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Yeah, and actually the absolute DR doesn't really matter either - what is important is having the same people test the other cameras in the same way so that the relative comparisons are valid. I read an interesting comment about the Alexa Classic on the CineD test for it, which basically amounted to it testing at about 14 stops of DR, but that was RAW and with NR it could get another few stops above that. Interestingly, a lot of the other cameras they test aren't RAW and so already have the NR (and smoothing from compression) applied - so if you're comparing a h264 camera with an Alexa then potentially the Alexa might actually have 17 stops in comparison, but maybe when comparing it to a RAW shooting camera then 14 is the relevant number. That struck me as being another whole variable on top of their numbers that they didn't seem to talk about much (I've read lost of their lab tests when I reviewed camera DR and put together my spreadsheet for it) and I also don't know that much about either. Fun stuff. I should really go read the technical manual for the software they use so I understand the charts better.

Cool - calibration is the key. In terms of monitors beyond that, I'm not really sure how to judge a good monitor vs bad. Obviously if you need a wider colour space than 709 then you'll want the monitor to have that coverage, and if you're working in an environment where you want to look at the monitor from different angles (eg, if you have multiple people reviewing your work at the same time - like director cinematographer producer etc) then colour accuracy over angle-of-view will matter. Maybe the bit-depth matters too? I use a BlackMagic Ultrastudio Monitor 3G to get a 10-bit image out of Resolve to my reference monitor without going through the OS colour profiles, so maybe the 10-bit helps? I read a bunch of monitor reviews some time ago but I got the impression they were the same as most camera reviewers - people that didn't know much (except how to speak like they're an expert) just repeating specs and media release BS back at you.

AUS only issue - that sounds about right!

If you're paying retail, $100K isn't a high end system... it's a very nice turntable, without a preamp!

"If it looks good, it is good" - common mantra from professional colourists.

Well, we all know how optimistic those manufacturers dynamic range specs are, but yes, Sony are up there in DR.

I suggest this model of calibrator: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1506566-REG/x_rite_eodisstu_i1display_studio.html Then buy whatever you can afford with the rest of your budget. Buying a monitor without it being calibrated is like having a two-year-old adjust all the secret manufacturers monitor parameters and then using it as a colour reference for your work.

An average monitor that's been calibrated will be better than the most expensive monitor available that hasn't been calibrated. There is no such thing as an "accurate" monitor without calibration. Buy a calibration device and then go looking for a monitor. When you do this you can calibrate your laptop screen as well.

Everyone here should be very very happy that they're not into high-end audio instead of cameras. I used to be, and high-end audio is broadly similar, except: a setup is 8 products, not two add a zero to the price you can't listen to it over the internet - imagine if you were listening to a radio show about cameras instead....

I really think that editing, and analysing editing, is the best way to improve everything else. People talk about "shooting for the edit" and that's a great strategy if you know what the edit is going to be, but I suspect most people don't. The edit is really "where the rubber meets the road" and you can have all the great shots and nice sound that you want, but if it doesn't work in the edit then it isn't good, period. So by deepening your understanding of the edit you're really deepening your understanding of what "good" really is. I'm noticing so much stuff about cinematography and it's really making me think about shooting differently too. I'm much less advanced on my understanding of sound design than I am of cinematography, but I'm really starting to notice things about this as well. Apart from the ad-breaks where obviously every element in the edit all stops/resets, there aren't so many neat pauses, rather the structures of these edits are more like a continuous stream where threads are interwoven and so visual themes, voice-overs, music, sound design (eg, ambience), and other elements are all overlapping. It gives a great feeling of carrying the viewer along on the journey, with a really rich experience, and it also provides a great tone from which to break if you really need to. In one episode there's a scene in a restaurant where the host is interviewing some people and all of a sudden some gangsters drive almost into the restaurant in a stolen car and get out and have guns and the place just goes instantly to chaos with everyone crouching down but the cameras keep rolling. In that section they cut to just raw clips with basic editing, which contrasted starkly to the rich multi-layered production just previously. It further added to the feeling being changed. It's great to see how they're supporting the whole aesthetic theme of each episode with all the layers and techniques - a true alignment of all departments all pushing in the same direction.

