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My ultimate use for this would be to have it be integrated into the camera and have the camera vary it continuously instead of the other parameters. This would mean that you can set it to 1/50th, F4, Auto ISO and Auto ND and it will control the exposure for me while I still have control over SS and Aperture. Then I never have to think about exposure ever again but I still get the advantages of 180 shutter and controlling DoF. It's unlikely, but are you able to make a deal with a manufacturer perhaps? Having this thing as part of the sensor stack, or maybe as a switchable ND (so the camera just moves it into the light path or out of it) would be perfect. At the moment I can either have the camera control the exposure, OR I can have full creative control, but not both at the same time.

Yeah that thought crossed my mind too, it's a pretty obvious move. I don't really know how the camera industry works in terms of which people are primary producers and which only assemble things and who specialises in what.. I guess if Nikon hasn't got much experience of tech at that physical scale, and doesn't make any, then it might be a hard transition to become a preferred supplier for a major smartphone brand. I watched a review of the new Sony 400mm(?) lens and the reviewers took the A9(?) to a sports game and their conclusion was that the lens was slightly more expensive than Canon or Nikon, slightly lighter than Canon or Nikon, and performed similarly (ie, great) but that when following a subject in AF-C the combination got 20fps instead of the 10-11 that Canon and Nikon got. If you're a sports shooter then that's going to be a set of features that will be really hard to ignore. Hey - be careful being critical of Aussies!! I do it all the time, but it's like many things - only we're allowed to do it!!!! ????

It doesn't surprise me if they were. I don't know what it's like where you are, but where I live there are a couple of large grocery franchises where people do their weekly food shopping, and a number of other smaller competitors. One of the things that the smaller shops would do is run their freezers warmer (still within the rules, well, hopefully) but what it would mean is that by the time you got home the frozen stuff you bought would have melted, whereas the same products bought from the large chain of stores didn't. Cutting costs in hidden ways that hurt the customer is a pretty popular business strategy.

Resolve has a pretty good customisable shortcut key system, with preset configurations for some editing platforms, so if you've got muscle memory from another package that might be a good place to investigate first. Also, the manual is absolutely excellent, so your first point of reference for any questions should be that and not google.

As a consolation, in digital audio the start was abysmal (in comparison to analog) but with better and better specifications the heart and soul is gradually coming back. Down the line I think it will come back, to some degree anyway.

This is absolutely killer!! Nice work!

Great idea. The free version is hugely powerful and isn't crippled that much so you can get by with it for most things. I bought a studio license (just before they reduced the price - doh!) because I wanted temporal NR and a few other specific things. It really is an amazing tool. Just a thought, but one of the things that I don't think people have tested that much is doing huge edits - lots of people using it for music videos and smaller projects. It might be a good idea to pull in a few hundred random clips from your back catalog and then copy/paste your way to a huge timeline and see if it bogs down or does anything else strangely. It would suck if you got half-way through a project and discovered something at that point!

@Robert Collins I get your point, and your stats aren't wrong. However, when I look at that graph I think a few things: Camera sales are through the roof Smartphones have eaten compact cameras almost completely Mirrorless is a relatively new product category If I put myself in the shoes of a Nikon exec I think I would see: Nikon was a leader in film cameras, which were eaten completely by digital, but Nikon adapted Compact cameras sold like hotcakes but sales are basically gone Non smartphone sales are down to almost 1/6th of what they were less than 8 years ago Nikon is unlikely to get into the smartphone game In terms of what is next, smartphones are going to start to erode the DSLR/Mirrorless market, they're introducing longer focal lengths, simulating shallow DoF, and getting better in low light. These are all things that you used to need a 'big camera' for. I don't really know what Nikon should do, unless they have another side of their business that I don't know about, they might be cornered at this point from digital convergence on one side and rabid innovation from the likes of Sony and m43 on the other. One question that would be interesting to know is what is the typical pay-back period on designing a new camera system? Is it 5 years? 10 years? I have no idea, but you'd be silly to invest funds into a bold move if the market doesn't look like it can be relied upon to pay it back, even if you do it properly.

I recall reading it in a book, but I'm not sure which one. If only the internet contained all knowledge! It used to only contain things that were new, but archiving is making progress thankfully, although how much of that archiving is behind paywalls is concerning, but probably a discussion for another day.

Please look at this much more appropriate graph and tell me that there you can't see a general trend going on here...... And if you don't think that's a viewpoint they'll be taking then consider that their company was founded slightly to the left of where your screen stops. and in terms of "in the long run we're all dead", please see the following: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/japans-oldest-businesses-have-lasted-more-than-a-thousand-years/385396/ and tell me that in the context of Business Planning that long-term thinking doesn't apply? Nope. But It's not too early to google them if I cared and when they compare the length of the line to the total length of the lines around the world of people lining up to buy iPhones....

If you want to understand what the Execs at Nikon night be thinking, you must get into the Japanese mind-set, one aspect of which is long-term thinking the likes of which the West has never seen. There was a famous example where someone asked a Japanese philosopher what the impacts of The Great Fire of London was, and his answer (over 300 years after the event) was "it's too soon to tell". Yes, that's a ridiculous example, but it's indicative of the culture. So, if you are the head of a corporation that's over 100 years old, in a culture known for 100-year business plans, you're not restricting yourself to stats from the last three years!!

Yeah, we're both right, a History of Complacency! ???

