kye

35 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

One.

Including yourself.

I think that's the logical conclusion, I'm sort of just letting that concept percolate from my brain through the rest of my innards.  Something deep inside has a need to feel useful, like it would be very unhappy if you paid me to do some task like writing a document or something, but knowing that no-one would ever read it, and art that is never viewed by anyone else seems to trigger that same (or a very similar) mechanism.

In a lot of the corporate work I've done we've found that there is a big difference between knowing something theoretically and having experienced it.  If you explain a concept to someone they can claim to understand it, and you can test them later and they'll remember it, but it won't change how they act when they return to normal duties.  If you run them through an exercise where they experience the very same thing, then something different happens and it's like it "sinks in" and they are then changed so when they go back to their normal duties they put their new understanding to work.  

Since seeing this happen dozens of times in many different situations, I've come to realise that this process for something to go from my brain to the other bits of my being is a process that matters, and although I have no idea how to do it reliably, often it will happen over time if I gradually ponder the concept and give it time.  It might also require some experimentation, of giving it a go and seeing what happens.
There's a saying that "it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting".  So it's probably a case that I have to give it a go.

I've just been a bit out of my routine since the holiday break and haven't gotten back to my routines completely yet.  I'm mostly back there, but I've got to add this part back in.  I would normally work, exercise, relax for a bit listening to music (sort-of a meditation), and then do some film-making by jumping into Resolve and do some editing or colour grading practice, or watching a course, etc.  I'm back to most of that, but haven't quite gotten the daily film-making part added yet, although I am working my way through the latest masterclass from Hector Berrebi on beauty and skin retouching, which is fascinating and deep into the professional colourist realm, but is super-useful and I've been waiting for it since it was announced.

8 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

Often when people talk about what AI can't do, they jump to comparing to the top 0.0000001% of humanity. AI might never achieve what Michelangelo, or Scorsese, or Bach, or Pink Floyd did. But if it can achieve what the bottom 30% of artists can--that's a lot of artists losing money.

Agreed.  and let's face it, AI probably isn't that far off being better than the designed-by-committee dross that the studios are just pumping out these days.

I keep posting this video, but it keeps being relevant:

Why?

Because it's easier to make a movie with explosions and cheap laughs than for the writer and director and actors to make characters the audience actually cares about.

10 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

No technological advancement will ever stop humans from the desire to make art.

I heard something the other day that I suspect is incredibly profound..  that the sense of emptiness that humans are prone to having (that we try all sorts of things to fill, like excessive consumption) can only be filled by creativity.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, considering that my film-making is extremely niche and may date extremely quickly and any music-making that I am contemplating returning to is unlikely to find an audience unless I engage in an open-ended part-time marketing campaign to promote it.  So the question is how many people need to view/listen for me to think that it's 'worth it'.

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

Next to nothing, there is one listed right now for a buy now price of US$825.99:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276260362267 

Also, if this is working for the AJA Cion, then I wonder, the Blackmagic Production 4K Camera and the URSA 4K / URSA Mini 4K all share the same sensor as the AJA Cion, could the same process work for them too? They're even cheaper!

It will depend on the processing in-camera.

Linear is Linear, so no dramas there, but getting the 3x3 matrix right to define the primaries requires a calibrated setup, and might be non-linear or some other thing normally inside the camera and hidden from us.

Don't the BM cameras have a defined gamma and colour space?  Wouldn't they be BM Film Gen 1?

7 hours ago, mercer said:

But I'm still really impressed with what the 5D3 with ML Raw and a Canon IS lens is capable of handheld. So maybe I'm just easily impressed. 

I don't think that's the case, Canon IS is very impressive.

I went from using my Canon 700D and 55-250mm kit zoom with ML, sometimes in 1:1 crop mode for sports, to the Canon XC10 with the 24-240mm equivalent lens to the GH5 and the GH5 wasn't stunningly more stable than either of the previous Canon setups.  

It was better stabilisation overall because IBIS has the two additional dimensions of stabilisation, but I wasn't wowed when I got it, despite people all over the internet being wowed by it, so I consider the Canon IS to be very high quality, and I only had the more consumer examples of it - I don't know how good the IS would be in the more premium FF lenses.

7 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Oh maaaan, I thought my post would put an interested smile on your face. But no:(😪

The comments of Cion owners were very enthusiastic about about this new attempt by David Bross.

Juan is well known of course. Juan himself has done a post about his p4k to log c lut on Eoshd.

