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Good luck with that! At this point I think half the people on these forums should list "Panasonic AF hater" on their CV under "Personal interests". Besides, all it takes is a quick look around and see all the flat-earth, plandemic, moon-landing / holocaust deniers, and you realise that it's more of a miracle that anyone is remotely sensible about anything at all!

Yeah, it's about having the highlight/shadow rolloffs and blur/grain. The OIS on the iPhones really is phenomenal - I wasn't ninja-walking and don't have particularly steady hands and even the walking shots were pretty good. I don't think I stabilised anything in post either, which would have over-stabilised things - the walking shots were already a bit too gimbal-like for my tastes. Having a nice 10-bit codec on a phone would make such a difference - Prores would be spectacular.

I'd imagine it would make you slow down and be more deliberate? I remember when I was shooting stills there was a heavy "anti-chimping" sentiment, which mostly overlaps in rationale.

Assuming you're still reading this thread, I'd suggest the following: Ignore all the tiny pieces of technical detail that the tech-obsessed and argument-prone contributors have shared in this thread and return to first-principles. First principle - get your shots in focus. Nothing else matters if a shot is out of focus. If you're shooting kids or anything else that isn't under control then either get phase-detect AF or learn to manually focus. I shoot similar to you and manually focus - it's a skill and requires some practice but it's do-able. Getting shots in focus with the best auto-focus cameras is also a skill that requires practice. Second principle - get a nice looking image - whatever that means for you. The nicer the camera the more likely it will require colour grading and most people can't colour grade to save their own lives, let alone create lovely images. Once again, this is a skill that can be developed, but making lovely videos requires (literally) a dozen or more skills so you just might not have it in you to learn to colour grade as well as edit, mix sound, master, learning NLEs, media management, etc etc. If you don't want to learn to colour grade then you're going to rely on the picture-profiles from the camera and that will potentially limit the dynamic range and other image attributes, sometimes quite significantly. Third principle - get the first two right and then buy the camera and then don't look back. Go learn about the other dozen skills. Highly skilled people can create feature film quality results with any of the cameras you're talking about so there's a snowflakes-chance-in-hell that the camera will be a limitation, it will be your level of skill. Fourth principle - if you get to here let me say this again. The camera doesn't matter. The only people that will tell you otherwise are camera nerds (like here in this forum), camera manufacturers (who want your money, over and over again), and camera influencers (who want the views and royalties and commissions and manufacturer kickbacks etc). Seriously. Buy the camera that will get your shots in focus and then move on.

For some reason, I seem to get the most excited about using the worst cameras I have. I know I'm not alone...... @dreamplayhouse @PannySVHS @QuickHitRecord @mercer I have some spectacular cameras.. the GH5, BMMCC and OG BMPCC. The GX85, XC10, X3000, iPhone don't have 10-bit or RAW so aren't in my top tier, but definitely are no slouches.... and yet, it's the GF3 and SJ4000 action cameras that make me the most excited. My eyes somehow skip over the nicest lenses and camera bodies but yet linger on those cameras and cause "what if" thoughts. I have similar thoughts about some of my worst lenses too. It's like there's a satisfaction from getting results that are better than they should be. A thrill about 'cheating' perhaps? It's not about image quality, otherwise it'd be the GH5 or BM cameras every time, but it's not. I think there's something in here about limited dynamic range. I've noticed that many people seem to be afraid of contrast these days too - maybe it's from staring too long at LOG footage and forgetting that film created rich contrasty images? Sure, these lower-DR 8-bit 709 cameras clip pretty hard, but according to imaging-resource the GF3 has about 10 stops of dynamic range. According to ARRI, colour negative film has 5.5 stops of DR between 2% and 90%. Who knows what film they were talking about but it's a real measurement from a reliable source so it's in the ballpark and worth consideration. According to Sony rec709 has about 5.2 stops - pretty similar to film. This means that we can take the 10-stops from the GF3 and add contrast so that we compress a couple of stops into a highlight rolloff and a couple more into the shadow rolloff and we'll be in the right range of contrast. This equates to 'stretching' the dynamic range of the middle stops. Assuming that the in-camera profile hasn't compressed any highlights/shadows then we only have to stretch the middle stops by a factor of two, which is do-able - just, but in combination with poor quality compression it benefits from a little blurring to smooth over any jagged transitions. I also think it might be the level of detail and sharpness. Steve Yedlin showed that a developed 35mm film has about 2-3K resolving power and high levels of noise (Resolution Demo pt 2 ~19:00). The sharpness is interesting too - film is resolution limited by how soft it is, whereas digital isn't. However, on moderate bitrate cameras the codec tends to obscure fine detail (but not creating artefacts so bad they have overly sharp edges), so this is a comparable aspect too. It's one reason I shoot 1080p on the GH5 - to control the fine detail to a more organic amount. BUT, regardless of the above.. I just know that I get more excited by these 'lesser' cameras than the better ones. I'm looking forward to getting better at grading with higher contrast looks, film emulation looks, and other nicer and stronger and more nostalgic image processing.