I've been persevering with analysing editing, and the more I do this the more I recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their skills. One piece of advice I would give, which seems actually kind of painful, is to cut up the video yourself manually. I cut up a show using the auto-magical tool and set it to be pessimistic (so it misses some cuts rather than has false-cuts on strong action) and then made a pass to manually add-in the rest of the cuts that it missed. This manual pass made me examine, frame by frame, some of the faster more complex parts of the edit. I'm cutting up travel shows with stylistic edits, and I have been noticing all kinds of tiny details in the editing. Some things I've found include: digital punch-ins for one or two frames before / after an edit to add a zoom effect or glitch effect (if the punch-ins were offset in X and Y from each other) jump-cuts to remove maybe 2-4 frames in some shots to add pace and style to b-roll shots with movement in faster montages barn door / sliding door effects on edits 'burst edits' where there is a longer shot, 1 black frame, 2 frames b-roll shot, 1 black frame, 2 frames b-roll shot, 1 black frame, longer shot whip pan transition wipe transition where a blurry object moves rapidly across the screen to obscure the first shot and reveals the second shot whip pan transition with a single frame of crazy motion-blur between the two shots - the single frame wasn't at all similar to the others so it kind of creates a flash effect fades... the combination of fade-out / fade-in is used (noticing when it's used is interesting) but fade-out / hard cut in from black was another combination I saw, interesting aesthetic colour grading variations - sometimes the colour was one way and sometimes another - seeing this choice of different looks was very interesting This might sound super-trendy but it wasn't from a travel YT video - this was from a major TV travel show episode that won multiple awards for editing. There are probably other things in there I haven't noticed yet either, but there are cuts in there that I've spent whole minutes just rolling back and forth and looking at and thinking about. Also in addition to seeing things at the micro-level with individual cuts, I'm noticing things at the structural level where the relationship of scenes within the final edit is laid-out. if you're making up the edit then the relative structure becomes visually obvious and the act of doing this makes you think about what a scene really is. Do the shots that get you to and from a location count in this scene? What is a "location" - some "scenes" might move between rooms or buildings and others might just stay put. The analysis forces you to notice these things. Sometimes they might have one scene that moves around and another that doesn't - trying to understand why is very useful. It is having several effects on me: It is making me realise how shallow the level of skill is on things like wedding videos (despite them being perfect for many of these innovative techniques) as they're multi-layered and very stylised It is making me realise how little is actually required to get a nice edit - some of the videos I've really enjoyed watching have been very very simple edits just having a simple structure and just music and no other sounds It is showing me how much you can get away with - knowing what is in an edit frame-by-frame and then re-watching it and not seeing what you know is there (or removing a single frame and re-watching it and not noticing a difference) it really shows you what is perceptible and what isn't** It is adding more and more tools to my editing toolkit I'm realising the importance of sound design I'm learning so much by watching the cinematography too ** yes I have checked that my editing setup is playing all the frames (I've actually examined the latency and jitter on my setup by filming my laptop screen and external monitor with my iPhone at 240fps and verified that the image timing is identical on both screens and also that each frame is visible for a similar amount of time, ie ~10 frames at 240fps per frame of 24p). I cannot recommend this type of analysis highly enough. We watch so much content and yet so much of the artistry is simply not apparent until we go deep and really look, frame-by-frame, at what the masters are doing. Pick something done by the people at the pinnacle of the craft and go deep on it and see what you find. You won't regret it - I find it's actually more entertaining than just watching TV or a movie so it's not a chore at all, but like opening a window to new ideas you wish you knew earlier.

I wouldn't think that the 50p readout would be different to the normal readout - both RAW outputs are at full sensor resolution with no processing, so there's no downsampling or anything going on. I prefer to shoot in Prores on this as it does a great job of removing moire etc (BM engineers are better than I am!) but it is still prone to it on sharp lenses and fine detail. I'd suggest that the only reason to change the settings in camera are to change frame-rate, otherwise you can just set it and then simply adjust aperture / focus / ND shot-to-shot, so it's a very straight-forward experience actually. If you're shooting Prores rather than RAW then in theory you should be adjusting WB too, but if you are shooting outside then there's a good argument to be made for just setting to 5600K and then when things are warmer/cooler in reality then they will show up like that on the files and that's appropriate because that's actually how it was. If you're using artificial lights then just set for those and forget. IIRC I read somewhere that the WB latitude on the Prores HQ was as good as it was in the RAW, so that's probably something else that's worth a test to confirm, but certainly my experience changing WB in-post was just lovely and I did some quite strong changes as I was shooting at and around sunset so was dealing with some quite strong WB shifts and it was all very straight-forwards and a pleasant experience.