Maybe I was a bit harsh..  it's great there is an additional camera out there that can perform well, and that someone has done the work to make good colour grading available.

I would actually be interested in the side-by-side images because it may be right up there with these alternative cameras - or maybe might even have some extra mojo..  we know cameras from that time were often hidden gems, and one with global shutter would be even better, maybe giving it double mojo!

I think these days I've become aware of the diabolical state of colour grading knowledge out there, and the more I learn the more I realise that the majority of free colour grading resources aren't just useless, or misleading, they're often outright lies designed to confuse and disempower people so that you'll give up and just buy the stupid LUT pack the person is selling.

Anyway, what are these AJA Cion cameras worth second hand?

8 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

I suspect you've fallen foul of the "y" being adjacent to the "t" on the keyboard there.

Man, of all the places to make a typo!

7 hours ago, IronFilm said:

"I feel like I spent 20 years of my life swimming suddenly they let motorboats into the Olympics."

Quite the analogy! But an understandable feeling

 

And you don't think having easy to access free/perfect/immediate plastic surgery wouldn't also have a major impact upon culture? 

So? Most people are not making films every day! Most people are not even watching a movie every day. 

 But AI will undoubtedly be massively changing both how we make and how we consumer movies. 

My point is that:

1) people want to look their best in pics, thus they pose

2) culture changes, it was once not normal to smile in photos, but now it is 

So what??

Most people can't even vaguely explain how a camera works. Does that stop them using cameras??? Nope!!

Heck, there is probably nobody on the planet who can explain in great detail all of how a camera works to take a photo. 

And certainly for the average casual consumer they do not care at all in the slightest that to them a camera is a totally mysterious and magical black box. 

  

If people on this forum wish to suck on a guy, I won't be judging them for it. Let them live their lives freely!

I think the fundamental principles still stand:

1) there is a reality and if you point a camera at it then it is a direct record of that reality and if you have an AI do a bunch of math it doesn't matter how it appears to be it will never be a direct record of that reality; and,

2) reality matters to people, and although they are willing to deviate from it by small amounts, and although people have different desires and tolerances for how large that amount is, there are limits to that distance; therefore:

AI will not replace the direct capture of reality in many contexts, and these contexts are a significant part of the moving images industry.

18 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Most wouldn't???? 

Sorry, but I completely disagree with that claim being able to be made in the long run if plastic surgery is free/instant/perfect. 

I mean, it might be true in such a world??? But I've got zero confidence in backing such a bold claim. If I was forced to bet one way or another, I'd bet against it. 

As I'd suspect in such a world where plastic surgery is free/instant/perfect that in the long run it would become widely accepted/expected. 

Look for instance at South Korea, already we have nearly one in three Korean women in their 30s who have had at least one plastic surgery operation. 

And that's with how the world is currently! Where plastic surgery has a risk, isn't perfect, is limited in what it can do, has lengthy recovery times, and is quite expensive. 

If plastic surgery became free/instant/perfect in South Korea then I reckon you'd see almost overnight easily the majority of South Korean women having plastic surgery. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that with time, the rest of the world's culture would shift to follow Korean culture as well with their attitude to plastic surgery.

How much do you know about South Korean culture?

There are many things that promote such things in that culture that are not present in other cultures, or are present to a much less significant degree.

Seems like a convenient subsample.

19 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

What percentage of regular users on Tinder/IG/Snapchat have never not used a filter or similar? 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/02/1021635/beauty-filters-young-girls-augmented-reality-social-media/

Quote from it:

Snapchat boasts its own stunning numbers. A spokesperson said that “200 million daily active users play with or view Lenses every day to transform the way they look, augment the world around them, play games, and learn about the world,” adding that more than 90% of young people in the US, France, and the UK use the company’s AR products.

Yes, it said ninety percent. 

90% of the daily users of a platform specifically targeted at people who want to post photos for other people to see.

200 Million is 2.4% of the worlds population.  I'd be amazed if 90% of the top 2.4% of the worlds most vain people didn't use it either.

Another convenient subsample.

22 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Depends on the culture. That can shift and change over time, as to what is "lying" or not.

Do you pose for photos? You do? Oh no, you're lying! Only candid snapshots allowed. 

It used to not be normal to smile in photos, as having your photo taken is serious business. Yet in the western world, this is normal now, as we wish to present a "happy" version of ourselves. 

And even if there are strong opinions against it, it still won't stop massive numbers of people doing it. For instance there are strong attitudes against catfishing, yet it doesn't stop a huge chunk of people on Tinder/IG/etc from tweaking their photos. 

