kye

Also, if you're looking to up your quality of final edits, it basically doesn't matter what type of videos you make, upgrading your camera is probably pretty far down the list of what will actually move the needle in terms of outputs.
I've seen inexperienced folks shoot with an Alexa and it looked like a poor quality student film 🙂 

I have kept my GH5 despite other offerings being a pretty amazing in many ways, for several reasons:
I was looking for a backup camera / tiny camera and ended up buying a GX85 which further locked me into the MFT ecosystem, and I really don't want to have to re-buy all my lenses The GH6 has that horizontal streaking issue that Panasonic don't appear to be motivated to fix, and I don't feel motivated to risk having to fix in post (although I think with much careful fiddling it could be done) The GH5 can look great and although it's not the best colour science in the world, my ability to colour grade is definitely the weak link in my setup I started studying award winning productions in the same genre that I shoot (and I mean studying seriously, breaking down 45 minute episodes sometimes frame-by-frame, dissecting audio and sound design, etc) and the more I looked at Emmy Award-Winning stuff the more I realised that the images looked OK, but it was everything else around that (editing, sound design, narration, music, etc) that made it great  It's reliable, I enjoy using it, and keeping it is free....  which is good because despite me buying it in 2018, the pandemic has meant that I didn't get to use it on nearly as many trips as I had planned to do before being tempted to upgrade Some months ago I bought a BM Resolve Micro colour grading panel with the goal to teach myself to grade the way that the pros mostly learned (using the basic tools but using a control surface) and kind of justified the purchase to myself by saying I would buy it to learn instead of buying a new camera.  I had planned on just putting in an hour or so grading practice per day, but I got distracted with other things (life!) - however I found that I got noticeably better for every two hours or so I put into grading.  I have a huge backlog of footage from past trips that a skills upgrade will improve but not new camera can influence, so I'm more motivated to upgrade myself rather than the camera.

Maybe a sign Sony are overtaking Canon & Nikon in sales figures.
A YouTuber's favourite camera is the one that generates the most affiliate commission with B&H.

To be fair, that's very sensible, if you're living alone in a van, have a dog with you for company/protection!

Actually, and I know this might come as a bit of a shock, but mostly these people don't think about the cameras they use the way that camera YT does, and many of them just use their phones.
Some of the ways I can tell this is that:
they mostly shoot deeper DoF they mostly shoot in-camera picture profiles (or do a stunningly good job of grading footage so it looks like the in-camera profiles) if they do get a new camera they will typically not mention it, except if they screw something up and have to apologise for it by saying "sorry, new camera, I'll work it out eventually" if they do a video covering their essentials they will often just say the brand of the camera and some even say they don't know what the model is Also, and these probably will also come as a shock:
Lots of them have been doing van life for years and years and aren't quitting anytime soon There is no way they would ever ever ever ever get rid of their dogs because they weren't a puppy anymore Outside of camera YT there's many many little niches where people care about things other than YT and equipment, aren't attention-grabbing narcissists, and genuinely care about living creatures other than themselves.  SHOCK!!!!

Lol! The combination of taking lens + Iscorama + diopter + vari ND = so many layers of glass that focus peaking doesn't even work anymore, even on the highest setting you just see nothing 😂 
I did another video the same day (more for the model than for me): slo-mo, vertical format, AF tracking with the Leica 12-60 (which worked most of the time btw) .... you know the kind of thing. It's fine, but it doesn't have much in the way of atmosphere.

Very nice!
I'm glad to see that at least one person on the internet hasn't forgotten how to put some feeling into their images!
Almost all videos these days look like a lens sharpness test that's been graded as a sharpening-in-post stress-test...

Puppies pretty quickly grow and look like dogs.  Even at 6-months or so, most puppies look like very excitable dogs.
If you do a bit of searching for van-life videos you'll quickly find that there are thousands of twenty-something women who live in vans with their dog and travel constantly while living full-time on their YT channel or Etsy store.  Dogs get a lot of air-time in that genre of content 🙂 

