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On 10/27/2022 at 5:13 AM, IronFilm said:

The Sound Dept meanwhile secretly hopes that there will not be even one more future camera released with the ability to do the evils of open gate shooting. 

Is there an arms race in the microphone world to make microphones more and more directional?

That would be the natural response to having to put the mic further away from the talent, and it's something that would be easily marketable as a single number...  which is how manufactures get people to replace their perfectly good equipment with newer, marginally better, models.

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

Maybe a sign Sony are overtaking Canon & Nikon in sales figures.

A YouTuber's favourite camera is the one that generates the most affiliate commission with B&H.

I wonder how many videos it takes for a new camera to pay for itself in extra revenue.  ie, where the YouTubers purchase price (whatever that might be for those with large sub counts) is overtaken by extra clicks that their videos get from having a new camera vs filming with the one they were using before.  

One of the things I've noticed in quite a lot of situations is that they (McKinnon, Matti, etc) often seem to have several of the new camera bodies on their shelves rather than just one that they'd need to buy to make the review videos.  If It's an R5, let's say, and they had three of them, and a few nicer lenses, then that's a serious investment!

4 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I understand why people put practical pragmatism ahead of perfectionism. 

Also, if you're looking to up your quality of final edits, it basically doesn't matter what type of videos you make, upgrading your camera is probably pretty far down the list of what will actually move the needle in terms of outputs.

I've seen inexperienced folks shoot with an Alexa and it looked like a poor quality student film 🙂 

2 hours ago, Django said:

I just discovered this "van life" scene the other day looking for FX30 videos. I was kind of shocked this one "influencer" got a whole Sony pelican case of gear yet at the time of release, she only had 25 subscribers ?! What's at play here, Sony marketing trend speculating?

HOW TO VLOG - with the new Sony FX30 Cinema Camera!

In all seriousness (or more than my last post at least), the formula for YT success is to make videos that can be found through organic searching (as this exposes you to new viewers) but also keep the content suitable to retain your audience (as this builds the channel over time).

A video where you get a new camera and put that in the title is just as good as a van tour video where you put that in the title, or go to a new place and put that in the title, or whatever.  These things are good for both organic views as well as your existing subscriber base.

If I was just starting out on YT an FX30 wouldn't be a bad choice I don't think.  These days all cameras are good enough, and Sony is popular enough that if you have problems then half the people in your YT circle can help you out because they're using Sony too.  It's one of the reasons that ARRI are the Hollywood standard, everyone knows the system and are setup for it, as well as the image and products being spectacular of course.

2 hours ago, Django said:

I just discovered this "van life" scene the other day looking for FX30 videos. I was kind of shocked this one "influencer" got a whole Sony pelican case of gear yet at the time of release, she only had 25 subscribers ?! What's at play here, Sony marketing trend speculating?

HOW TO VLOG - with the new Sony FX30 Cinema Camera!

and here's a channel with 825K subs that is filmed with an iPhone.... https://www.youtube.com/c/hannahleeduggan/videos

What can we draw from these two amazing data points?  How about...  cameras don't matter than much 🙂 

3 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I wonder if we can get this thread to have more pages than the "A7RV announced" thread....

I'm willing to do my part!

43 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

They will need the latest Sony for sure (probably the next gen…or one after that, ie, will have to wait a few weeks) for when they make their, “Why I QUIT Van LIFE” video.

Also, “Anyone Want A DOG As It Is No Longer A PUPPY”.

Actually, and I know this might come as a bit of a shock, but mostly these people don't think about the cameras they use the way that camera YT does, and many of them just use their phones.

Some of the ways I can tell this is that:

• they mostly shoot deeper DoF
• they mostly shoot in-camera picture profiles (or do a stunningly good job of grading footage so it looks like the in-camera profiles)
• if they do get a new camera they will typically not mention it, except if they screw something up and have to apologise for it by saying "sorry, new camera, I'll work it out eventually"
• if they do a video covering their essentials they will often just say the brand of the camera and some even say they don't know what the model is

Also, and these probably will also come as a shock:

• Lots of them have been doing van life for years and years and aren't quitting anytime soon
• There is no way they would ever ever ever ever get rid of their dogs because they weren't a puppy anymore

Outside of camera YT there's many many little niches where people care about things other than YT and equipment, aren't attention-grabbing narcissists, and genuinely care about living creatures other than themselves.  SHOCK!!!!

