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I've been watching the TV show M*A*S*H (1972-1983) and I'm finding it really interesting: The storytelling trumps the image quality, and it only takes a few seconds to stop looking at the image and start paying attention to the content It was shot on 35mm film, but was before colour grading, so the image is about as pure as you get The image is rather drab in comparison to any image that has been colour graded Whenever they cut to a shot that fades out or does a freeze frame the image degrades significantly in resolution and the colours and contrast shift significantly, presumably because it had to go through another generation to add the effect, so the quality and resolution limits are no joke However, having said that, the skin-tones and the high-DR external shots filmed in full direct sun are world class, even compared to the flagship cameras of today from ARRI. It makes it obvious that ARRI are in the business of making cameras with as many film-quality pixels as possible, and everyone else is in the business of making cameras with as many pixels as possible and letting quality fall where it may.

Meanwhile, wedding videographers are getting pinged for having audio that's too clean due to AI processing.. linked to timestamp: How on earth did we get here....

AI generated cartoon aired in China. It's a 26 episode series of 7 minute episodes about classical Chinese poems, so is sort of a cultural education thing. It took 6 months to do using AI text-to-video and the studio that developed it released the series to coincide with the opening of their new AI studio.

Just thinking about this more, and I recall that testing the GoPro on that little outing was actually really illuminating. I have always shot video in uncontrolled conditions, so never seriously studied coverage or blocking or sequences etc. What I found was: I shot everything I could see (which was really fun because I didn't have to wait for the camera) Not being able to see (the GoPro I had didn't have a screen) eliminated all aspects of chimping Pulling everything into the edit, I realised that I had so many different options, and make it a more whimsical edit with little sequences of fast-cuts like when getting seated at the cafe, and then again for standing up and walking out The success of those fast-cut transitions made me realise the value in having lots of shots to cut up, but also made me realise things like you can cut faster if you keep the compositions similar between shots so that the subject doesn't move, etc I made several videos with it, essentially going through a learning process each time, understanding more about how you can push the edit pretty hard without it seeming odd, realising where the barriers were in the edit and how I might solve them when shooting, shooting with that in mind, pushing further in the edit, etc I highly recommend shooting a few test videos like this, literally of anything, just to get a sense of the possibilities. Also, it's good to specifically test: How long it takes from hitting the button to the first frame, and how much it chops the ends off clips (the clip may end before you hit the stop button) How far off-centre you can put a subject before the wide-angle lens starts becoming unflattering or straight-up odd How active you can be in shooting and how much motion that creates in the frame (knowing you can run and get usable footage for example might open up possibilities) How far you can go in low-light before it's no good (for example, it might be ok indoors during the day in rooms with windows but not ok if there aren't any, etc) You probably know all this, but in case you don't, or the lurkers don't, this stuff is invaluable. Unfortunately, despite me shooting little tests quite frequently, I always learn things on trips that I wish I'd learned before and come away basically thinking I've screwed up each one.

The only reason you might not be able to is if the optics in the speed booster protrude too much and will interfere with the lenses you're planning on using. I have a vague recollection this was the case for some of those BM-specific speed boosters, but couldn't tell you which ones.

Definitely agree about the bulk of an external monitor. I've been bouncing between my OG BMPCC (P2K) and BMMCC (M2K!) for years now, and one of the biggest challenges of the M2K is how large the screen makes the rig, even though I have the Ikan 3.5" monitor: it requires a separate battery the mounting isn't slimline at all and so the monitor is quite far from a camera (compared to a flip or tilt screen) the HDMI cable takes it a very large step into "we are the Borg" territory I've used camcorders in the past, and also have the XC10 which is a camcorder in all but body-design, but my GX85 + 12-35/2.8 setup is what I use as my main camera now and I use it like a camcorder, so I get most of the benefits: It looks like a little P&S (because it is) so I invoke the dorky Dad vibe I'm planning to also get the 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens to pair with it which will give it a similar all-in-one lens The Dual IS gives it equivalent levels of stabilisation It's limited to 8-bit 709 style images, but these look pretty good in reality, so has a similar limitation but also strength in that regard too It lets me stop thinking about the camera and start thinking about what is in front of it

