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I'm not being deliberately problematic, just stating why the answers provided don't really suit me and how I shoot. That's fine - not all solutions have answers (if they do then I want the 100g Alexa Pocket for $100!), but you don't find out unless you ask - sometimes you ask the question and someone comes up with an answer you hadn't thought of or didn't know about, so it's worth a bit of a discussion. I'm perhaps putting more emphasis on this than what people might think is reasonable, but it's actually the tip of a large question for me. Currently I shoot with IBIS cameras (GH5, GX85) in auto-modes but am actively considering moving to a more cinema-camera style of shooting without IBIS or auto-modes when it's time for my next upgrade as that can get me a bump in image quality, so there's many thousands of dollars in camera bodies / lenses / accessory purchases that depend on things like me being able to get acceptably stable shots in windy situations. In this sense my problem isn't "how do I get good stabilisation with an OIS only lens", it's really "does OIS give me stable enough shots, in the situations I encounter, with how I shoot". Not so useful in conditions so windy I can't hold the camera steady with both hands! 🙂 🙂 I think you nailed it by talking about being self-conscious, which definitely applies to me. If I could change how I feel then I would do it immediately, but that's not how it works! Getting older is gradually making me give less shits, but I'm not there enough yet 🙂 In terms of running into Karen's, I've found they're everywhere in terms of giving you dirty looks and giving you the non-verbal equivalent of the viral videos you see, which just makes it not worth it for me. That's why I like to do what I can to fly under the radar and not trigger it to begin with. I also shoot a lot in places you're not allowed to be pro in, like museums and galleries and all the other types of private spaces that hold all the interesting things. You never know when you're going to run into a power-hungry security guard who is going to teach you a lesson - unfortunately this seems to be the majority of security guards (although it probably isn't the case it certainly seems like it).

I'm gradually pushing myself to see how basic/manual a camera I can get away with using as a proof of concept. That's why I'm shooting with my P2K and my GX85 in full-manual. If I find that these things are do-able then it will put cameras like the P4K, P6K Pro, Sigma FP, etc on the potential list, which have much nicer image quality and DR than the GH5 and (potentially) GH6. We haven't seen a lot from the GH6 but that just means that the jury is still out on it, rather than it being ruled out. Whenever I hear someone saying "I want.." as some sort of statement that implies they should get it just because they want it, I just reply with "I want a Lamborghini." and normally follow it with "what's your point?" or "but back here in reality" or "I love to dream" etc... The kids probably find it annoying as hell but it amuses me no end!

I want a new camera, despite not wanting to want a new camera. There are a great many things in life that I don't want to want, but want anyway. Or the opposite, I want to want some things, but I just don't.

I'm comparing UHD on a 1080p timeline, but they're rough figures anyway. In terms of not being able to see 1-2 stops of DR difference, if its right at the edges of what is visible then yeah, you can totally see it. Have you ever even shot in uncontrolled conditions and tried to pull detail from both ends of the spectrum? It's really sounding like you haven't because I have, and it's really quite obvious.

Everyone wants a new camera all the time. Except when they're asleep, and when they're thinking about what they're shooting and what is in the final video.

No, I wasn't. This is from CineD. Source is: https://www.cined.com/content/uploads/2018/10/recent-results.jpg What's the article that shows the chart you showed? I don't recall having seen that before.

