kye

Current totals and some very shallow analysis.




Not much overlap between what is used and what is discussed, and not much respect for what people are actually using.

They literally mean what the words say. 
"Pixel binning" is taking the average for that bin.
While "Line Skipping" is skipping over entire lines, no calculations done whatsoever. 
That is why line skipping generally performs so much worse. 
  
Sound Devices is missing from the list of brands 😞

Good point...we should start talking more about the cameras we already own and about making the most with them.

I've gone through a journey over the last few months, and have come to a new clarity in my work.
As most know, I shoot video of my family but want to make it look as much like high-end TV and films as possible.  This involves shooting in completely uncontrolled situations with no re-takes.
My new found clarity is this.  
Priority 1: Get the shot
You can't use the shots you didn't get.
Priority 2: Get shots in the best way
Shots that aren't in focus, are shaky, don't have good composition etc aren't optimal.  Also, having shots where subjects are aware and nervous of the camera, people in the background are staring at the camera, etc are also not optimal.
Priority 4: Get the nicest image quality
Insert all the normal camera stuff here...  DR, colour science, etc.  No, I didn't mis-number this, it's priority 4 because it's so far away from priority 1 & 2 that there is no Priority 3.
Priority 1 is about feeling comfortable pulling out the camera and shooting, and having it be easy and fast to use.  No fuss.
Priority 2 is about stabilisation and focus, but is also about camera size.  Smaller is better.
This means that iPhone > GX85 > GH5, but unfortunately for priority 4 it's the opposite.
Overriding principle: Use the biggest camera that won't draw too much attention in the situation.
My first challenge was to see if using the iPhone was going to even be feasible.  I mean, the image quality that I saw from it was horrendous.  @mercer laughed when I called it "MAXIMUM AWESOME BRO BANGER FOR THE 'GRAM" but it was potentially the most savage insult I could think of - and the way to make images look as cheap and amateurish as possible.  I own the iPhone 12 mini, which has the normal and wide cameras, but not the tele.  One thing that escaped even my attention was that this has HDR and 10-bit support natively, so it's got at least some potential.
Long story short, I filmed a test scene with all three cameras, as well as a colour chart I made in Resolve and a colour checker and attempted to match them.  Matching to the GH5 was obviously not feasible, but I like the GX85 so I matched to that.  Matching the GH5 to the GX85 was as simple as making a few basic adjustments.  Then came the iPhone.... I tried matching the scenes first, with limited success.  Hues and saturation and Luma behaviour were clearly different and not in easy or nice ways.
That's when I turned to the colour chart and tried to look at what was going on.  At first, the iPhone vector-scope was horrifically tangled, but in a stroke of luck I noticed that the luma curve was pushed up to brighten the mids, and when I brought it back to being linear, the vector-scope immediately fixed itself and was stunningly plain and straight-forwards.  Win!
This is the before/after of the greyscale from the colour chart:


While this isn't a perfect linearisation, check out this before/after of what it does to the vector-scope from my Hue vs Sat test pattern in Resolve....


(I'd removed a few rows in the mildly-saturated region so I could more easily compare between cameras.  This is the GH5 in HLG without a conversion to 709 for comparison)

If I apply a CST to the GH5 (from rec2100 to rec709) and include saturation compression, we get this horrific thing:

I've used that CST technique in the past and it's been fine on real footage, so it's not as bad as it looks.  But the moral of the story is that the iPhone now has easily manageable colours.
I was absolutely stunned when I realised that grading the iPhone footage could be as easy as working with the GH5 footage.  Plus, it's 709 footage in 10-bit, so it should be prone to less banding and artefacts than the GH5 footage, which is 10-bit log.
Next step is to use the colour checker to match the hues and saturation levels of the GX85.
Here are the vector-scopes before matching..  GX85:

GH5:

iPhone with curve:

Obviously the iPhone is nothing like the others, which is what you'd expect - Apple gave it a very distinct look and it's very different to the Panasonics.
I also took shots of the colour checker in -3 stops and +3 stops.  This showed that on the underexposed image (-3 stops) the iPhone is less saturated than the GX85/GH5 and on the overexposed image (+3 stops) the iPhone is more saturated.  Resolve has a curve for this.  I couldn't match it completely as it required a brutal adjustment but I pushed it in the right general direction.
After applying some hue and saturation adjustments, we get quite a good match.  iPhone:


The plots at -3 match well, but the plots at +3 are all over the place, with the GH5 clearly having some rather strange issues.  I'll ignore these for now - the goal is to make the iPhone into a camera that can be used for filming more than just memes, it doesn't have to match perfectly.
I also applied a gaussian blur to the footage to un-do the horrendous sharpening that is applied.
Here are some sample images from a recent trip with the above adjustments applied, without even adjusting each image individually - this is just the starting point.  As I shoot auto-WB I'd be adjusting each image individually, main focusing on skin-tones.  It should also be noted that these adjustments apply equally well to the normal, wide, and selfie cameras, and also apply to the 1080p120 and 1080p240 modes from both the wide and normal cameras.  These shots include a mix of these.





