eatstoomuchjam

For me, it's not even an argument. Or if it is an argument, it's a silly one and I want to stay as far away from it as possible. There was a time when zooms were noticeably worse optically than primes - potentially made worse with the release of lenses like the Nikkor 43-86 (that said, I have and kind of love the 43-86, though I have yet to convince anybody to let me use it on set). But since sometime in the 80's, high quality zooms have existed. The 24-70/2.8's and 70-200/2.8's from Canon/Nikon have been fixtures in the bags of nearly every professional photographer since then. They're sharp, fast enough, and extremely convenient. I've used them on set dozens of times. When shooting by available light or when going for more extreme subject isolation, I might move to a faster prime... but when I do, I'm rarely like "wow, this is so much better." I'd even go so far as to challenge most of those people to tell the difference between the 24-70/2.8L II at 50mm stopped down to f/4 or f/5.6 and the EF or even RF 50/1.2L stopped down to f/4 or f/5.6. There might be a different character in the bokeh from the RF, but that's more of an ultra-modern design vs still-pretty-modern design concern vs a zooms vs primes one. I'm pretty sure that's what I just said. 😉 This goes with another of my parlor tricks when on someone else's set - pointing out things to them that will be a problem in their scene simply by looking at the lens on the camera and where it's pointed - I usually have a good idea of what their frame is without having to look at the screen. "You sure you don't have the sound engineer's pack in the frame on the right edge? With that 35mm lens, I'd think you'd see it." (pause) "Oh, yeah. Could you take a step back?" It can be useful for making a guess at the price/quality ratio of the lens (also based on the widest aperture). Finding a good quality f/2.8-f/4 lens that's a 2x or 3x is usually relatively affordable. 4x less so. At 5x, you're either going to be forking over a lot of money, getting a slower lens, or mounting a coke bottle to the camera. That said, I still check prices on the EF 35-350 sometimes in a fever dream since I'd like to see if it can be "good enough" in many cases - and the same with the more useful EF 28-300, but its used price is staying stubbornly high. Once it hits $700, I might buy one in a late-night drunken rampage or something (I barely drink these days so there are fewer opportunities than there once were). Kubrick was fully correct! As he often was!

I really wanted to like the PDMovie. I had the previous version (Air 3 Smart? Something like that) for a bit and ended up selling it after trying to use it just a few times. The weird batteries were a little annoying, but I could have lived with them if not for the complete lack of ability to choose what it focuses on. As far as I could tell, the focus would always be on "whatever is closest" With DJI focus, the hand grip has a little screen where you can at least tell it where you want the focus to be - and it'll successfully focus on that thing about... well, 85% of the time. For me, the systems that fake out PDAF are more exciting. I hope that someone comes out with one for RF mount sometime - or even better, for EF mount. Otherwise, the ones with a little motor are kind of neat - though moving the lens back and forth is not quite the same as adjusting the focus (though usually it's a relatively petty distinction).

This is exactly why I ended up selling my fp and fp-l. I tried just about everything to keep the kit small for raw recording. And kept coming back to how big they got, even with the smallest possible external SSD (one of the DPL SSD cases in their mount). By the time I added that, I had a camera the same size as my Canon R5, but also less capable than the R5. If Sigma would release the exact same camera, but able to record compressed 12-bit raw to SD card (Canon did it on the C70 and they do it in raw lt on the C80!) - or with a CFE slot that can record the existing uncompressed raw, I'd be strongly considering it again. The default size for the fp is just so good. Similarly, once the price of the bf gets to "not silly" level, I'd be apt to get one. Anyway, the ZR seems to be almost everything that I wanted the fp to be - it's another one that I'm likely to get someday after prices drop more (or there's a crazy good sale).

"Cinema" over the last 130 years would strongly beg to differ in terms of the size of the imaging sensor used. 😉 This one is a best seller, presumably, because it was just recently announced and it's still in preorder state (with a free PL adapter!). I'm tracking it, though, as it's in the "less squeeze, but with oval aperture" that I find somewhat interesting, as shooting true 2x anamorphic feels generally unwieldy. I'll point out that even in a distortion-free 28mm lens, shooting a close-up tends to be unflattering due to perspective. The reason longer focal lengths tend to be seen as more flattering is because the relative distance from the nearest part of the face (probably the nose) and the rest of the face (especially the eyes) is much larger. If I am standing 12" from a subject with a nose 1" long, the nose will seem much larger in comparison than if I am standing 48-72" from the same subject. This can be observed simply by holding the hand about 11" from the face and moving it back 1". The difference in size is noticeable - and it is for the nose in a portrait as well. There's an additional part of this which will get you chased out of a number of forums for heresy - if you are shooting at sufficiently high resolution, you can take a couple of steps back with your 28mm lens and then just digitally reframe/zoom in on the subject and get functionally the same result as putting on a slightly longer lens at the same aperture value (give or take variances in lens character, etc). If you're shooting at 8K to deliver in 4K, it can be a pretty big couple of steps. This is basically turning a prime lens into a zoom lens. This sort of thing is specifically why I love having a 180mm macro lens - it lets me do extrame c-u of an actor's eye or eyes without getting the entire camera package right up in their grill. No matte box, though. I ain't professional enough to use a matte box. Controlled sets can also be places where using a Zoom lens becomes more attractive, as swapping lenses can take 3-5 minutes. - Detach FF gears - Remove support - Unmount first lens - Mount second lens - Attach support - Attach FF gears - If using electronic FF, run calibration - Potentially, if on a fancier set than I'm usually on, inform whoever is doing script notes of the change If shooting under any sort of time constraints, everybody will start to hate you after a little while if doing this frequently. This sort of thing is why I've begun using a Canon C80 with autofocus stills lenses for timed film competitions. I did one with the RF 24-105/2.8 on loan from CPS (worked great, beautiful lens, maybe someday when the price is more reasonable, I'll buy one) and another with my own 24-70/2.8L II and 24-70/4L IS and swapped in the 85/1.4L IS for some close-ups and the 180/3.5L for some extreme close-ups. It's been working really, really well. On the last set, when someone got annoyed that I was swapping lenses again for some reason, they timed me - total time for a lens swap was about 1 minute 15 seconds (no lens supports, no FF gears).

For me, I'm still not seeing that as especially useful or revolutionary. It's been possible for a long time, probably 10+ years, to do gyro control of larger gimbals (usually through the phone app, but I think I had or saw at least one with an external gyroscope controller in the past). It never took off much and I never saw anybody strap a phone to their head to remotely control their gimbal. I'm not sure if gyro controls are in DJI MIMO, but if they are, it's already basically possible with the Pocket 3. I've found gyro control to be somewhat useful with the Ronin 4D (including with the flex unit). On one shoot, I was getting too tired to carry the camera anymore so the grips started carrying it around while I controlled the frame from the gyro on the high bright remote monitor. It worked... OK. It'd be better if we'd practiced it beforehand, probably. For me, it's more "parlor trick" than "genuinely useful tool" in most cases.

But all of that was previously already possible by using something like the Insta360 Go mounted on the brim of a hat. And as I previously mentioned, that has the advantage of actually being the perspective of the person using it, vs the perspective of their chest.

For me, the head tracker suffers from a few problems. - No 4th axis stabilization means the footage will be partially smoothed, but with footstep movement (not different from carrying it, but not ideal) - Is not actually at eye level, assuming that the wearer and people they interact with are all of average height, the viewer will be staring at the chests of everybody - or at their double chins and nostrils. - Many people are going to find it creepy and will not react naturally when someone comes up to them with ET in the papoose For this sort of use case, something like the Insta360 Go line is a lot more suitable and it can be clipped to a hat. People might still find a little square camera on a hat to be a bit intrusive and odd, but at least it's closer to eye height and will be looking directly at people's faces. And electronic stabilization is generally pretty good these days - haven't used a Go myself, but I'm sure it does a perfectly adequate job of making things not overly spastic. And aside from the hat use case, helmet mounts for action cameras have existed just about forever and for any use case where the user would naturally wear a helmet, they work well and most action cameras are more robust if there's a crash - and they cost less if they do get broken. Of course, there are also SmartGlasses that sit exactly at eye height an point to exactly whatever the user is looking at...

There are so many variables when it comes to how you're viewing the film images. Negative film has wide dynamic range and soft highlight rolloff. Positive film has much more limited dynamic range and pretty hard highlight rolloff. Faster film tends to be grainier. Filmmakers with a big budget would be choosing their film stock for aesthetic/style reasons. Imagine shooting Taxi Driver on the same technicolor low-grain film stocks that were used for The Sound of Music. Bright saturated colors would have been terrible for Taxi Driver. Scorcese chose less gritty films than some others might, but Travis Bickle lives in a relatively desaturated/dark world and that's for the best. Filmmakers with low budgets were likely to choose the cheapest film stock they could and some even used the leftovers that weren't exposed from the productions of others. Or in the case of John Waters, whatever film he could steal. Next, as you said, for these classic films, you aren't necessarily looking at scans from the master negatives. You might be looking at scans of the release prints. They didn't always save the masters. It could even be a second or third-generation print. Then to add to that, the way the film gets transferred matters. Did they scan the original negatives or a print? How was it scanned? Was the film being scanned perfectly flat? What compression was used on the scanned image? Was it scanned or telecine? If telecine, which projector lens was used during the telecine process? As far as the lenses, razor sharp lenses have been available for a long time, including in the 50's, and including wide angles. Lots of vintage wide angles are a little softer in the corners, but they can be very crisp in the center... but fashion applied in many eras of film, just as it applies now. For some of the softer images, especially close-ups, they might have been using a net filter, made more complicated by the net filter potentially being mounted behind the lens instead of in front. https://www.provideocoalition.com/the-secret-life-of-behind-the-lens-nets/ I'm sure I'm forgetting more things too. Like almost anything going through an analog to digital process, there are about a bazillion variables to consider along the way.

Famously, the greases that Leica used in their old lenses would evaporate and deposit on lens elements over time. It can be cleaned, but the danger of evaporation/depositing is real!

The faster the lens being boosted, the more likely you'll have some speed booster artifacts. Even with Metabones, I don't think I'd go past 1.2. If you really wanted to go that way, and it's off-topic for this thread, but I'd suggest looking at the Voigtlander 29/0.8 which, IIRC, is native for M43.

Starting at $770!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Guess they saw GoPro's pricing on the Mission 1 series and said "hold my beer."

This is correct. Depending on the emulsion, grain is also not sized uniformly. And since you posted the Take 2 Films' tour of Kodak, it's also worth pointing out their latest film is comparing a couple of different film stocks and methods of processing them. This aligns with something that I frequently say - "film look" is meaningless as a phrase, given that different films have different characteristics - and depending on processing, can take on even more other characteristics.

Still no info on whether it's IMX410 (it probably is), but Kinefinity have wisely dropped the price. It's now $2,499 and that's with a built-in 220GB SSD. They also are offering a break on preorders so it's only $1,999 in the short term. IMO, $1,999 is the correct price. That puts it really close to the Nikon ZR which has a lot of fairly similar specs, but also can shoot raw internally, just at the cost of a really dumb placement for the battery/memory card. Time will tell, but overall, not a bad value at all. I hope they get some good sales. https://www.cined.com/kinefinity-vista-confirmed-at-2499-full-frame-6k-open-gate-220gb-built-in-ssd-610g-body/

Oh, I wasn't getting as fancy as anybody's sensor stack or anything like that. I just meant smaller lenses which didn't need to decide to have an image circle that covers S35 or any other larger sensors. The Laowa 7.5mm that you mentioned is a fantastic example of a lens designed for Micro 4/3 and I'd be shocked if its image circle would cover S35. I'd contrast that with something like a Rokinon Xeen. You can go buy one with an MFT mount, but it'll be the same design/glass that you'd find on the same model of Xeen for FF. It'll work fine, of course - but the lens is bigger and heavier than it needs to be. In that case, of course, there's an EF mount version which would make more sense on a focal reducer.

That depends on which back-bone modded camera you get. Their modded Sony RX0 has a 1" sensor, passive MFT mount, and the exact same crop factor as the Mission 1 (if I remember right). My modded Insta360 One RS also has a 1" sensor and a passive MFT mount. It suffers from lack of any option for wired monitoring - so one either needs to focus on the tiny action camera screen or over wireless which can get laggy at the most inconvenient times. It's pretty great, though, for setting up to record with fixed focus (I shot the eclipse with it, for example). The GoPro has at least some option for wired monitoring so that'll be nice. It's possible, even, that one of the older 0.58x boosters made for the OG BMPCC would work (if you could find one). My Metabones 0.64x and 0.71x boosters work fine with the Insta360. Though it's sometimes more fun to use it with a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter. With a 1.4x, the Canon 100-400 becomes a 140-560 with an equivalent view of about 380-1500mm. That can be pretty fun in nature. I don't need to anticipate it. I've lived it and I know the limitations don't bother me too much. But mainly, the ergonomics of an action camera are poorly-suited to trying to hold the camera and manually focus. Mission 1 seems to be a little bigger than some others and it has a small protruded grip on the right side which could help a bit. But otherwise, one ends up with the right hand curved into a weird claw, trying to hold the camera steady while the left hand turns the focus ring. If the focus ring is stiff, it can look pretty funny. Mounting a handle to the camera can help and it feels a little more like carrying around an 8mm or 16mm film camera. Passive MFT mount means that indeed, autofocus won't work. It also means that aperture won't work on a majority of Panasonic/Olympus lenses - and in some cases, manual focus won't work on them since they're focus-by-wire. Removing Pany/Oly doesn't leave a ton of lenses that are optimized for M43. Veydra mini-primes were nice (and still are, can't remember who bought the Veydra brand)... There are some nice Voigtlanders that are MIcro 4/3 designs. But a lot of the other third-party makers just take their S35 or FF lenses, jam on a M43 mount, and call it good. For me, I'm much more interested in it as a platform to mount my C-mount and some D-mount lenses. Like I have a 13mm f/1.9 Yvar which could be fun - or a positively tiny 15mm f/2.8 Yvar. But like I said, I think a lot of people are going to find that a 1" sensor with a passive MFT mount sounds like fun, but will balk once they start using it and realizing, for example, that they actually need a monitor to effectively focus it.

