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1 hour ago, jonpais said:

Tony Northrup recently did a poll where respondents frequently got it wrong when comparing the noise in two shots, even when the two images used were identical. I guess some people were intentionally guessing wrong just in order to mess up the results. So I'm pretty skeptical of these kinds of online polls myself. 

You're right to be.

We did a bit of study at uni around how to analyse things and how to not accidentally taint your results or get misleading results.  The impression that I took away was that it's a minefield and it's ridiculously difficult to get it right.

Of course, much data gathering is either completely biased through vested interests or incompetence.  

I once started completing an online survey, question one was pretty straight forward "Have you had fast food in the last 3 days" I answered "yes" because I'd had fish and chips, but then it all came to a crashing halt with question two "Which did you have: KFC, McDonalds, Chicken Treat, Hungry Jacks" and there was no "Other" option.  Never mind the local fish-and-chip place - not even all the big fast food chains were in there!

(The article suggests that Apple will push everyone to iOS)

Two main problems with iOS is lack of real multi-tasking and no shared file system.

Until iOS supports running 10 apps concurrently (with maybe a total of a dozen browser tabs open) and has a file system where all kind of files can be stored then there's no way in hell it would be usable.  and when I say 10 apps concurrently, I don't mean it remembers what was running and re-runs it when you swap back to it, I mean things active in RAM.

If moving away from Intel means better performance then great, but no support for real workflows brings performance to a complete stop.

2 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

As a doc director/producer/shooter I can agree with this...and also disagree with this.  A good shooter can and will find the best angle for light even in bad lighting situations.  Changing the perspective of a shot for better light is always an option.  It's not always easy, but that's part of the craft.  Making good cinematic decisions under the gun is doable.  So, you don't control the light, but you do control how the camera sees it.

1 hour ago, kidzrevil said:

Im not assuming and I have ?

This was shot in SLOG2 and compressed to the 6-7 stops of REC709 gamma

There’s ways around it OR you can choose what you want to keep and what you want to lose. I don’t mind choosing between crushing shadows or blowing highlights as long as my midtones are preserved and my composition is balanced.

It all comes down to how much control you have.  

I fully agree that the operator has way more control and options than the average amateur thinks are possible - otherwise the famous street photographers (HCB, Maier, Winogrand, etc) were just the luckiest people in the universe!  I have done enough street photography and wildlife photography to be able to feel the split in my brain where one part is thinking about the shot I'm taking and the other part is thinking about what is about to happen, what shots are likely to be available and how I would capture the best one.  Highly skilled street photographers could have one eye on the viewfinder composing a shot while the other was open and surveying the broader scene looking for what was about to enter the field of view.  I'm good enough at this to know what is possible but also how bad I am at it.

However, there are always situations where you have no control.  You have no control about where your vantage point is, if, for example, you are sitting in a packed moving vehicle shooting out the window (tour bus, helicopter, train, plane), or when you're at the zoo looking at the animals from the lookout that is only wide enough for a couple of people to stand in at the same time.  In a vehicle you get to control framing, and camera position within a space about maybe 50x50x50cm perhaps, but that's it.  
Sometimes you don't have control about where the subject is, kids running in the park in-between areas of full sun and full shade (and the full shade is relatively dark because vegetation is pretty good at absorbing light).  

My approach to these situations where you are restricted about where you can shoot from, or the lighting on the subject you're shooting is two-fold:
1) Just film a lot - "spray and pray" as it's called.  This is partly valid as the more you film the more likely you are to get a great moment, but it also means that when you're in the edit room you are able to replace great content that has unusable levels with other great content that does have useable levels.
2) Understand that you are not always going to get the shot from the best angle - either by lack of options, lack of skill, or both - and just buy a camera with more DR.  This is what I am talking about here.