I think you missed the point. The GH5S was a non-IBIS camera designed for use in externally stabilised circumstances (ie, gimbals, tripods, steadicams, vehicle mounts, etc) where the IBIS mechanism would cause problems (eg, the sensor would wobble after a bump) and a fixed sensor is the preferred design. If you rely on IBIS (as I do) the GH5ii or GH6 are the upgrades to the GH5. The GH5S was the start of a parallel line of fixed-sensor cameras that happened to come out with some improved specs and happened to come out around when the GH5 replacement would have been nice and happened to have a similar body and happened to have a similar name. Saying that "imagine how successful Panasonic would have been if they just made a gh5s with IBIS a few years ago" is basically saying that you wanted a hypothetical camera that would have been popular. So on that note.... Imagine how successful Panasonic would have been if they just made a GH6 with 18 stops of DR and internal RAW in 2014!

I found that grading the BMMCC images was completely different to anything I'd experienced before. I suspect it's due to the fact it's RAW and so the challenge is to build a grade starting from scratch rather than having the camera do all sorts of things for you (if you want it to or not!). This was also the case for the ML footage I took from my Canon 700D, and would be the case for the EOS-M too. I'd suggest that you find some reference footage you like and use that as a guide for getting things in the ballpark and can adjust from there. You could even shoot a test clip in both RAW and Prores and then use the Prores as a reference for what the camera is doing and as a starting point for your grade too, especially with NR and softness/sharpening.

I suppose it's really about how close you are to the edge of what the equipment is capable of. I've posted about the GH5's limitations and how the GH6 is better in many ways, and probably not worse in that many, cost being a notable exception of course. Truth is that I'd be nervous about buying any camera other than a GH6. I've been around long enough to hear that camera manufacturers fill them with all kind of stupid stuff that can really bite you in the backside if you don't know about it. It's normally certain combinations of things, like in certain modes certain features aren't available or don't work as well, etc. I heard semi-recently from somewhere that in full-auto a camera doesn't smoothly adjust the exposure level, but goes up or down in steps while recording. I was stunned to hear this and made me wonder what the hell else that camera (and others) does or doesn't do that is completely ridiculous. Actually, the irony is that the shot in question would probably be unusable from a 5d2 or an NX (I don't know the Oly well enough to comment). The camera was on auto-ISO and auto-SS and the Voigtlander 17.5mm was fully open at F0.95, so the SS would have been 360-degrees and there's enough noise in the shot for me to know the ISO was really being pushed. IIRC I also lowered the exposure (using exp compensation) so that the background wasn't completely obscured, pushing the subject lower into the exposure range. Note that the BTS shot, which was taken with a modern iPhone, is out-of-focus. Think about how low-light the situation must have been for a phone to not be able to focus on anything in the frame! This is one of the shots that shows how well the GH5 operates under pressure - many of my shots are right at the limits of the IBIS, SS, lens T-stop, ISO performance, and right at the limits of my ability to grade the footage and bring out the best in it. I know that many of my shots are right at this limit because many are actually past that limit and I can't salvage. That's kind of the unspoken undercurrent of this thread. Depending on how heavily you rely on the features of the GH5, there may literally not be a better camera in existence (except the GH6). Many brands offering better low-light, colour science, DR, etc etc, but IBIS is substantially worse on all options except Olympus who can match the IBIS, but don't offer every feature of the GH5 still, and definitely not the GH6. Even the FF Panasonics have their own drawbacks, the S1 and S5 are cripple-hammered because they're not the S1H, and the S1H is large and expensive and still lacks all the features I hit the limits of the stabilisation of the GH5 quite often. Mostly it's due to being cold or low blood sugar. I'm shooting with manual lenses of course, so could get better stabilisation by using an OIS lens, but you'll lose a couple of stops of low-light, and guess when you often get cold - at night.. when it's dark! In reality, there could just as easily be a thread about who hasn't upgraded from the GH5 because it is still the best compromise for all the things that you need in a camera. The image quality is actually the worst feature of the GH5 - the best features are all the ones that add up to you being able to get the shot in the first place. I took the OG BMPCC out to shoot once, for a visit to a festival in a park, and that was enough to tell me it wasn't going to work for me. The screen couldn't tilt, I couldn't see it in daylight, I could solve that with a monitor but that would double the size of the camera which defeated the point, and the poor screen meant that I couldn't focus properly, etc... I spent so long getting each nice b-roll shot (and once graded they were genuinely lovely, the ones in focus that is) that I literally lost where my wife went and had to skip part of the place to find her again. Most of the spontaneous moments had evaporated before I was able to get the focus and exposure dialled in. This is all completely appropriate and not the fault of the BMPCC - it IS a cinema camera after all! It's that life doesn't wait for the camera to be ready. Of course, the easier your shoots are, the less these things matter to you. If you hit record on your camera and know what's going to happen with the lighting and composition of the shot, even 20s from now, then the demands on the camera you choose are significantly less. Anyone who can control the action to wait for the camera has such a different experience of shooting that they practically live in a separate universe.

