kye

Hi. 
Thank you for the words. 
I only used a Gimbal in Curiosity and it was only for a handful of shots. The orbit around the actor on the bush track and the wide in the water pumping station along with a few shots at the end.
Intrigue, the other clip, is entirely hand held aside from a couple of obvious car mount shots (where I forgot to turn IBIS OFF)
I have mixed feelings about gimbals and just like IBIS, they’re good in certain situations. I tend to use something like a gimbal for tracking shots rather than relying on IBIS. 
As I mentioned way back, ibis works best to stabilise hand held shots that aren’t tracking in some way. Which is not the same as locked off shots. 
Any good operator knows that on a long lens the shot is easier to hold steady if you keep it moving slightly. This can be a gentle rock of changing weight as you operate the shot. By keeping the shot “alive” you’re less likely to notice jitter.  With very light and small MILC and dslr style cameras they’re actually harder to hand hold when they have less mass. 
IBIS helps smooth out the jitter on hand held shots like this that aren’t tracking but you’re also not locked into one position.
Depending on the storytelling style you might prefer hand held in a more “natural” style too.  After trying gimbals out for a while when they first became available I’ve tended to not really use them except for very particular shots that they’re great at.
But for 97% of my work it’s not stabilised by gimbal or IBIS, mostly because I only use these kinds of rigs for shots where I need IBIS. 
JB
 

I’ve been playing around some more. I found a better wide angle adapter. It is able to go over the entire lens just enough to cover the lens and be gaff taped onto it. the autofocus works perfect and the new focal length is 14mm. So we now have a 14mm f2 autofocus lens. It’s perfect for vlogging! 


Also, I found the EVF to be way too small and crappy to use as an actual method for manual focusing. So I pulled out my old BMPCC Z-Finder and it works great! I just gaff taped it to the monitor, but you could probably buy the Zacuto sticky mount for it. (You’d loose the ability to fully close the screen obviously.)

Also, I don’t know why but I’m just really enjoying toying around with this camera. I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed something this much. I had fun like this when I got my BMPCC for the first time, or when I hacked my 5D3 to shoot raw. It’s just plain fun. 

"hey guys...and if these tablets pleasest thou, yay, may thouest not forget to like and subscribe?"
 
Anyway, Liam's a midwest guy, correct?  DVD still goes a long way in the fly-over states, especially if you're angling towards anyone GenX or older.
 
The thing you need to keep in mind is that if you're gonna go around and hustle your wares in the flesh, you have GOT to be good at it --and that means enjoying doing that sort of thing.  If you don't like it, you're just going to be wasting your time.

Hey guys, what do you think about using stone tablets for media distribution? I just came down the mountain with a handful of them. 

As soon as the HDSLR Revolution hit in 2008 that was the start of the death bell ringing for any ultra low budget indie film to ever shoot on film. 
Then when the BMCC launched in 2012 that was the final strokes of the clock counting down until it was time over for even more "mid budget" indie level films. 

This is not even counting the impact RED and ARRI had, and honestly today an indie film can totally shoot on a RED or ARRI camera if they really really want to. I've worked on plenty of ultra low budget films using a RED or ARRI. 
Of course the other impact RED and ARRI had, is as the bulk of the high end productions switched over to them and away from film, that then dried up the source of work for the film processing labs. 

Once the last film processing lab is gone in your country (like is the case in New Zealand. Park Road Post closed its film post-production facilities in 2013, that is a looooong time ago!) then it becomes very very hard to produce a film film.  At least in the USA they're massive enough I think there is still a couple of commercial scale ones left. 

Another big impact upon indies this switch from film to digital at the high end is that in the past indie filmmakers would beg/borrow/steal/scrounge the ends of rolls of film, and thus at least have the raw beginning materials to make their film with (but have to work around the hassle of having incomplete rolls of film as they're short ends). Which would help bring down costs for them. Of course today there is much less opportunity to source these, as there simply are less of these film ends around. 
I looked up Jim's films: The Limits of Control (2009 released, so perhaps actually filmed a couple of years earlier in 2007? Maybe, could be more, could be less), then Only Lovers Left Alive (2013 release, but again the actual production would have been earlier).

First of those two was filmed with an ARRI film camera, the 2nd of those two with an ARRI digital camera. And those two dates aligned up with my earlier comments about the timing of the transition. 
Am sure of that.
 
An old RED ONE is practically free to rent. Heck even say a Scarlet MX (maybe even Dragon) you can get owner OPs throwing it in extra for nothing at all. 