If your video is about your families trip to the park, and your kid is happiest when they're running, and the bad lighting was where they were running before everyone sat down to ate and then the kids all fell asleep, good luck in the edit suite looking at one of the nicest pieces of footage you have from the outing and trying to decide between the best content and it not being noisy or clipped all to hell.

41 minutes ago, kidzrevil said:

at this point its about how good we are as camera operators. 

You assume that a good camera operator has control over their environment.  Try doing any documentary work outside in direct sunlight and it won't matter how good an operator you are - if your camera doesn't have enough DR you're going to be clipping highlights or crushing blacks or both at the same time in the same shot.

5 hours ago, Deadcode said:

Storm is coming... 

SD Card writing speed hack

If you are familiar with the ML possibilities, you already know the best RAW capable cameras are those with CF card. The CF Card interface is capable of 70MB/s writing speed with 5D2, 75MB/s with 7D, and 95MB/s with 5D3.

6D / 700D which has SD interface is only capable of 40MB/s, limited by the camera and not the SD card.

Now the ML team are pumping up the SD card interface writing speed. It seems like the 40MB/s can be raised up to 70MB/s or even further.

That means the 700D will be able to record in 2520x1072 continuously

I hope they can make it stable

 

Holy wow.. that is excellent news!  I bought my 700D for stills and to replace my Panasonic GF3 as a travel camera more years ago than I can remember...

I think I read something about RAW compression (which I interpreted as lossless compression) which was also being worked on?

4 hours ago, IronFilm said:

You're hiding in there the wild assumption that camera manufactures will all be equally sensible with the compression algorithms used. 

Which isn't at all true!

I did say 'roughly'..   maybe I should have compensated for the internet taking everything literally and said 'VERY roughly' :P

However, regardless of codec, every 50Mbps codec is going to be bested by every 500Mbit codec, so I think the principle applies.

If this was a general discussion about image quality then I might have put more finesse into my argument, but considering the stupidly high bitrates of the BMPCC, I thought that it was a good enough explanation

Well, this is a lively conversation!!

As I see it @markr041 and @webrunner5 are both right with excellent points.  

The big one for me is that @webrunner5 is right to equate run-and-gun with poor quality, and that is exactly why we need smaller high quality devices.  A few points:

1) why shoot run-and-gun?  
Reason #1 - because some things move very quickly and you need to move quickly to follow them.  Exhibit A - kids and any family outing.  No pauses, no waiting, no do-overs.  
Reason #2 - because content is king and most of the world is more than 20m walk from where you can park your equipment truck!  You need to get to the places worth shooting - and these are often at the end of long hikes.
Reason #3 - because many historically or culturally significant places don't let you in with a tripod - Vatican City wouldn't let me in with a ~25cm tall Gorillapod!  And good luck getting into almost anywhere with a camera that looks 'pro'.

2) why do run-and-gun shooters need high-quality equipment?
Reason #1 - it's precisely because we don't have control of the environment that we need higher quality recording.  If you shoot slowly and in controlled situations you can shoot with a camera with 6 stops of DR in 8-bit.  Good luck with that if you're outside and the sun is shining.  Part of the reason that camcorders and home videos look so awful is because people used them where the action was, not where the lighting was like a film-set.  
We need higher DR because the sun shines on things we're filming.
We need higher bit-depth because sometimes the sun goes behind a cloud when we're recording and now the exposure is way under and we need to significantly boost the gain to get a sensible exposure.
We need higher frame rates because we haven't got the ability to predict what will need to be in slow-motion and what won't.  So we would ideally like to film everything in slow motion.

Do I need to keep going? :D

Hi Simon, welcome to the forums.

I'm no expert on what cameras are in the market at the moment, but your requirements and your budget look like they might not be terribly compatible.  I could be wrong and people may reply with great recommendations, but if they don't, then that's probably the reason.

If you don't get helpful replies I'd suggest having a look through the recent threads on the forum (ie, the last few months) - there are threads talking about most of the well liked cameras.  Eg,  there's one talking about the BMPCC active right now, partly because the camera is well-liked by people here.  Threads talking about cameras that aren't well liked sink like a stone because no-one replies.