Gerald is one of the only long-form reviewers on YouTube, he doesn't have much competition.
Someone like Kai is not going to be much competition
The thing is Gerald is a box and spec sheet reader, the presentable face of a specs sheet.
It is useful for finding out info although you could find it out a lot quicker by reading a web page instead.
He is a tester of what it says on the box. If it shoots 8K he is probably going to show you what the wall of his studio looks like in 8K versus all the other modes.
Without wanting to get rude, or personal, What's missing is any kind of real world creativity. This was apparent in the Sigma Fp and especially Fp-L review where he dismisses it for not having IBIS and fancy AF.
That was yet more proof if you needed it that he doesn't shoot anything. Those Sigma cameras have a unique look, a unique form factor, and Cinema DNG.
I think Gerald has an imaginary user in his his mind whenever he does a reviews. His imaginary user is always turning up for work for an online advert shoot, rather than on a street to shoot some poetic cinematography, or showing up at an indie film that he wrote himself.
So it is always going to be heavily biased towards "getting a job done" based on having all the boxes checks... AF, IBIS, 120fps, and so on.
It is a pity that in so many years he hasn't developed a craft, because he's had the perfect opportunity - so much spare time, money and freedom to put these tools to good use - but seemingly no actual interest in cinematography.
Anyway, that's just my opinion of Gerald.
A bit like as was the case with Bloom, these people get put on a pedestal because of internet fame and their work just doesn't justify it.

Spoiled in regards to what people had to work with not too long ago in this price bracket. I grew up with VHS home video, which is barely watchable now. I now own probably the best digital cinema camera ever made and also have a myrid of hybrid cameras that shoot videos that are remarkably close in quality to that said camera, at least to the untrained eye. Couldn't say that when I first got into this, at least not without a lot more money. 

No way, cats and flowers! : P

The major issue with cameras these days is the cripple hammer / technical limitations they put in them which aren't in the marketing.  Sure, a camera might be 8K, 240p, 10-bit, but the fact that it's not all of them at the same time is the information that isn't mentioned, and which combinations are available are hard to find out.  Gerald is useful because he seems to systematically find many of those gotchas whereas other people don't go that deeply.
In terms of Sony and his opinions, to put it bluntly, who gives a crap?  If you're spending thousands of dollars then you should be making your own decisions rather than simply listening to other peoples conclusions.  Gerald is good because his videos are full of facts about the tech details...  just ignore his opinions and you're fine.
Most other camera reviews are ONLY opinions.  That's where we should be getting annoyed..

Very sneaky timing with the Sony a7R mk5 announcement by Sony to overshadow the news of the groundbreaking new revolutionary OM System OM-5. 

oh no i have lol, but not in ages. i used to be a big ridley scott fan!
outstanding
awesome visual – and horrifying. this happened to me with 2001 as a kid and it made me a crazy adult
i feel u. wise. same. or, i try lol
will check out
def should watch again!!!
too many ufo opinions, but ill give it a shot. big milla fan
familiar but ive never really seen it?? will do!!
also EVIL DEAD btw
nice!!! hmm interesting will check it out
amazing that idk what these are... what a great thread by me!! looking now...

I'm not really into Halloween (and it's less of a thing here in Australia, although it is growing in popularity each year)....  but, Alien is seriously good sci-fi cinema!  I can't imagine you haven't seen it, but if not, wow are you in for a treat!  My first experience with the series was Aliens, which I watched as a ~7? year old alone in the lounge room of someones big old scary house where my dad was visiting and the adults put it on to keep me entertained why they talked somewhere else in the house.    I had a major jump-scare when during a particularly tense moment in the film someone suddenly stuck their head into the room to ask me what I wanted for dinner!  A memorable watch!
I've often wished that I could 'forget' a movie so that I would get to watch it for the first time (again).  I purposefully don't watch my favourites for years so that I have forgotten at least some stuff and get some surprises and fun twists.
Other fun movies that come to mind:
The Forgotten 2004 with Julianne Moore (watch it without any spoilers or previews at all if you can) The Ring The Fourth Kind 2009 with Milla Jovovich (again, watch without spoilers or previews if possible) and of course, just for fun...  Shawn of the Dead 🙂 

The OG BMPCC is hugely different again, compared to the Digital Bolex and Ikonoskop. The Ikonoskop had the same Kodak sensor as the D16. I shot with both side by side (BM Pocket and Ikonoskop) in Berlin.
Whereas the D16 and Ikonoskop have a very particular low-fi look and a lot of "imperfections" in certain conditions from the CCD sensor, the original BM Pocket was far more modern and clean looking, just all round a bit more normal. Still very nice, but it was its own thing and separate to the DB.
Joe ran the sensor hot in the D16, basically overclocked it.
It also had a much more appealing look undercranked to 16fps in post than a modern CMOS sensor camera.
So if we can get even a bit closer to this look, with the help of some tricks and post production I'd be a happy bunny.
Yeah. It's very much uncompressed.
Cinema DNG is the key to the Fp. Even in 8bit.
It doesn't have the squeaky clean and processed look of BRAW and ProRes RAW.
I may try the 2K on the Fp-L and see if it's any good. The file sizes in 4K are a bit of an issue.
But so is finding, maintaining, keeping and shooting a Digital Bolex lol.
I am also curious to hear more about that.
The CMOS 'plastic' look could well have something to do with that.
I also think it handles white balance and colour temperature completely differently to CCD.
There is always an overall slight veiling especially in warmer scenes.

