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Very nice work there @BenEricson ??? The stylising elements were done really nicely, strong but coherent and adding to the package instead of distracting. Was the WB differences in some shots from filming or done deliberately in post? I thought it added to the aesthetic, thus maybe added. I also very much liked the style and editing. I'd assume the transition shots between the two sections where you pan left/down and then pan left/up from the water was planned and deliberate, and it was subtle but so nicely done. I used to write electronic music with a guy who was a master of subtlety and would just nail things but in a very understated way and in a sense this video reminded me of that. What were you riding while filming? and how large / cumbersome was your rig? I used to be a skater a long time ago and watched a lot of videos and some of the most incredible efforts are by the DoPs who have to keep up while still getting the shot.

I agree that we're making large strides and will continue to do so. I've been into high end audio for over 20 years and I see parallels between the audio analog vs digital debates and the film ones. In some ways digital audio is quite far ahead of film, and if I extrapolate from that then my predictions for digital video are that: Digital will keep getting better Eventually it will reach thresholds where the engineers say that anything beyond that is imperceptible After that there will be people who say that analog is still better, and the engineers will tell them that they're either suffering from bias or that they are in love with the deficiencies of analog Digital development will stop or be severely limited once the engineers suggest things aren't perceptible anymore The connoisseurs will still pursue higher performance digital but they will be a tiny percentage in a minority that make up a tiny industry so will struggle to make headway and to make matters worse for the connoisseurs there will be people who like analog because of it's nostalgia and the engineers will not distinguish between the two groups There are examples of this on this forum already: discussing the benefits of RAW (which are real, but are very very niche at this price point) discussion of things like Motion Cadence which not only can't be measured but no-one seems to understand what might even be involved, so is ripe for the engineers to say doesn't exist and in digital video we're a long way away from the limits of human perception: 14bit RAW might be approaching it but after grading it might not be there 4K is only beyond perception if viewed on a screen occupying a minimum percentage of the angle of vision (ie, only not visible if screens are too small or too far away) and only if they haven't been stretched or processed in post (eg, digital stabilisation) and if used to capture 360 video is woefully inadequate when viewed with goggles 24fps is linked to the minimum frame rate for humans to observe continuity of motion rather than a slideshow, no-where near the limits of human perception which are being explored by computer games and are upwards of 100fps (IIRC)

Thanks John, informative post. A couple of questions: 1) If you don't mind me asking, how often does The Pattern you describe finish an episode? I'm keen to understand shooting ratios etc. I understand if this info is a bit too sensitive to share, and I understand it's talking about people other than yourself, so no worries if you decline. 2) a bit OT, but the pace of such a schedule reminds me of the you tubers who create daily content (vlogs normally). Casey Neistat is the oft cited example but many more are similar. Casey created a 5-15 minute upload every day for something like 500 days straight, including doing everything himself from story design, shooting, editing, colour and export and upload, and the episodes were competently edited with structure, music, B-roll and sometimes FX. He mentioned it involved editing for 4-9 hours a day. Your comments frequently align with these creators, they shoot 1080 for ease of editing, they get colour right in-camera, they have multiple setups, etc, and prioritise story-telling and throughput over other concerns. My question is - have you seen any impacts to the industry from this segment of high-productivity film-makers? I'm assuming that before vlogging was a thing very few people even attempted to maintain a pace similar to a professional shooting schedule. Thanks!

There's been a sort of 'revolution' of late that gets called 'business model innovation', which you may have heard of. It's a phrase that is trendy but lacks a commonly understood definition, however the best one that I have heard of is when you take a traditional business model and you turn something that used to be a cost into something that is a source of income. One example of it is Ryan Air. Traditionally, airlines have to pay to use the airports they fly to, but Ryan Air approached the second largest airport in any given city and negotiated a deal where the airport pays Ryan Air to fly there instead of the largest airport, turning the airport from a cost to a source of revenue. It works because Ryan Air bring passengers to the airport it wouldn't normally have. In the case of the cam-girls, they're not really doing business model innovation per-se, but they are taking something that was traditionally valued at zero (having dinner) and combining it with things that are valued (time with a cute girl). The basic idea of business model innovation that is frequently used is to take something that hasn't been valued previously (like your house while you're away) and creating a mechanism where it's sold to someone who thinks it's worth something, so maybe it is business model innovation. Anyway, some people have it and want money, some people have money and want it, and the internet is a free economy, so it works

In that case I have no idea! lol

My understanding was that trends in fashion and music are often working in 20 year cycles. For example, in the 70s the music was very analog, then in the 80s synthesiser technology became cheap enough for the masses and we got electronic music like Human League, then the 20-year cycles kicked in and the 90s took 80s electronic sound and brought back the 70s influence with bands like The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim working out how to integrate the two approaches, and then in the 2000s things swung back to re-integrating the 80s again, and then in the 10s (or whatever the hell this decade is called) I lost track of what was going on.. the clothing fashions seemed to follow this path too. I have no idea about how it works in film, but it may be similar. In a sense 20 years is about a generation, so it might be linked to that?