Best of luck!

16 hours ago, mercer said:

That’s true on some level, although I think ProRes HQ out of the Pocket and Micro has a higher bitrate than that. But your 4K examples aren’t the price point I am referring to. In the sub $1000 market, 4K bitrates hover around 100mbps, so really not that much higher than the 90mbps all-i 1080p out of the 80D. With that being said, I don’t hate 4K, I just feel consumer 4K is often thin and brittle and oversharpened with too heavy of noise reduction. For $500 used in ProRes and Raw you are getting a purer, thicker image, with a better basis for cinematic grading.

Interesting.  I remember back in the day I compared the quality of a 720p file and a SD file of the same bitrate and the 720p definitely had more information in it, but perhaps this isn't what it you are looking for.  I've been playing with ML on my 700D and trying to work out if I should bother, and if so, what the benefit was over 300Mbps 8-bit 4K.  I had in mind that perhaps the colour was what people were liking about it, and 'a purer, thicker image' might be a good way of describing it, with 'thin and brittle' perhaps being the opposite.  If you're going to grade heavily afterwards then putting more data into colour bit-depth wold make sense as well.

Regardless, the high bit-depth / bitrate of cameras like the BMPCC can't hurt, is difficult to find at any price-point us mortals can afford, and is almost unrivalled in such a compact package.

The BMPCC made the top 3 when I was buying the XC10 - it was the non-IQ related aspects like battery life and poor sound quality that meant I didn't end up with one.

On 31/03/2018 at 1:02 PM, mercer said:

Yeah they really are special cameras. Every time I read too much discussion about 4K this or 4K that, I go back to my Vimeo favorites and watch some videos from the Pocket, the Micro or some ML Raw.

I wouldn't be too down on 4K...  Think about it like this - we like things like high DR, higher-bit-depths, higher resolutions, lack of over sharpening, etc.  If you think about it, except for DR, all of those are related to compression.  Bit-depth is colour value quantisation and resolution is about image detail quantisation (over sharpening creates artefacts similar to JPG compression and is related to the distortion of high-frequency image information) but all of these are related to throwing away information.  Assuming the camera manufacturers allocate the bitrate in a sensible way, which they are pretty good at doing (ie, not 480p with 30-bit colour depth or 8K with 3-bit colour depth), then image quality will be roughly proportional to bitrate.

If we look at a few random cameras, this plays out:
My Canon 700D natively outputs <50Mbit 1080, but ML can do ~300Mbit.
The Canon 5DIII natively outputs <50Mbit 1080, but ML is something like 500Mbit? (I'm not sure on this but it's a lot)
My Canon XC10 records 1080p25 in 35Mbit, 1080p50 in 50Mbit (which is 25Mbps when conformed to 25p) and 305Mbit in 4k25
IIRC the GH5 records 1080 in 100Mbps and 4k60 in 400Mbps (166Mbps when conformed to 25p)

The BMPCC records 1080 at 230Mbps in Prores and 569Mbit in RAW.

When you look at IQ like this it makes sense about why the BMPCC and other models in the range still stack up.  It also makes sense why people are drawn to 4K recording modes, and why despite lacking 4K TVs have looked fine for decades.  I don't know what the signal-noise ratios of analog television was, but the combination of a good signal, high DR TV and a darkened room would have represented a high bitrate, as would film.

With a few exceptions, 4K is the only way to get high bitrates out of the 'stars' of the DSLR revolution.

9 minutes ago, markr041 said:

The size is right, and given the wide angle it is possible to shoot blind. But, does this model record 10bit 4K via HDMI? Unfortunately not, just 1080. We need an upgraded model.

I completely agree.  A new model that did 10bit 4K (and maybe a 'premium' model that does 10bit 4k60) would be excellent.