6 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Well, it's certainly true that the GH6 has not made the same kind of splash that the GH5 did. Personally, I don't find M43 to be too much of a burden when shooting with a 0.64x Speedbooster. It's kind of a sweet spot of boosted light for exposure and manageable DOF. For me full frame has too little when shooting wide open with fast glass and I think that approximately APS-C or Super35 sensor size is pretty good. M43 is too small, but with a 0.64x speedbooster it's actually "bigger" than APS-C at 1.28x crop relative to full frame.

Here are a few clips shot wide open with an Iscorama 36 on an Olympus OM 50 1.8 manual lens. Talk about making life difficult for myself with an Iscorama shooting wide open - swapping diopters between almost every single shot! A lesson in patience! Oh well, it's worth it for the bokeh and the flares I guess 😂

Very nice!

I'm glad to see that at least one person on the internet hasn't forgotten how to put some feeling into their images!

Almost all videos these days look like a lens sharpness test that's been graded as a sharpening-in-post stress-test...

Why do people have this secret desire to be a coroner?

13 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

And puppies? Why don't we see more puppy videos??

Puppies pretty quickly grow and look like dogs.  Even at 6-months or so, most puppies look like very excitable dogs.

If you do a bit of searching for van-life videos you'll quickly find that there are thousands of twenty-something women who live in vans with their dog and travel constantly while living full-time on their YT channel or Etsy store.  Dogs get a lot of air-time in that genre of content 🙂 

6 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

I've defended Gerald a lot on this forum, but when you do those analyses and then completely downplay the results or say they're not important because you're in the bag for Sony, you do more harm misleading people than the reviewers that just gush about how great every camera that is sent to them is. He built a reputation for his technical, long form reviews that were neutral and even-handed. Now that reputation is used to shill a company. It's dishonest, far more so than those that just give their opinions. And whether we like it or not, these people DO influence a lot of people's purchasing decisions. Whether you're one of those people or not, his move from being objective to significantly less so should be disappointing.

I guess I never trusted him, so was never betrayed.  In terms of being neutral and even-handed, facts are always neutral and even-handed, so that part hasn't changed - unless he's outright lying of course.

To me, reviews contain facts and fluff, with the facts being the only useful things.  The challenge was always what facts were missing, which is always a problem because it doesn't matter how deeply a camera is reviewed, they're never going to cover every aspect.

When I first got into video, I did a bunch of reading and came to (what I thought) were reasonable conclusions.  Those were that 4K, bitrate and AF were the most important things, oh how little I knew!  Could I have saved myself from going down that particular dead-end road by trusting the right person?  No.  No reviewer was saying what I needed to hear, and the ones that I later found that were pointing in (at least) partially the right direction would have been waaaay out of the realm of what I was ready for (Steve Yedlin for instance).

It's a process, you have to learn for yourself, and unless you're a YouTuber making camera reviews, then the YouTubers making camera reviews couldn't possibly steer you in the right direction, even if they were squeaky clean.

3 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

That probably sounds privileged as we are so spoiled when it comes to cameras now. They are raking in the cash though so why not keep them on their toes. 

I don't think we are spoiled.

Cameras have gotten more and more features, but the manufacturers aren't giving people what they want, they're improving the specs that drive TV sales and then marketing the crap out of them in order to brainwash the customers into thinking the new features are actually desirable.

Did you see the two recent videos by Crimson Engine about cinema cameras?  I thought he did a great job.  The first one is what the manufacturers are pushing, and the second is what people actually want.  Spoiler, there's very very little overlap.

Maybe this is the thread where we discuss how well the camera can make cat videos?

16 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

It looks like a pretty decent camera, and the screen is awesome, but it doesn't seem to be a vast improvement over what Sony offers. Doesn't stop the usual suspects from gushing over it, though.

Watching the Gerald Undone video, and it's really a bummer to see how much of a Sony shill he has become. He will bring up negatives, but then downplays them or just outright dismisses them as not important. Meanwhile, he'll temper his compliments of other cameras. The titles of his reviews from the last year or so really sum it up, honestly.