The better I get at grading the more I can see aspects in the OG BMPCC / BMMCC images that aren't there in modern sensors. I made that thread about every camera looking like a Sony some time ago and it's still the case - almost every camera looks like a Sony sensor in a box. The theory is that a perfect camera can emulate any other camera, but there are two caveats with this: The perfect camera has to surpass the "target" camera in every way, and there are certain aspects of image quality that the OG BMPCC BMMCC cameras still surpass every modern camera except the Alexa and Red and perhaps the Venice and other random examples. The colourist has to be up to the challenge. Steve Yedlin famously emulated film with an Alexa, but this was pretty controversial because most colourists are simply not capable of that level of image processing and he had to write his own custom software to do it, let alone taking a Sony image and making it look like an Alexa. To put it bluntly, even if Sony made a sensor good enough (and you could afford it), you're not good enough to grade it, and neither is almost anyone else, perhaps on the planet. In the camera sensor landscape there are essentially four players that I know about. On Semiconductor who make the Alexa sensor, Fairchild who made the OG BMPCC and BMMCC sensors, Canon who make their own sensors, and Sony who make basically everything else. The development of the Alexa sensor and the Fairchild sensors was done at a time when the noise and colour reproduction of film were the most crucial aspects of image quality for their customers. The primary driving factors for Sony is resolution and dynamic range. You're right that smartphones will replace most cameras, but not because they will be better - it's obvious that they aren't - but because people will change their tastes to align with what smartphones can do. If all you see are "Sony" images then you'll be happy with them because you don't know any different. Almost everyone on these forums has now adjusted to the look of Sony sensors, which is an increase in technical specification and a huge decrease in emotional performance. This emotional performance is why companies like Leica stay in business making cameras that are technically worse but still sell for many times the price.

You're thinking about this wrong. The P4K / P6K / P6K Pro have a very strong feature-set and this addition gives them PDAF. The only other ways to add good AF to a setup the same way is to either hire a focus puller, or to upgrade to a camera that has everything the BM cameras have but also has PDAF. Either of these options easily runs into the tens-of-thousands-of-dollars. The problem with cameras is that people don't compare the full package, only isolated features, but when you're buying a camera you can get one feature very cheap, but for each extra feature you want it multiplies the cost - by the time you have internal RAW and 13 stops of DR the addition of PDAF creates a pretty small and expensive list of potential candidates.

You're thinking about this wrong - when you shoot LOG you create highlight rolloff in post using the methods I have mentioned. For all practical purposes, all cameras are just large arrays of linear light measurement - they don't have any highlight rolloff at all. The "Look" of each camera is defined almost exclusively by the colour processing that happens after the image is captured (and a tiny bit by the sensor) and when you shoot log you're in control of the vast majority of that processing that occurs. I couldn't find reliable DR tests for the Z6, but the GH5 doesn't compare well to the XT-3... GH5 v1 has 10.8 stops, GH5 v2 has 11.5 and XT-3 has 13 stops. DR can make more of a difference than many people think when shooting in uncontrolled conditions and when it's not just art but needs to be informational as well. In shooting the GH5 v1 I am often forced to choose between clipping the whole sky and being able to identify the person sitting in the shade. A choice between "here's a photo of Susan and the sky is digital white" and "here's a nice photo of .... someone? who is that?" isn't a choice that I enjoy having to make. Of course, this choice is actually a factor of how usable the image is in latitude tests rather than just DR as a single digit. Having a photo of Susan where she's bright purple is better than her not being recognisable, but still leaves a huge amount to be desired.

The ultimate statement about DR is perhaps that people shooting with an Alexa or RED which have the highest DR capturing around still light and control their contrast ratios. Yes, they can push and pull the RAW / Prores files from those cameras in ways that we can only dream of, but they still take the time and effort to capture it right in-camera. There's no substitute for making your scene look how you want it, even if you have 15+ stops of DR and have 14-bit RAW.

There's no substitute for dynamic range. Ultimately you can emulate the nice rolloff (highlights, shadows, or both) of high-DR cameras by using curves but that will increase the contrast of the image. If there's already lots of contrast in the image then you can emulate the lower-contrast look by reducing contrast so the mid-tones are softer, but that will ruthlessly reveal your white and black clipping levels. Another trick is to raise the levels of your image, which means you have some extra space to lower contrast or rolloff the highlights nicely, but that will raise your noise and black levels, so the trick is to apply noise to mask this. The cost of this look is that you'll have elevated black levels and lots of noise in the image. It's not really for modern work but it can work for vintage / film looks though. High DR cameras are desirable because they give you the flexibility in post to choose whichever look you want, but lower-DR captures (like 709 profiles that don't include the full DR of the camera) simply can't do everything - you have to choose the trade-offs. Higher DR cameras are also a challenge in post because you're trying to pack all the DR into the lower-DR 709 profile to publish them, so in a way your lower-DR capture is just doing in prod what you would have to do somehow in post anyway, except that you don't get to fine-tune or apply curves like you can in post. I shoot higher DR shots with moderate DR cameras (GH5 HLG which is almost 11 stops and OG BMPCC and BMMCC which are 12.5 stops) and even these are difficult in the grade when you are capturing the full DR on these.