However, it's worth considering that the RX0 isn't as much of a shooting-blind-action-camera as others because of it's 25mm equivalent lens, as compared to the GoPro at around 14-17mm. For the RX0 the rig where it's mounted to the top of the monitor makes more sense.

Considering that the RX0 isn't fixed focus, how much of a challenge is it in getting focus?  I'd imagine it's got a relatively deep depth of field.

9 hours ago, markr041 said:

Now we have another reason to want a small external recorder

Some time ago I was looking at external recorders and learned about the Atomos Ninja Star - something that I assumed would be a spectacularly useful and popular product.  Then I discovered it was discontinued and was stunned.

If you were using the RX0 as an action camera (ie, mounted and used 'blind' - unlike most of the examples here which treat it as a normal camera) then the Ninja Star would be the perfect companion.

Maybe Atomos is the Canon of external recorders and protecting the higher models in their range..

What kind of setup would people use this in?  I thought that by the time you add an external recorder (and likely a cage of some kind to connect the camera and recorder) that the benefit of having an action camera was lost and you may as well have a larger camera.

Not criticising - I'm interested to hear how it would be used

4 hours ago, Snowfun said:

Why don’t we try to do a “festival” here on eoshd? Someone suggest a theme and give everyone a week or whatever. We link our offerings, sit back and enjoy... we’d have to agree to do the beer/weed thing remotely.

Big question - how many would participate?

Liam - organise it!!!

I'm in!

Maybe it could be weekly or fortnightly (just don't submit if you are busy during that time) and maybe have an optional challenge, like "something red" or "up high" or "complicated".

I find that the optional challenge might be inspirational.

14 minutes ago, Liam said:

Yeahhh.. I'd do that if I had film buds.

*cries a lot, but in a cool way*

Is this film festival a way to find film friends then?  if so, maybe social media might be a good place to reach out to people.

Especially if there's a film festival already in your area and you want to be a bit counter-culture about it, you could post on a bunch of forums or whatever saying something like:

Quote

 

The Other Film Festival

Didn't get into BigFilmFestival?  Come to ours.  Hell, come to ours anyway.

No frills, no budget, and no taste.  All films under 5 minutes get screened.  Bring beer.

Email Liam at ........

6 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

If I were you I'd just call up the buddies and have a night of it. 

Completely agree.  

Perhaps calling it a "short film night" might have better connotations?

How often do you finish a project and 'publish' it by sharing it (either with the end audience or, if you do one step in a larger production, with the people who do the next step)?

Do you want to finish projects more frequently?  Less frequently?

What are you doing to accomplish this?

I'm interested in hearing about other people's workflows, efforts to increase efficiency, and barriers people face.

Personally, I make home videos and 'publish' to family and friends.  I don't publish as often as I should and recently I've just gone through a phase of reviewing my equipment in preparation for a couple of big trips I've got this year, so the production line of editing (and getting through the large volume of footage I've got) has stalled in preference for technical evaluations of lenses, camera settings, etc.  I'm almost coming up for air, but I've made a few key improvements to get a good workflow setup, something I wasn't completely clear on previously, so I feel it's been worthwhile.

I heard a story (no idea if it's true) about someone in the industry - maybe they were a film critic(?) - that had a large shed in their backyard that was setup as a makeshift cinema and they ran a video night every Friday night.  In summer they had it outside on their lawn.  Anyone was welcome to attend, they showed short films on any format (I think he had a collection of players for different formats, like VHS, Beta, etc).  It was famous for being a completely mixed bag - great films mixed with awful crap.  I heard that often the best ones were shot on poor quality equipment as his night was known to accept all formats so it attracted those people that either didn't know how to get access to good equipment or didn't know it mattered to film-festivals until after they'd finished.  Apparently he screened a film shot on one of those Barbie cameras (where the camera was mounted in the doll) and it was well received by the audience despite being very poor image quality.