For your older MF lenses that are too small is there a way to mount threaded adapters (the kind for a follow-focus) to the MF / Aperture to make them bigger so it's easier to control? I know the outside would be geared, so maybe running some tape around the outside to smooth those out a bit might work? It would mean it's not hard to find the rings without looking and would give you finer control as well. Anyway, just a thought..

As a Resolve user who uses it for my complete post workflow I have a couple of comments: Resolve is a very very mature colour engine, but has much less mature editing features. I believe it's the all-in-one platform of the future too, but the summary of feedback from the professional editors that I've read was that it's promising, but isn't there yet. I'd recommend researching it a bit more to make sure it does what you want it to do. Resolve isn't the fastest NLE on the planet. Maybe do some research about benchmarks comparing it to other competing platforms. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Resolve, and I love it for what I use it for (very small amateur projects with simple edits but lots of colour work) but it's not the best platform for everyone. Not yet at least!

Great posts. On the side for Nikon hitting it out of the park we have: it's do or die, they don't have a cinema line to protect, a new mount grants freedom from technical compatibility baggage, they already have a huge user base, they talk to customers all the time, they have runs on the board with colour science and other stand-out aspects, etc. On the negative side we have: History. It sure is exciting though. As someone who is going to be in the market for a new camera system around xmas this year, there's a bunch of cool stuff to choose from: A7III, XH1, Pocket 2, and promises of Canon mirrorless FF, and Nikon mirrorless FF! And I don't list the GH5 or GH5S because every camera I listed has a killer advantage over those (or promises one) that is directly relevant to how I shoot. It's going to be an action packed 6 months!

I totally agree that there's no such thing as 'bad', everything just has a different aesthetic which may or may not suit your project. Even if the bokeh was hugely distracting, maybe you're making a film about the POV of someone with ADHD and so you deliberately design shots so that the viewer is always distracted and missing important elements My goal is to understand what range of aesthetics it has so that I can incorporate it into my work in a way that supports what I'm trying to achieve.

I have exactly the same setup and issue - Kallax 4x2 with the drawers, but the bags don't fit in it.

I knew it! The A7SIII will shoot MEDIUM FORMAT 8K RAW!!! ....the delays in announcing are just them working out how to stop it catching fire ????

I read somewhere that apparently they're making a come-back, or at least subtitles, because people watch on their phones in public and their headphones are probably a small Gordian knot in their bag!

From another thread: He also talks about aperture, saying the iris normally ranges between 9mm and 1mm. Google says the diameter of an eyeball is ~24mm, so that would make the eye f24 in daylight and f2.6 when it's dark. I guess that contributes to the popularity of the 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8 lenses. I think I'm with you on this one - I did some tests with my Sigma 18-35 1.8 and decided that I liked 2.8 (which is F4 on FF) because it was enough to get a bit of depth and separation. I'm aware of these elements.. a friend of mine lost sight in one eye and he was surprised about how some things were almost unaffected (playing squash, driving, appreciating scenery) and other things were completely hopeless (trying to catch something) and we talked about the different ways that we perceive depth. That actually further reinforces other 'cinematic' techniques like adding smoke. Is everything to do with cinematic-ness just trying to add the third dimension back in? I thought it was both how out of focus something was as well as the quality of the blur, but I'm happy to be corrected. I just did a test of focusing on my hand and looking out the window and I was surprised to find that the 'quality' of the bokeh on the building perhaps 1km away was just awful - very hard edges and interference patterns from the repeating high contrast patterns. I was surprised about that as I thought it would be softer. I'll have to try tonight with lights in the distance and see how hard the edges are.

Thanks for the link, that's interesting. I am not surprised that Ken has a useful page on such a thing.

Bokeh (blurry backgrounds) is trendy right now, but it also has roots in how we see, so it helps to add depth to an otherwise flat medium. I'm curious to understand more about what is going on from an artistic perspective so I can use it best in my projects. Technically having shallow DoF is a pain because it makes focus even harder to achieve, thus things like Sonys eye-detect focus which are required. If you hold your hand up close to your face and focus on it, and then without changing your focus pay attention to things further away they aren't actually that blurry. OF course, if it's dark then the iris in your eye will open up more and things will be blurrier. So if we were going for 'natural' in order to create depth, this might be appropriate: This is probably too exaggerated (especially during the day): And these are completely artificial and distracting: In cinema people used to be impressed with deep depth of field, and it was used for storytelling purposes: I know that using shallower depth of field is a good compositional tool to draw focus to the right areas of a frame, and I know that people sometimes use the strange and artificial bokeh of lenses to simulate when people have been drugged or injured, but what else is there? What else does it do aesthetically? How do you use it in your films and why?

True, assuming that you haven't disabled GPS location embedding in your camera.

I find the noise from my 700D with ML RAW at high ISOs (3200 / 6400) quite nice, but only when I do chroma NR. Luma noise is a different beast than chroma noise. I think I've been able to see grain from my eyes in extremely dark situations, but maybe I'm wrong? If someone knows about human sight it would be great to get a more informed perspective. Of course, that's only at something like ISO 1,000,000 or above, so ISO 3200 noise isn't a real-life thing. This is probably one of those things where comparing film to digital is comparing two complex sets of things - we can't truly separate out the variables.

You're not wrong - electronic tech and computers that make calculators look advanced took us to the moon!