Thanks for sharing - always interesting to see people's work. I noticed that the stills are very different to the video (subject matter, composition, etc) - every other wedding shooter I've seen includes the same in both, so the wedding films tell the story with the getting ready / dress / rings / first-look / venue / guests / waiting / bride entrance / ceremony / kiss / rice confetti / reception venue / buffet / entrance / toasts / speeches / first dance / party mayhem.... Curious your thoughts on taking a different approach?

My tips for highlight rolloff are to have a curve that makes the transition more gradual, so things have a really gradual transition into clipping. That requires you to either add contrast, or to lower the white-point, so that's a creative choice and either can help if things are clipped. It's also nice to desaturate the whites too, which hides it when the channels clip at different levels. Ultimately, if you want to shoot and 'fake' log then the best way is to shoot subjects that are low-contrast to begin with, that way the files SOOC will be quite flat because the subject was flat.

Have you tried playing with Saturation vs Colour Boost? Sat expands all saturation evenly, whereas CB only expands the low-sat stuff and doesn't increase the high-sat stuff, so using various combinations of them you might have a setting that doesn't need any masks. Maybe a combo of Sat with negative CB to boost stronger colours and not over-do the skintones? Any time you can apply an overall adjustment vs pulling a key is always safer. You could also try the spider-web tool (Colour Warper) to boost sat for all hues except the skintones?

Yeah, they seem to over-blur the things close behind the subject and under-blur the things a long way behind the subject. I would have thought that they'd apply a progressive blur? The depth-camera is surely able to give zones where things are further away, although the more zones you have the more edges you have to navigate so I guess that's a potential issue. For me it's the lack of progression to being blurred that makes them look odd. I saw a video the other day where the subject filmed at a wide aperture in front of a landscape with everything a long way from the subject and it created this two-levels kind of look which immediately looked fake, but I think it was real and just how the scene was. It's kind of like when 3D graphics first got good and you'd get used to the tell-tale signs of how they looked fake, but every now and then you'd see one of those signs in real-life and do a double-take.

The P2K is under 70mm tall. The Crane M is 346mm tall, and the rig looks like it would be taller with the camera mounted on it... so literally 5 times taller! I'm not even sure it would fit into my bag either 🙂 Maybe you don't get odd looks when you're using it in public, but I've used a phone gimbal before and people looked at me like I was carrying a sword rather than a gimbal. I'm not entirely convinced that it would hold up in the howling wind either, which is basically the point - if the wind wasn't so strong I wouldn't have had so much of a rotation problem to begin with and OIS would have been fine.

In a sense, yes, but the devil is in the details. One example is with the GH5, if you turn on AF then it enables face-detect and the auto-exposure automatically exposes the skintones in the face correctly, but if you turn off AF (or have a manual lens) then it disables face-detect and will only expose the frame as if it's a landscape, letting the face / skin-tones (which are clearly visible) fall where they may as if they don't matter in the slightest. So the automatic metering is fine, but it's about as reliable as AF - meaning that it can do it but reserves the right to screw up for random reasons and at random times.

Hahaha... the flat background is unmistakable. I like it how in an attempt to make the photo have more depth, it just makes the background look like a green-screen or a poster mounted a few feet behind the subject of the photo.

That looks really good - great use of tech and I'm sure that it would be really useful to lots of people. You need an electronically controlled lens of course, but I wonder if a similar setup might be possible using something like a wireless follow-focus perhaps.

I love the touch of fake-DoF blur on the brim of the woman's hat!