@QuickHitRecord @PannySVHS @dreamplayhouse iPhone 12 mini..... processed in Resolve with Kodak 250D and 2393 Print Film Emulations 🙂

Yeah, a raw to raw conversion shouldn't take that much processing at all - almost nothing in comparison to the other processing required when editing and grading footage.

It converts on the fly, I believe. It's a great option because it's one less step in the workflow and you don't have to have extra disk space etc. Of course you pay for the conversion when editing and rendering because the conversion is being done every time a clip is accessed, but it's a raw to raw conversion with All-i files so shouldn't be anything like editing from an IPB codec.

Nope, not GX85 either 🙂 It was all shot in 4k24p, maybe that's a useful hint?

Nope! Definitely an 8-bit camera...

OK - I was inspired by this thread, so I took some footage with an 8-bit camera of a shopping trip and gave it a film emulation treatment. Any guesses on the camera?

Yeah, it's definitely lacking the sorting and retouching parts and if you have a few images would be a reasonable alternative for Lightroom, but absolutely not for Photoshop.

There seem to be some discussions appearing now about using Resolve to edit stills. This thread on the colourist forums has one such discussion. I haven't tried it myself, as I no longer do stills basically, but I'll admit that Resolve isn't that intuitive a tool for working with stills and the associated workflows.

Great little edit. Film emulation is on-point too - great stuff!

Cool edit, and especially amusing transition at the end to the reality of the situation! Honest thoughts about the grading: You've done well, and some shots are definitely there with the film look I think the saturation is too high - if you do a google image search for "super 16 film stills" and just scroll through then you'll see that film doesn't get that saturated, or if it does it's because it's been pushed in one direction (e.g. when the whole frame is very warm or very cool) I think the "look" is applied too strongly - the look pushes the warm and cool colours and mutes the magenta/green colours but if you look at the rainbows (the bag and the girls t-shirt with the heart on it) the purple is almost colour-less compared to the warm and cool tones which are bordering on electric Some shots are too sharp - different film stocks all had different colour palettes but one of the give-away things of film was the texture of details and of grain. Some shots are soft and have the right amount of detail, but other shots are much more detailed/sharper and are reminiscent of 35mm or MF film, which doesn't fit with the camera being hand-held outdoors. A slight blur of those shots would really help. Getting the "film look" is a rabbit hole that's very very deep, and I've seen colourists say that they've never seen a film grain emulation that looked real to them - but that's because they stared at real film for 12-18 hours per day for 30 years. Obviously the rest of us aren't so attuned to it! If you apply the film emulation slightly less strongly, make the whole thing less saturated and blur the shots more evenly then I think it'll be quite convincing. The awesome thing about these three treatments is that they all help to make lower-quality footage from a cheaper camera look better. I've played this game with very very low-image quality cameras and you'd be amazed at how much you can 'save' a horrifically digital image by making it look low-quality film. Image quality doesn't get better, but it's much much nicer to look at.

