kye

Over the past decade I've been a part of thirteen independent micro or no-budget budget films.  Five of which I'd actually feel comfortable enough to show to strangers and say, "I've done this."  It's weird because I've never been too precious about IQ.
My personal-tech-craft-sloppiness-indifference does show in the final product, but only if you're looking real hard (at least I think so).
I kind of want to be better, but I also don't really feel a strong pull to eek out that extra little juice, you know?  I'm more interested in trying to shape a story by putting a bunch of note cards on the wall in the writer's room.
Anyway, I've held tight to my LUMIX cams since the 20-teens.  Also have an Oly cam.  Haven't bothered to upgrade much.  I know I'm missing out on the latest and greatest, but when I look at stuff a decade old vs. the film I just finished, and I think they both look a-okay, I guess I'm just not the type of filmmaker that's eager to change gear.
Anyway, if anyone wants to see those five films I mentioned, let me know.  I've posted them here before, but can share anew.

This looks incredible!
Great images and colour, and I really like the music and edit too.
It really is a different world down there isn't it...

Another range example I did with it here, this time on a GX80.

 
Its a very powerful combo but, despite the 35-350 being compact for what it is, when it is mounted on the GX80 it is all a little bit ... 

It's true - though if they made that lens and it had decent quality, I might be one of the only people who would be excited to get it as soon as it hit the second-hand market.
It's true - when on set, I'm usually shooting my t/1.2-t/2 lenses at closer to t/2.8-4, partly because getting the subject in focus is better than having a razor-thin focus plane.
I tend to like to deliver in 4k, but yes, post-cropping flexibility is the main reason that I usually capture in 6k or 8k for narrative.  I also like wider aspect ratios (even in film, where I like 6x17, 4x10, and 8x20 the most) so even shooting 4k gives some room to reframe up or down a little bit.
I used to have the EF 24-105/4 and I never liked it much, but I have the 24-70/2.8 and it's fantastic.  It could certainly be an option.  I've also, at various points in my life, considered the Canon 35-350/3.5-5.6L - still a fairly large lens, but it's a 10x zoom for FF that manages quality a bit nicer than a coke bottle.  It's pretty affordable used these days.  But I'm more likely to try to stick with things I already have.
Guided safaris are extremely expensive from what I've seen.  It's potentially good advice, but I prefer that we go our own way.  There's always the possibility of seeing one of the guided tour buses rolling around and following it for a bit too.  Plus, if I gave somebody $1,000-2,000/day to show us the animals, I'd probably mentally feel a bit entitled when seeing them.  If we go on our own and I see a single giraffe head snacking on a tree, I'll be beside myself with excitement.  Plus we can research before arriving to see if there are sites listing the most likely places.
I also am focusing on the time in Etosha, but it's also going to be 2-3 days of a 2-week trip.  I'm also really excited to see some of the shipwrecks along the skeleton coast, the dune-filled houses of Kolmanskop, the huge sand dune fields of Sossusvlei, and to take my own version of the iconic field of dead trees in front of an orange dune at Deadvlei...  (among other things)... and from what I've read, random wildlife encounters (zebras, etc) are pretty likely when driving around a lot of the countryside.

Youtubers are snoring! Better quit watching, cuz it's so boring!

Yes, it's the AF that makes me think of manual lenses on the GF3.  For stills it's a fully featured camera, but for video it's auto-everything* and so having an AF lens on it is a pain because the CDAF will hunt occasionally.
(* actually I recorded some clips with it last night and discovered it keeps the current WB setting - how odd that's the only thing it will let you lock down!)
If you don't already own the Olympus body cap lens then perhaps the "7Artisans 18mm f/6.3 Mark II" might be a better choice as it's cheaper and faster than the Olympus. 