If you're putting posing for photos or smiling into the lying category then I can tell you're either trolling or you're on some serious drugs.

The people on Tinder / IG / etc are one of these vanity collections again, like if you surveyed everyone at a Miss World competition and concluded that everyone uses 450g of makeup per day.

An AI video is a video where:

• no pixel was ever directly recorded from real-life
• there is no way to go back to the source because there was unknowable amounts of training data and limited input data (these mysterious GoPros scattered around)
• there is no way to know how the training data was processed
• there is no way to know how the AI works

I think we're a tad beyond sucking in your guy when someone pulls out their phone to take a snapshot.

On a more general note, I occasionally read members of the forums writing that the world is going down the drain due to one social trend or other, and I just roll my eyes and wonder what the hell they are looking at online.  I mean, when you open a browser you don't see anything until you search for that thing, so the things that people say about the world are really just a reflection of what they have somehow become fixated on and have let it distort their world view.

3 hours ago, IronFilm said:

"Other than the biggest & game changing difference, how is this different?" 

Nobody is paying me to do that

Everything we do already in filmmaking is about crafting a beautiful looking spin on reality vs being hyper realistic.  (even so called "Reality TV" is not even reality)

Would generative AI truly be that different from this? 

Extremely few people are happy to pay $$$ for that, most people are just happy to hang a pretty picture on their wall. 

They already use tonnes of stock footage in them, and/or lots of B Roll "filler". 

Using generative AI is only a half step further along from that. 

If we can chuck up a few GoPros to capture the "real" aspect of this to feed the generative AI, that can then spit out flawlessly perfect wedding trailers, then why wouldn't I want this? 

I'd rather spend $500 for this on my next wedding, than spend $5K for a team of wedding videographers & photographs to do it. 

Ditto the same is true for birthdays / sports / bar mitzvah / etc 

 

I have read and re-read your post over and over, and I just can't seem to get where you're coming from on the majority of your comments.

Perhaps the biggest confusion is over reality, and how desirable it is as a concept.  

• People wear nice clothes, do their hair and makeup, but most wouldn't get plastic surgery (even if it was free and instant and perfect)
• People are fine with having flattering lighting for portraits, but many people are very opposed to being photoshopped
• etc.

People are happy to read fiction and "movie magic" and "the magic of the theatre" but outside of the realms where fiction is acceptable there are often very strong opinions about how far from the truth we are comfortable going.  The ninth commandment is literally about lying "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”  

Even if AI generated images are perfect beyond what we could even check, it's sort of like someone completely trustworthy testifying in court when they refuse to take the oath.  It either is the truth, or it isn't.

4 hours ago, JulioD said:

I get that part.  

The real question is…will it work creatively well enough for the audience to like it, or even actually prefer it to the real thing? Narrative drama.  As opposed to not having a choice (advertising or training content) 

Right now I see cheap ass producers licking their lips at the idea they can do get more for less. It’s a way to get animation done cheaper and better maybe with famous actors you can skin or liscence for cheap.   Doesn’t mean an audience will like it. I don’t like most of the billboards I see on the freeway, but it doesn’t stop people making them.

Is someone going to do genuinely compelling emotionally engaging story with it that transcends its computational origins?

Im not so sure it’s capable of doing that.  Unless it’s DIRECTED by a human.  In which case…

It really is just another tool for storytelling. Like you know..animation.

Perhaps the critical concept is that AI is calculators trained with only human input data.

This whole thing is like when people learned anatomy.  

At first people thought that we couldn't possibly understand how the body worked because it was made by God.  Over many hundreds of years we've basically worked out more and more of the organic chemistry and various principles etc, and now no-one who is familiar with modern medicine would question our ability to understand the physical body.

Now comes AI, and we're back to saying that we couldn't possibly understand or replicate what it is to be human, because we're etherial magical special and knowable only to God.  I think that line of thinking will suffer the same fate, and will suffer it at thousands of times the pace.

12 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Aja Cion, just sayin. Not many Aja Cion owners here I think.:) Protect your highlights is a rule. But the image can be very lovely. Global shutter btw!:) This DP is offering some very nice color science and rolloff, looking promising. What do you think @kye and all of you?:) The video consists of three parts with a plugin for download. So there are still super cool youtubers around.:) cheers

 

Footage looks good, and global shutter is a definite plus of course, but I'd like to see a side-by-side with the OG BMPCC or P4K or Sigma FP etc.

