kye

Yeah my point exactly. I have very little doubt AI will take over huge swaths of the market, it's just I think there will always be room for human made products. 

Maturity level 1: specs are everything
Maturity level 2: specs don't matter
Maturity level 3: let's talk about specs in a nuanced way
Let's try and elevate the discussion, shall we?

Absolutely.  I once overheated an iPhone shooting in direct sun in probably 40-43C (104-110F), and considering that iPhones overheating is something that is practically unheard of, overheating is something I pay a lot of attention to.

Absolutely.  It's like people have forgotten what the images in the cinema actually looked like, or that they were 35mm film.  I say that because people who apply a "filmic" or "cinematic" look seem to apply a film emulation at about 284% of what is realistic.
This is a scan of (IIRC) Kodak 200T (source) :

The video above is:
too sharp too heavy split-tone very heavy-handed diffusion ridiculous halation etc It's like they got a film emulation plugin and put some sliders to 0% emulation, and others to 350%.
In colour, "if it looks good then it is good" definitely applies, but it doesn't seem to have a look of its own, it's just got a bad film emulation on it.

No doubt, and these options are definitely worth pointing out.
For me though, I prefer a much larger range of focal lengths for travel.  I'm sure you know this stuff far better than I, but for @SRV1981 and others, here are some thoughts..
I'm not far enough into the film theory, but I know they shoot documentaries and ENG with zooms for a reason, and I suspect my reasons for wanting that flexibility is the same as theirs.  I shot travel for a couple of years with a 35mm FOV being the main lens, and after a while I noticed a same-same kind of look to the footage.  I noticed this same look when iPhone video first got popular but it only had one focal length, and the same for action-camera-only videos.  
My analysis of award winning documentaries and travelogues showed me two critical things about the cinematography:
1) the shots were nice, but not incredible
2) the way they were used in the edit was what made the final product really great
I was also amazed at how many shots there were, and their variety.  We all know that the average shot length of today's media is around the 2-4s (with 4s being on the slow side), which is 1400-700 shots for a 45 minute episode.  This is easy to achieve if you don't want the shots to be that different from each other, but if you want variety and you want them to be interesting, you either need to go to a large number of locations or you need a zoom.  
The average vantage point will potentially have a large number of interesting compositions..  the wide shot of course, the low-angle wide and the high-angle wide might also be interesting, but beyond that it's about zooming in to interesting details.  Due to compression at longer focal lengths you can also juxtapose different foreground and background elements by getting closer and wider or further away and zooming in.
For travel, your ability to "zoom with your feet" is often severely limited, and you have to shoot from where you are allowed to be:
At the zoo or the safari park, you can't go into the lions cage and walk up to the lion to get a close-up On the top level of the hop-on-hop-off bus you're not allowed to stand up when the bus is moving.. so the choice is either shooting the wide shot only (which might include the people next to you), or zooming and getting all kinds of compositions My shot of the pope giving a Sunday address at the Vatican would have been a shot of a tiny speck in a window of a rather grand building if I'd only had the wide, but thanks to the 10x zoom I had on that trip I am zoomed in enough that you could see his facial expressions Any landscape photographer will tell you that having a telephoto is wonderful because all mountains in the distance look small with the wide but the tele is how you make them look big Any time there's an animal - birds, squirrels, monkeys, etc...   often you want the close up but don't want to get close to them, or they don't want to get close to you etc etc The online world seems reluctant to look at or learn from the professionals, who often have hundreds or thousands of times the experience and insight that the online crowd has.  Or, if they do, they only pay attention to what Deakins might say about shooting a feature film.
But travel isn't a movie set - it's real life and the doco shooters use different equipment for a reason.  
Ignore their experience to your own detriment.

Maturity level 1: specs are everything
Maturity level 2: specs don't matter
Maturity level 3: let's talk about specs in a nuanced way
Let's try and elevate the discussion, shall we?

Absolutely.  I once overheated an iPhone shooting in direct sun in probably 40-43C (104-110F), and considering that iPhones overheating is something that is practically unheard of, overheating is something I pay a lot of attention to.

Sony practically doesn't give a shit about overheating. In fact, it is now a trademark.
It seems here in Italy in the summer you can't use the camera at home.
 

pdaf may pulse too. my c300 og is upgraded to dpaf. I used it for continuous af. at infinity for landscape, I can see it pulse. I have to use one shot af to force the lens to stay at infinity, then pan or tilt. for subjects 3-5 meters away during an event, c300 og dpaf works fine, I have not seen significant pulse. c100 mk ii dpaf is much more reliable. at infinity, I don't see pulse on c100 mk ii. 