Equivalency of DOF is the elephant in the room for sure.  In comparison, MFT lacks in the selection of gargantuan lenses with super-shallow DOF and FF lacks in small lenses without shallow DOF.  If someone made a FF 28-280mm F7.0-11 lens then it should be the same size as my 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens, but of course the internet would go ballistic over it and run whatever manufacturer dared to create such an abomination out of town faster than you can say "grab your pitchforks - the devil has come for our children!".
It depends on what you're doing of course, but for me personally when I switched from watching YT lens reviews to watching award winning movies and TV shows from the worlds leading professionals I had the Ah-ha moment when I realised very few shots had shallower DOF than could be achieved with relatively normal MFT lenses.  Even when looking at the shots that would have required quite fast lenses on MFT, the aesthetic penalty for the DOF being deeper was very low.
I then looked at what potential benefits would be traded-away for it....  lighter cameras that make me more likely to carry them around and use them and therefore get more shots to use in the edit...  smaller equipment making me more pleasant to be around and having a nicer trip and causing the people around me to be happier and more relaxed and look nicer in frame...  the smaller rig making the people around me less distracted and suspicious...  the deeper DOF meaning there was less chance of having one person in focus but the others out of focus or it simply missing focus by focusing on the wrong thing...  the much lower likelihood of having a difficult conversation with law enforcement or self-important security staff, etc.  I concluded that getting slightly shallower DOF was a very small benefit competing against a significant number of advantages that would make far more impact to the end product and to my experience in using it.
The extra cropping potential is one of the only benefits I can see for sensors above 2.5K.  I put the cropping modes on my GH5 and GX85 into good use when I was shooting on primes and have been hugely impressed with them with my GH7 + 9mm F1.7 PanaLeica which I'll use for shooting in ultra-low-light.
The R5 + EF-RF + 40mm F2.8 would be a great medium size setup.  Perhaps the best second camera FF setup I could think of would be your R5 + 24-105mm F4.  Like I mentioned above, the flexibility and speed of using a zoom when shooting in uncontrolled conditions just gives you more coverage - there's a reason doco and ENG shooters use zooms!
Yeah, that's a real gem, I'm still seeing footage crop up on YT that really shows how much you can push things.  I've also noticed it's very popular with the vlogging crowd and it seems to give really good results, similar to those who might use a small mirrorless, which is definitely saying something when you consider the size of it.
Nah.
Do a complete end-to-end analysis of what gives you the best results in the final edit or final photos, work out what equipment aligns best with those trade-offs, buy it, test it and learn the settings, then shift focus to actually shooting and don't look back.
Beauty magazines make you feel ugly, and camera YT makes you regret your equipment.  Best strategy is to ignore both.
By far the most important skill in uncontrolled environments is being able to understand and predict the behaviour of your subjects.  Not only does this matter for shooting people in public, but it matters doubly (triply?) for safari because the biggest struggle seems to be even finding the animals in the first place.
A professional animal tracker would probably get better footage with an iPhone than an amateur with all the equipment in the world who spent a week and only saw a few animals the whole time.  
Perhaps a good exercise is to think about what the total cost will be of the trip, think about how much it would matter if you didn't see any animals at all, and then see how much it would cost to hire a guide or some other service that would help you locate things.  There's a reason that people hire a model instead of just walking the streets hoping to find someone to shoot!

Yes, AI is a real wildcard.
I see that there are really three fundamentally different groups when it comes to generative content.
The first is professionals who create material for the general public, or various niches of the public.  This is where AI will have incredible impacts.
The second is professionals who create for their clients directly.  This is people like wedding photographers etc, where the client is the audience.  This has been debated, but I think that there will still be a market here.  If I did something and wanted a record of it, I would want the final images to be of me, not AI generated content that looks like the people I know might have looked during the thing that actually happened.
The third is people creating for themselves, where there is no client or money changing hands.  This is every amateur, every personal project from professionals, etc.  The goal is to have a final result that this person created.  Amateur photographers take photos and print and hang the best ones, not because they're the best photos ever taken, but because they were taken themselves.
Personally, I'm in the last category and I am completely resigned to the fact that my videos will never be great, will never attract a significant audience, will never be regarded as important, etc, but that's not why I do it so in that sense AI is no threat to me at all.  I do understand that people are all in different segments of the industry and have very different perspectives for very good reasons..

This is my most recent finished edit.
I wrote the music for this too.
I've shared it before, but some might not have seen it.  Shot on the trip I did to Seoul last August where the wife and I got sick and spent most of our time in the hotel.
OG BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2.  Graded in Resolve with heavy use of the Film Look Creator tool.  Music written in Logic Pro.