To be honest, the CST in Resolve can convert Linear gamma to whatever you want, so that part was done already.  Adjusting the primaries can be done with a 3x3 RGB matrix, which isn't easy but also wouldn't be too hard if you knew what you were doing.  I commend him for pursuing the project, but it's probably half a days work for a professional colour scientist, at most, maybe even an hour or two if they are setup for it already.

This is an example of a RAW shooting camera with a good conversion to LogC and then a nice LogC LUT put onto it, nothing more.  This has been done by Juan Melara for a range of cameras including the P4K etc, which are almost indistinguishable in side-by-side comparisons.

https://juanmelara.com.au/products/bmpcc-4k-to-alexa-powergrade-and-luts

This is why I moved to colour grading rather than going from camera to camera, the RAW-shooting cameras are all nearly perfect already and improving them without improving the colour grading is a waste of time really.

On 2/18/2024 at 3:08 AM, Ty Harper said:

Reality TV is not even 'reality' and clearly cares little for the tenets of JSP, so I would argue that format will embrace AI with the quickness and you'll have AI-based characters that viewers are rooting for...

I agree that "reality TV" won't be saved and didn't put it in my list.  Apart from the fact it's scripted or the participants are poked with a stick until they explode, and the editing is practically perjury, but in the end the audience doesn't know or care who they are as people - they are simply characters that no-one knows and so could be anyone (or no-one).

On 2/18/2024 at 3:28 AM, JulioD said:

While reality tv is contrived it’s still the work of independently performing humans (actors?) with their own flaws and traits. Even if they followed a script what they bring and how they perform it is unique in that moment. I’m not sure AI will replicate that human agency any time soon.  It may be able to fake it and maybe that will be good enough but I suspect that the audience won’t see it that way. 

I think it's pretty easy to look at AI and think that it looks like an awkward and clunky human being and conclude that it has a long way to go, but I think that's a misleading way to think about it.

AI is literally trillions and trillions of incredibly fast calculators.  Literally.

So, acknowledging that, it's more useful to think that AI technology has managed to go from being a calculator to being a human-a-like, which is a thousand billion miles from where it started.  The journey from where it is now to where it will be refined and sophisticated and creative and expressive isn't nothing, but it's short in comparison to the journey it's already taken.

... and in case you're not getting a sense of it, here is how human it was to begin with:

• 1+1=2
• 3>2=true
• 8/2=4

1 hour ago, Ty Harper said:

Agreed. As you say, if people want to use cams and other traditional forms of real life capture for home/family use, no one will stop them. But it's unlikely that media/film production companies in the future will be hiring/paying people who offer camera capture, set design, lighting, etc, etc, as a sole and primary service - which is really what we're talking about. Also, the AI approach won't be seen as a 'forgery' to mass consumers in most circumstances. The ones intended for insidious deep-fake purposes? Yes, of course. But most AI-based video will be seen/consumed as a valid representation of real life ala a painting. It will also be impossible to tell the difference in the future. That's just based on how far a company like Open AI has come in a year. Also, these distinctions we're making around real vs fake will be irrelevant to the vast majority of humans born into it from here on out. All realms of commerce have experienced crushing human labor disruptions in the past and present times (car manufacturing being the most obvious example). What makes this stunning and unique is that it is happening to the realm of commerce (i.e art-based commerce) that we instinctively know humans will continue to do whether they are paid for it or not. You can't say the same for alot of other realms of the human labor economy. So it will be, imo, one of the most poignant blows in the history of human labor to date. 

I agree, but I think there is a distinction here between videos that contain people I know/care-about/etc and people I don't.

If a movie people see has Brad Pitt in it, people probably don't care if it was the real Brad Pitt or an AI version of him, and if they go see a movie they probably don't care if the actors are even real people or AI generated fictional characters.

However, if I watch a video that has anyone I know in it, and it's a depiction of a real-life event then it matters if it was real footage or not.
This might seem to be irrelevant detail, but I think that this means that the following parts of the industry may not be completely gutted:

• Documentaries
• Sports videography
• Engagement/Wedding videography (although some might want a more 'enhanced' version than reality)
• Event videography (birthdays, bar/bat-mitzvah and other religious occasions, etc)
• Corporate videos
• All live-streamed event videography
• News and current affairs TV
• perhaps others?

These are pretty significant percentages of the entire professional moving images industry.  It's easy to start thinking that no-one will pick up a camera professionally any more, but that's just not likely to be the case.  