If you're using it like a traditional cinema camera then its appearance doesn't really matter (everything looks like a cyborg when it's rigged up lol), but if you're not using it that way then sometimes a cameras appearance can matter. I shoot home videos in places people are ok with you shooting home videos but not 'pro' videos, and if the camera looks 'pro' then you run the risk of getting hassled. Basically, other people make judgements about what your intentions are and where the footage might go from what type of shooter you are, which they judge from the equipment. If you're shooting in dangerous places then a pro looking camera might get you robbed, but a pocket one might not (people deliberately make their cameras look beat up or old when shooting in high-crime poverty-stricken areas for this purpose), if you're shooting an event and your equipment looks pro maybe people will be uncooperative with being filmed in the hope you will pay them, which they wouldn't do if it was an iPhone or P&S, if you're shooting your kid in the park and the camera looks pro the security guards and council workers who aren't cops but wish they were and act like it can assume you're shooting a commercial project with actors instead of shooting your family and hassle you for permits and make you leave. Even if you're shooting a low-budget piece in public the larger your rig the more people in the background are going to stare at the camera as they walk past, but wouldn't as much if you looked like a parent or a tourist. When I visited the Vatican they had high security and wouldn't let any tripods in, and didn't seem to care about my pocket-sized mirrorless camera, but if I had a VENICE or maybe even C200 I bet they would have hassled me for filming permits, and saying "I'm just a hobbyist" wouldn't get around that kind of situation. Of course, a Venice or C200 would be overkill for a hobbyist, but people see a 5D as a "pro camera" because for photography it is, so there's a risk of someone seeing your tiny little video camera and thinking it's a pro looking stills camera. If you're shooting for a professional purpose then having a professional looking camera isn't a problem, it's when it doesn't match your purpose that problems can come in. Lots of people shot hand-held travel films with the Pocket 1, so there is a segment of people that like IQ but want to use it incognito on unofficial shoots.

Digital is convenient, and good digital is good, but analog is nice, and good analog is just wonderful.

This is OT, so apologies, but how does one 'stumble' across an unlisted YT video? I'm assuming it was somehow shared by the youtuber? I use unlisted videos as private videos that don't have the inconvenience of a password, so if there's another way to discover them I'm very keen to hear about it

Interesting images. What RAW recorder are you using?

I first heard about this from my teen/pre-teen kids (like most new things online TBH). When I asked about it, apart from them eagerly showing me some videos, they mentioned that they didn't get the sensation, but they sometimes listened while falling asleep. There is an entire genre of cam girls (in Japan IIRC) that will have dinner with you. There are lots of lonely people in the world, and they are more likely to die than people who aren't lonely. I'm not saying that people who make these videos are saints or anything, but it's probably doing more good than harm, and doing it in a way that society isn't dealing with yet.

Over editing is preferable to no editing - or as I like to call it "taking 20 minutes to say badly what could have been said well in 2" ?

Cool video. I shoot almost exclusively handheld and one technique that seems to work is to either hold the camera still enough for the IS to simulate a locked off tripod shot, or to be deliberately moving the camera in a direction (pan, tilt, whatever) because then the micro-movements from hand-shake kind of get hidden by the larger movements you're making intentionally. I've also found that panning with IS is a bit strange. It's like the lens has 'modes' where it thinks you're stationary or you're panning, and it can be very difficult to get the lens to understand that you're panning (and will jerk and be strange) but once it works it out then it will stabilise the pan quite well. I guess that depends on the lens though. The main lenses I have experience with for IS is the kit 18-55 and 55-250 APSC lenses and the built-in lens of the XC10, but they're all Canon so might be similar to the IS in your 85mm.

Regardless of if I end up buying one I'm going to benefit from it by forcing myself to consider buying it. I agree with @webrunner5 and others above that it will disappoint some people and I plan on making sure that isn't me. I already know that it doesn't meet some of my criteria (mainly stabilisation, AF, fast zooms and a tiltable screen) however the image from the Pocket 1 is so lovely and the promise of ultra-high-quality 4K so enticing that I'm going to use my existing equipment with those limitations, learn the required skills, see if I can make it work for my style of film-making and then read reviews before buying. Worst case is that I can't live without one or more of the features or it has some unanticipated Achilles-heel and I get an A7III and then learn to grade it to get the look I want (or I get the Canon FF unicorn and instantly die happy). If @webrunner5 is right that it can't be the only camera you own buy does a lot of what I want I might consider a Pocket 1, perhaps with a small fast prime, as a second camera. I'm sure that the Pocket 2 regret selling will further reduce the Pocket 1 used price. Anyone who has a manual camera now, buys the Pocket 2 and then sells it again because of its shortcomings really should have done their homework properly I think.