Yes, AI is a real wildcard.
I see that there are really three fundamentally different groups when it comes to generative content.
The first is professionals who create material for the general public, or various niches of the public.  This is where AI will have incredible impacts.
The second is professionals who create for their clients directly.  This is people like wedding photographers etc, where the client is the audience.  This has been debated, but I think that there will still be a market here.  If I did something and wanted a record of it, I would want the final images to be of me, not AI generated content that looks like the people I know might have looked during the thing that actually happened.
The third is people creating for themselves, where there is no client or money changing hands.  This is every amateur, every personal project from professionals, etc.  The goal is to have a final result that this person created.  Amateur photographers take photos and print and hang the best ones, not because they're the best photos ever taken, but because they were taken themselves.
Personally, I'm in the last category and I am completely resigned to the fact that my videos will never be great, will never attract a significant audience, will never be regarded as important, etc, but that's not why I do it so in that sense AI is no threat to me at all.  I do understand that people are all in different segments of the industry and have very different perspectives for very good reasons..

This is my most recent finished edit.
I wrote the music for this too.
I've shared it before, but some might not have seen it.  Shot on the trip I did to Seoul last August where the wife and I got sick and spent most of our time in the hotel.
OG BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2.  Graded in Resolve with heavy use of the Film Look Creator tool.  Music written in Logic Pro.

This looks incredible!
Great images and colour, and I really like the music and edit too.
It really is a different world down there isn't it...

prepping a no budget feature.

here's some stuff that i like somewhat from the past year and a half or so:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Speaking of new cameras...
This was shot by a friend of mine on a "vintage" Lumix LX10 in Nauticam housing and different wet diopters.
 
 

Test video - GX85 with Standard profile and 12-35mm F2.8 wide open.  A few shots were ISO 400 or 800 towards the end.
SOOC:

After grade:

Despite being fully manual, the shots had significant colour variation.  Not sure if it was the vND or what, but colour management is critical to give ability to WB and expose in post on 709 footage.

That's a hell of a lens!
I have a Tokina 400mm F5.6 permanently on my GH5 now to act as a telescope because I looked into buying one and it was cheaper and more fun to buy a super-telephoto lens!  It's not super-sharp wide open but in daylight you can just stop down, plus anything that is quite far away suffers from heat haze anyway, so the sharpness of the air is the limiting factor.
I've thought about going on safari for years but have never actually gone.  My thinking eventually lead me to the idea of having two bodies, one with a very long lens on it, and the other one with a very shot zoom on it so you can get shots of when the monkeys start stealing food out of your van, or the elephants ram you.  My impression from social media is that these things are practically guaranteed to happen.
I have the PanaLeica 100-400mm on my "when I'm a millionaire" list as it seems it would be perfect for things like a safari where you never know how far away the subjects are going to be.

Ouch!!
My GH7 (with battery, card, 14-140mm, and vND) is just over 1.1kg.  The 12-100mm is just a hair under 300g heavier, so the GH7 + 12-100mm combo would actually be a hair above 1.4kg by the time it's fully functional, and my setup doesn't even include any audio equipment, so that's also something to take into consideration.
I walked around Pompeii carrying the GH5 + Voigtlander 17.5mm + Rode Videomic Pro (1.4kg) in my hand for several hours, raising it up when I saw something I wanted to shoot.  My wrist was sore for several days afterwards, just from having the weight on it for that long.  It might be something you'd get used to, but having to train so you have the strength and stamina to carry a camera around seems a bit much to me!
I agree.  The high-ISO performance is actually quite impressive too.  For low-light I have the 9mm F1.7 with CrZ and if I want longer range than that I have the 12-35mm F2.8.  Probably the only other lens I would get for super-low-light shooting is the PanaLeica 15mm F1.7 because it's small and fast and being a Leica lens should be nice and sharp wide-open so the CrZ mode should be quite usable with it.

I own and use both. The Oly 12-100mm F4 is a great lens, but it's much bigger and heavier than the Pana 14-140mm (560g versus 265g) - both on an OM-1:

On an E-M1 ii/iii or OM-1 the 12-100mm supports Sync-IS which gives sublime video IS performance, but even with the relatively light (for that kind of camera) OM-1, the combo is 1.2 kg and somewhat front-heavy if you're using it handheld. A GH7 + 12-100mm would be nearly 1.4 kg.
As a 'travel' lens, IMHO the combination of low weight and focal length range makes the 14-140mm almost perfect (other than in really low light, of course).

