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Feature films with decent budgets often have the most resources for a colourist compared to other types of productions (eg, reality tv shows, documentaries, other types of tv shows). As I'm sure you're aware, there are aspects of the image that can be adjusted in post and aspects that must be done in-camera. This means that the colour and contrast differences that can be adjusted in post might be left to the colourist, whereas the lenses might be chosen for the characteristics that must be captured in-camera. I'm in a number of social media groups about vintage lenses and these are full of cinematographers building sets and modding / servicing them for cine use (and often for rental) and these guys still care a great deal about matching. It's common for someone building a set to take years and buy several copies of each focal length in the series and then choose the best / sharpest / best matching ones and then sell the rest. It's also worth mentioning that in big budget features the colour will be heavily stylised in post anyway, so matching things becomes a much smaller task in the overall amount of things to be done, whereas if you're keeping a very neutral look and operating on a tight budget then matching would be of much higher importance (or should be!).

I'm not optimistic about it staying alive very long in here, but anyway.... Is the 18-35 a good lens for AF? I had one on my 700D and when focusing (either PDAF in photo mode or CDAF in video) it was clunky and noisy and felt like it was made of stone-age clockwork.

I'm quote prone to motion sickness myself, but I was more curious about which types of footage you had issues with. I've had a number of hobbies in the past where I knew people who were more sensitive to various aspects and I've found that much can be learned by understanding their experiences more. Images and cinematography is essentially a game of subtlety, so it's like looking at things through a magnifying glass 🙂 For example do you have issues with unstabilised hand-held footage? hand-held footage with OIS? with IBIS? or is it less dependent on the type of stabilisation and more on the amount of motion? I wouldn't be holding your breath for this type of integration. BM deliberately doesn't provide any support for Prores RAW in Resolve, I'm assuming because B-RAW is their competitor. It's a game of thrones style clash where everyone tries to own every part of the ecosystem by using all their products to promote all their other products, like Apple etc. If BM consider Sony cameras to be their competition they may just never include it, especially if it's not something that "the industry" uses.

My point exactly.

I find that a curve with a nice rolloff in post can give a nice highlight transition without too much fuss - it does raise the brightness of the highlights though, so you can either have brighter image or one with more contrast, but if you're willing to do that then I find it's not too much of a challenge. Another trick that is easy enough is to desaturate the highest luma values. It seems like the most common issues with poor highlight rolloffs is the channels clipping at different points and there being banding of colours around the edges (eg, like the sun going through rings of yellow at sunset or cyan if transitioning from a blue sky). This desaturation can often deal with these in a very organic and neat way. Combine the two approaches (curve and desaturation) and you can get quite good results from even poor footage I've found. Is that what ARRI is saying in the link?

I find that photos and video are very different and I don't prize either from a smartphone. My friend only takes stills and the really good ones get printed and framed and put on his wall. He's shot many more photos with his phone than with his ancient Canon DSLR (IIRC it's a 40D?) and yet he's never taken a single photo with his phone worthy of being printed. In terms of video, you seem to love your smartphones but I find the images thin and uninspiring. They have large resolutions and frame rates but I feel they lack all the things required to give them feeling, which is why I shoot in the first place. In terms of overthinking things, that's what this forum is for, mostly. Hardly anyone comes on and says "I shoot this what do I need" gets some technical info and then says "thanks, I've got it all working now, bye....". There are a few, but all the rest of us are really just here, overthinking everything!

Absolutely. I'm not sure this really ever gets discussed here - the effect that the setup has on how well you use it and how creative you are when actually shooting and making directing / composition / lighting / etc choices. I know that the GH5 felt way nicer to use than the XC10 and for me I think a big part of that was how the images feel in post and the 10-bit codec - holding the camera and knowing that when you hit record you're making files you will enjoy editing in post certainly contributes a lot to my experience while shooting. Camera size is one of these things - not only does it change how you use it and how you feel about using it but it also changes how the people around you feel about the situation. Filming in public with a huge camera makes people wary and distracted and on set will make them take you more seriously (warranted or not) and the opposite is true of small cameras.

