kye

I don't know about the Komodo-X, so maybe some of these considerations are different, but the sorts of things I was thinking about were:
Long startup times Poor non-native ISO performance Lower resolution outputs crop into the sensor, so if you want to shoot in anything less than 871K then all of a sudden your whole lens collection has shifted FOVs, and your 6K RAW files are ridiculous if you're shooting for socials which are 1080p max and people are watching on their phones Higher frame rates are only available in lower resolutions, so a FPS change is now a lens change, which is a DOF change, and might be an exposure change, which combined with poor-non-native ISO performance is a lighting change...... These probably aren't a big deal for anyone who already use cinema cameras, but lots of these folks saving up for years to finally buy a RED came from the high-end cameras of the time like GH5, C70, 1DXii, etc, which are completely different beasts to use.
So it's really a cinema-camera vs video-camera type of thing, and lots of people aren't shooting in controlled situations either so the struggle is real.

I may have spoken too soon. I went back to play around with the image and it turns out that the noise is easily dealt with in MLV App. I think the 5Diii creates a more characterful and interesting image than the C70 (and maybe even the Scarlet-X). Even if the image was exactly the same, it's smaller than a cinema camera, comfortable in the hand, weather-sealed, shoots full frame 14bit raw video, won't overheat, won't attract as much attention, and can be easily replaced at a low cost if necessary. What other camera has those characteristics? The only thing it doesn't do is shoot 4K with full real-time preview. So maybe it still represents a pretty unique value proposition 12 years on!

All good, though I personally would love to see some 5D3 prowess and some Komodo in the wild:) Now, how we gonna start it anyway?:)

I don't know about the Komodo-X, so maybe some of these considerations are different, but the sorts of things I was thinking about were:
Long startup times Poor non-native ISO performance Lower resolution outputs crop into the sensor, so if you want to shoot in anything less than 871K then all of a sudden your whole lens collection has shifted FOVs, and your 6K RAW files are ridiculous if you're shooting for socials which are 1080p max and people are watching on their phones Higher frame rates are only available in lower resolutions, so a FPS change is now a lens change, which is a DOF change, and might be an exposure change, which combined with poor-non-native ISO performance is a lighting change...... These probably aren't a big deal for anyone who already use cinema cameras, but lots of these folks saving up for years to finally buy a RED came from the high-end cameras of the time like GH5, C70, 1DXii, etc, which are completely different beasts to use.
So it's really a cinema-camera vs video-camera type of thing, and lots of people aren't shooting in controlled situations either so the struggle is real.

Yeah, I suspect that a lot of people get a rude shock when their fantasy doesn't mean reality. 
And the release of the Komodo & Raven, plus the general march of time (which has made older RED DSMC1 bodies very affordable), has pushed a lot of REDs into the reach of almost "affordability" for many indie enthusiasts / semi pros / aspiring pros.  
We'll perhaps see the same happen with ARRI as, especially if an ARRI Mini can drop under US$10K in the next couple of years (which maaaybe it might, especially if the recession drags itself out for that entire length of time).
  
What is your current "fun camera"? 
In some hypothetical world where you lost everything, but insurance pays you out, so you can start out again from scratch rebuying whatever, then what "fun camera" would you get? 
 

I think most of us are kind of hacks - it's like Richard Hammond once said while tearing around the test track in some hypercar "this car is so much faster than me!".
I've come to realise that almost all of the magic in a final edit gets there by flowing from the people through the tools to the footage.  This is why I don't feel creatively limited by my GX85.  I'd say that for 50% (or 80% or 95%) of the people on the planet if they were shooting on a GX85 then the limitation on the creativity would still be on the operator and not on the camera.

I went for a walk with my og Bmpcc yesterday, mounted with a 25mm lens. Handheld shooting without rigging was quiete a challenge and a lot of fun. Color response in grading is still impressive. I imagine the 5D3 to be on par with it. In that case I would prefer it over any Sony or Pana dslm in regards of sheer beauty under natural light or 5600K fixtures. S1 and S1H impressed me in lit scenarios though under tungsten btw. I bought a 5D3 1.5 years ago and it's waiting for party time.

I would never claim to have any sort of Redcode "prowess."  With the K-X, just like most of my other cameras, I'm kind of a hack.  😉

I went to Japan and have the loaner S9 from Panasonic. I told them I am not in the camera review space like I used to be, and they still were kind enough to invite me. I plan on making a few videos with it, but haven't posted anything since the embargo because I am so unsure what to say. It seems everyone has already made a "First Look" video and many others have tried to apologize for accepting the free trip and camera. I don't feel bad for accepting the trip as I'm sure anyone else here would do also. I think all the conversation around this is generally healthy for our industry and why I personally took a step back from it all over the last two years after quitting Indy Mogul. 
 
Feel free to ask me anything you want. I promise to be honest. 