Yeah, that lens should be a spectacular performer. IIRC that's the same glass as the Zeiss CP.2? @mercer is that right?

I can't speak to which VND filters to buy, but if you search YouTube usually you can find videos where people test and compare various VND filters. It's a bit of a difficult one because "good enough" is different for each person, so what is acceptable for one person isn't for another. I'd suggest doing some searching and seeing what you can find.

Awesome! Maybe it's a newer version of Resolve - I tried exposing a power grade to a LUT and it failed because it ignored the CST OFX plugin, and surprisingly, it didn't work right without that CST in the middle of it!! Resolve is better, no doubt. However, you can do a huge amount even with basic tools, so there's no excuses 🙂

You never said you had underworld connections... maybe we can use them to finally get someone to make the perfect camera!

@webrunner5 I've put your post through an automatic meme generator and this is what came out... Of course, you're right. All the more reason for governments to keep them in check.

@hyalinejim Have you confirmed this works? I thought LUTs ignored OFX plugins? I've tried creating LUTs before with it and the OFX plugins were ignored and the LUTs weren't usable because of this.

The press release is dated yesterday, and the statute of limitations for these things extends back a ways, plus it was an existing ruling. Always good to have government oversight to prevent for-profit companies over-reaching. When left to their own devices, the profit motive will put the public in significant danger in all kinds of cruel and unusual ways, sadly.

Absolutely agree. I shoot travel style content of my personal travels and started studying Parts Unknown and especially the parts they film outside (as opposed to the sit-down interviews which are controlled lighting and often closed set). The first thing that stood out to me was that their cinematography wasn't radically better than mine, but the editing and storytelling absolutely blew anything I did away. If you looked at the stills from an edit of mine and stills from an edit of theirs then there were lots of similarities, but that was where the similarities ended. After analysing many episodes I've come to realise that it's actually the sound design that drives their edits, and I would say that in that situation the sound is significantly more important than the image, and the purely visual aspects of the image (composition, exposure, colour, movement) is of dramatically less importance. I think if you gave their team some rather uninspired and drab footage, by the time they'd edited the interviews, edited up the b-roll and travelling segments, applied copious amounts of music, sound design, and audio effects, and then put in the voice-over, you'd potentially not really be able to tell that the visuals that went in were lacklustre at all. Of course, the visuals that did go in were of high-quality, no doubt, but that's not what makes or breaks a project. I think that camera YT paints a completely false impression that the camera and image is what carries a production. The elephant in the room is that it absolutely doesn't, and cannot. Cinematography is probably not even top 5 in terms of what makes or breaks a project.

It's hard to tell from stills - so much of film-making is in the context of the story that you really have to see it to understand. There are still a bunch of quite tangible things I see in film-making all the time that I have no idea what causes them or how to manipulate those aesthetic aspects. I find it's best not to get too polarised about anything - either too positive or negative - as reality is always much more towards the middle with both sides represented. Just concentrate on the things that are within your power 🙂