Interesting that you're very sensitive to the motion. I'm curious to hear more because I suspect it means that you're sensitive to un-natural motion rather than all motion (otherwise you could never go anywhere or do anything!). What types of motion are you more/less sensitive to?

Thanks for trying it.. but I think something went wrong with that test - or the software you're using couldn't handle that particular motion perhaps? The pulsing was terrible! Maybe it would work getting for a more normal shot? I think it's worth pursuing if you were interested in gimbal-like stabilisation, but obviously if you're not chasing that locked-on dead-smooth look then the gyro is definitely good enough.

Actually I was talking specifically about this forum. For example, here we are in a Canon thread and there are now three people who will simply not let a mention of Panasonic occur without criticising the AF. You already explained your opinion, and yet you replied again with many more paragraphs of criticism. If I kept replying, would this conversation last forever? Does the last word in every thread have to be a criticism? This perpetual negativity is the "shouting from the mountaintops".

I'm reminded about the idea that you can't think creatively and analytically at the same time. A quick google didn't reveal any good sources for this, but it's definitely something I've experienced myself. In terms of making good films, I think that the image is actually one of the least important aspects, contrary to the camera-television industrial complex and social media echo chambers. I do wonder if having less 'options' in terms of DR is just related to the fact we have more with 'nicer' cameras. ie, the effect only happens because it's a change from our nicer more capable cameras? Of course, it could also be to do with the relationship between the capture DR and output DR being similar for non-HDR which makes it easier. It also distracts us from the red-herring of pixel-peeing the image, as everyone seemed to do for the first 5 years of 4K being around... "did you like the video I sent you" "it looked glorious in 4K - wow" "but what about the video - did you like the story" "what story? I was looking at the resolution". I wonder if people are shooting with a higher DR camera and publishing in HDR if they no longer have the burden of trying to compress the DR in post if that makes it simpler somehow? I think having less distractions on things that don't matter so much (tech) you're forced to do things that are more creative and that's what gets the creative juices flowing. Think of how the tech-focused 'creators' work is just a cookie-cutter of the same stale creative elements, whereas the folks who aren't tech-focused do new things in terms of camera angles and editing style etc etc. Absolutely agree about the differentiation between personal and paid work. I love the tech, which is why I'm on forums like these. If I was trying to learn how to make good content then people sitting around arguing about codecs and DR and colour science wouldn't help at all 🙂 Due to this, I think I get distracted by the tech and so it's really nice when shooting to be able to put those thoughts to the side and think creatively. It's one of the reasons I shoot with the camera doing the exposure for me - it's a non-creative task (in almost all cases) that isn't worth me putting my energy into at the expense of creative aspects. I have moved to manual focusing, and did so because I found that it's a creative aspect and I really like the aesthetic and what it contributes to my finished films. I'm quite lucky in that when I get out and start shooting for real the tech parts of my brain seem to get pushed to the back and I'm thinking about composition and subject and movement and all those creative things. Well, not all the creative things, but as many as my inexperienced brain can handle. I wish I was able to think about sound more while also concurrently thinking about the other things! I'm getting better on that though 🙂

Now I'm beginning to doubt myself. If I take the film stock ARRI was talking about and a super-big DR film stock and expose both of them to a XYLA 21-stop test chart they're not going to both have the same density of exposed film at the +3 and -3 patches. The high-DR film stock has more total DR, so the DR in the scene has to be represented as lower differences in the density of the stock. ie, this image has the stops quite far apart (GH1 DR test) and this image has the same stops much less far apart (GH6 DR test) The number of stops between two points is absolutely about the scene and nothing else, however the number of stops of light required to change the exposure value on a given negative or camera from 2% to 90% has everything to do with the film/sensor and nothing to do with the scene. Right?

ARRI film cameras are in no way "worse" cameras, it's the combination of various factors that makes this label.. they seem to correlate with "affordable" though! I'm on the fence about the GX85 being a bad camera - the 4K is pretty nice when viewed at 4K and when downsampled to 1080p it's a very nice 1080p image indeed. I don't know what it's DR of video is, but IIRC I did an under/over test some time ago and it was pretty flexible - much more than I would have thought. In terms of an update to the GX85? Give it h265 12-bit support and I'd be happy!

Nah, just as you get close you'll arbitrarily move the goal posts again to 6K or 8K or some other thing that makes very little difference except making you re-buy all your equipment again and be forced to choose between cameras that are severely stretched and limited in many ways. .......just like everyone did when they went from 1080p to 4K, mostly for very little reason except to sell more TVs.

I think it might be helpful if you'd read the link I posted? The figures are about the Characteristic Curve of the film, which is how exposed the film is (density) when it's exposed to certain amounts of light by the scene. 9 stops! 🙂

The image looks indistinguishable from my XC10, although I haven't edited the files from it in a while. Maybe with a much more contrasty grade the 10-bit advantage of this camera would be more visible.

Great tests and thanks for sharing. One option you might test is doing the gyro stabilisation and then the normal stabilisation on top of that. I suspect that Resolve will only let you apply one type of stabilisation, so you'd have to render out a clip with the gyro built in and then import and stabilise that clip in a second pass, although in reality if you wanted the extra stabilisation then you could just do a pass of all the gyro shots in a project and then replace the original clips with those processed ones to edit your final project. I suspect that would take it to gimbal levels of stabilisation, although still not giving the shutter angle support of a real gimbal. Personally, I absolutely detest the look of a hand-held gimbal - it's the look of camera that is completely stabilised in terms of where it's pointing but is bobbing around all over the place in 3D space, it just screams amateur to me. In this sense you'd want to limit the gyro stabilisation so that it's not dissonant with the camera physical movement, and in this kind of limited stabilisation the gyro looks easily up to the task. Very promising!

Fixing things in post is a real mixed-bag. Lenses with simple (ie, not complex) distortions can be fixed in post to make the lines relatively straight, but that's not going to cut it for things like large groups of people. The fundamental problem on wider lenses is that the world is angled and sensors are not, so objects on the edges of the frame will appear larger than ones in the middle of the frame. You can adjust the image to straighten lines (as you would do for architecture) but this makes the relative sizes between the edges and middle even worse. Or you can choose to adjust it so that the sizes are relatively similar but lines will not be straight. There's no way to get both in the same image unfortunately, and lenses that are rectilinear (have straight edges) will have the worst corner stretching. Here's what is happening: Notice how the corners get stretched? Things look even stranger when you move the camera. The 14mm f2.5 isn't too bad, but is still quite curved. IIRC it can be corrected pretty easily. I have it and can do a quick test..

Best wishes for a full and speedy recovery!

Interesting, that's a lot more forgiving than I would have thought, being that 5-stops over is pushing things right up into the highlight rolloff. Maybe I should have said 7 stops over! Just goes to show the relative "bit-depth" of analog and what kind of subtleties are there, should they be expanded out to be more visible. I guess that really emphasises the importance of bit-depth, and suggests why cameras like the ARRI, the Canon 5D with ML, etc have such great and flexible images. In a way, the 9-stop DR of film that ARRI was talking about is 9-stops combined with an almost limitless bit-depth - such a great combination for colour subtlety and richness. Every time I try and emulate the look of film in a project (not in a technical way but using pre-existing LUTs or transforms) I learn a lot about image aesthetics and colour and contrast and tone. I really need to get back into shooting more little tests and grading them just to get more practice.