That's the thing, you kept referencing the silver screen and cinema standards so I just thought I'd give further context..
Its like HDR.. I feel it makes much better sense on a device used in daylight than in a dark room. Different medium, different tech and workflows make more/better sense. Context is everything.
 

lol...  I guess it's just me and my logic again, getting too big for my britches 😛 

Two very useful sentiments that I try to live by are:
If in doubt, don't buy anything If the solution isn't obvious, you don't fully understand the problem

Yes, acquisition tried to keep pace with the tech I'm sure, and this was also in the days when cameras didn't downscale in-camera which made oversampling at capture even more important.
My point was simply that if a 2K Prores HQ didn't have intolerable macro-blocking when used in a workflow that was projected in multiplex cinemas, that 4K Prores LT with a similar/superior bitrate wouldn't be worse than that.  Also, the people in this discussion are pretty unlikely to be shooting for projection on a 590" cinema screen, so a codec with 400Mbps being streamed at 15-25Mbps, LT is probably good enough....   even with our post-millennial biologically superior eyesight 😉 

What's interesting is that the Digital Bolex used a completely separate board for the Kodak CCD sensor internally. This was to avoid introducing noise which would need cleaning up and it is that step in the pipeline that hurts the nuances of a sensor according to Joe Rubinstein.
So it might be that with the modern cameras and their single circuit board, there's simply too much pre-processing going on and too much interference with the signal coming back off the sensor, which lends more digital look. It would be lovely to get the look of a Digital Bolex in a modern mirrorless camera. We'll see if we can harangue the X-H2 into looking more 'raw'.

The difference between 3.2k the resolution being used if shooting spherical and 2.8k which is what the Alexa classic sensor uses is pretty small imo. Yes the Alexa Classic is 2k, but its downsampled from 2.8k. If you look at the difference between downsampled 2k from 2.8k and 2.8k native it is pretty much impossible to tell the difference. The benefit of shooting RAW is definitely nice, ARRI raw has more texture than prores. Of course it comes at the cost of a little more grain. I am sure the little extra info in Prores 444XQ is helpful sometimes too. To me ARRI didn't get a big boost until the LF tho. You do notice the extra detail comparing the LF to any of the previous S35 Alexas. Comparing different flavors of 3k is pretty negligible though at least in terms of resolution. 

I do think 12bit 444 makes a noticeable difference over 10 bit if you push the color at all, mainly with skin tones.


just my 2 cents 

It is interesting that Joe says in the video, they wanted the absolute character of the Kodak sensor to be preserved in-camera, without any noise reduction or introduction of any circuit noise. Just the natural grain from the sensor.
So it got me thinking...
With HVEC and modern sensors we have a squeaky clean look. It has a lot of noise reduction you can't turn off, and a lot of compression.
So if we wanted the colour, character, uncompressed Cinema DNG and film grain of the Digital Bolex...
We need to find a modern camera...
Because the D16 on eBay now is $6K!!
I think the closest I own is the Sigma Fp-L in crop mode.
It has the resolution for 2x crop so works with Super 16mm lenses.
But any crop from about 1.37x onward gives a very detailed texture to the uncompressed 4K raw.... as it is a 1:1 pixel readout.
If you download the frame grab below, and look at the full 4K JPG conversion of my DNG, it is apparent at 1:1 that nothing is being lost and nothing is being added.
Especially since this is at ISO 3200 behind a strong ND filter.
At lower ISOs it looks a bit too clean to be a Digital Bolex-a-like.
However at ISO 3200 it is perfectly on note.
What other cameras could we wrangle (with a few tricks) to look like a Kodak CCD?
GH5S?
S1R 5K?
Canon RAW?
Nikon Z9?
How about our smartphones in Motion Cam?

But Kye, the human eye has evolved, you see. What was more than adequate in 2015 is no longer going to cut the mustard in 2022. Funny how things have changed.

I'm talking acquisition from a DPs perspective.
As the following video from 2014 states, 80% of films back then where shot above 3K yet indeed 99% were finished in 2K.
That doesn't mean it was ideal as far as IQ as the guy explains nobody printed Super35 to Super16 which is sort of what was being done back then. Not to mention they were already anticipating 4K streaming (or "broadband" as they called it then lol). He goes on to explain/push the benefits of shooting in ARRIRAW at 3.4K with the then new XT and details a workflow where you'd transcode to ProRes 444 2.8K for a 50% gain in file size and almost 3K resolution. That would have definitely been the forward-thinking workflow: