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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?

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

Just re-read @jpfilmz comment and now I'm not sure what he means? But what I am sure of is that the image quality coming out of these setups is absolutely phenomenal, even before you consider the price!

Considering what you'd have to pay to get equivalent image quality, maybe there's budget for a gimbal in there?

In addition to the above, it's worth noting that the larger the wheel diameter the better they deal with any loose objects they have to run over. ie, a bike can easily ride over a power cable but a skateboard would have issues. You haven't specified where you'd use it, but it's something to consider if it's going to be used on surfaces that aren't perfectly smooth.

I'm assuming you're referencing my post as I was the one that was talking about AI.. it seems there was a mis-understanding. I wasn't saying to rely on AI to somehow future-proof my footage. I was saying the opposite - I was saying that although AI will do fascinating things, in the not-too-distant future things will have changed so much, and from there looking back our 4K will be potato vision. It will be unusable except for nostalgia. and to directly answer the OPs questions: Yes. They will look back and see no difference. To them both will look like complete unusable mindblowingly bad poop, or it will be cute and retro and trendy and have no seriousness about the IQ applied at all. How much do you look at Charlie Chaplin films and distinguish between the ones before he could buy a sharper lens and those before? Do you care? Could you even tell if you wanted to? If you want to future-proof your films, make them good enough that people in 10-years will still watch them even though the quality was bad. Charlie Chaplin isn't still a famous name because of the image quality of his films! We can go further than anyone in this forum can possibly imagine. IIRC we've created sensors that can detect individual photons of light, so once they're miniaturised sufficiently we'll have sensors that have the bit-depth of the universe and billions and billions of pixels. The Apple A11 cpu inside my iPhone has 4.3 billion (BILLION!) transistors in it, and is probably smaller than full-frame. If those transistors were photo sites (a reasonable comparison as it's a simple circuit that requires power, data in and data out connections), that would be about 90,000 pixels wide by 50,000 pixels high. Just for fun I'm assuming the future is still 16:9.

@jpfilmz that is absolutely stunning. reminds me of the likes of things like ARRI promo videos etc..

You can't pull something out of an image that isn't there, but you sure can have a good look at what is there and take a guess about what is missing. Humans do this kind of interpolation all the time... there's a loud noise and we miss a few words in a sentence but we can guess by the context what they were, it's raining really hard and the windscreen wipers on your car aren't keeping up so half the time the view of the road is blurry and the other half it's got big drops all over it but not only can we keep the moments when we could see properly in our heads when the rain obscures everything but we can somehow correlate what we saw clearly with what is now blurred and if something moves suddenly during the blurry part our brain has kept track of what it was and even what it might look like if we could see. This is how computers will do it. The first phase is being able to recognise objects (which Google etc now do pretty well from photographs), the net phase will be to be able to understand an image in multiple layers and for them to have an understanding that the part of the person that is behind a pole still exists but is obscured, and the third will be to have a huge database of objects and be able to stretch and manipulate them in 4D space with all the physics applied and then match them to what it's seeing and put in the detail that isn't in the image. If you and I see a blurry image of a person wearing a scarf we know that the scarf is probably knitted (coarse pattern of woven thread) that has an array of fine textured fur around that coarse structure. AI will soon know this and substitute it in for us. Absolutely!!