Me sitting in a row boat: a shot I got from where I was sitting: Obviously if you can light or expose better then you should, and it depends on what you're filming about how much control you have over the variables, but most of the time the most difficult shots to film are the ones where I have basically no control over what is going on. I regularly find myself right at the limits of what the GH5 can do, and I just find it annoying that the generic response is to just "film better". I asked the question on the colourist forums too and they basically had no advice except to say that shooting in nicer conditions and using a better camera were the only answers. PS, if you're not aware, standing up one one side of a row boat is ill-advised unless you want to immediately transition into underwater photography.

You want people to shoot travel videos, adventure videos, home videos, weddings, outdoor sports, and everything else that happens outside in a studio instead?

I think this is the fate of many cameras. The camera market seems to be oriented around camera size being a prerequisite for image quality, despite the fact it doesn't have to be (as evidenced by BMMCC and OG BMPCC which were affordable a decade ago). This means that there is little support in-post for the lighter cameras and less reputation. This creates a feedback loop where people who want to shoot light don't make good-looking videos because the expectation isn't there, and people who have the expectation of great images shoot with larger cameras, reinforcing the concept that small and budget friendly isn't the way to go. In response to this completely made up size=quality concept, BM decided to make the BMPCC 4K literally 3x the total size of the OG BMPCC and abandoned the delightful S16 sensor for one that looks like any other camera, and almost all evidence that small could be great was swept under the rug. Those who shoot small typically shoot in uncontrolled conditions where the lighting is mixed colour temperature and lighting ratios are difficult to deal with, leaving those who shoot in the most difficult conditions and have the least ability in post production to shoot with the cameras least able to handle those conditions, and unaware that it could have been any different.

The news shooter article says that normal retail price will be $3,500 or so, which seems reasonable. The price of mechanical and electronic components has plummeted over the lsat few decades thanks to centralisation in China. The factor that makes or breaks products these days is the design of the physical unit and the software that controls it. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, so I would reserve judgement until there are units in the wild, and of course, all PR materials that are real (it's common for even things like car commercials to be 3d renders now) will be under the absolute best possible circumstances. Anyone who has ever used a GoPro knows that you'd have to be luckier than a lotto winner to get shots like they put in their promos.

Yes, it is noteworthy, but it would be good to see some tests where the magnitude of the streaks is known. ie, are the streaks 10-stops below the bright part of the image? 20-stops? 30-stops? If we knew that then it would be easier to know which situations you might encounter a problem and which you wouldn't. This is the GH6 XYLA21 chart from CineD, and the curve from the brightest patch to the noise floor (the curve on its left) looks like it drops away into the noise floor pretty quickly, so I'd imagine that for the streaks to be visible above the noise floor maybe 1/4 of the width of the frame from the brightest areas (as in the image you showed) then the highlighted areas must be well above 13 stops or so above the flag. That seems obvious considering the flag is pretty dark and the windows are completely blown to hell, so who knows how bright they actually are.