I shoot family travel videos, where you shoot what is happening and you have to shoot quickly to keep up, and I ran into the issue that I wasn't capturing establishing shots or getting any shots of moving between locations, so in the footage we'd just sort of teleport from one location to the next, starting with when we'd gotten into the venue and I could then take out the 'big camera' and start shooting again. I resolved to try and get a setup that I could shoot with while we were getting in and out of vehicles, walking to and from venues, buying tickets on entry, etc. I had an old GoPro and did a test of shooting a random outing when my wife and I went to get coffee by the beach. Predictably, I found that it was super easy and fast to shoot while walking down stairs, thinking about other things like navigating and reading signs, getting selfies, etc. What I didn't expect was that it was actually really easy and fun to get a large variety of shots too. High-angles, low-angles, detail shots (while remembering the fixed focus has a minimum distance) etc, and these were both fun to shoot and super useful in the edit. I personally like to shoot when I'm out doing things, I find it adds to the experience both in terms of giving me a toy to play with and a challenge of finding creative compositions but also training me to really look at the world and appreciate the beauty of everyday things. Now I have mostly replaced that role with my phone or a smaller camera like my GX85, but if I could only shoot something with an action camera then I think it's a really useful tool to make you focus on the creative aspects of film-making like subject and composition and movement and variety and sequences and editing style and sound design etc, rather than the technicalities of the image.

Lots of people are using NLE's to colour still images, but if you want to get picky then just substitute "NLE" for "post workflow" and then it's format agnostic 🙂 Social media sites with their low resolution and high compression formats will likely have a reduction in grain to a significant enough effect to make the choice of grain relatively inconsequential, especially considering that the character of still grain is less obvious than moving grain.

Obviously it depends on how you deliver your videos, but if you're delivering via a streaming service, the compression has such a devastating effect on grain that there's practically no benefit in applying one type of grain over any other, so you may as well just use a grain plugin in your NLE and be done with it.

Not an informed opinion, but I would have thought that the Osmo Pocket would be a bit physically vulnerable for this situation. It would suck if you veered into a snow bank (or 1000 other ways to crash) and killed the gimbal mechanism. I'd suggest watching "how to" videos for each of the action camera and looking specifically for a setting that enables easy on / off / recording / stop functionality. IIRC early GoPro models had a feature where you could press (or hold?) the power button and it would turn on and start recording straight away. I'd be surprised if the competitors didn't have an equivalent mode too, as operating a camera in gloves while being "busy" with other things is pretty much the situation they're designed for.

What aspects of the Fuji do you think will make it different to the Sony? What subjects and style will you shoot with it? Video or stills? Some equipment just has a magnetism that makes you want to pick it up and use it, and other equipment just doesn't, it's a strange thing but a large factor that we don't talk about enough I think.

Nice compositions. What lenses did you use?

What was the reasoning, if it was before AI? Aftereffects of COVID? or the changing media landscape with streaming etc? Something else?

@MrSMW Why on earth would you teach a course of "How to shoot hybrid weddings in France for English speakers"??? You're only a few steps off "How to shoot hybrid weddings in France for English speakers named Freddie and Susan" which has a market size of either 1 or 0 weddings a year. Why not ""How to shoot hybrid weddings"? Cameras still operate the same way in France, right?

News flash.... Critical thinking is a good idea, and you should remember the end goal of making a final edit that [gets likes / looks awesome / gets the client to pay you / gets you hired / etc]. I'd say it's not that hard, but evidence says otherwise!

I would imagine the easiest thing to do would be to go through a training organisation that already runs courses to photographers and would already have a mailing list and let them do the marketing and handle payments etc, and for you to just write your bio and then deliver the actual training. Obviously they'd take a cut, but sales and marketing isn't easy so they've earned a split. I wouldn't underestimate the number of stills photographers who haven't transitioned to video yet either, but as you say, hybrid is a whole thing so your market is potentially both photo-only folks, video only folks, and hybrid people who want to learn and get better. In terms of the random people asking you for free info, for every topic where people get paid well for providing training there will be people who want the info for free too, so I would suggest that your dataset might not be sufficient to draw any conclusions... I don't know what effect it would have to provide training to your competitors, but being able to say that you not only do hybrid but teach it to other pros might give you an advantage as well. Not to mention the advantage of getting them to give you some of their money 🙂

I don't think that's true actually. If you wanted to get into training then I'd encourage you to do it, especially if you have downtime during the off-season to try new things. I have bought several colour grading courses, probably totalling over $1K, and they always have dozens of people attending and who knows how many buying the recordings afterwards like I do (timezones between here and LA always suck). Many of the folks attending are solo operators who are upping their colour game, so might be a similar target audience to your skillset. Obviously training is a whole other skill and it's a business so there's a lot of prep work, but the rates can be pretty good, especially if you wouldn't otherwise be earning anything.

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.

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. 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'.

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?

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.

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?

Man, of all the places to make a typo! 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.