Historically we will plateau when IQ becomes close to the limits of our perception, HOWEVER we are nowhere near these limits yet. Think 4k is enough because movie theatres were fine in 2K? What about VR capture - if your field of view is 120 degrees (just to pick a nice number) then that means you need 6k to spread 2K over your entire vision, but that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about the angle of view of a TV - which is something more like 45degrees, which means you need 8 * 2K horizontal, just to properly render sitting in a room watching a 2K TV. What about VR simulation of a 4K TV? Forgetaboutit!! But why just talk about resolution - let's talk about pixel depth.. what is the DR of the human eye? When they get "retina DR" devices, what will the bit depth of that video signal look like across that amount of dynamic range? I'm thinking that 10-bit isn't going to cut it at that point. And we're only talking 2D here.... what happens when we want 3D environments to be simulated from AI processed video feeds? Just mount a grid of cameras in the ceiling perhaps 12 inches apart and feed all those to an AI that creates a 3D VR environment and UH OH! The AI doesn't have enough information to go by and so the virtual attendees of the latest Hollywood whatever event can't see the expressions on the stars faces (or tell the difference between Elijah Wood and Daniel Radcliffe!) so we need to up the resolution. Now deaf people can't lip read, up it again. Now the FBI gets interested and decides that the tech is now ready for AI facial microexpression monitoring at all airports and other critical locations - more resolution needed! To many of you this will sound like science fiction, but you will be proven wrong. if you want evidence of this - pick up your smartphone and start talking to your virtual assistant, and then cast your mind back 35 years when many people still had Black and White Television. This is an array of audio microphones with computer processing... 8 years ago. https://www.wired.com/2010/10/super-microphone-picks-out-single-voice-in-a-crowded-stadium/

@webrunner5 - thanks! I just chalk it up to having a good memory and reading / watching too many tutorials.. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Everything from Montage Theory to the psychology of colour to the basics of composition from the early days of photography - we're swimming in images that have absorbed many many decades of talent and hard work. Kraig Adams (who did the above videos) is a bit of a wolf in sheeps clothing in film-making terms. IIRC he started filming weddings straight out of school, got crazy good at it, then created the Wedding Film School YT channel (which is excellent BTW), before pursuing vlogging and other videos and phasing out wedding filming altogether. He's also a minimalist so is a deep thinker in terms of what he needs for the final film and then how to get it with the minimum of equipment. I watch YT film-makers / vloggers a lot, but they're all operating at close to this level, which I know is the exception rather than the rule. Several of my favourites have things like C300s in their home studios for their talking-to-camera pieces, or at the least use A7SII (as Kraig does - including the above) or equivalent performance cameras, so they're at the top end of the platform. As someone who is also on the 'downhill' side of 40, they all look young to me too! If you're interested in more outrageously talented Yuotubers I can happily recommend people like: Brandon Li, Leftcoast, Peter McKinnon, and for people that are all about content and not film-making talk: Primitive Technology (videos of him making stuff in the bush without tools - he does not speak), and Andrew Huang (behind-the-scenes of making electronic music but I think his videos are better than the music). Subscribed. Looks like lots of good content there. Thanks!

In case anyone hasn't seen it - Philip Bloom playing with the Terra 4K. Very nice looking footage IMHO.

(In reply to all of the above) I had an "ah-ha" moment in film-making from one of my favourite YouTubers - Kraig Adams when he released these two videos: I'm not saying that he's a genius or anything, but I can say that he knows a ton more about film-making than I do, and his style of shooting is similar to mine so I find useful information in videos like these. The "ah-ha" moment was that he basically shoots in two separate 'styles'.. The first is 'vlog / real-life / run-and-gun / content-over-style'. This is shot with the gorillapod, in real-time (ie, not slow-motion), with location sound, and is shown in 16:9 aspect ratio. The second style is 'cinematic' and is basically used to show beautiful things in a beautiful way. This appears to be shot with the gimbal (or a drone, although he's moving away from drone footage), sometimes in slow motion depending on how fast things are moving in the scene, music only, and is shown in something like 2.35:1. The reason that I 'clicked' with these two was that in the above video he makes the two really obvious be deliberately contrasting the two styles, and talks about them in the making-of. @heart0less You probably already know this but I think it's about working out what look you're trying to achieve, looking at the conditions you're shooting in, and then working out what equipment / techniques / etc are required to bridge that gap. I can assure you that a gimbal will not produce smooth-with-no-soul results if you were riding a horse at full-speed! I've settled on having two rigs. The first is the XC10 and GoPro on the GorillaPod which with the IS in the XC10 and the crazy-wide-angle of the GoPro will give lifelike and natural movement without fast/tiny hand-shake. The second is my iPhone8 on a gimbal which between the lens IS and gimbal will allow me to do smooth panning shots of a beautiful scene, have walking shots that aren't distractingly shaky, and even have a faux drone shot or two (if you hold the gimbal up above your head they really look like a drone!). The gimbal can also be automated for panning during time lapses, or create hyper lapses which are basically super-smooth time lapses with the camera moving, and both of these are almost in the special-effects category, but will be fun to play around with. From an artistic perspective my films are about my family and photography/videography is a big part of my life so having a little bit of it in the video isn't inappropriate. @Matthew Hartman Homework assignment received - I will practice with my gimbal the moment I get home!