@PannySVHS I've now tested the Crop Zoom (CrZ) mode in 1080p.
This is the first test, and I exposed for the sky (which it thought was the right thing to do) which meant that the plants were a bit low, so I ended up bringing them up a little in post.  The Prores HQ is great at retaining noise and so there's quite a bit visible despite me having shot this at base ISO 500.  I've found that ETTR is definitely recommended if you want a more modern looking cleaner image.
I also used the 12-35mm lens at F4.0 for all images as that's where it's the sharpest.
First is comparing the C4K Prores HQ vs 1080p Prores HQ (on a 1080p timeline):


Next we compare the CrZ vs zooming with the lens.
I have prepared these images in sets of three.  The first is the CrZ image, the second is zooming with the lens, the third is the CrZ image again but with sharpening added.  This allows you to compare both CrZ images directly with the 'proper' one, as the more zoomed CrZ images did look a little soft in comparison when viewed at 300%.
Around 14mm (1.16x):



Around 18mm (1.5x):



Around 25mm (2.08x):



Once I got those images into Resolve and looked at them I decided to re-shoot it with a better exposure.  So I chose a different framing that meant the sky wasn't influencing anything.  However, I didn't realise that where I was standing was going in and out of the sun, so some shots were washed out and I had to compensate for it in post, adjusting contrast/sat/exposure/WB to match.  Tests are never perfect but are enough to give a good idea of what's going on, and in real use where there is no A/B comparing going on no-one would ever spot it anyway.
There's also a slight difference in exposure between the C4K and 1080p modes too, which is a bit odd.  I imagine it's due to changing the sensor mode.  I compensated for that in all these tests too.
C4K Prores HQ vs 1080p Prores HQ (on a 1080p timeline):


Around 14mm (1.16x):



Around 18mm (1.5x):



Around 25mm (2.08x):



I am actually rather encouraged by these results, as my previous test was in low-light and I did on something with much sharper edges and that showed differences I'm not really seeing here.
However, it's not really surprising that the GH7 did this well, as even with a CrZ of 2.08x it's still reading an area of the sensor around 2776 pixels wide.  I say "around" that wide because there is a slight crop when you compare the native 5.8K mode with the native C4K, 4K, and 1080p modes, but I think the 2.08x crop will still be oversampled from the sensor by a good amount.
The other thing I noticed was that I couldn't adjust the CrZ function while I was recording, the button just didn't do anything.  I'm not sure if that's because I have it assigned to a button and that there might be some other way to engage it while recording.  Maybe through the controls that are used to control powered zoom lenses, not sure.
Anyway, it looks pretty darn good to me, and the grain actually reminds me of the OG BM cameras which are quote noisy at native ISOs too (and also lots of seriously high-end cinema cameras too).

The 9mm I tested is the Panasonic Leica 9mm F1.7, I'm not aware of a 9mm F1.4 - maybe you're thinking of the Leica 12mm F1.4?
Let me see if I can further tempt you!!
I have done some tests (images below) but found the following:
You can use the Crop-Zoom function (CrZ) to go up to 1.3x in C4K and up to 1.4x in 4K resolutions There is no 4K option in Prores, only C4K If the sensor was cropped to be a 1:1 readout, it would be a 1.4x in C4K and a 1.5x in 4K, but the CrZ mode stops just short of these amounts.  I suspect that they have limited it so that it is always downscaling, even if just slightly.
Test shots.
First set are with the S-16 Cosmicar 12.5mm F1.9 C-mount lens.  These are all on a 4K timeline, so you can really pixel-pee if you want to.  I didn't have quite enough vND to have it wide open on all the shots, so some are wide open but some are stopped down to F2.8.







Now, I switched from the 4K to the C4K, which meant I had slightly less crop available and you can just start to see the edges of the image circle.  I suspect your mileage would vary depending on what lens you were using.  The Cosmicar is pretty wide, so if you were using a long focal length you'd probably get no vignetting at all.
This should also give a comparison between the 4K H.264 and the C4K Prores HQ.