Sony a7R V Review: A Fantastic Camera!
Sony a7 IV Review: The Best Hybrid Camera for the Money!
Sony Alpha 1: A VERY IMPRESSIVE Camera! (Sony a1 Review)
Sony FX30 Review: Good Camera. Great Value!
SONY ZV-E10 Review: Sony's BEST Budget Camera
The SONY a7S III: A Technical MASTERPIECE!
The SONY a7C: Why THIS Camera Is IMPORTANT!

vs.

Canon R3 Review: 10 Things I Love/Hate
Fujifilm X-H2S: A Very Nerdy Review & Technical Guide
Nikon Z6 II - Video Review & Blackmagic RAW Discussion
The PANASONIC S5: A STRANGE but POWERFUL Camera
Sigma fp L Review: A VERY CONFUSING Camera!
Kinefinity MAVO Edge 6K: An Undone Review

I don't even think he does it on purpose (or maybe he does?) But it feels like we're far ways from what made him appealing to me in the first place, which was a measured analysis of a camera's capabilities.

The major issue with cameras these days is the cripple hammer / technical limitations they put in them which aren't in the marketing.  Sure, a camera might be 8K, 240p, 10-bit, but the fact that it's not all of them at the same time is the information that isn't mentioned, and which combinations are available are hard to find out.  Gerald is useful because he seems to systematically find many of those gotchas whereas other people don't go that deeply.

In terms of Sony and his opinions, to put it bluntly, who gives a crap?  If you're spending thousands of dollars then you should be making your own decisions rather than simply listening to other peoples conclusions.  Gerald is good because his videos are full of facts about the tech details...  just ignore his opinions and you're fine.

Most other camera reviews are ONLY opinions.  That's where we should be getting annoyed..

23 hours ago, MrSMW said:

8 stops of IBIS.

Just remember, there are two attributes that define how well IBIS works, and this is the one that doesn't matter.

1 hour ago, Django said:

Cinema screen is actually not a great example as 85% of theatres in the world are still using 2K projectors (that number was probably even bigger a decade ago). Cable TV in the US aren't even all 1080i with some networks still broadcasting at 720p. 

That is the main reason why ARRI have been so slow to develop true S35 4K cameras and why DI/editing/finishing have been done on 2K timelines.

We often like to put cinema on a pedestal for various valid reasons but truth is that concerning resolution, that whole industry has been lagging behind home entertainment and streaming productions for a minute. The 2014 video I linked already assesses that back then. We simply can't ignore what's been happening on streaming platforms and social media like it or not that's most peoples daily reality and benchmark. 

So yeah depending on what industry you're in, what you shoot, what your end viewer is displaying on, your storage capacity and bandwidth, what your post tech skills & min/max requirements are: different workflows, different resolutions, different codecs may be used in the pipeline. That is the reason why there are so many options.

Heck for some, 8-bit rec709 may still be better than 10-bit log or even 12-bit RAW.

So within this diversity of context I don't think we can really blanket one codec or one resolution format as being ok across all scenarios.

That said, sure 4K ProRes LT is a pro standard codec, fairly chunky and superior to low bitrate h26x. Its no XQ 444 though.

ProRes in consumer hybrids is a great leap forward. Much more practical than RAW in editing sense.

I was really just comparing 2K Prores HQ to 4K Prores LT.

If we're talking about anything more than that, then we have to start talking about what is visible, and that means discussing a certain resolution test that makes sensible discussion basically impossible.

To me, the FP or FP-L seem like the natural choices, but I do wonder how far away other options are.

I see three essential criteria:

• Rolling shutter amount
  Zero is ideal of course, but I wonder how much leeway there is for this.  IIRC film had a degree of rolling shutter so some is likely tolerable.
   
• Colour science
  I've tried at length to replicate the colour of the OG BMPCC and BMMCC with my GH5, even when recording RAW stills, and have fallen short by miles every time, despite being able to match other cameras together as well as match grades etc, so this tells me there is something magical about their colour that perhaps simply isn't captured by other cameras.
   
• NR / noise performance
  This happens in-camera from deliberate processing and also as a side-effect of compression in the codec

The Sigmas are great because they seem to have some of the nicest colour science around at the moment (I'm not sure if it's the camera or the transformations and management afterwards but the results speak for themselves), and the output is (AFAIK) completely unprocessed and uncompressed RAW.