Even at the highest end of RED cameras, they've always been cheaper than the high end latest ARRI digital cameras. 

My reference to $5M was actually about camera equipment, and was around the point that anyone using a >$5M camera setup would think of the entire DSLR revolution in the same way that this board seems to talk about vloggers..  basically as spoilt whiney teenagers 
You're right that the situations I describe don't have anything to do with budget.  You can shoot in a highly controlled environment with a phone, a couple of desk lamps and a wired lav mic if you wanted to.  On low budget films as soon as you don't pay people minimum wage you can get away with spending almost nothing (except lots of social capital!).  I co-produced films at $2K and $5K that were absolutely situation A with months of pre-production, >20 cast/crew, and one of them had >10,000 person-hours in it (I didn't estimate the other).
I understand that my post is a huge simplification, but I think the principle stands.
As someone who shoots at the C/D end of things its amusing/frustrating when I mention a challenge I have in shooting my home videos and the reply is to add crew (take extra people on my holiday), to multiply the weight of my rig by three (or more!), or to get my family to repeat parts of the holiday over and over until I get a shot with the right lighting!  
This topic is an attempt to get people to understand that there is a huge variety in film-making outside of the niches they seem to live in.
I was going to say this!  Film is too slow for most commercial shoots, and for indie it is too expensive!!!
I think I heard somewhere that it's cheaper to rent a RED than to shoot on film these days?

Absolutely
I mention $50K because I thought that was expensive enough to distance it from what we're talking about (mainly GH5 / GH5s / BMPCC4K / A7 series) which aren't anywhere near $50K.  Also, a production that large is outside my experience
I watched the ARRI Academy HDR Masterclass series and just about had to poke myself with pins to stay awake, the pace of the guy running it was so slow that I would consider him a fire risk - ie, if the place caught on fire I'm not sure he would be capable of leaving the premises fast enough to make it to safety!  During a real shoot he might move faster, but it's hard to drive a Ferrari at walking pace so...
I'm aware that one metric is 2 minutes of final footage a day for a feature film and that's not a case of going fast by rushing, it's a case of going fast by being thorough and doing things right the first time, so that pace is understandable and I'm not criticising it at all.  However, if you compare a big film set like that where a squillion people worked a 12+ hour day to capture 2 minutes of final footage with a production like event or documentary shooting where a single operator captures 2-10+ minutes of final footage in a day the ratio of speed is huge....  (maybe 50-100 times?) .....Let alone a vlogger like Casey Neistat who captured, edited and published videos 5-15 minutes long every day without a break (with no gaps for planning) for months at a stretch then the ratios may as well be in parallel universes because you have to include all of pre and post-production person-hours.
In terms of people thinking their situation in C or D but it's really situation A, yeah, that's inevitable.  Film-making is an industry so big that people can be involved in part of it but be completely unaware that other parts of it even exist.  One of the challenges I have with home video stuff is that because it's mostly kept private there's very little visibility of it.  Just like how many people use fancy DSLRs to take pics of their kids - it's hard to understand how many are doing it because people don't publish photos of their kids much - it's an iceberg where only a little of it is visible from the surface.
I should also add that in a sense the people operating in a faster environment need to demand more from their equipment rather than less, high DR is useful when you're not in controlled lighting, higher resolutions / bit-rates are useful when you want to punch-in digitally in post instead of changing lenses and doing another take, etc etc.

Vloggers aren't crazy....  but there sure is lots of debate around the topic!  
My theory is that they are making films in a different situation and the fact they have different needs is why they appear to be crazy to film-makers from other situations.  This is my attempt to explain it.
I think film-makers fall across a spectrum of the speed of film-making and the amount of control over the environment that exists.
Situation A: low-speed / high control.
In situations where things happen very slowly (eg, on a controlled set, or perhaps shooting landscapes and B-roll) you can have everything on full-manual and get the best results because you're in full control of what is happening.  This means time to level a tripod, setup whatever lights you want, use a light-meter, adjust all camera settings, setup and rehearse camera moves, etc etc.  In this setting having the camera do things for you is counter-productive because you want to have full control over everything.  Therefore things like autofocus and IBIS are unwelcome, camera weight and size might not matter, but image quality probably matters a lot, and cinema-primes are a good fit.  I think the GH5s / BMPCC4K are aimed more at this type of application.  There is always room for a sound-person and various crew here.
Situation B: moderate-speed / moderate control.
In situations where things happen faster but you have a good degree of control there is value in having some 'helpful features'.  This might be something like run-and-gun film-making where you have time to setup an interview station where you have a moderate amount of control.  Things like manual focus can still be used, but reliable face-detection would be useful.  You might set shutter speed and aperture but have auto-ISO enabled.  Camera size and weight potentially matter because you might be filming B-Roll or featuring clips of things that aren't in your control (eg, shooting an event) so having a lighter tripod setup you can carry around and shoot with quickly is useful.  Having a sound-person and other crew also works here.
Situation C: high-speed / some control.
In situations where things are happening in real-time but you have a degree of control over some aspects the priorities shift again.  This might be something like ENG film-making where when the action happens you have to capture it with no second chances, but you might also be interviewing people and have some degree of control about how the interviews are done.  For example if you were covering a building fire you have no control over when or how the fire will burn, what the responders will do about it, etc, so you need to be able to move very quickly, having a rig that can be hand-held (shoulder rig normally) and also having a tripod that is quite portable.  In this situation IBIS, reliable auto-focus, an all-in-one zoom lens, etc become desirable features. However, during the interview situation you can still have input into what is asked, where it is (interviewing the fire chief with something burning in the background makes a nice shot) but if people fumble their replies you can often ask them to repeat something or prompt them in a variety of ways.  These can have crew, but often due to the economics of the situation there isn't budget.
Situation D: high-speed / no control.
I add this mostly for myself and my home videos, where my priority is to capture what happens without directing anything, as I prioritise the experience over the film.  This is 'fly-on-the-wall' film-making in a sense.  Technically this is within the previous situation, but I choose not to exert most / all of the control I have.
I teased that this discussion was about vloggers, so I think they sit across situations A-C, but the controversy comes in when vloggers are in situation C.  There is a hierarchy of needs for vloggers in situation C:
They REQUIRE that the camera be small and not attracting the wrong attention because situation C is about shooting in public (I've posted elsewhere about being stopped by authorities when shooting in public) and they require that the camera be able to be turned on and recording at a moments notice and they are almost exclusively a self-shooter with no allowance for any dedicated 'crew'.  This is basically iPhone / RX100 territory, and creates films where the content better be great because the picture will be shaky and the audio will be noisy and full of ambient sounds. They often WANT to improve the basic quality and so they add a directional microphone of some kind (typically Rode VideoMicro or Rode VMP+) and try to make it more stable by adding a handle (typically a gorillapod). However (and this is where we get the controversy between vloggers and other film-makers in situations A and B) they LUST after having more 'cinematic' videos, which drives them towards higher-bitrate codecs and large aperture lenses (which means they're now looking at the same cameras - 5DIII, 1DXmII, A7SII, BMPCC4K, XH-1, etc), and they want 'buttery smooth footage' which means world-class stabilisation.  Film-makers in situations A and B get these by having setups that are have at least one of the following challenges: slow to setup, cumbersome to use, large and attract attention.  When a vlogger looks at a high-end DSLR and sees that it doesn't meet one of the basic things they require (small, inconspicuous, no-setup time) they see it as a fundamental flaw in the camera.  This perspective makes no sense to a film-maker who places these features of a camera quite far down their priority list, and this is where the controversy occurs.  
Of course, vloggers often don't know a single thing about how the pros do things, are often self-centred and unwilling to learn about other styles of film-making, which enrages the pros and thus flame wars ensue.  (Of course, exactly the same can be said of a minority of film-makers who are uninterested in how vloggers do things, are self-centred and self-important because they view their film-making as somehow better than other types, and are equally as responsible for the flame wars as the vloggers...). Hopefully this helps to explain some of the key differences and why we keep tripping up on these topics.
I know that this is a huge simplification of the variety of situations, that this is a spectrum and film-making can exist anywhere between the four situations I listed above, and that many film-makers have projects that are on different parts of the spectrum and require equipment that is flexible.  However, each film-maker and each purchase decision will be made by prioritising the features in one category against the others.
BTW, the entire DSLR revolution (ie, the vast majority of people on this board) probably look like vloggers in the eyes of those shooting on big-budget sets with the $50-100K setups and equipment that requires a truck to lug it around.  Anyone criticising the BMPCC4K is going to look like a spoiled millennial when we criticise a $1300 camera that shoots 4K RAW!

Your post inspired me to start a new topic about how I see the differences in priorities that film-makers have
 
Here's an example with a battery...

It's from this campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gimbal-with-focus-control-skyvideo-pro#/

$50K?! That is nothing. I've been on shoots where just a single lens costs that. 

And yeah, some folks coming from that world might do shoots they call "Situation D / C" yet from your perspective it very much "Situation A". So even simply classifying different types of shoots isn't always straight forward. 

And even within "Situation A" there is a tonne of variety, from shoots which might want to get a couple of dozen pages of dialogue done in a single day, vs others which are only aiming to complete a couple of pages worth per day. 

Could you mount the external monitor on the handle of the gimbal and run a (very flexible) cable to the camera?  I've seen people running cables from fixed microphones or power banks to the camera on a gimbal before and they seem to work.
230g isn't much but every bit counts!

Circular argument.

I guess it's not about having more weight balanced by the gimbal (the Crane 2 is strong), it's about holding all of that with only one hand. I would hate to hold 3-4kg in a single hand (considering the bad leverage when you tilt the gimbal in that hand), we're reaching levels where a two-handed gimbal would make more sense for usability.

Shot in Rec709 and ProResLT! ha

Quick BTS on my YT channel:
 
 
 
The final edited result is already up:
 
 
And this is how a clip looked straight out of camera (you can even hear how I recorded the right track at a lower level than the left track! Intentionally so as a safety measure):
 
 

I've been looking to get a set of LED lights that I can travel with (fly around the world) that are versatile, high quality, powerful, not heavy and not too expensive. In this test I was comparing lights that I want to mostly use as a kicker/practical or maybe key (if I need to). 
The lights tested are: 
Boltzen bi-color 30W (3200k - 5600k), Aputure LS-mini20d (7500 k), Aputure F7 (3200k - 9500k), Luxli Viola (3000k-10000k/RGB)
Test methodology: I placed all lights 3 meters from a gray card. I set my camera to center/spot meter at auto ISO. 1/50 and F/4 (this is for my needs) and then I read the iso meter. I repeated the reading a few times to ensure there are no strange anomalies. The Aputure LS-mini20d (7500 k) is lighter than the Boltzen. It has much better spot focus ability. But it has two big issues. Just during this simple testing the fan came out. Not loud but audible. However, more importantly I place the 3200k soft gel inside the slot (I guess the slot was for the 5600k hard gel) and it burned. I heard Kaleb talk about the 5600k gel bleaching. Still makes the LS-mini20d a useable kick/accent light. Since I'm planning to shoot tungsten WB and it will give me a nice shade of blue. But it makes it not as versatile as I had hoped. Otherwise it's a perfect light. The Botlzen on the other hand gives you pretty much the same output in 5600K as well as 3200K. It's more powerful on paper, but not having as good as a spot as the Aputure makes the same power but for more weight. On plus side it has not fan, but it uses a heavy heat sink which is why it's heavier. 
 
@IronFilm and @HockeyFan12 as promised here is my quick test so far. 
Boltzen spot:
3200k ->  iso 320
5600k -> iso 250
Boltzen flood: 
3200k iso 1000-1100
5600k iso 640-800
------------------------------------------------------------
Aputure spot
7500k iso 140 
5600k gel iso 250 
+1gel 3200k iso 400
Aputure flood
7500K iso 640 
5600k gel iso 1100 
+1gel 3200k iso 1250-1600
---------------------------------------------------------
Aputure F7
5600K iso 1000
3200k iso 2000
7500K iso iso 1100
9500k iso 1250 
 
Luxli viola 
5600k iso 2500
3200k iso 2500 
 
2 Luxli viola 3200k iso 1250 (I did this, because I'm looking at a Luxli Cello as a possible key and Cello is essentially has 2x the LEDs of the Viola). 
 
Here are some images of the shape of the light on the bookshelf where I have my gray card
 
Boltzen full spot 

 
Boltzen flood using the barn doors to shape the light to around the book case 

 
Apurture full spot 

 
Apurture full spot with a 3200k gel on 

 
Apurture F7

 
Luxli Viola
 

So this was my bad, I put the flexible 3200k conversion gel (this is for the Apurture to convert the 7500K light to 3200k) in the slot where the hard gel goes (the hard gel is to convert the light to 5600k).  I only had get there long enough to do a flood and spot mode a couple of times. Maybe 5 minutes and it practically burnt right away. I'm not sure if the hard gel for the 5600K would do any better or as Kaleb Pike said in his youtube channel they got bleached. I can see that happening. Which really makes this like a 7500k light that you can use as accent/hair light etc. 
 

Circular argument.

I was suggesting something more along the  lines of some sort of compressed RAW via HDMI and Atomos decodes and can recode it as either CDNG or Pro Res Raw - or other pro res non-RAW formats.
I don't understand...
Isn't that what the a7III is doing? 4K FF Mirrorless for $2K...
I don't understand this either... 
What are we doing here... follow the leader?
From my understanding each company (specifically Canon, Sony and Panasonic) leap frogged one another...
Yes, it all started with the 5D mark 2... but lets skip ahead to the 4K gen. cameras. I mean I can talk about the GH1 to Gh3.... but again.... lets skip to the 4K DSLRs and 4K MILCs...
2012 -> Canon 1DC - First 4K DSLR.
Panasonic said, we can do that and add 1080 @ 96fps -> GH4
Sony took their time but they did have a low-light monster... eventually leap frogged them by introducing 1080 @ 120fps (though cropped in the a7sII)
2016 -> Canon 1dx mark 2 - First 4K @ 60p and 1080/120p (no crop)
Panasonic said, oh yeah? 10 bit and 1080 @ 180p
No wait... we have more improvements -> GH5s 
Blackmagic comes in.... and said.... "What? You forgot about us?" Throws the Pocket Cinema4K and mind fucks us.
Sony, can't be like... we can match the Panasonic GH5........... 
 
 
 

Seems like a pretty fair overview of the camera, and interesting that it's more sized like the BMCC rather than original BMPCC.

Seems like a pretty fair overview of the camera, and interesting that it's more sized like the BMCC rather than original BMPCC.

We have standards for tonnes of things, why not gimbals?    Specifically, how well they stabilise?
As far as I can tell, a gimbal is a physical device that receives vibrations from the handle and through the three motors forms a low-pass filter such that only large slow motions are able to make it through to the camera.  This should be easily test-able via a test rig of some kind.  I would expect a graph showing dB of attenuation across a range of frequencies over the three axis's of motion.
That way we'd be able to say things like:
"gimbal X has better attenuation than gimbal Y up to vibrations of strength Z, but above that X runs out of steam and Y is better, therefore for fine work X > Y but for difficult environments Y > X"
or
"gimbal A has much better attenuation of higher frequencies than B or C or D, therefore if you plan on mounting it to a vehicle (which has a vibration frequency distribution shown in the graph below) you're better off with A".
Instead, what we get is "I'm going to watch youtube videos where people compare two different gimbals by running with each in turn, therefore seeing how well each performs IN STABILISING A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SET OF VIBRATIONS".  Hardly the best way to compare devices costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Everyone knows you need 8K RAW for flower videos..  I mean, they're flowers, right?

A very good article by Frank Glencairn on the new camera
https://frankglencairn.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/why-the-new-pocket-cinema-camera-2-0-isnt-actually-a-successor-of-the-original-pocket-and-why-it-doesnt-mater/

Prediction- they'll put even more cool stuff in for a great price, and people who use it to shoot flower videos will still complain about it. 

Yes to a,certain degree.
Ram sticks are available up to 16gb. A motherboard will typically have 4 to 8 slots. Ram is dual channel which basically means if you only want 16gb you should buy 2x 8 rather than 1x 16.
You still eventually get bitten into upgrading your ram sticks when new motherboards come out that don't support your dram generation.
 

@OliKMIA You raise excellent points, however I still believe that "black box" testing as I've described above would still be useful.  The same kind of testing would apply, but you'd have to re-test given firmware updates.
It doesn't matter what the mechanisms are within the gimbal, it can be reduced to a "black box" and tested by providing a known input vibration and measuring the output vibration (which would ideally be zero above some cut-off frequency).
In analog audio circuits there are two main parts of the circuit - the signal path and the power supply.  The job of the signal path is to create an output signal as close as possible to the input signal but amplified (voltage and/or current amplification).  The job of the power supply is to take the awful noisy mess the AC power from the power company normally is and make it a DC power source with zero AC on it, both at idle and during heavy amplifier loads.
There are dozens / hundreds of designs for signal paths with varying architectures (global feedback / local feedback / zero feedback / Class-A / Class-AB / Class-D / MOSFETs / JFETS / pentodes / triodes / etc) and there are as many power supply designs (linear / regulated / passive filtering / active filtering / valve / solid-state / etc) but all of these can still be tested by looking at what they output with a given typical load.  In fact, these don't even require the same testing signal to be applied for calibrated testing setups to create measurements that can be compared to each other.
Everything I said above about audio applies to the analog components of video processing and broadcast as well, just at a higher bandwidth and with the video embedded on a carrier wave instead of 'raw' through the circuitry, but the principles remain.  If an analog video signal path had a high-frequency rolloff or the power-supply was noisy or didn't have a low output impedance it would result in visual degradation of the picture - something that the test pattern would ruthlessly reveal, which is why it designed and used.