Now we switch lenses to the 12-35mm and stopped down to F5.6 so we can compare the CrZ crop to a non-cropped image.
This is cropped to 1.3x using the CrZ function in C4K Prores HQ:

and this is without any CrZ and using the 12-35mm to zoom in to match the FOV:

I didn't shoot any clips this morning comparing the CrZ mode in 1080p, but I can also shoot a test for this if you're curious.
I had a closer look and discovered you can't change the zoom amount, which seems to be stuck at 3x zoom.  I'd say that it is resolving enough for focusing and I used it with the Cosmicar in the above test.  It's the normal story of using peaking and rocking the focus back and forth to find the sharpest spot.
At least I'd say that if you can't use it to manually focus then the problem isn't the punch-in feature but some other issue!

I'd argue that this kind of testing is actually necessary to understand how things behave.  Over the years I have tested a lot of things and it's amazing how many things that "everyone knows" do not stand up in even the most basic tests, but continue to be myths because no-one bothers to even look.
Aristotle claimed that women have fewer teeth than men, which is not true, but he obviously never actually looked to see if he was right - despite being married multiple times where he could easily have tested his claim at any time.
No, not mixed up, but the 12-35mm has a shallower DOF and so you have to know where in the image to look to compare sharp details in the focal plane.
This is the unsharpened cropped image:

This is the 12-35mm image:

This is the sharpened cropped image:

The sharpening is perhaps a little over-correcting, but the thin edges are still slightly blurred in comparison to the proper image from the 12-35mm.
This is where it is important to know how to read the results of a test.  This comparison of the zoom to the crop matched FOV but not DOF, and while I probably could have zoomed in using the 12-35mm and also stopped down at the same time to keep DOF the same, the lens sharpness would have been reduced so it wouldn't have been a fair test.  To get around that I should have tested using a flat surface like a resolution chart or a brick wall.
The problem with going that route is that now we're no longer testing anything close to real-life, and no longer answering questions about what will and won't work in real shooting.
The test wasn't "what percentage of resolving power is lost using the CrZ function?"...  it was "is the CrZ function usable for shooting with cropped lenses?".  Realistically I shouldn't have included the 12-35mm optical zooms at all, I should have just cropped in using the CrZ function and left the images to be judged on their own merits in isolation, the same way that any project shot using the CrZ function would be.
This is the danger of pixel-peeing - it distracts from the only thing that actually matters - the image.
The cosmicar really is a gem!
There's a reason that cinematographers have relentlessly driven up the price of vintage lenses over the last decades, and why modern lens manufacturers are designing and releasing brand new lenses with vintage looks, and manufacturers are even creating new mechanisms to control the amount and type of vintage looks with custom de-tuning functions.

The elephant in the room is Resolve.
As I have discussed and demonstrated in my "New travel film-making setup and pipeline - I feel like the tech has finally come of age" thread, over the last decade Resolve has gotten more feature-rich, but more importantly, it's made it HUGELY easier to use and get good images.
People now have a lot more knowledge about colour grading tools and techniques, that's for sure, but things like the Film Look Creator enable you to use a single node, you set your input and output colour spaces, and then you can adjust exposure / WB / saturation / contrast and all sorts of other things in the same tool.  You don't even need to apply a film look at all...  just select the "Blank Slate" preset, which sets it to have no look at all, and you can still use all the tools to adjust the image without having to worry about colour management at all.
Any improvement in your post-processes is a retroactive upgrade to your camera, your lenses, and all the footage you have already shot.
Colour grading is such a deep art that I think the average GH5 user back in the day was probably extracting a third of the potential of the images they'd shot, if that, simply because they didn't know how to colour grade properly.  I'm not being nostalgic about the GH5 either, the same applies for any camera you can think of.
There are reasons to upgrade your camera, for sure, but most of the reasons people use aren't the right reasons, and they'd be better spent taking the several thousand dollars it would take for a camera upgrade and taking unpaid leave from their job and improving their colour grading skills instead.