There sure is.. and the music people are freaking out more than the film-making people.

Maturity level 1: specs are everything
Maturity level 2: specs don't matter
Maturity level 3: let's talk about specs in a nuanced way
Let's try and elevate the discussion, shall we?

This partly true. Many pros will also come up with a lens/camera/filter combo that matches the look they want for a specific project, then stick with that combo all the way through. They then will add specific filters for specific shots. It's what I see done a lot anyway. 

I think the missing part that no-one seems to mention is how they're used.
Pros will choose which filter, at which strength, if any, is used for each camera angle and each shot.  It will be tailored to the exact contents of that composition, including the actor/actress who is in the shot.  It was common back in the day for big-name actresses to include a clause in their contract that all shots that they appear in must have a particular filter used.
Amateurs buy one, slap it on their lens, and never take it off.
There's a reason that amateur footage looks amateurish.  Probably the biggest giveaway is razor sharp footage with diffusion on it.

This was true with RED and yet it barely made any penetration into the industry.
It almost makes you think that the image coming out of the camera isn't the thing that determines the fate of the brand.....

Oly/OMDS cameras I've used have an 'MF' function you can assign to a button - it stops C-AF and enables the lens focus ring. After you've done the manual focus, press it again and AF takes over again. When going from MF to AF it doesn't force the AF to re-focus so basically (if C-AF is enabled and the in-focus part of the image is within the AF area) the C-AF will hold your focus. Also in MF mode you can push the AF-ON button to force an S-AF re-focus.
On my OM-1 I normally have video AF set to C-AF, then using the MF and AF-ON buttons I can switch between C-AF, MF and MF+S-AF while recording if I want to.
(Oly/OMDS cameras don't have an AF-lock function, so the MF function is the next best thing - you just have to be careful not to touch the focus ring accidentally...)

Those examples are just how I described..  PDAF knows where to go and CDAF doesn't..  No new information here 🙂 
But you're right, there are a great many things I don't understand...
Cameras over 4K that aren't needed for VFX Seeing that high-end movies and TV shows have been softened using filters, vintage lenses, and softened in post, but then pixel peeping the sharpest lenses and highest resolution cameras Trying to compare cameras without discussing what they're being used for Making decisions on the aesthetic of an imaging system without considering the emotional impact it has on the viewer Not understanding that the purpose of an imaging system is having an emotional impact on the viewer People perpetuating myth after myth when each one can be easily proven to be false with a smartphone and an hour of work etc etc... I mean, I also don't understand why people insist on shooting interviews with a 135mm F0.8 lens, then blaming their AF mechanism for not being able to track the subject, but maybe secretly I'm the dull one when they are deliberately going for that "talking head in a sea of blurry confusion and it seems like I've been drugged and the background is growing and shrinking" aesthetic.

Those examples are just how I described..  PDAF knows where to go and CDAF doesn't..  No new information here 🙂 
But you're right, there are a great many things I don't understand...
Cameras over 4K that aren't needed for VFX Seeing that high-end movies and TV shows have been softened using filters, vintage lenses, and softened in post, but then pixel peeping the sharpest lenses and highest resolution cameras Trying to compare cameras without discussing what they're being used for Making decisions on the aesthetic of an imaging system without considering the emotional impact it has on the viewer Not understanding that the purpose of an imaging system is having an emotional impact on the viewer People perpetuating myth after myth when each one can be easily proven to be false with a smartphone and an hour of work etc etc... I mean, I also don't understand why people insist on shooting interviews with a 135mm F0.8 lens, then blaming their AF mechanism for not being able to track the subject, but maybe secretly I'm the dull one when they are deliberately going for that "talking head in a sea of blurry confusion and it seems like I've been drugged and the background is growing and shrinking" aesthetic.

I agree with pretty much all of this. Honestly we dumb the conversation down when we just talk about PDAF or CDAF, as if each implementation is equal to one another when that simply isn't true. Look at Fuji. It switched to PDAF what, 6 years ago? Yet it still isn't very good. We also ignore that CDAF's hit rate in stills was pretty much on par with PDAF, meaning the issue was largely video related and that issues like pulsing were issues with CDAF in general.
Panasonic built on years and years of fine tuning their auto focusing algorithms and technology, which were always pretty solid, and merely switched how the focusing is done. Do I wish they'd done it earlier? Yes, if only because I got sick of people (mostly people that were never going to use their cameras anyway) complaining about it. 