The challenge is that I want to keep the rig as small as possible - the beauty of the camera is that it's so small. I also own the BMMCC but with a monitor and cables you get strange looks which I'd like to avoid. A gimbal would make the vertical size of the camera 10x larger, hardly a compact solution! Realistically, the smallest addition would be a side-handle, but even then it's doubling the width of the camera and making it look far more odd to the public. I was using it in wind so strong that I couldn't keep the camera still enough with my two hands. A steadicam would probably break in the kind of conditions I was in - let alone make the shaking worse by acting as a large sail. Yeah, the handle / viewfinder is the typical solution, but it doesn't work well for what I want. Firstly, the viewfinder is great if you want to make your cinematography "I shoot from eye-level" but that's not a great way to make interesting images. The handle underneath the camera also doesn't work in strong winds as the issue is that the wind hits the camera from the side and the camera rotates around where you're holding it - which in that case would be below the camera - creating a roll. People don't seem to understand my original post - I was cradling the camera with my left hand which was under the body of the camera and holding the lens, and my right hand was firmly on the hand-grip on the right-hand-side of the camera (and is actually quite a good grip as it's quite deep and covered in grippy rubber) but the camera was still being severely shaken with the wind.

Sure - I'll revise my statement to "They're essentially really good, really small, really affordable, camcorders." Were you comparing the "Smell of Village" video to the OG BMPCC? If so, the video looked good and was obviously shot as RAW, but beyond it being RAW and deep DoF, it doesn't look anything like a OG BMPCC to me. It looks more like a smartphone that can record RAW. I looked at OG BMPCC footage only days ago, and even SOOC the footage just screamed "film" to me. The grain and texture and resolution and sharpness are all on-point for film, and nothing like the high-quality high-resolution very-modern presentation of that "Smell of Village" film. I've said it in other threads but it's worth repeating - I think people have forgotten what film actually used to look like. If someone posted stills of non-recognisable moments from big blockbuster films and TV shows shot on film, the response would be akin to "your lens is broken" rather than "looks cinematic".

Interesting stuff, but still a way to go. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra has a crop-factor of 2.7 (calculated from sensor width) with an f1.9 fixed wide (which equates to a 23mm f5 lens) and an f4.1 zoom (which equates to an f11 5x zoom lens) and a f2.2 ultra-wide (which equates to a 13mm f6 lens). This means that even wide open its got deeper depth of field than decent lenses on a S16 camera: https://www.vintagelensesforvideo.com/category/super16/ The codecs are getting better though - I noticed that my iPhone 12 does 10-bit video, which makes a huge improvement to the subtlety of colour and also to the DR which seems to just be chopped-off in 8-bit mode compared to 10-bit mode. Prores and RAW are better still. They're essentially really good, really small, camcorders. Great if you want that look, but without ability to change lenses they're useless if you want any other look, which these days is what most people want. They're also a pain to put an ND on if you want them to still fit in your pocket, so most users will just expose with SS making terrible motion cadence.

Yeah, you can (sort-of) dial in however much stabilisation you want. I haven't tried on this footage yet but will try to hit a balance where the shake doesn't look overwhelming and the blur isn't either, but I'm worried there won't be a middle ground where neither looks bad.

I shot a bunch of clips hand-held in terrible weather with my OG BMPCC and 12-35/2.8 and now looking at the footage I realise the OIS did a great job with pan/tilt but zero reduction in roll / rotation (which OIS can't stabilise). I've had a few goes at stabilising it in post but much of it is blurry due to 180 shutter. I don't mind a hand-held look, but the mismatch between the pan and tilt being almost perfectly stable and the roll being jittery as hell is really not a good look. I realise that my options are some combination of stabilising the roll in post and de-stabilising the pan and tilt (adding shake) so the aesthetic works. I've been using IBIS on GH5 and GX85 for years now, and I have OIS in my X3000 action camera, but haven't used OIS-only in a "cinema" setup before and hadn't really realised that this would be a major issue. The OIS in the 12-35/2.8 is far too good to match with the lack of roll stabilisation. How do the OIS-only hand-held shooters out there deal with this? Build a huge rig so you don't get roll jitter? (In which case, OIS isn't really needed that much - right?) Stabilise in post and deal with the shutter-speed blur? Seems to be an incredible advantage of IBIS over OIS.