There has been a revolution in colour grading over the last 15 or so years with the invention of colour managed workflows. These enable the automatic conversion of footage between various colour spaces, and enable things like colour matching between cameras. Prior to this, all colour grading was based on either manufacturer-provided LUTs (or other LUTs like print film emulation LUTs), or manually grading the camera files to create the desired output (typically grading log into rec709). However, colour management doesn't negate the need for manually adjusting the image to get a desired look. I've been working with colour management and colour grading for years now, but decided to up my game by getting a control surface and learning to do things manually, no colour management or LUTs - just full manual ruthlessness. Enter the BlackMagic Micro Panel! which isn't actually that micro in real life.... After shipping delays (8 weeks!!!) it has arrived and I've put in maybe 6 hours over two sessions. As anticipated, my skill level is "disappointing", but my plan is simply to put on some music and put in the hours, like building any other skill. My first grading session was actually a bit of a revelation. I started off grading C-Log footage from the XC10, and using on the Lift/Gamma/Gain controls. My second session was grading HLG footage from the GH5, and including Contrast/Saturation/Offset as well as a bit of Lift/Gamma/Gain. The three trackballs adjust the hue offset, and the three rings/wheels adjust the luminance. At first I thought that the wheels were very insensitive, large rotations seemed to make small changes in the image - especially the Gamma wheel. However, the more I used them a funny thing happened. I found that there were all these little "niches" where suddenly a particular thing emerged. Go a little bit one way or the other and you adjust the feel, but go a bit too far and the look dissolves. These are so fragile that the whole niche might only be 1-2mm of adjustment on one of these wheels. So when you find one of these all of a sudden the control feels like it's very sensitive, not too sensitive but you definitely don't want it to be faster. These things are "looks" related to a colour balance, but can also be "textures" related to shadow levels and shadow contrast, or to do with highlight rolloffs. They can be broader too, like "warm sunset glow" where the balance of the colour matches the contrast, or when I was grading some Thai temples there's a way to make the gold-gilding on the buildings and statues really glow. These looks really seem to be based on combinations of various things in the image. Here are my initial take-aways: These controls are enormously powerful There are dozens / hundreds / more? of looks that you can do with only the LGG controls - throw in the Contrast/Pivot/Saturation/Offset controls and it's almost limitless. Just using a surface is a revelation I've used all the individual controls (LGG, Contrast/Pivot/Offset/Saturation, etc) literally thousands of times over the years, but I'm learning new things by the hour that I never noticed or never understood. I genuinely have no idea why having a control surface has made this difference, but it really has. Maybe it's being forced to concentrate on only one or two controls at once. Maybe it's the tactile nature of it. Moving multiple controls at the same time is game-changing Moving two controls at the same time and in opposite directions is game-changing and simply isn't possible without a control surface. This is where the plethora of looks comes from, as you adjust multiple controls against each other the overall image doesn't change much (assuming you're balancing the adjustments) but the ratio between the two does and you can gradually dial in different looks by navigating up and down this balance point. There's no way you can do this with a mouse because by the time you adjust one control (which throws off the whole look of the image) and then adjust the second control (to almost completely eliminate the impacts of the first control) you've forgotten what it looked like before, so you can't possibly dial in the subtle changes required to find these tiny niches in any reliable way. Muscle memory developed really early This surprised me, but it was really fast to really develop. The surface feels familiar even after a few hours. I'm told that pros grade without looking down, maybe at all, and that's part of their efficiency. You can grade full-screen This is perhaps a Resolve-specific thing (I don't know how panels work in other NLEs) but if you're adjusting things with the mouse then you can't do that with a full-screen image because the controls are hidden from the cursor. I have an external reference monitor, but it means that I can put scopes on my UI monitor to cover the controls and I can still adjust things even though those controls are under the scopes. Very useful. It's teaching me to see I've spotted a few things happening in the footage (which I had seen previously) but because I was adjusting something at the time they emerged, I was able to play with the controls and see what caused them. Now, I recognise that thing and know what is causing it. I've learned what causes things I've been seeing for years. Once you've found a look it's interesting to adjust each control individually to see how that control impacts the look. That can help to dial-in the look too - you adjust each control to optimise the look and after a few 'rounds' of tweaking each control you'll have nailed it. You'll also learn very quickly which controls matter to the look, and also which ones that look is more sensitive to. Would I recommend this? Yes and no. Yes, but only if you're willing to put the time in. If not then you're probably going to have a very bad time. I tried grading some iPhone footage, with its auto-WB and highly processed 709 image, and I was half-way to rage-quitting within about 15 minutes. I still had that sour taste in my mouth the next day, and it took me a few days to get over! I've now realised that all practice is good practice and so I may as well grade more forgiving footage and leave the iPhone until my skills are significantly more developed. I don't know what my long-term plans will be, maybe I will learn to grade well enough that I don't need to use a panel but will be able to use the knowledge I've gathered. Maybe I'll always want one. I will definitely grade real projects using colour management and LUTs, but having these skills will complement that. At the moment, it's a learning tool, and damn - I'm learning a lot.