kye

11 hours ago, Snowfun said:

Good question! A bit of both. It’s more to capture the essence and atmosphere of the resort (in Lapland) rather than super gnarly tricks (by myself or others!) Some boot mount shots, some rails, some lift shots and some scenery. Nothing too preplanned or set up - if it’s looking good, whip the camera out and shoot. I’ve already damaged fingers with frostbite so my hands get very cold very quickly hence the need to emphasise ease of use. Beginning to think more along GoPro lines (agree with @kyethat Osmo might be too fragile).

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.

14 hours ago, Davide Roveri said:

I was talking specifically about film emulation for stills not video, like the ones you can find in Fuji cameras 

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.

9 hours ago, Davide Roveri said:

Potentially the system in Lumix cameras is even better than what Fuji is offering since it can be based on LUTs if you want and therefore you can create very customised simulations.. The only limitation at the moment is that the grain effect (which is very nicely implemented and you can read more about it here) is only available in the L.Neo and L.Monochrome profiles which are very stylised already so unless you base your own profile on those you won't be able to add the grain but let's hope this will change in future firmware releases 🤞

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.

11 hours ago, Chrille said:

I ordered one: my Sony a74 is just sitting on the shelf and only comes out when i shoot a real project. I would love to have a something with me that shoots nice quality and feels like a camera at the same time... We will see...

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.

4 hours ago, Davide Roveri said:

Hello everyone,

just wanted to share a little travel film I shot in Valencia on my first trip with the S5IIX, hope you're gonna enjoy! 

 

Nice compositions.

What lenses did you use?

3 minutes ago, Ty Harper said:

Point is this was all happening BEFORE this Open AI/Sora news hit.

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!

2 hours ago, MrSMW said:

Maybe… I get around 1/2 a dozen asking every year but when I mention the info they are asking about has a value, every single one says, “err, no thanks, I just wanted a free info dump”.

It’s not like there are a million folks offering grading tuition but there are near zero offering it regarding hybrid so it’s a rare bird indeed.

My issue is, unless I am making it VERY worth my while, I would just potentially be feeding my direct comp.

Unless I only sold my services to folks who don’t or won’t be offering the services I do in France…

That could be viable. I’ll think on it…

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 🙂 

1 hour ago, MrSMW said:

I'd write a book or offer training, but no one wants to pay for anything these days so I'll take my secrets to my cardboard coffin incineration day

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.

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.