I watched that video some time ago and one thing I noted at the time was the OG BMPCC having NR built in to manage the noise of the circuitry inside the camera. I have played with digital circuits and optimising for signal quality and have done a reasonable amount of research into the topic, so it makes perfect sense to me that a product designed like any camera with many circuit boards and high-frequency digital busses would be noisy as hell, but I never thought that they would need to process it within the camera beyond just keeping a digital signal viable between ICs through careful PCB design and the odd bit of shielding.  I'd be extremely curious to learn more about this.

7 hours ago, Django said:

I'm talking acquisition from a DPs perspective.

As the following video from 2014 states, 80% of films back then where shot above 3K yet indeed 99% were finished in 2K.

That doesn't mean it was ideal as far as IQ as the guy explains nobody printed Super35 to Super16 which is sort of what was being done back then. Not to mention they were already anticipating 4K streaming (or "broadband" as they called it then lol). He goes on to explain/push the benefits of shooting in ARRIRAW at 3.4K with the then new XT and details a workflow where you'd transcode to ProRes 444 2.8K for a 50% gain in file size and almost 3K resolution. That would have definitely been the forward-thinking workflow:

 

Yes, acquisition tried to keep pace with the tech I'm sure, and this was also in the days when cameras didn't downscale in-camera which made oversampling at capture even more important.

My point was simply that if a 2K Prores HQ didn't have intolerable macro-blocking when used in a workflow that was projected in multiplex cinemas, that 4K Prores LT with a similar/superior bitrate wouldn't be worse than that.  Also, the people in this discussion are pretty unlikely to be shooting for projection on a 590" cinema screen, so a codec with 400Mbps being streamed at 15-25Mbps, LT is probably good enough....   even with our post-millennial biologically superior eyesight 😉 

4 hours ago, John Matthews said:

But Kye, the human eye has evolved, you see. What was more than adequate in 2015 is no longer going to cut the mustard in 2022. Funny how things have changed.

lol...  I guess it's just me and my logic again, getting too big for my britches 😛 

4 hours ago, Django said:

If you're referring to the Alexa Classic, 2K ProRes HQ was closer to 300Mbps and it could shoot up to 430Mbps in 4444.

Second gen Alexa XT really changed the game though with ARRIRAW /Prores XQ and resolutions up to 3.4K in OpenGate.

So I'd say "sufficient" by 2010 theatrical standards but ARRI IQ took a major bump as soon as the XT came out around 2013. 

Besides I heard there were software upgrades to give the Classic 3.2K/3.4K XQ/Open Gate so those bitrates and resolutions may have been used much earlier than 2013.

Long story short I don't know if that many features were actually shot in 2K ProRes HQ..

What were they distributed in?  and what about the DI?  I ask because once something has had things like macro-blocking then there's no fixing it downstream.  I thought that a 2K Prores DI was common for colourists, and they'd deliver in 2K as well.  Not sure if that would have been 4444 or better though.

54 minutes ago, The Dancing Babamef said:

I think it's great that they brute force the quality with "excess" bitrate rather than have you suffer from macro blocking at the highest quality 422 HQ. IF you shoot LT then you probably know the risks.

This raises an interesting question for me about what role resolution plays in the quality of Prores.  

Prores bitrates scale proportionally with resolution, so 4K is ~4x the bitrates of 1080p because there are ~4x the pixels.

I would assert that 2K Prores HQ is "sufficient" (not perfect, but sufficient) as countless feature films were shot in 2K/1080p Prores HQ (at ~180Mbps) and were projected in theatres worldwide on the largest screens available (short of IMAX), so the macro-blocking can't have been too bad.  
So then, if we're talking 4K, Prores HQ is ~700Mbps and LT is ~330, which is almost double the 2K HQ bitrate.  If you film 4K you don't project it onto a larger screen just because you have more bitrate (plus there aren't really many screens larger than real cinemas anyway), so even if the macro-blocking is larger from LT in terms of how many pixels wide the artefacts are, the fact that there's more bitrate for the whole image, surely the artefacts would be less visible than on 2K HQ?

Does anyone know how this comparison actually fares in the real world?  I've never tested this particular aspect.