The elephant in the room is Resolve.
As I have discussed and demonstrated in my "New travel film-making setup and pipeline - I feel like the tech has finally come of age" thread, over the last decade Resolve has gotten more feature-rich, but more importantly, it's made it HUGELY easier to use and get good images.
People now have a lot more knowledge about colour grading tools and techniques, that's for sure, but things like the Film Look Creator enable you to use a single node, you set your input and output colour spaces, and then you can adjust exposure / WB / saturation / contrast and all sorts of other things in the same tool.  You don't even need to apply a film look at all...  just select the "Blank Slate" preset, which sets it to have no look at all, and you can still use all the tools to adjust the image without having to worry about colour management at all.
Any improvement in your post-processes is a retroactive upgrade to your camera, your lenses, and all the footage you have already shot.
Colour grading is such a deep art that I think the average GH5 user back in the day was probably extracting a third of the potential of the images they'd shot, if that, simply because they didn't know how to colour grade properly.  I'm not being nostalgic about the GH5 either, the same applies for any camera you can think of.
There are reasons to upgrade your camera, for sure, but most of the reasons people use aren't the right reasons, and they'd be better spent taking the several thousand dollars it would take for a camera upgrade and taking unpaid leave from their job and improving their colour grading skills instead.

This seems like a simple question, but the more I think about it, the less simple it gets.
Let's start out with the seemingly obvious answer - it looks like Super-16 because the sensor is literally a S16 sized sensor.  End of thread, thanks for coming, byeeeee!
Here are some thoughts suggesting it looks more like S35, or at least more than S16.  Some are good arguments, some aren't, but summed up I think they're hard to dismiss.
It appears sharper than S16, a lot sharper.
Without getting overly technical, S35 has around 4K resolution, but the level of contrast on the fine details is quite low, and it's well known that by the time you print and distribute a 35mm film it really only looks like about 2K once it's projected in cinemas.  This is perhaps the biggest argument for me - the P2K just looks like cinema did in the 90s.  I know this isn't comparing a 35mm neg scan with the P2K files, but virtually all the memories of 35mm film that most people would have are from movies shot and distributed on film, not from viewing modern film scans.
Lenses are much sharper now too, adding to it.  S16 lenses were often very vintage!
We have speed boosters, much faster lenses, and much wider lenses now.
One of the looks of S16 was longer focal lengths and deep DOF, but if we were to use the P2K like we would use any other camera, it would be with speed boosters and faster lenses which would have much shallower DOF.  The wider lenses we have now would be much sharper and faster too.  So the lens FOV, lens DOF, and sharpness combinations would all be much more like S35 was, and perhaps even exceed it.
How it's used would be much more modern.
The framing, movement, lighting, locations and subjects also play a role in 'placing' a medium.  This has probably changed less than the above arguments, and the things that any of us might shoot are more likely to still resemble things that I would associate with S16 (like FNW and TV and low-budget projects).
I'm curious to hear thoughts from others.
I've been reviewing my equipment and got to the P2K and thought "oh, it's a pocketable S16 camera" but my brain immediately added "that looks like 90s movies" and then I realised that these two things don't align!

The elephant in the room is Resolve.
As I have discussed and demonstrated in my "New travel film-making setup and pipeline - I feel like the tech has finally come of age" thread, over the last decade Resolve has gotten more feature-rich, but more importantly, it's made it HUGELY easier to use and get good images.
People now have a lot more knowledge about colour grading tools and techniques, that's for sure, but things like the Film Look Creator enable you to use a single node, you set your input and output colour spaces, and then you can adjust exposure / WB / saturation / contrast and all sorts of other things in the same tool.  You don't even need to apply a film look at all...  just select the "Blank Slate" preset, which sets it to have no look at all, and you can still use all the tools to adjust the image without having to worry about colour management at all.
Any improvement in your post-processes is a retroactive upgrade to your camera, your lenses, and all the footage you have already shot.
Colour grading is such a deep art that I think the average GH5 user back in the day was probably extracting a third of the potential of the images they'd shot, if that, simply because they didn't know how to colour grade properly.  I'm not being nostalgic about the GH5 either, the same applies for any camera you can think of.
There are reasons to upgrade your camera, for sure, but most of the reasons people use aren't the right reasons, and they'd be better spent taking the several thousand dollars it would take for a camera upgrade and taking unpaid leave from their job and improving their colour grading skills instead.