I have this in the AFX in differing combinations.
You can set four focus points and then transition to them manually with the stick on the controller (or the Tilta wheel if you have connected that to the AFX) or with different transition times including one called "NATURAL" which is based on the difference between your current focus point and the target.
The transition times also work when it is in AF-C mode to keep the transitions as smooth or as instant as you prefer.
You can also use the first two focus points to set up a ring fenced area between the two where the AF system is only active for targets between the points.
And then of course there is the focus recorder function where you can do real time record of up to two minutes of focus movements using any combination of live LIDAR acquisition in AF-S or AF-C, the four focus memory position recalls and manual focus and then play it back as it was recorded.
As I say, its the combination of all differing methods that, to me, makes the difference between a type of focus and a focusing system.

In a contrast detect camera, the camera can tell how in or out of focus an area of the sensor is, but not which direction is more in focus (closer or further).  In a phase detect camera, the camera CAN tell which direction is more in focus.
A CDAF focus system picks a direction randomly (nearer or further), and goes the whole way looking for focus, and often it would pick the wrong way, and that's why that old P&S camera from 2010 would spend 3 seconds racking the whole focus range before zero-ing in on the focus, despite the fact it was only a little bit off.
That's it.
That's the ONLY difference between the two.
What you are talking about is differences in the mechanism that CHOOSES what to focus on.  
A PDAF system can randomly choose to focus on the background just as easily as a CDAF system can - the PDAF system will just do it slightly more confidently because it knows exactly how to get there and roughly how far away it is.
Apart from the Panasonic DFD pulsing issue (which is a side-effect of CDAF), I have not seen a focus error that was CDAF related in probably years.  
The issues with focus today are that it chooses to focus on the wrong thing, or on nothing at all.  This has nothing to do with CDAF or PDAF.
It's a whole other thing.
Sure, PDAF cameras focus much better overall, but it's not the PDAF, it's something else in the AF implementation.  CDAF and PDAF are a very minor part of the whole AF mechanism.

This is a comparison that I did between the internal CDAF of a Pocket 6K versus the lens being driven directly (although it uses the same internal motors) by an AFX.
It highlights the general speed issues with CDAF in lower light and lower contrast situations of course but also on when the lens is being driven from near to close targets and its these which are most likely to cause it to not lock and to give up the ghost completely.
Despite Panasonic's interpretation being a lot better it can still have these issues in my experience.
PDAF isn't immune from this stuff either and in the S5ii which uses a combination of both PDAF and CDAF I've had it struggle in lower light.
Low light or absolutely no light doesn't bother a LIDAR based system like the AFX in the slightest of course 😉
 
As I've said numerous times, the fully sentient AF system doesn't exist and an operator chosen combination of AF-S, AF-C and manual focus is still the one that yields the best results.

I totally agree that BM cameras are really good for the small budget production / owner-operators - great image quality for modest investment.
As soon as you get into the world where you're paying people minimum award wages then camera rental costs become insignificant and you're better off going with whatever the standard is for your genre (Alexa for narrative / studio, and Sony or Canon for doc work) either because the people that are involved will be familiar with them or that getting familiar with them would be a plus for getting chosen for larger projects.

I used the Animal Eye AF on my S5ii the other day for the first time and whilst it was reliable in stills, in video it was certainly less so as these frame extracts show.
When it worked, it worked well.

But in a lot of cases it preferred his nose.

This was with the Panasonic 85mm f1.8 so there isn't a massive margin for error but it also has to be said that Rolo is what can politely be described as a lazy little fucker so he's not exactly doing a lot of leaping about to overly tax the detection and tracking.
Maybe it thought his nose was a built in Owl and it was picking up its eyes.

In certain gigs, the higher the best. Affordable gear doesn't help to maximize the price of the wages. And this is actually what is going on a lot on this plot why the most expensive gear is invariably a good choice ; )
But when you operate just for the sake of the art or strictly making a living from the art, that premise doesn't put food on your table per se.
To someone who has already produced a feature film shot on Arri which has been praised and supported by the mainstream of the British Film industry, both routes can really help but the latter always come as secondary and under certain circumstances, never as primary. So, it's a bit upside down the idea people outside tend to retain.
- EAG