2 hours ago, kaylee said:

heres a fun thread!

my current playlist includes helping build haunts (!!!), shopping for trashy halloween store stuff aaaanndd

• horror movies ive never really watched like Exorcist 3 or Halloween 18, whatever 

• fav 'horror' movie of all time is the shining btw lol (sort of doesnt count?)

• maybe ill watch Alien...

• Simpsons treehouse of horror seasons 1-10+

• x files monster of the week episodes

• Anything Ghost podcast

• Garfield halloween (garfield sucks but i have a soft spot for him. not funny but kinda sweet)

• been watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? vintage nick, never seen it before

• do you know whats ACTUALLY p darn good? dahmer on netflix. check it out..... IF YOU DARE MUAHHAHAHHAAAAA

• oh, and of course GHOST TO GHOST AM with art bell

what are you watching/doing? costumes? haunts?? projection mapping the house???

give me stuff to watch

I'm not really into Halloween (and it's less of a thing here in Australia, although it is growing in popularity each year)....  but, Alien is seriously good sci-fi cinema!  I can't imagine you haven't seen it, but if not, wow are you in for a treat!  My first experience with the series was Aliens, which I watched as a ~7? year old alone in the lounge room of someones big old scary house where my dad was visiting and the adults put it on to keep me entertained why they talked somewhere else in the house.    I had a major jump-scare when during a particularly tense moment in the film someone suddenly stuck their head into the room to ask me what I wanted for dinner!  A memorable watch!

I've often wished that I could 'forget' a movie so that I would get to watch it for the first time (again).  I purposefully don't watch my favourites for years so that I have forgotten at least some stuff and get some surprises and fun twists.

Other fun movies that come to mind:

• The Forgotten 2004 with Julianne Moore (watch it without any spoilers or previews at all if you can)
• The Ring
• The Fourth Kind 2009 with Milla Jovovich (again, watch without spoilers or previews if possible)
• and of course, just for fun...  Shawn of the Dead 🙂 

9 hours ago, Dustin Jenkins said:

Sure. I don't have 2 copies of the same lens so I won't be able to shoot them simultaneously.

I might be able to get some black magic shots too, I don't own any canon or Sony since I've gone to Fuji.

and if you stop both lenses down at least a couple of stops from wide open then they should all be nice and sharp so there won't be any resolution issues between them.

2 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

If not in need, keep using what you got I guess. Which is never the worst thing to do and often a good idea. 🙂

Two very useful sentiments that I try to live by are:

1. If in doubt, don't buy anything
2. If the solution isn't obvious, you don't fully understand the problem

7 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Apparently the FX30 is doing less in camera noise reduction too than the FX3/a7Smk3. 

(which is what some people actually want)

In addition to my previous post above, I think the optimum amount of processing is having more NR/sharpening than RAW has, and less than the GH5 has.  If the FX30 is closer to that mid-point then that's another plus for the camera.

Despite not liking Sony all that much (both their company behaviour as well as the design of their cameras) and not wanting to move from MFT to anything but FF, the FX30 has an appeal that I can't understand.

Is there some sort of X-factor for this camera? or is it just me?

7 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Apparently the FX30 is doing less in camera noise reduction too than the FX3/a7Smk3. 

(which is what some people actually want)

That's very interesting.

One thing that I've noticed is that there is very little colourist content available (for free and even in the paid stuff I've seen) discussing sharpening techniques or discussing NR techniques.  Yet, my personal experience with both of these topics (as well as seeing the brief mentions they get occasionally) suggests that they're hugely important to building a look and also quite a deep subject.  I've done comparisons myself of comparing different sharpening methods (IIRC Resolve has at least three, not counting the manual techniques you can do with various combinations of nodes) and they are all different.

I keep meaning to do a deep dive into them, sharing it with the group as I go for discussion and feedback, but just haven't gotten the motivation up for it.  In my previous attempts to grade RAW footage I've struggled to get the results I was looking for.

Even when the subject gets mentioned on the colourist forums the discussion doesn't seem to go into that much detail.  I wonder if it's one of those subjects where the colourists all just judge it by eye and therefore think it's obvious and not worth talking about.  Or, it's something that directors/producers/etc have strong opinions on and they just look to them for guidance and therefore don't feel it's worth discussing.