instead of changing lenses and doing another take, etc etc.

7 hours ago, Nathan Gabriel said:

My bad I should have said "I" instead of "we". Personally I have never been a fan of autofocus (and don't you use veydras? In fact, when I was thinking about getting my first autofocus lens, you specifically said you couldn't test the sigma 16mm autofocus because you don't like using autofocus). I guess part of me has this obtuse attitude in which I honestly enjoy and prefer manual focusing regardless of the rare situations where autofocus might provided marginally better results. I do enjoy the IBIS on my gx85, but I don't think it is desirable for gimbal use or car mounts. I know you've said otherwise. My point was not to say that AF and IBIS are never useful, but that there are some times when I'd intentionally avoid using them. IBIS can't be fully turned off which can be problematic for some. AF I simply never use (like it's been more than 5 years since I've used AF in anything other than my smartphone and GoPro). At the very least, IBIS is far less important to me than battery life or an articulating screen (if the gh5s were the same price as the pocket, if take it's better life and screen over the pockets codec. But this is a controversial preference I'm sure). I guess I'm open to being converted on the issue of IBIS (pm me some comparisons if you like). AF and IBIS seem nice for quick travel photos with the family, but frivolous for the pocket's intended use. Sorry for the long wandering response.

Your post inspired me to start a new topic about how I see the differences in priorities that film-makers have

3 hours ago, Damphousse said:

If you have any examples of this handy can you link to them?  I'm thinking of doing something like that with a battery.

Here's an example with a battery...

It's from this campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gimbal-with-focus-control-skyvideo-pro#/

Vloggers aren't crazy....  but there sure is lots of debate around the topic!  

My theory is that they are making films in a different situation and the fact they have different needs is why they appear to be crazy to film-makers from other situations.  This is my attempt to explain it.

I think film-makers fall across a spectrum of the speed of film-making and the amount of control over the environment that exists.

Situation A: low-speed / high control.
In situations where things happen very slowly (eg, on a controlled set, or perhaps shooting landscapes and B-roll) you can have everything on full-manual and get the best results because you're in full control of what is happening.  This means time to level a tripod, setup whatever lights you want, use a light-meter, adjust all camera settings, setup and rehearse camera moves, etc etc.  In this setting having the camera do things for you is counter-productive because you want to have full control over everything.  Therefore things like autofocus and IBIS are unwelcome, camera weight and size might not matter, but image quality probably matters a lot, and cinema-primes are a good fit.  I think the GH5s / BMPCC4K are aimed more at this type of application.  There is always room for a sound-person and various crew here.

Situation B: moderate-speed / moderate control.
In situations where things happen faster but you have a good degree of control there is value in having some 'helpful features'.  This might be something like run-and-gun film-making where you have time to setup an interview station where you have a moderate amount of control.  Things like manual focus can still be used, but reliable face-detection would be useful.  You might set shutter speed and aperture but have auto-ISO enabled.  Camera size and weight potentially matter because you might be filming B-Roll or featuring clips of things that aren't in your control (eg, shooting an event) so having a lighter tripod setup you can carry around and shoot with quickly is useful.  Having a sound-person and other crew also works here.

Situation C: high-speed / some control.
In situations where things are happening in real-time but you have a degree of control over some aspects the priorities shift again.  This might be something like ENG film-making where when the action happens you have to capture it with no second chances, but you might also be interviewing people and have some degree of control about how the interviews are done.  For example if you were covering a building fire you have no control over when or how the fire will burn, what the responders will do about it, etc, so you need to be able to move very quickly, having a rig that can be hand-held (shoulder rig normally) and also having a tripod that is quite portable.  In this situation IBIS, reliable auto-focus, an all-in-one zoom lens, etc become desirable features. However, during the interview situation you can still have input into what is asked, where it is (interviewing the fire chief with something burning in the background makes a nice shot) but if people fumble their replies you can often ask them to repeat something or prompt them in a variety of ways.  These can have crew, but often due to the economics of the situation there isn't budget.

Situation D: high-speed / no control.
I add this mostly for myself and my home videos, where my priority is to capture what happens without directing anything, as I prioritise the experience over the film.  This is 'fly-on-the-wall' film-making in a sense.  Technically this is within the previous situation, but I choose not to exert most / all of the control I have.