Even if you're right that people born from now onwards don't have any special relationship with reality (which I don't think will happen for a very long time), the people who are 10 years old now might live for another 100 years and they probably want to continue to want to see real life content, so that will be phased out pretty slowly.

15 hours ago, Mark Romero 2 said:

Thanks for the input.

Yeah, I think that the MAIN reason i never used HLG was because there wasn't a simple LUT available for it (as far as I knew at the time), and I was told that IF I ever wanted to uses ACES in resolve, then it could be problamtic. Is that an old wives tale? Don't know. Just didn't want to experiement with it because I was pretty happy with V-LOG and the Ground Control LUT (I think that is the one I am using... will double check. I just know it was free, because, I am cheap).

But will certainly give it a go now, although I admit that sometimes when using a CST node in Resolve, I then don't know what to set some of the other "ancilliary" settings to (like the tone mapping and such). And reading through the Resolve manual makes my brain hurt.

If you're doing the colour grade yourself then here's my advice:

• If it looks good, it is good (and it doesn't really matter how you got there)
• If you're not sure what a setting does, and it doesn't make the image clearly better, then probably just leave it at whatever the default was

That's literally it. 

As you gradually get better you'll build up a sense of what tools make what situations look better, and you'll get that from trial and error / reading forums / watching tutorials / etc, but as soon as you start using the word "should" a lot then you need to go back to the first bullet point above - if it looks good then it is good.

The goal of the tech is to learn it enough to start thinking about other more creative aspects.

22 hours ago, PPNS said:

thank you. i dont disgree, i think reels are hard to do, and im not sure what to do with them other than combining a bunch of pretty stuff in a timespan that doesn’t bore people.

A resume isn't meant to be a page-turner.  It's a document built for a purpose.

This is the same.

This doesn't mean it shouldn't be interesting, but if the sound design isn't that great then that's not the point of the video, unless you're trying to get hired to do that.  IIRC I've seen colourist reels without any sound at all, but I might be wrong about that.

18 hours ago, IronFilm said:

How much more of videography will be dead too, what if anything will be safe a decade from now?

I feel completely safe in doing my own home videos of family and friends.

I don't care how photorealistic the AI will get (and it will get to be perfect), there will still be a fundamental difference between what something actually did look like vs what something might have looked like.

This difference will remain as long as people are attached to a physical reality at all.

There are parallels in other mediums as well.  Art forgeries are still forgeries, even if they're perfect.  If you think that no-one will care, just google "art providence" and see how much people really do care.

11 hours ago, Mark Romero 2 said:

Curious as to how you are then converting from HLG to a Rec.709 image? (or maybe you are just monitoring / delivering in HLG???). I haven't tried HLG yet because not sure if there is a "right" way to get it in to Rec 709. (Maybe there is a CST for it in Resolve??? Or a Third-Party LUT???)

HLG isn't a standard, it's more like a semi-technical marketing phrase, however, rec2100 and rec2020 are HDR standards and you can use a CST to convert them to whatever you like.  If I shoot a clip in 709 and then HLG on my GH5, then the conversion from rec2100 to 709 is pretty close to the 709 version SOOC.  Close enough that the difference is irrelevant, because you're going to want to push and pull the image in post, and those adjustments will easily override the differences out of the camera.

It's easily tested - just record a clip in HLG and then in V-LOG and use the CST to convert both to rec709 and see which input colour space / gamma is closest to the V-LOG conversion.

The better you get at colour grading, the less you care about which camera or colour space was used, as long as it's a robust and efficient codec and has colour management support.

14 minutes ago, PannySVHS said:

Anyone really loving the colour they are getting from their S line cameras? I liked the results filming in HLG better than in VLog, which I got after grading.

I decided with my GH5 that HLG was a better log space than V-Log, because in HLG the amount of bits for the midtones and saturation were higher (and therefore suffered less from the compression).  This comes at the expense of the shadows and highlights, but these are far less important than skin-tones, so I figure I'm making a good trade-off.

22 pages on...  and nothing has been learned.

17 hours ago, Chrille said:

Thanks a lot for your feedback - i have watched wanderingdp but will intensivy! You are absolutely right with all the inspiration and a stronger focus on concept. I feel bad answering your text with just one sentence , but i cannot say more than it's highly appreciatet and i will definitely look in those directions. 

The other thing that occurs to me is to watch BTS videos of music video shoots.  These will include lots of tricks about how to achieve various looks, as well as showing what the final looks are.

17 hours ago, Chrille said:

It's just hard to capture the focus, especially on a gimbal. you can only move from side to side but not in and out. AF ist much more convenient 🙂 On the other hand it just looks so nice wide open...