Nice little edit ? Because I only tend to get enough motivation up to get through editing when I go on actual trips or family outings I think it would take me more like 500 years to get 10 years experience! I do camera tests and kind of get to know my equipment and what modes work etc, but the feedback I'm missing is the storytelling and finer aspects you only get through going through the complete edit process. That's kind of how I work - I shoot a lot but don't edit much except big projects. It still takes a long time before the camera sits nicely in the hand and the dials stop squirming around and just sit nicely where your fingers go to access them when you're not looking etc. Nice! Yes, young children would make excellent practice subjects running around having fun. My kids are 14 and 12 and are more in the 'get that thing out of my face' stage ???

Like all skills, film-making improves with practice. As my focus is on family videos of holidays and special occasions, I get one shot at capturing them, so my skill level really matters. When I was a stills shooter I took up street photography for practice as it is a similar environment. With video I find that haven't found a suitable replacement - partly it's because editing is such a burden after shooting stuff, and partly it's because of a lack of interesting things to film. Yet, with the Pocket 2 and other cameras coming out, there's an even greater temptation to learn to manual focus, manually expose etc, all things that require a lot of practice to become proficient at. At film-school they start you off with 'editing in camera' and even do so with 8mm film so you can't cheat. I wonder what other interesting methods there are like this. Do you practice? How often? How?

Yeah, something like that. IIRC the shots I looked at yesterday were about 250Kb? I would have been maxing out all the settings - I remember I took about 20 disks out shooting with me that day... disk space to BURN!!

Recently there was something happening maybe a KM from my house but visible (flashing lights and all sorts of things) and so I fired up my 700D 55-250 and ML 3x crop mode on a tripod (120mm equivalent) so we could see better what all the commotion was, and I was surprised at how much the IS was drifting around. It might have been drifting perhaps 10% of the width of the screen, was going in all directions, and was perhaps moving around at a 2-3 second timeframe. I was surprised that the lens obviously didn't have the fine sensitivity to detect these movements and correct them, it was like these were rounding errors in its algorithm.

Those Floppy Disk cameras were really something! I borrowed one from work one day and went out shooting, giving the camera the best fighting chance by taking shots in full sunlight. Behold the brilliance of how well the tech did, even in those days, when used in forgiving conditions If the timestamps are correct, these were 2003, but who knows - these files have moved from HDD to HDD over and over and over during their existence

The problem is that everyone speaks from their perspective, and humans are adaptive, and contextual creatures. $2 for a cup of coffee doesn't sound like a lot, but to someone in the 1,000,000,000 people living on less than $1 per day income, that would some like a ridiculous luxury. Considering that most of us can afford hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy camera equipment, and care about things like Dynamic Range and Colour Science, we are all in the vastly deluded minority of people whose concerns seem trivial and frivolous. Potentially the largest problem this forum has is that the members habitually fail to acknowledge that we are each coming from a different environment, trying to accomplish different things, and have different priorities, and then we howl at each other furiously because of our lack of almost the tiniest bit of perspective.

Actually, if we apply the analogy to photography, they'd say "That's a great looking hammer - it must make spectacular houses!!"

I think it would have made a difference.. of course, if the one with the larger lens selection and sales history had licensed the technology to the other then it would have been better than inventing a new one as there would be a range already available. I think people underestimate the influences of lenses on body sales - everyone is critical of Canon DSLRs for video yet they still manage to make lots of money and some of that has to be because of the huge range of glass available.

You were clear, my summary might not have been The more I learn about the A7III the better it looks and the less likely the alternatives will suit my purposes.. Then I will begin the journey of learning to tame its colour science

Collaborations and sharing between companies can significantly impact the success of a product line... Imagine how different it would have gone if Panasonic and Olympus had competed with each other instead of making their m43 lenses compatible. In many industries there is only room for a set number of 'systems' so if two manufacturers who aren't currently occupying one of those slots team up they've got a much better chance of throwing someone off a throne and taking that slot. Of course, even if this ends up being a camera, we'd have to wait a long time and even then all it takes would be for it to have poor AF or no IBIS or one of any number of other 'sins' and it won't do well in the marketplace.

I've seen people add noise in preparation of harsh compression to prevent banding and other compression artefacts, especially for online compression. It's a common technique - they add noise in audio under very specific situations because it can lower artefacts (dither). Oh, I don't know. There's talk in other threads about just using a small kit lens or a single wide angle, so if you do that and have cargo pants or one of those vests that can take a 70-200 2.8 then it might be just fine! ?