If it helps, you can go to a hardware store and grab a bunch of highly-saturated free paint swatches with the brightest colours you can find (and grab some skin-coloured ones too while you're there if you don't already have a colour checker) and you can experiment with those. Assuming you're setup with a calibrated monitor and neutral studio lighting (I recommend MediaLight https://www.biaslighting.com/ and have lit my studio with their bias light and plug-in globes) then you can shoot some test shots (I recommend in full-sun for best colour accuracy, or a halogen / incandescent globe if it's not sunny outside) and then you can bring the switches into the studio and compare them to your monitor (if you have a portable high-CRI light you can light the swatches with that - keeping any spill off your monitor) and literally compare then side-by-side, which is by far more brutal a comparison than anyone would ever have looking at your work in isolation. Much easier to do that than convert your studio into a rainforest habitat! What are your thoughts on RAW vs Prores and how good Prores is at matching the capabilities of RAW? I ask because lots of folks here have only shot with h26x and RAW and the differences are obvious, but may not be aware of where Prores sits in that spectrum. lol.... Are you able to provide any examples? I've seen a number of tests that don't have these issues, so interested in seeing how people are testing this. I'm seeing random idiots all mouthing off without having any thought (or even fact) behind their opinions all the time at this point. I think I saw one person declare that the GH6 was useless because it didn't have PDAF and then raved about the S1 for a while, I was thinking "um.........??" lol.. I find that when shooting with the family on trips there's a few things that solve lots of problems. Unfortunately one of the ones that gets used most often is a credit card!!

On what I shoot I'm everything... director, cinematographer, audio tech, editor, colourist, and Head of Distribution. You'd think that would make things easier, but it just means that instead of a room full of people all blaming each other and feeling good about their own work, I just sit quietly wondering what went wrong and wishing I was better at literally everything! That's probably pretty easy. Shoot a few test shots, then just adjust the curves to get the right output. Specifically, Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Sat and Hue vs Lum. You'd be amazed at how powerful those are. if you start with Contrast/Pivot/Sat and then do a pass on those Hue curves you can really get a good grade very simply and easily. I use them a lot when grading videos from here in Australia where the grass is almost always patchy and somewhere between lush green and straw yellow, and trying to get a shot-to-shot match when you're pointing in different directions and seeing different bits of lawn. The final season (and one episode especially) of the show was so dark that it was difficult to follow what was going on in the show - it was a social media shit-storm, the cinematographer blamed the viewers: https://mashable.com/article/game-of-thrones-too-dark-cinematographer and websites got a lot of mileage talking about how to re-watch it so you could actually see it: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/18522550/game-of-thrones-got-season-8-hbo-battle-of-winterfell-long-night-fix-tv-settings-darkness In reality, it was a large-scale test of how content is consumed in the real world because they pushed how dark the final grade was (which was appropriate to the narrative and subject matter), and the answer was that basically the entire pipeline isn't setup for dark things to even be visible, let alone somehow .. "accurate".

Walter Volpatto also mentioned that he's never been asked for a HDR output that wasn't limited to the P3 colour space, so it seems that you're right that 1000 nit P3 is becoming the standard. Colour accuracy is a pipe dream and (besides "how can I get my iPhone to look like an Alexa") is the topic that gets the colourists the most excited. The best approach that I've seen the colourists take is: grade on a calibrated display keep a calibrated consumer-grade 709 display handy and check it every so often to make sure you're not doing anything stupid get whatever display the Director is viewing your work on and check it on that too once it leaves your studio, forget about it whenever someone important (other than the Director) starts yelling at you incoherently about the colour being completely screwed, arrange to have them visit your studio and show them what it looks like on your reference display and make sure to explain in great detail how expensive and calibrated everything is If you want to talk about accuracy, let's start the conversation discussing the final season of Game of Thrones...... It seems to be an approach taken by other manufacturers too - shoot a scene at "correct" exposure on multiple models of their cameras using their standard log profile and you should be able to pull all the footage into post, apply their LUT or CST, and everything should match across all the cameras. Canon did that with the XC10 - matching it to the C-series line, which was why it took the same ridiculously expensive media as the C200/300 but didn't use the cards to even remotely near their performance, and used the C-Log profile but didn't use the full 0-1024 values but instead mapped the XC10 limited DR to where that DR lined up with the same values coming from a C500 or whatever. In the case of the XC10 it meant they basically crippled the camera for the sake of compatibility, but it would have been great to be able to use these for BTS and reference use (which seemed to be something they did) and not have to have a separate colour pipeline in post, which would have been really useful for the VFX folks who might want to see the setups and might also want a colour reference from that.

I thought this video was interesting...