You cover the loss of earnings like you would for any vacation, except you generate revenue from this trip through sponsors and ad revenue based on the content you make from it.
I've traveled all over the United States but I had virtually no time to actually enjoy it. There are cities I've been to literally four dozen times that I've seen very little of, because I had MAYBE 2 or 3 hours of leisure time if I was lucky and the rest were 12+ hour days in a venue doing production set up and filming. Most of my time not at work was spent in a car, hotel, or airport. I guarantee these YouTubers got more time to check out Japan during one of these trips than I got to check out Philly, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. in the dozens of times each that I was paid to be there to work.
Here is an example of a work trip I did regularly:
Early flight out of Burlington to Chicago on Friday. Land, get picked up, and drive immediately to the venue for 10AM, only stopping to get food. Spend the day setting up. Event starts at 7PM. Film the event (4 hours or so). Tear down. Leave venue around 1AM. Get food. Drive to Detroit. Go to hotel and sleep a few hours. Go to the venue for 10AM, only stopping to get food. Spend the day setting up. Event starts at 7PM. Film the event (4 hours or so.) Tear down. Get food, then drive to airport for early flight back to Burlington. Get home late Sunday. Edit the events. Then repeat the entire process the next weekend.
None of those trips afforded me the opportunity to check out local markets, bars, or watch sunsets surrounded by postcard scenery while enjoying engaging conversations with my colleagues. 😉
 
 

These guys get flown to awesome locations to review cameras. They use the video as a prop to put sponsored ads   But we also have no real alternative to learn and see cameras so we just have to accept it and move on. They need to make a living too and this is their chosen route. 

I would be happy to have a GH5 II image and codecs in a LX or GX camera. Fun fact, a S16 width variante of the G9II sensor with 4 to 3 aspect ratio would still sport more than 12 MP and more slightly more than 4096 px width. A LX100 body with the lens mechanism of the LX10 would be perfect for that and the monitor of the LX10 or GX80. Perfectly dreaming.:)

Plus there is this thing that ‘no publicity is bad publicity’…and whilst I am not sure I entirely agree with that sentiment, in this case it has probably raised more awareness of the S9 than there might otherwise have been.
I didn’t really care about the release initially but since the controversy, have looked a little deeper (more at the camera than the shenanigans BTS) and could make a case for it in my lineup. Not a strong enough case at this time, but that otherwise I would not have bothered with had their not been the controversy.
Also, the CC’s can make ‘reaction’ videos 🤪

Nice of him to spill the beans after only 10 years of benefiting personally from such beans.
What's next...
A pivot to reviewing Macs?

As I have written about before, the best film-making advice I ever got was to try to the most contrast and saturation into my images.  Once you can push really far then it's easy to not push as far, so it's like doing altitude training, and you don't know the limits until you hit them.
As such, here's a very heavy grade of some night footage from the GX85 and 12-35mm F2.8 zoom.
This shows just how far 8-bit 709 footage can be taken.  It's not free from artefacts, but then again, I see grading issues semi-regularly on Netflix, so...
SOOC:

Grade:

In terms of how far this is pushed, lots of films get into this territory..




I concentrated a lot on matching tones across shots and it was pretty fiddly at times, but I was pushing things.  Realistically I think there's a bit more in the footage and the limitation is my grading.
It's worth pointing out that this was done in Resolve 18, so no Film Look Creator, and no third-party plugins so no FilmConvert, no Dehancer, etc, so some of the things I did might not be the best tools.  When Resolve 19 goes out of beta I'll be rocking the Film Look Creator and Colour Slicer etc, which I think will make this stuff so much easier.

Gerald just put out an incredible video talking about YT camera reviews, reviewers, manufacturers, and how the whole thing works.
He talked about brands specifically and how they have treated him, including Panasonic punishing him for a YT title, Canon, Fuji, Sony, etc.  The good, the bad, and absolutely the ugly.
He also gave a pretty comprehensive and level-headed-sounding overview of how it works.  If all you want to do is complain about everything (which is most people online sadly) then you can skip the nuanced parts of his video and just get to the gossip about each brand (that's what it is after all...) but the whole thing seems well thought-out.  
 

What I understand now is that working with these YouTubers is extremely hard and I feel sorry for marketing people of camera brands who have to work with them.

I like this conspiracy theory! Sounds fun.
Wasn't there a rumor recently about the Panasonic S1H mk2 being not too far away? 
https://www.4kshooters.net/2023/03/23/leak-suggests-panasonic-s1h-ii-may-have-8k-phase-detection-autofocus/ 
https://www.l-rumors.com/l2-first-rumored-panasonic-s1h-ii-specs-8k24p-and-built-in-nd/
 
Oh noes, don't kill the fun with facts before it has even started! 😞
In a hopeless attempt to keep the conspiracy alive.... maybe there was a leak from BMD themselves? Someone outside BMD knew they were planning a big price cut to move out old stock after the launch of the Blackmagic Design PYXIS 
  
Yeah, that's how we first saw for sure confirmation of the S9, because an Amazon listing for handgrip/cage was up for it. 
  
Yes
I would have thought then it makes more sense to be doubling down on the Panasonic LX15 / LX100 series. Bring out their next generation of them. 
They're "large sensor" P&S cameras, but to be fair, still smaller than the X100 sensor. 
But if Panasonic brings out an APS-C sensor camera, that's very unusual, it would be a bit confusing for Panasonic branding? They've never had recently an APS-C camera (wellll... technically the Varicam LT I guess was the most recent one?? ha), as Panasonic has been all about MFT or "Full Frame". 
 