It looks like a real camera to me!  Not the best in the world, but it doesn't make me regret shooting with it, so firmly in the usable category.

some stills from a new short i dp’d. Still ungraded, some still need to be cropped a bit.

 

Interesting post. I really like the GX85 shots. It's a shame that Panasonic hasn't upgraded the GX85 and G85 with 10bit.
But I think the biggest takeaway is that Canon sucks.

The GX85 is the next challenge.
For Priority 1 it needs to be kept handy and accessible.  This means either being kept in-the-hand or kept in a pocket - keeping it in a bag adds access time unless the bag is on the front of my chest.  Both of these mean that the rig has to be kept as small as possible, which essentially boils down to lens choice.
The 14mm f2.5 lens is an absolute gem in this regard.  In the 4K mode (which has a 10% crop into the sensor) it's got a 30.8mm equivalent FOV.  I edit and deliver in 1080p, like all sensible people in the real world who haven't confused their ass for their elbow do, and so I can also use the 2x digital crop feature, which gives a 61.6mm equivalent FOV.  These two FOVs are hugely handy for showing people interacting with the environment around them - environmental portraits.
It also has good low-light, good close-focus distance, and has a bit of background defocus if the subject is close.
I have the GX85 configured with back-button focus.  This means that I hold down a button on the back when I want to engage AF and hitting the shutter button doesn't engage it.  This works brilliantly in practice as it means that I can focus once for a scene and then shoot without having to wait for the camera to AF.  I also have the viewfinder set to B&W and have focus peaking enabled in red, making it easily visible.  The histogram is also really handy to know what is going on too.
For Priority 2, this setup works well - the tilt-screen is great, AF is super-fast, IBIS is impressive and very functional, and I find using it in real-world situations to be easy, fast, and very low-friction.  It still gets some attention, but it's not excessive.
I find that for most shots I want to stop down to ensure that everything is in focus.  This is because my work is about the subjects experiencing the location and the interactions that are going on.  A nice portrait with a blurred-beyond-recognition serves very little purpose as it could have been shot anywhere at any time and therefore has no relevance.  This lens can give a satisfying amount of background defocus for mid-shots if required, and especially for macro shots, which are occasionally relevant in an edit.
Here are a few grabs SOOC.  
In grading I would typically lower the shadows to the point where the contrast is consistent (assuming it makes sense for the scene - lots of these have haze which you have to treat differently) and I would even out the levels of saturation etc.  I'd also sharpen or soften images to even out the perceptual sharpness too.
Interestingly enough, most of these images have enough DR, and even have elevated shadows, despite the camera not having a log profile.










These provide a really solid foundation to grade from.

I'm still using my 5D Mark iii with ML Raw as my main camera for hobby narrative filmmaking. I recently bought a Sigma FP which I like okay enough. I also have a BMMCC all rigged out but I never use it. I think I'll sell it soon so I can hold onto the FP for a bit longer.
I'm still unsure about the FP. I like it, but it doesn't feel like an extension of my arm like my 5D does. Here's a frame from the FP with the Nikkor 35mm 1.4 ai-s lens that I took recently while working on a short film...

Otherwise, I have a few film cameras I enjoy walking around with when I'm out and about.

I'm curious to know what cameras people are actually using?
By reading the forums I get the impression that everyone is using the latest and (so called) greatest cameras, but I suspect that's not the case.  I haven't been posting lately because I've gotten the impression that no-one would be interested unless I was pixel-peeing a Z9 or whatever, and I've moved past that now.

I'm curious to know what cameras people are actually using?
By reading the forums I get the impression that everyone is using the latest and (so called) greatest cameras, but I suspect that's not the case.  I haven't been posting lately because I've gotten the impression that no-one would be interested unless I was pixel-peeing a Z9 or whatever, and I've moved past that now.

I'm curious to know what cameras people are actually using?
By reading the forums I get the impression that everyone is using the latest and (so called) greatest cameras, but I suspect that's not the case.  I haven't been posting lately because I've gotten the impression that no-one would be interested unless I was pixel-peeing a Z9 or whatever, and I've moved past that now.