I was going to comment on the gate weave. For me, it's a little much. If you told me it was shot on 70's-era 16mm, I probably wouldn't second guess you after watching it. I think that in some shots, the blur/lack of detail might go a little too far - like the shot of all the trees with orange leaves seems a little too blurry to me and looks a little closer to super 8 than to 16mm. Otherwise, great job!

It's not just the ILS model that is $700 - it's the Mission 1 Pro as well. Currently the Hero 13 normally sells for about $430 and they are often on sale for $350. The Insta360 Ace 2 and DJI Osmo Action 5 are in generally the same price range. At least for traditional action camera use cases, it's a relatively hard sell to say that Mission 1 Pro is worth almost twice the price. For the ILS, Back-Bone haven't exactly been lighting the world on fire with sales. I think that there will be a first wave of adopters who quickly dislike the limitations of a 1" sensor with a passive MFT mount. I'm excited for it, but not at $700. Maybe a year or so after it's released, the price will drop. It's a lot more interesting at the price of the current Hero 13.

For years now, the EF 35-350 has been near the top of my "will I or won't I" pile. So far, still "won't I," but one of these days, i'm gonna get a wild hair to search and find a great deal..

I worded my response badly! I meant that the $700 US price tag was "already there" in terms of 'exorbitant, ridiculous, and "this is just an action camera - WTF"' which Kye had just said in anticipation of the AU pricing. I should have chosen phrasing that made it more clear that I wasn't simply repeating US pricing that is already known. 😅

Their strategy is similar to the one that I've been taking for a little while now - I used to hard mount more things to the cameras, but now I'm doing more with nato mounts and arri rosettes, but still keeping things compact. I've also been experimenting a little bit with some of the newer locking quick swap stuff - hawklock from Smallrig and the spider crab stuff from ifootage. They're both alright. Their setup is really clean/nice, but if it's shown cabled up at some point, I missed it. That's the biggest problem I've had (and still haven't solved in a way that I find satisfactory) in moving away from hard mounting my rig/parts. That one is gonna need an HDMI going from the camera to the monitor as well as the power cable going from the battery to the monitor. Their short type c cable shouldn't be too intrusive when plugged in, but the rest of the cables can get/feel a bit obnoxious.

The $700 price tag in the US is already there!

As a counterpoint, their marketing seems to be working, given that they are now reporting big delays due to higher-than-expected preorders. https://nofilmschool.com/panasonic-lumix-l10-delays Of course, that could also be marketing and/or indicative that they just didn't make many in the first batch to force Fujifilm-esque shortages. This is somewhat true, I suppose, but Sony is still announcing/releasing 4K full frame MILC cameras and people are buying them. Nothing says Panasonic has to release 6K or 8K in a tiny body. If Panasonic released a camera in the GM5 body with the sensor from the GH5 or GH5s for $700, I'd be all over it. In fact, GoPro is releasing an action camera with terrible ergonomics, a smaller sensor, and a 1" mount for $700 and there's all kinds of buzz/excitement around it. If GoPro can cool an 8K sensor in an action camera body, why not Panasonic in a MILC body with 2x the volume? How long can the new GoPro bodies record 4K without overheating? Bet it's "until the battery dies."

Not quite. It's announced, but not available yet, last I checked - unless the latest Resolve 21 beta included it. Though if there's really something to inclusion of additional near-infrared wavelengths making the subtle difference for skin tones is true and if BMD's ir cut filter removes that wavelength, there would always be at least some difference. That said, a lot of the way that guy describes things remind me of someone explaining why they think their $4,000 toslink cable is giving richer midtones than someone else's $30 toslink cable. There seems to be a mix of some genuine understanding of things mixed in with pseudo-scientific bullshit. Regardless, even if were all 100% true and based in pure science, a decent colorist is a big equalizer for a bunch of differences in the SOOC image. 😅

I'm not sure about how to answer parts of your question, but I would suggest that if you want IBIS, but to be able to fully lock down the sensor when IBIS is off, some of the Nikon cameras do that.

The trailer is gorgeous. Great job!