It's just a backlash against the slick looking perfect images, and looking backwards to go retro. That's why those old CCD P&S cameras are selling for sky high prices. 
 

Of course...  duh!  *slaps own forehead* 🙂 
Interesting about the cage manufacturers doing the leaking.  I guess they'd be the ones with the most detailed knowledge of the cameras too - considering that they'd be required to receive accurate dimensions and potentially would also get the size requirements of the lenses too so they'd be able to figure out the lens configuration and sensor size.
I think it's a straight up content creators camera.
Gerald said he thinks that it was Panasonic trying to get some of that Fuji money after the success of the X100 selling out, and that the inclusion of all the more advanced features was simply a case of taking the S5ii package and not paying engineers to disable features when they can just release the new camera with those features and not pay anyone to remove them.
Millennials and GenZ are running around with vintage point-and-shoot cameras and want film presets now, despite their smartphone being technically better in practically every way.  The fact that us crotchety old camera nerds don't know what the hell they want isn't surprising, especially considering I'm pretty sure they don't know what they want either!
Anyone who has ever looked at the fashion industry will know that nothing makes sense, lots of things look completely stupid, yet there is a rabid market for it and you can make squillions of dollars if you can get it right.

After a little while reading comments and watching videos and reading the specs, I have come to think of this camera a little differently than it seems others are.
I think it's about size.  
If you want a better camera and don't care about size then just buy an S5iiX, or a BMCC 6K, or Alexa or whatever.  
Camerasize.com doesn't have the S9 yet, so I did a mockup myself, basically it's the same size as the GX85:

In those terms, it's a GX85 sized camera body but FF, PDAF, Dual native ISO, 10-bit LOG, Open Gate, claimed 14+ stops of DR, cutting edge colour profiles, etc, without losing the IBIS etc.  If it was an MFT camera then people would be falling all over themselves about it, but it's FF and so somehow has to be an Alexa LF to not get roasted..  doesn't make sense to me.
Of course, it's not perfect because nothing is, but at this size and price the competition really isn't perfect either.  
Also, the F8 prime doesn't really bother me that much, and it's a much closer comparison to the 14mm F2.5 lens than you might think.  The 14mm F2.5 has the DOF of a 28mm F5 lens, which is only just over a stop deeper, and if you combine the dual ISO of the S9 with the F8 lens then that gives it a 2.5 stop boost giving equivalent light gathering of a F3.5 lens (if I did the math right?).
The iPhone 15 main camera has a crop factor of 5, so the main lens is equivalent to a 26mm F7.2 lens, and older models had smaller sensors so would be equivalent to slower lenses.  Entire media empires have been built on content shot on phones, so I don't see this as a major issue.  
Then again, I bought the Olympus 15mm F8 body cap lens for MFT, so what would I know!
My review of that lens is that it's great, but F8 is too slow for anything indoors or after sunset.  With the Dual ISO that limitation disappears.
The challenge for FF was lens size (and especially the L-mount), so here's a lens that's small and pocketable and great for street photography.  Is it overpriced?  Should it be AF?  Probably..  but it exists, and "F8 and be there" is a saying that came from the best photographers who ever lived and has stood the test of time.
All that said, I'm not buying one because the lenses are all still enormous except the new pancake.  Hopefully this is a new body that Panasonic can re-use for the MFT line 🙂

Have been messing around with a friend's XA50 and love the AF, cLog3 and above all... the form factor. The process becomes solely about composition and storytelling. Anyway here's a frame I grabbed after shooting with it for about 2 minutes...

There’s quite a few ‘R Us YT’ers Full of Shit’ videos already uploaded, I guess in response and there will be others.
Gate opened.

One thing I think is useful to keep in mind is that anything published to YT is a part of the entertainment industry.  That's why everything is about views & subscribers (the ratings system for free online content) and ad breaks and sponsored videos etc.  The business model is the same - the owner pays to make content that will attract viewers and then sells that attention to advertisers.  YT didn't call them 'channels' and have a TV as its icon by accident - everyone is running a TV station now.  Some are trying to be community stations, attracting patrons of the arts rather than selling out, etc, but the game is the same.
If camera reviews were part of science then there would be peer-review and the general goal would be to be well-respected and get funding through that mechanism.  Sure, there are lots of corruptions to science with research funding politics and publishing etc but it's still a long way from being in the territory that the entertainment industry is.
Only you can decide if a TV show / YT video is an informercial, a talk show, a documentary, or a public broadcast, but you should be making that decision when you watch.

To add... anytime gear becomes the center of discussion, there always ends up being flame wars. This camera is better than that camera. The features on my camera beats the features on your camera. My dick is bigger than yours. Blah, blah, blah. And the videos from YT get celebrated for it. If GeraldUndone posts a video about whatever technical, resolution achievement it becomes a fact and a must have. If Zedlin, a working Hollywood cinematographer, posts a video about how and why filmmakers are chasing the wrong thing... he's considered a dipshit.