Thanks. I've also trimmed up the cold-shoe mount between the xc10 and the GoPro to make it a bit shorter too since I took that pic. I have a *very* accepting partner, and in a sense it's the price for me being happy I have toys to play with and for getting nice home videos

No worries whatsoever.. after all, clients are paying for skill and experience - not just equipment hire

I'm gradually 'making friends' with ML RAW on my 700D, and this is probably a stupid question, but I can't work out how to select some of the resolutions people talk about. When I go into RAW video (MLV) --> Resolution I can only choose from 640, 960, 1280, 1600, etc. People talk a lot about 1344 and other modes but I can't find them. Changing the aspect ratio only changes the vertical resolution, not horizontal. I know that if I choose 1920 or above it selects 1728, but what about modes like 1344? I've tried the nightly build, I've tried the 10/12 bit RAW Video experimental build 700D115 (released Jan 31 2018), I've tried the crop_rec module/build (magiclantern-crop_rec_4k.2018Mar10.700D115) and looked in the 3x3 crop mode and the 720/60fps canon mode but no joy there either. I've looked on the ML forums and YT videos but can't find any complete instructions. I'm probably just missing a step somewhere... any help would be greatly appreciated!

@kidzrevil great look! What is your post workflow?

What kind of projects / shots do you normally take with this setup? I'm curious to learn more about how other people shoot and what works for them. I know that film-making is similar to travelling in that when you start out you take far too much because you don't know what you'll need and you take it 'just in case' and I know I'm definitely in this phase!

Each 'bubble' on the legs have a rubber ring around them and they're surprisingly grippy. Combined with the fact you can bend it however you'd like it can do an ok job. The most significant issue is that as everything is flexible and there's no way to lock things down (there is no tighten adjustment) if you put enough force on something then it will move. I don't think you'll run into this problem if you get a large enough one (this is why I went with the largest model) but you can't expect it to be completely rigid either. Great advice. Rigs are personal and depend on what you're shooting and how you are approaching it. @jonpais what a great rig - reminds me of the contraption I've built for my next family holiday... It has the XC10 and Rode VMP+ pointing forwards and the GoPro and Rode VideoMicro pointing backwards so that I can get shots of myself included in the video. Including the GoPro also means that I can do things like time lapses (eg, if we stop to eat by a nice view) without having a separate rig. I'm also taking my phone with the a phone gimbal for those wide panning shots that I can never get smooth handheld. Time will tell if this rig is genius, ridiculous, or both! @heart0less view this as a sign of what NOT to do!

In addition to the above advice, another option I have opted to go with is a Job Gorillapod (I bought the largest one, I think it's called the 5K?). It's a small tripod with bendy legs, and is a jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none. If you're familiar with Casey Neistat it's what he uses on his hand-held rigs. It can be used: as a very short tripod (~30cm tall) if you bend the legs so they're together it works as a handle if you have a bullhead you can adjust it so the legs go straight out behind the camera horizontally and it's a crude shoulder rig if you have the legs coming back at you then you can have them make two points of contact with your chest, with your hands making three if you put one leg towards your chest you can shape the other two out to the sides in a W shape and they become two handles - one on each side of the camera a variation on the above is that the leg coming back goes over your shoulder making it a shoulder rig with handles it's grippy so it can be wrapped around trees, poles, etc etc etc etc It won't do any of those things as well as dedicated rigs, but it's probably the most flexible rig you can get. You said you didn't want to go overboard - this will give you some extra stability but will also ensure you aren't going too far! My other suggestion might be a monopod. Super stable if you're stationary, and if you're walking then it makes a decent counterbalance a bit like a glidecam.

