kye

Maybe not....

The TL;DR is that you're incredibly valuable to any office environment, but the challenge is that compared to the average (borderline useless) office worker you're so different that the entire system won't be able to see your value, so the challenge is how to get in the door and then get your bearings. I've spent my whole career in offices - starting with IT background and working through project management to program management to various consulting and transformation engagements. I am an independent consultant not under the umbrella of any consulting firm, so I'm on my own for networking and finding new contracts etc, so have navigated this territory for a while now. The most significant things I have observed are these: Almost no-one understands the concept of transferrable skills. There is no understanding of this in the recruitment process or HR department at all - zero. Offices and corporate environments are designed to treat staff as pre-programmed robots. If your entire career history isn't the same job title over and over again then they don't know what to do with you. Offices and corporate environments are places where the rules of the game do not include things like productivity or practicality (or probably anything you'd recognise), they are about perceptions and processes and culture and not rocking the boat. The only people that appreciate people who can take ownership of an outcome and actually get things done are a select group of middle/senior managers who are being suffocated by red tape and actually trying to move the needle on some outcome. There are two types of people, those who change things and those who run things and maintain the status quo. You are the former, not the latter. As you are someone who knows how to actually get things done, I'd suggest the following: Any kind of role with a focus on making changes or solving problems and hitting deadlines should be a good fit - this is likely a management role but don't confuse the management roles that are just managing a team of people that do repetitive tasks Smaller organisations are likely to be a better fit, as they'll be more comprehendible for someone not familiar with the corporate world (think of it as a parallel universe completely separated from reality with different rules) As much as you can, bypass any recruitment process, and try and establish contact with the people inside the business who make decisions and can see your worth (and if necessary can ensure you're not filtered out in any recruitment process that is required) Try and meet these managers directly - many people have needs to hire good people but don't have advertised positions because the job market is pretty devoid of sensible people - so if you get in contact with these people they might make a new position for you What you want to do is get talking to the managers who have money and decision-making authority and have them decide to hire you. This is the whole purpose of networking. The other challenge is once you're in the door, how do you work out how to fit in and get people to work with you. Things like running meetings, getting people who don't work for you to do work, how to explain things to management types so that they understand you (including how to tell them things they don't want to hear without making them want to fire you), etc. My sister made the transition from film to 'normal' work. She retrained in Business Analysis (basically analysing a problem and designing solutions) and Project Management. She got hired into a large corporate firm into the call centre, but very quickly started doing things on top of the normal work (which she absolutely hated) and was internally promoted, and has now been internally promoted several times as they gradually see her potential, and as she gradually learns the new culture and ways of doing things. It's a long learning curve, but it can be done. Good luck!

Yeah, it's hardly the ideal package size if you want a tiny setup. If I went this direction I would fit it with an external SSD and small monitor like the Ikan VL35 3.5" 4K monitor I have with my M2K and a battery plate. Still, the other options for a RAW setup also have pretty significant compromises: OG BMPCC - small all-in-one package and internal RAW/Prores but only 1080p and screen is fixed and not bright and tiny batteries and no 60p and no dual-ISO OG BMMCC - same size as this plus internal RAW/Prores but only 1080p and no dual-ISO P4K / P6K etc - internal RAW/Prores but ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS Sigma FP - small with internal RAW (in limited resolutions/bit-depths) but fixed screen and RAW not compressed so file sizes are large and some modes require external SSD Various mirrorless cameras - much larger to begin with but also require 5"+ external recorder to record RAW The ideal package would be this sensor in an updated P2K chassis, but I doubt this will ever eventuate. In terms of this only recording BRAW and not Prores, I do wonder what the computational differences would be between BRAW and Prores - they might be similar in practice.

60p at 360deg shutter looks like poop. 60p at 180deg shutter looks like poop. 60p at 45deg shutter looks like poop. 60p at 1deg shutter looks like poop.

What do you mean "will be"....

It's easy to tell... When you look in the mirror do you see a long majestic flowing magnificent beard? If so, then you might be Ironfilm, or potentially a member of ZZ Top, but if not then it's ruled out definitively.

More M4K footage.... Cat video was apparently shot on the Voigtlander NOKTON25mm 0.95, but details are sparse. The second video has no details at all, and the first simply had "#cat" as the description, but someone asked about the lens in the comments!