On 24/03/2018 at 2:49 AM, Liam said:

So I kind of want to start the smallest film festival ever…

In contrast to the other helpful and valid posts above, I'd like to challenge you a little bit around making it smaller rather than larger.

If I record a clip on my phone and then show my fiancé then is that the "smallest" film festival?  I would imagine that you would probably say that's not a film festival, and I'd probably agree with you, but what is important is WHY isn't that a film festival?  What are the minimum elements of a film festival that make it a film festival?

If I invite some mates over and we watch a video I shot, is that a film festival?  If not, what's missing?  More people?  More films?  Films must be edited?  Must be advertised?  Must be judging and a winner?

Make a list of what you think you require.

What are you hoping to get from hosting it?  Fame?  Fortune?  Gratification?  Gratification of what?  Making community?  Making a lot of noise?  Making a mess?

When you've done that, try and figure out how to minimise it - if you don't need a huge audience then you might not need a venue, which might mean you don't need insurance.  Try and think outside the box on this.  Ask yourself what you're willing to do in terms of 'breaking the rules'.  For instance if you were only interested in the community aspects of it you might drag out a an old Ebay projector (good films look fine in SD) into a park and use your mates car for sound, you'd probably be in violation of some kind of county laws or whatever, but maybe you don't care about these things.  Maybe there's a park that no-one will notice you using if you get there later in the evening (in summer it gets darker later so that works too).  Word of mouth and maybe photocopy a few fliers would get you enough audience for your own purposes.  

I think it's an awesome idea and I wish you all the success in the world, but I challenge you to think about what is important to you and have the smallest simplest cheapest least-official event that meets your expectations.

5 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Yup! Some YouTubers punch is so extreme is must be like 240p or worse!

I think many times it's "worse" rather than silky smooth 240p!

1 hour ago, Aussie Ash said:

Many you"tubers" have this problem, ten minutes of "talking head"to say something that could have been summirized in 60 seconds.

Yeah, and you know what 'streaming' is and why it's becoming so popular right?  It's making videos without the editing.  Or, as I like to call it, "you save 4 hours editing and 100,000 people waste 30 minutes watching crap you should have edited out - creating a total waste of 50,000 hours minus the 4 you saved yourself".  Or shorter - "selfish and worse".

Of course, some you tubers had already worked out that not editing anything saved them time before streaming became a thing.

In case any YouTubers are reading this, please drink deeply from the following statement...   IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PRE-WRITTEN SHOW WITH MULTIPLE PRESENTERS AND AT LEAST ONE PERSON PRODUCING THEN YOU ARE WASTING THOUSANDS OF HOURS (OR MORE) OF HUMANITIES TIME.  IF YOU'RE NOT A PRO AND CAN'T DEVOTE THAT KIND OF TIME THEN DON'T STREAM, AND IF YOU ARE A PRO AND YOU'RE NOT DOING THIS THEN DO YOUR F**KING JOB AND KEEP IT INTERESTING FOR THE WHOLE F**KING SHOW.

I know I don't have to watch, and I'm optimistic that eventually everyone else will work this out, but in the meantime the person whose time you wasted might have done something that helped cured cancer instead of watching you read the comments section without saying anything useful.

Ok, rant over.

1 hour ago, brianwahl said:

Another quick little clip using 60 and 120p footage and Eterna (graded in Resolve).

Nice footage.

If you get a chance it would be interesting to see the quality if you exported and uploaded this in 4K/UHD to YouTube.  I've done tests and found that YT compression is far less brutal on 4K.

I see lots of compression artefacts but it's hard to know what is the camera and what is YT.

If you don't have time then no worries - thanks for sharing!

Interesting thread, and a topic I've come at from a different perspective.

I bought my XC10 partly as a stills camera.  I'm sure that will come as a surprise to many, however for my needs it does make sense.