Or shutter-shitting an S5ii

 
 
 
 
 
Welcome back btw

OG BMPCC - costs less to buy outright than renting a C70.....  in 2022!
 

I think this is the fate of many cameras.  
The camera market seems to be oriented around camera size being a prerequisite for image quality, despite the fact it doesn't have to be (as evidenced by BMMCC and OG BMPCC which were affordable a decade ago).  This means that there is little support in-post for the lighter cameras and less reputation.
This creates a feedback loop where people who want to shoot light don't make good-looking videos because the expectation isn't there, and people who have the expectation of great images shoot with larger cameras, reinforcing the concept that small and budget friendly isn't the way to go.  
In response to this completely made up size=quality concept, BM decided to make the BMPCC 4K literally 3x the total size of the OG BMPCC and abandoned the delightful S16 sensor for one that looks like any other camera, and almost all evidence that small could be great was swept under the rug.  
Those who shoot small typically shoot in uncontrolled conditions where the lighting is mixed colour temperature and lighting ratios are difficult to deal with, leaving those who shoot in the most difficult conditions and have the least ability in post production to shoot with the cameras least able to handle those conditions, and unaware that it could have been any different.

Here's a video showing some ARRI Alexa Classic footage upscaled to 8K with Topaz.  It's in bits throughout the second half of the video.
https://youtu.be/YJpQCSFZMTM
(link won't expand, not sure why)
TBH I thought the results looked quite mixed - some shots looked much higher resolution but other shots just looked the same (had the same 2K film-like rendering and noise) so I guess it depends on your tastes and input footage.
This might be a better real-world test as it doesn't seem to be only the cherry-picked footage that gives great results.

In addition to my previous post above, I think the optimum amount of processing is having more NR/sharpening than RAW has, and less than the GH5 has.  If the FX30 is closer to that mid-point then that's another plus for the camera.
Despite not liking Sony all that much (both their company behaviour as well as the design of their cameras) and not wanting to move from MFT to anything but FF, the FX30 has an appeal that I can't understand.
Is there some sort of X-factor for this camera? or is it just me?

To me, all cameras give with one hand and take with the other.  Those that have some great features pay with other features, and if they have a lot of great features then you pay with your wallet and probably with the size of it. 
In many ways the best camera is the one that is 7.5/10 in every category because then it doesn't have some 'fatal flaw'.  In that sense, the RS is fine - middle of the pack perhaps.  How I read something like that is that it's not going to be a problem, unlike if it was notably bad.

Just remember, there are two attributes that define how well IBIS works, and this is the one that doesn't matter.

This is hilarious. I intended this to be about how the C100/C300 codec holds up in 2022. We are talking about something SO DIFFERENT now

@kyedoes a lot of travel so I can definitely see how a GH5 with vari ND and a small lens is a better setup for that usage. You could probably pocket that if you have the right Jacket where as you'll never be able to pocket a C100. 

Also for situations where you want to film and not be noticed a GH5 or other camera just looks more like you are doing casual photography. C100 not as much. But if you rig out a DSLR it stops looking like a stills camera and you stop looking like a hobbyist. 


I did a video using the ARRI Alexa, C100, and GH5. The C100 was my favorite out of the box look. It was a lower dynamic range scene but the colors were just really pretty. 

 

Using color space transform and the ARRI lut gets them to match contrast wise. The color still looks vastly different. I feel they look quite close after adjusting WB/tint around, but my color blind eyes aren't a great judge. 
I use 100 iso to see my highlights and then push from there between 400-800 to see what I have in the shadows. I used this method on the last feature I did and was happy with the results. 

640 iso does looks underexposed after changing the color space. However after boosting the exposure to match both cameras it actually seems similar to the Alexa in terms of noise performance. So in that sense it actually works out. I could have lit it bright and got a cleaner image but I wanted to see both cameras in a dim situation. The Sigma FP could have been cleaner if I bumped it up to 3200 iso but I wanted to see them at the same ISO. 
 

You'll find the shadows do not hold up as well in 8 bit or 10 bit. But if you expose reasonably you'll be fine. 

I've seen this a lot on camera comparisons.  Two images look like they have a different WB, but when you compare them the neutral greys are both neutral but there will be different tints with the highlights/shadows or on hues that are beyond a certain level of saturation.
It makes looking and comparing images very confusing - they look different but sensible adjustments don't seem to be effective in making them match.  The good thing with the FP is (I assume) you can CST back to a neutral point and then apply whatever colour science you want, side-stepping any oddities from a particular colour science or other.

That vlog life tho...

Sony's breathing compensation, at least for now, only works with some of their more expensive G and G Master lenses–no third party lens support as of yet. That could be a deal breaker for some.