Good points, but I think perhaps you took a few things out of context. Firstly about the DR figures.. your quote was correct - I did say "colour negative film has 5.5 stops of DR between 2% and 90%", and I did mean that, however, I absolutely did not mean "colour negative film has 5.5 stops of DR", which is a completely different statement and one that is factually incorrect, as you point out 🙂 (As you said that you didn't read the page I linked to, ARRI actually said "Current color negative materials can capture a dynamic range of 9 stops" and then had a summary table that outlined the exposure values at various points, of which the 2% was three stops below mid-grey and 90% was 2.5 above mid-grey). The reason I quoted stops of DR (either for the 2%-90% range for film or 5.2 stops for rec709) was to establish an absolute measure for how much contrast in a scene would translate to how much contrast in a given image. What I mean by this that when you adjust the image so that the clipping point of your input file is at 100IRE and your noise floor is at 0IRE, you can then adjust the contrast knob and you decrease the amount of stops that fit between (say) 10IRE and 90IRE, without losing the total DR (because it compresses that in the rolloffs). The point of mentioning these things was to make the comparison between the DR captured by these "worse" cameras and the level of contrast in a properly lit/exposed film pipeline (eg in theatres), or a properly lit/exposed 709 (eg video broadcast). This means that in these lesser cameras, by the time you shoot something in their 709 profiles (and maybe add some contrast or rolloff in post) then you're getting a similar level of contrast in the final image to these reference pipelines. The purpose of that comparison was to say "these cameras have a similar level of contrast to get the looks that are desirable and even nostalgic". I would go further than this actually, I think that given the (perhaps) 7-8 stops of DR in the video mode of these "worse" cameras it's easier to create an image for non-proficient colourists than it is to do so with a camera that captures more DR. I know that when I was grading the images from the XC10, I had trouble with its ~11 stops of DR, because I wanted to keep everything it captured, all the way from the texture in the clouds to the subtlest shadow details. I don't know what it was about that challenge that kept me from getting it right, if it was that when I added enough contrast I would lose any contrast in the parts of the image that got pushed into either rolloff, or if I didn't know how to balance the level of contrast with saturation (converting the XC10 C-Log into rec709 using the CST or Canon LUTs gave crazy saturation that I didn't know how to deal with at the time). Regardless, it was essentially too much for me to handle and I struggled. Had I been given an image with those levels of contrast built-in, I think I would have just taken what I was given and did what I could with it. There's also an element of the paradox of choice. The more choice we have with something, the more that we get anxiety around not having chosen the best option. The optimum amount of choice is (of course) not zero, but actually the peak where anxiety hasn't yet overtaken the experience is quite low in the overall spectrum, certainly lower than people would think, especially in todays world where manufacturers are always pushing us to think that more options is better.

Not at all. Their AF will ruin your life. Not a single Panasonic camera has ever created a single frame where a single item was in focus. Not even if you filmed in a forrest - it would pick a focus distance where no single trunk, branch, twig or leaf was in focus. It's so bad that it's probably the cause of global warming and religious extremism!

I agree they have an image problem. My point was that it's based on ignorance, which cannot be cured.

I meant the old P6K, as I was responding to @PPNS saying "dont really get the point of the p6k anymore since the release of the pro anyway, i just would've discontinued it" Now with the new P6K being the same size as the pro, yeah, that size advantage is gone. I heard someone say that you don't need the internal NDs if you prefer to use external ones, potentially as they might be higher quality than the internal ones (I think they were referring to people who use filters in a matte box). FrameVoyager also said they had problems with their P6K Pro NDs breaking because the camera was dropped by luggage handlers so the NDs are another moving part that can fail. Seems like a typical camera industry thing, as: You get some upgrades from the previous model and combined with the same price point it's a "better" value for money You pay for it with down-sides that you wouldn't have wanted and aren't welcome for a range of users That's basically how the camera industry rolls right?

I'm reminded of Werner Herzog saying that his cinematographers need to know their equipment and their especially their camera/lens so that they could shoot without looking through the viewfinder but would still know the framing. It was his minimum criteria for a cinematographer to be considered competent IIRC. It is one of the things that they talk about with street photography and using only a single prime lens - you get to the point of not needing to look because you already know the lens and the compositions you'd get. ...and yes, the grass is always greener with other cameras, but apart from resolution and increased DR, the 5D ML combo is right at the top of what is available, basically regardless of price.