newfoundmass

They're decent! I'm not a big fan of earbuds though!

I just got my wireless earbuds for doing the survey ha ha

I love Gunpowder Neither of my pups ever stay still long enough to have their picture/video taken

There's still authoring software out there, both for free and for under a hundred dollars. The big problem is that most of them are very limited when it comes to customizing menus. Many limit you to templates. You're not going to find something that gives you the flexibility that DVD Studio Pro or Adobe Encore gave you, at least not on a budget. I'm on PC these days, so I don't have any recommendations for Mac software since leaving Apple 5 years ago (DVD Studio Pro still worked then) but you might want to head over to VideoHelp.com and check out their software database to see what's available for DVD authoring on a Mac.

It's weird, cause rarely do we get these kinds of deals in the US! In fact, I was just looking and I think the price of used GH2's have gone up since I helped a friend buy a set of them for under $200 each off eBay! Used GX85's are going for about $250 to $300 on eBay currently!

What brands did you buy that gave you problems?

Yeah, if you buy one from B&H or Adorama you're good to go, but it's a craps shoot if you buy it from Amazon unless the seller IS Amazon (as opposed to just "fulfilled by Amazon.") I've used Power Extra batteries for 4 different cameras and they've never failed me after thousands of hours of use, so I stick with them.

I've had good luck with Power Extra batteries personally. OEM batteries naturally work better because they're made by the camera manufacturer. They often have better quality control compared to generic manufacturers and don't fudge things, or at least not as much as some unknown company might. Generic manufacturers also have to backwards engineer batteries since they don't have the exact manufacturing specs that the OEM have.

The Panasonic 12-35 is a great lense. I'm sure it would be good on a GH5s with stabilization turned on. If you absolutely need a new camera the S1 is a good option, especially with the pending firmware update. I'm still incredibly fond of my GH5, whether I'm using an adapted or native lens. The stabilization when using dual IS is great, and is very good even when using a Sigma 18-35 with the Viltrox speedbooster.

If that was a real wedding... ? The goal is to be as least intrusive as possible for weddings. I barely want them to know I'm there for the actual I Do's.

Bummer to hear this about 6 Avenue. Bought a couple cameras from them back in the day.

And they work wonderfully on a M43 camera. It feels as though people have been claiming the M43 mount is dying for the last 6 or 7 years. Then came the GH4, the OG Pocket, the G85, the GH5, the Pocket 4K, etc. all cameras that have been wildly successful. As long as there is a demand there will be M43 cameras.

What happened to Jon Pais?

Give me that Super 35 sensor and M43 mount and take my money.

This is great news. Filled out my survey!

I used to be a regular viewer of Max but yeah, over the last two or so years he has done quite a few tiny things that made me question his credibility overall, particularly in his camera comparisons. The blatant dishonesty with the thumbnail kinda sums it up.

You had me up until CFast cards!

How'd everything come out?

You sure about that? I've never used them together, but Sony colors in the A7Sii aren't very good. Wasn't until the A7iii that I saw improvement in Sony's color.

For things like auto focus I don't think it's so much about tech really. With a focus puller you have complete control over it. You can pull focus as slow or as fast as you want. You can set multiple focus points. There are just so many reasons for why manual focus is preferred and why AF isn't something they need or want.

After some of the discussion about Cloud storage in this thread and concerns over increasing costs, I laughed this morning when I got an email from Dropbox telling me that their price is in increasing by $20 a year. Granted they doubled the space from 1TB to 2TB, but still.

I don't personally know a single narrative filmmaker that uses auto focus even when using cameras that have good AF. They all use manual lenses, which gives them complete control over focusing.

Ha ha, I don't envy this at all for a variety of reasons. Neither of those cameras are ideal for this kind of work due to battery life, though I'm guessing they'll be rigged up. A lot depends on the switcher and whether it's capable of tweaking the colors for each input. Once you've custom white balanced everything and have them using similar picture profiles, you'll probably want to head into the camera options and tweak the settings so that they match as best as you can. Hopefully then the switcher can fine tune it, cause I'm not sure how close you'll be able to get things just through the more broader image profile settings. I've avoided mixing camera brands for live switching like the plague for this reason. Even if you can't get the same camera for each angle, you're in the ball park as long as they're the same brand.

Don't they have a file size limit? Correct. If you're only storing a couple hundred gigs, or even a TB or so, it's not too big of a worry. It's when you start getting in the 10's of TBs or more that it becomes an issue where you're kinda held hostage. It's not as simple to switch Cloud services when you're dealing with such a massive amount of data.

Storage and back up is increasingly becoming a bigger problem for me. I want to have a local copy, but also having cloud backups are kind of necessary at this point. Amazon Web Services Glacier storage is the most cost effective to store but slow, and costly, to retrieve. When you've got dozens of TB of data though your options dwindle, and the costs quickly get into enterprise plan territory which can costs thousands and thousands of dollars a year. Once Amazon cut the unlimited storage for Prime users it became clear to me that this was only going to become a bigger issue / problem.