Yeah, a 58mm F2.0 lens isn't so easy to manually focus, especially on a gimbal, unless you had a remote-follow-focus, a very good monitor with excellent focus-peaking controls (that can compensate for the softness when wide-open), and are practiced at operating a gimbal and follow-focus at the same time.

It's not that difficult to degrade the image in post to achieve at least some of the major optical aberrations that these vintage lenses have.  One power grade you could setup for yourself and just pull out when needed might include:

• a power-window that darkens the edges (ie, vignette) and also adds a blur towards the edges (bonus points for mixing a normal blur with a radial blur)
• a lens correction that adds some barrel distortion
• a glow / haze effect to lower contrast (can easily be done with a blur that is put over the top of the footage at a low opacity)
• a very small-radius blur over the whole clip to knock the sharpness down a bit

When fine-tuned, the above can do a pretty decent imitation of a vintage lens, so is worthwhile putting into your toolkit if you're a fan of the vintage look.

Now we have AI there are other things you can play with too....

The Resolve Magic Mask is able to identify objects pretty well now (see the red overlay over the man):

So you could potentially mask out the main objects and then do things to the background like darken it, blur it, make it a different hue, etc.  The Depth Map feature is also interesting:

I would suggest that neither of these is good enough for really strong adjustments (without visible artefacting - they're roughly like the iPhone DOF simulations) but in music videos the look might be appropriate.  

Filters and blend modes are definitely your friend with music videos.  If all else fails, you can pull a key of the skin-tones and then do whatever you want to the rest of the image.

With all these things, if the edges aren't great or it doesn't quite stand-up then just back off the opacity.  You should always be applying too much of an effect and then pulling it back to something acceptable.  Then you can A/B it with and without the effect and adjust to taste.  If you don't go too far and then pull back, you will always be used to the image without that effect and so it will always look like it's overdone.

Also, most colour grading breakdowns show that it's about applying a number of small and subtle adjustments that add up - it's very rare for any one individual adjustment to be significant, with the exception of colour space transforms and the basics like adjusting exposure and contrast and saturation.

12 hours ago, MurtlandPhoto said:

Higher education marketing and communications. Innately human-centric marketing that doesn't have the same corporate hellscape culture of tech, finance, or most consumer goods companies. Colleges and universities are trending towards hiring content teams full-time versus outsourcing work for cost savings, consistency, and efficiency. Even schools that outsource usually have project managers and communications leads internally that maintain the brand message. I've worked in this space my whole career. It's nice here.

I've heard anecdotally that tertiary education (university and technical colleges etc) is being stripped bare by cost-cutting and efficiency programs, to the point where a friend of mine did a Graduate Certificate (which is the first third of a masters degree) and wanted advice on which course/units to choose when re-enrolling in the next part and there was literally no-one he could talk to.  All lecturers were only accessible to students enrolled in specific units and he was ignored / actually turned away, the course controller was also the head of the school and not even contactable and the entire enrolment process was all online and there literally wasn't even a student services desk where you could talk to a human being.  This was at a major university here in Australia that appears in lists of top universities world-wide from time to time, so it's no backwater institution, and it's not like the fees aren't putting a truckload of money into their coffers either.

Maybe life is different in the marketing department?

1 hour ago, Chrille said:

I am really wondering how much it would be to buy the complete Digitial Bolex project ( incl. contakt to manufacturers etc.)  from the original creators. I guess all the technical parts have become dirt cheap since the original release.

Do you mean technical parts like the chips etc?  If so, maybe they're out of stock and no longer being manufactured, so would be practically infinite in cost, rather than cheap.

7 hours ago, QuickHitRecord said:

It's the first test footage I've seen in a long time that made me think, "Well, that's different!". The colors feel a little overzealous, but there's something immersive about the this footage (and I own that Cosmicar lens). At least to me. And they dynamic range test on the bus is remarkable. If they launch a pre-order, I may have to break my "No Gear Year" and put myself on that list.

I also thought that the colours were overzealous, but this is actually a good thing - increasing saturation on poor quality footage really reveals weaknesses in the codec and colour science, so the fact that the colours don't reveal such weaknesses is a real plus.  Had they posted only desaturated images I would have immediately suspected they were covering up some weakness, but this is obviously not the case.

Triple post... 

*sigh*

Double post

That's very promising looking footage, and definitely the right sized cameras - 80 x 80 x 50mm and under 400g (3.2" x 3.2" x  2" / 0.89lbs)