Firstly, I'm a rubbish photographer in terms of 'the decisive moment' and even sports photographers don't rely on hitting the shutter at just the right moment.  In this sense video is constant 25 FPS burst mode, so I should be able to pick the perfect frame in post.  Even sports cameras don't offer anything much more than 25fps burst modes.  One of the camera manufacturers (is it Red?) has a page on their website for magazine cover images taken from video.  I remember watching a video of headshot photographer Peter Hurley trying uncompressed 4K instead of still images, and he said there were too many frames to go through, so video is the 'ultimate' burst mode in a way.

Secondly, if a singular moment of fun is about to happen (it's my kids birthday and they haven't seen the cool cake yet, someone is receiving an award, etc) do you video it, or take still images?

Thirdly, building on point #1, the quality has to be sufficient.  Taking a stills frame from an ageing Canon DSLR will likely not be sufficient.  Therefore I wanted a 4K camera with a high-bitrate, which the XC10 fit the bill for.  In preparation for this I posed a few key questions to myself:
Q: What is the most demanding use I will have for still images?  A: printing at 8x10.  I'm not likely to print larger than this, and online won't go larger than this for a long while.  There's an argument that no-one needs more than 5MP because the larger you print something the further back you stand from it when looking at it.  That might not be 100% true, but it's worth taking into consideration.
Q: What is the most demanding user I will be putting these in front of?  A: these are photos of family and friends, so no-one who will be super-picky, and no paying clients.
Q: What is the minimum level of quality that I will require (in line of above)?  A: I did tests - 1080 frames were captured as still images from a point-and-shoot video, processed in LR, then displayed on the computer screen at varying sizes.  I found that 2MP isn't quite enough, that the codec was quite fragile and anything other than slight brightness/contrast/sat adjustments 'broke' it - this is worse in low-light.  This created my requirement for a 4K, higher bitrate codec, high DR camera with decent high ISO performance.

One compromise in the above was that shooting for stills requires a shorter exposure time than the 180-degree-shutter-rule, but that's life.

My tests from the XC10 were that still images taken from the 4K and then re-compressed were at a level of quality equivalent to about JPG quality 11 out of photoshop.  This is the equivalent image quality of higher-end compact point-and-shoot cameras with full manual controls that lack RAW capture and only support JPG image formats.  Obviously RAW would be better (!), but if you think of this as being an infinite 25fps burst mode of 12MP quality level 11 JPG images, that's a pretty decent level of performance and would suit many non-critical applications.

I only have personal experience with the XC10, however the above logic should apply to all current high-bitrate, high DR, 4K cameras, and those with 10-bit instead of 8-bit will of course be higher quality again than what I have from my setup.

I guess the question to ask is - how good is good enough?

8 hours ago, eoslover said:

Many other smartphone companies are also developing multiple focal lengths like 25mm, 50mm, 80mm packaging in one unit

I'm really looking forward to that.  I remember reading somewhere the estimated cost to Apple for the camera assembly in an iPhone and thought "Shit - I'd gladly pay for 4 of these if you could work out how to output a better image because of it".  Different focal ranges is the obvious step, and would make a phone so much more useful.

I went to go see one of my kids in the school play last night.  I wasn't sure on their policy on taking cameras as they widely publicised they were making their own video of the production.  They had signs up that said that we were allowed to take photos / video of our own kids, but no-one was allowed to publicly upload video containing any other kid without written permission of that kids parents.  I understand that totally.  This is the kind of shooting environment that phones find their way into, and having a wide lens really doesn't help with this at all.

I took high-bitrate 4K footage and will crop in post, but if my phone had 24, 50, and 100mm lenses to choose from then it would be far more suitable for things like this.

What's the small thing on top of the main camera?  Is it a remote viewfinder?  Or a small digital camera being used in parallel for footage review and management?

19 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

  I think jpfilmz is talking about the buggy LiveView on the LCD that still has some problems. It is probably better now since this statement was written by A1ex.

That makes sense..  sorry for the distraction.  Nothing to see here - move along!!