The latest Samsung USB SSDs get 2000MB/s, which is 16,000Mbps. The BM 6K FF camera does 6144 x 3456 (6K) with Blackmagic RAW 3:1 at 323 MB/s for 30p, so 2000MB/s would be able to do 10810 x 6080 at 60p. Of course, that's BRAW, but I don't think it being a removable drive would be the bottleneck. Also, if it was removable, not only could you swap them out in the field, but over time when the SSDs got larger / cheaper you'd be able to benefit from that progress.

Not an odd request at all! These days it does seem that the preference is to go with ProresRAW or BRAW in order to get file sizes under control though, and after looking at the Sigma FP I can understand this trend because WOW, those data rates are just stratospheric! One thing I'd dearly love for the manufacturers to offer is downsampled Cinema DNGs. So, if you had a 6K sensor then you could choose 4K, 3K, 2.5K 2K, 1080p resolutions that were still the full sensor width. This gives much of the benefits of both worlds. Are you talking about internal storage like a small internal SSD inside the camera? I have definitely noticed that many cameras record externally to SSD at much higher data rates than their card slots are able to muster. Perhaps, and I know I'm being optimistic now, an open standard might emerge where NVME shaped SSDs in a slimline hard-case could be used as removable media via a slot. Any camera that supported it would have the benefit of not requiring a fragile lump+cable to be attached, but the user would get the benefit of a fast drive.

Yeah, it's deceptively deep!

There's also the concept of Enshittification, so actually there is no rule it has to be better at all.

The idea that justice is even common, let alone the norm, is a fantasy. The world is a place where people can get away with almost anything, provided they were lucky, or smart, or had help, or were in a situation that condoned it. My approach to staying sane is to try and view injustices as reality, and try and focus on what happens next. If you got robbed one day and you spent the rest of your life being angry and sour about it, your attitude would cost you a lot more than what you lost.

I wouldn't suggest beginning things as a colourist now to anyone - the impacts of tech evolution have barely even begun and they're practically incomprehensible already. I'm in the Resolve Professional Users invite-only group on FB, I understand only about half the questions being asked, let alone know the answers, and the group recently decided there were too many basic questions being asked and has created another invite-only group with a higher standard. In terms of who is where on the scale, one comment I've heard from quite a number of colourists is that anyone can make great looking images, it's the skills beyond that that separate the amateur from the good from the great. Considering I can't even reliably make great looking images, I shudder to think of how deep the knowledge goes of the folks at the top, who can reliably make great looking images from footage shot on random cameras in random ways with a random number of mentally unstable people giving them creative direction in sentence fragments and gesticulation that would scare most mental health professionals... and make enough profit doing so to prevent themselves from becoming homeless. I'd suggest that the list of criteria to get even 2/10 would probably contain a number of phrases that most camera YT folks wouldn't even be able to pronounce, let alone define, let alone work with, let alone troubleshoot. There are people out there shooting with mirrorless cameras, getting impressive looking results, who don't even get to 1/10 on this scale.

We all know that professional colourists are more skilled than the rest of us, but one thing I've started to become aware of more recently is that there is a huge gap in the middle ground between us and them. Sort of like we're down the bottom in the 0-2 range, and the serious pros are up in the 6-10 range. Of course, there are professional colourists who are in that middle 2-6 range, but the thing is that because they're working on images 20-80 hours a week (20 at first, but very quickly building up to 80 hours a week - they work crazy crazy hard) they very very quickly progress from that 2-6 range of skill up to the 6-10 range. I say all this because I've had very unpredictable interactions with them - sometimes I ask a question or request a feature and they all turn around and answer and discuss it, and other times I get zero reaction at all. Every so often I learn something and realise the questions / comments that got no reaction were actually just enormously ill-informed or don't make sense when you start thinking about things the way they do (which is very very different to how its described on forums / YT). So, all that is to say that I genuinely have no idea what the rationale is behind various decisions in Resolve. It might be that it's a tech company introducing a random feature because someone worked it out and it actually sucks, or there's some technical limitation, or there's some special reason it's like that but we'll never know because it's designed to work in a way that fits into a particular workflow that solves a problem that you and I will never have. The more I learn about the world, the more I realise what I don't know, and the more I realise there are many things that I cannot know. Most of my progression these days is unlearning things I've learned in the past that are just flat-out wrong, useless, misleading, or all of the above.

Actually, that's an interesting idea - you could take the 4K image and Super Scale it to 8K, then when you crop into it on the timeline you'd be cropping into (let's say) a 6K area of the image, which was originally a 3K area. It's definitely worth trying along side dialling in the sharpness yourself.