My partner is starting her own business and part of her duties is public speaking, so I'm learning a bit about editing those videos. When you're going to smaller events they only film them with one camera (if they film them at all) so if you want to edit the speech down for length or to take out awkward moments then I've found punching in to be very useful. As much as I think people look down on YT and vloggers I have learned a lot about low budget film-making from watching how the best of them handle difficult situations. Partly because their publishing schedule is too fast to allow endless re-takes of things, and partly because they often talk about filming, or walk past mirrors, etc so you get to see a bit of behind-the-scenes as well. I particularly benefit from the fact that they have little to no planning, shoot under uncontrolled conditions and then have to make the best of it in the edit room, as that's also what my run-and-gun shooting is like with family holidays etc.

It depends on why you are punching in. In a true example of story > IQ I see many vloggers digital zoom in to 5x or 10x if there's something funny going on (especially of faces that people make in the background when they say something noteworthy). If they only do it for maybe a quarter of a second then the blurry and noisy quality is almost a filter that says "I punched in to this funny thing'. Part of my choice of the XC10 was that between the higher bitrate 4K and the lens IS the lens IS takes care of blur during the exposures of each frame and then I can punch-in or stabilise in post to smooth or eliminate macro-sized movement, meaning I don't have all the downsides of owning a gimbal. Obviously it's not quite the same, but it's a lot better than you'd think, especially if you're only rendering to 1080.

I agree with the above, but would add that 4K can be nice for talking head stuff for people whose channels are higher quality and more like they're the presenter of a show rather than someone recording inane verbal diarrhoea to amuse themselves while in-transit to somewhere unimportant (which - let's be honest - is most vlogs). This camera could easily do the presenter style videos because those people shoot under controlled conditions (essentially in a studio set) and so manual focus and a chair with a backrest would work well in these instances. RS doesn't matter as much if the camera is on a tripod and it's just a person talking. If they had to make compromises (it's Canon, so we'll let the ML team determine if they were necessary) then they're not so bad for vlogging I think.

THIS. I was that guy - I did my research, bought the XC10 and then read the 50+ page XC10 thread on this board to try and learn how to get the most out of it. The purchase was one of the top 10 most expensive things I've bought in my life and the result of much research and conversations with my significant other to get financial approval, and by the end of the thread I thought that I'd f*cked it up, both for buying the wrong camera and also not realising it was only worth about a third of new price on the second-hand market. Now I know that not only had most of the critical people in that thread never even seen the camera in real life, but that many criticisms were factually incorrect (ie, they hadn't even read the spec sheet), they don't actually know much about film-making, and are just aggressive ass-hats. But I didn't know that at the time. In terms of what that means for this forum - I registered to every other film-making forum before joining this one. I read all threads on this board with the assumption that every second person can't read, can't make films, and is unpleasant. I don't have that mindset on any of the other forums I'm on - it may not be related but they're all industry forums where almost every single person is courteous, respectful, and tries not to talk out of their a**es. That's why I had a look here today. I literally thought "I'll have a look in that thread - let's see if there's any chance that there's usable info there - I'll read the last page and if not then I won't bother reading any further".

True.. I rarely watch movies these days actually, mostly watching TV shows (mostly ones where there is no episode-only plot lines - so they're more like a movie delivered in chunks) and youtube videos / documentaries. I do understand there's an art to introducing characters, pummelling the crap out of them and then wrapping it all up, and having it fit into 75-120 minutes, but mostly that constraint doesn't seem to have any intrinsic value to me and if there's enough story in the story (so to speak) then making a TV show out of it and having 6 hours (UK) or 10-17 hours (US) to tell the story makes it a better experience because there's more time to develop characters and story etc. Obviously though, if there isn't enough story in the story then longer is much worse than shorter (eg, Sherlock vs Elementary where the UK told the story in 6 hours and the US version had the same 6 hours of story but also about 12 hours of filler).