I teased that this discussion was about vloggers, so I think they sit across situations A-C, but the controversy comes in when vloggers are in situation C.  There is a hierarchy of needs for vloggers in situation C:

• They REQUIRE that the camera be small and not attracting the wrong attention because situation C is about shooting in public (I've posted elsewhere about being stopped by authorities when shooting in public) and they require that the camera be able to be turned on and recording at a moments notice and they are almost exclusively a self-shooter with no allowance for any dedicated 'crew'.  This is basically iPhone / RX100 territory, and creates films where the content better be great because the picture will be shaky and the audio will be noisy and full of ambient sounds.
• They often WANT to improve the basic quality and so they add a directional microphone of some kind (typically Rode VideoMicro or Rode VMP+) and try to make it more stable by adding a handle (typically a gorillapod).
• However (and this is where we get the controversy between vloggers and other film-makers in situations A and B) they LUST after having more 'cinematic' videos, which drives them towards higher-bitrate codecs and large aperture lenses (which means they're now looking at the same cameras - 5DIII, 1DXmII, A7SII, BMPCC4K, XH-1, etc), and they want 'buttery smooth footage' which means world-class stabilisation.  Film-makers in situations A and B get these by having setups that are have at least one of the following challenges: slow to setup, cumbersome to use, large and attract attention.  When a vlogger looks at a high-end DSLR and sees that it doesn't meet one of the basic things they require (small, inconspicuous, no-setup time) they see it as a fundamental flaw in the camera.  This perspective makes no sense to a film-maker who places these features of a camera quite far down their priority list, and this is where the controversy occurs.  
  Of course, vloggers often don't know a single thing about how the pros do things, are often self-centred and unwilling to learn about other styles of film-making, which enrages the pros and thus flame wars ensue.  (Of course, exactly the same can be said of a minority of film-makers who are uninterested in how vloggers do things, are self-centred and self-important because they view their film-making as somehow better than other types, and are equally as responsible for the flame wars as the vloggers...).

Hopefully this helps to explain some of the key differences and why we keep tripping up on these topics.

I know that this is a huge simplification of the variety of situations, that this is a spectrum and film-making can exist anywhere between the four situations I listed above, and that many film-makers have projects that are on different parts of the spectrum and require equipment that is flexible.  However, each film-maker and each purchase decision will be made by prioritising the features in one category against the others.

BTW, the entire DSLR revolution (ie, the vast majority of people on this board) probably look like vloggers in the eyes of those shooting on big-budget sets with the $50-100K setups and equipment that requires a truck to lug it around.  Anyone criticising the BMPCC4K is going to look like a spoiled millennial when we criticise a $1300 camera that shoots 4K RAW!

1 hour ago, Damphousse said:

If you have any examples of this handy can you link to them?  I'm thinking of doing something like that with a battery.

I did a quick google and found these - hopefully they're helpful?  Most people are doing this to mount an external microphone, but a battery should be similar.

Skip to about 2:30 in the above for where he connects the external microphone.  Spoiler - making sure the cable has some slack in it is the key.

Here's another example:

The gimbal will need to have the horsepower to move the cable around, which normally isn't a problem.  If it were me and it was a more permanent part of my setup I'd buy a longer cable and run it from the camera to the handle by attaching it to each moving section of the gimbal, allowing lots of slack at each of the motors to ensure it has the full range of movement.  This would prevent the cable from flapping around or getting caught on anything, but would take some time and effort to setup.

I remember GoPro saying that the 12/15p modes would be good as in-camera time-lapse modes, which didn't make that much sense to me to be honest.  

However, giving customers the option of something is often nice, instead of limiting what can be done because many/most can't see a use for it, so there's two sides to the argument.

12 hours ago, salim said:

So this was my bad, I put the flexible 3200k conversion gel (this is for the Apurture to convert the 7500K light to 3200k) in the slot where the hard gel goes (the hard gel is to convert the light to 5600k).  I only had get there long enough to do a flood and spot mode a couple of times. Maybe 5 minutes and it practically burnt right away. I'm not sure if the hard gel for the 5600K would do any better or as Kaleb Pike said in his youtube channel they got bleached. I can see that happening. Which really makes this like a 7500k light that you can use as accent/hair light etc. 

Perhaps there's a way to rig up a gel that spaces it a bit from the light?  It looked like it only burned in one place and if you can get a few inches between the gel and the light then you'll get a bit of cooling airflow over the gel.

It might be a bit of a PITA but if the light has other advantages maybe it salvages it as an option for some situations?

2 hours ago, Axel said:

But: keep in mind that because you HAVE to see the image and the Zhiyun's roll motor perfectly blocks the Pocket's display, you'd then need an external monitor (but then again, with smallest battery, the smallHD Focus would add just 230 g, which would make the setup 1900 g sans camera). 

Could you mount the external monitor on the handle of the gimbal and run a (very flexible) cable to the camera?  I've seen people running cables from fixed microphones or power banks to the camera on a gimbal before and they seem to work.

230g isn't much but every bit counts!

On 16/05/2018 at 4:39 AM, Andrew Reid said:

In fact I'd get shot of the mode dial altogether and do what the X-H1 does. Dedicated ISO and shutter dials, with option for auto on both, and auto ISO.

Totally agree..  the first time I saw the Fuji approach with separate dials I was amazed, then amazed at why other brands don't do this.  Can we start a petition of some kind??

I've also been totally pissed off in the past at cameras that don't allow Auto-ISO in manual mode, which means there's no way to control SS and Aperture but still have the camera expose for you - like you would do in street photography!