If you haven't done it already, I suggest you do a test to see how much you can zoom in post before it becomes visible. I did this test and was able to zoom to 150% without degradation. Here's what I recommend (and I did): Get your sharpest lens Find a subject with sharp edges / textures Put high contrast lighting on the subject, so the edges have maximum contrast Setup up the shot, be sure to stop the lens aperture down 2-3 stops from wide open so you're in the sharpest part of the lens Take one shot from this perspective Move the camera a bit closer, refocus, take another shot Repeat 6 a few times In post, take the first shot and crop it to roughly match each subsequent shot For each crop, go back and forth between the cropped and normal shots, and add sharpening to the cropped shot until the overall level of perceptual sharpness is even Apply a colour grade across all the shots Export / upload the footage how you would normally deliver Compare each pair of FOVs and see if that level of crop is acceptable I've done this test, and I've seen others do this test too, and the results are surprising. I've also seen a bunch of morons do this test but without applying sharpening, then when the sharpness didn't match they declared that they needed the extra resolution - talk about embarrassing yourself in public! Of course, this test is grossly unfair, as in real shooting it takes a much greater difference to notice, and what is visible on the timeline is often not visible in the export (and is obliterated in the stream...)

The before and after shots in the video sure are pretty convincing. I had to laugh a couple of times though. What he should have said was: 1) It does a great job of removing moire, but on the other hand it also reduces the sharpness which improves the image more than the removal of the moire, and, 2) It introduces a slight colour shift, but here, I've radically overcompensated in post and made the WB much worse but in the other direction! My vague recollection is that the Rawlite ones seem to be the ones that go bad, but here's how I see it. Either your filter is about to go bad, in which case you have enough problems and the last thing you need is to make your life worse by worrying about it, or your filter will be fine for a long time, in which case worrying will stop you from simply enjoying yourself. 🙂 So, either way....

One downside I can think of is how long the OLPF might last? The ones that people put into their OG BMPCCs have some sort of problem - IIRC they go foggy? Anyway, people are always talking online about replacing them. It might just be isolated to that time-period or manufacturer, but something to look into. Otherwise, yeah, why not.

Cool video, and nice use of a projector as light-source. In terms of more normal narrative lighting, I highly recommend the WanderingDP YT channel for cinematography breakdowns, mostly from advertising but also some features. He talks about the whole topic of cinematography, but mostly concentrates on camera placement in the environment, location design, lighting, blocking, etc all together because they interact, but the focus is on the light, which is why I mention it in response to your question. Moving into more interesting lighting for things like music videos, I don't have a specific recommendation, but a couple of thoughts that did occur to me are: Try to create more contrast Music videos are where you can push things, and you can push the colour grade as well as the production design. In the situations like the outside shots where production design is pretty limited, you can still push the contrast in post, you can push the saturation too (perhaps pushing only select hue ranges, and perhaps darkening them to fit the grittier vibe), and you can also do a split-toning effect (like having cooler shadows). All these will create more contrast in post. Try to create more variation in the frame This relies a bit more on equipment, but try having more sources of coloured light and really push the hues. Maybe grab a second projector and shine one on the talent and one on the background but having different colours. Try shining one on the talent from the left and one from the right. Another more general thought is to create a bit more variation in shots. This involves shooting more angles, so would take more time, so maybe it wasn't in the budget, but getting more angles would really help in the edit. Even if you could get the artist to do an additional run-through in each location and you just film it getting as many different angles as possible - high-angle, low angle, close-up, shot of their hands, focus on the background with them blurred in profile etc. Then you can find any interesting little moments in that one and put them over the top in the edit. In terms of inspiration, do a bunch of google image searches for inspiration, and save any images you like. This is the images for the search "great music videos": Lots of cool ideas in there. Remember good artists copy, great artists steal! Why don't you like the Helios for run-n-gun work?

A hazelnut?

It's also nice to see signs of life from the brand and for the system overall, considering that lots of MFT users would best be described as..... skittish.

43rumours reports that on Jan 30th, OM SYSTEMS will announce: OM-1II 9-18mm II 150-600mm f/5.0-6.3 The article has more details, and also linked to this video. Anyone interested in these things?

Very very carefully?

Something like an F3 looks better than most of the latest mirrorless cameras regardless of how you use them.... unless you've got half-a-decade of colour grading experience, and even then....

We might be closer to Adelaide than you are to Sydney, but have you been to Adelaide? From any kind of perspective it's a non-place, so I'd rather be slightly further away from Sydney!