eatstoomuchjam

The only way to upgrade the GPU on a MBP is to buy a new MBP for another $4k. Not the best plan unless you're independently wealthy - and if so, then you might as well just spend the extra $300 for the better chip now. 😃

The above is exactly why I say there are asterisks and "it depends" in the answer. Will either computer be able to play back 12K braw in Resolve without dropping frames? As long as the storage is fast enough, absolutely. Will it be able to play back in Premiere without dropping frames? 🤷‍♂️ FCP? 🤷‍♂️ As I said before, my M2 Max (the weaker version) w/ 64GB is just able to play back 8K raw from my R5 in Resolve. If I put on a grade where I tweak a few raw options, add FilmConvert Nitrate, and tweak some curves/color warper stuff afterward, I still get 23.98 on it as long as I'm not doing anything else in the background. Canon raw is a nightmare codec in terms of performance. Braw is easier. One other thing to consider is that I'm sure that the local Apple store (if there is one) has some M3 Max models on the showroom floor. If you're nice about it, they might be willing to at least put FCP on one (or let you download Resolve) to load a sample project file and some footage. Since the UM12K has been out for a long time, I'm sure some nice reviewer/youtuber has put some raw files online for you to download. You could just give it a try with one of your sample grades to understand if it performs as needed.

There are a lot of asterisks and "it depends" in any answer to that, but overall, I'd say that if you're spending $4k on a MBP (which updating from the base RAM and SSD would do), if you plan to edit 12k, it might be worth the extra $300 to jump to the bigger chip. It partly depends on how many effects/how much noise reduction, etc. I'd also say that if you're like most people, if you're gonna spend $4k on a laptop, you're going to want it to last for a while. You might factor that in too. Speaking for myself, I bought the lower of the M2 Max chips in my MBP and it's just barely enough to handle 8k Canon raw in Resolve and once I add noise reduction to the clips that need it, export times get pretty slow (like 40 minutes for a 15 minute short). Would having the system be 30% faster help a lot? Not really. 30 minutes to export the clips wouldn't be life changing. You might also consider whether M4 is coming soon - M2 was released in June 2022 and M3 in October 2023. If the M4 is coming, it'll probably have about a 10-15% speed boost over M3 - that or you might be able to get a nice deal on an M3 at that time. Depends on when you're planning to start shooting 12k, I suppose. 😁

From the videos I've seen on Film Look Creator, I think subtractive saturation and split toning are the things that stuck at to me as most interesting - that and I'm going to need to spend a bit of time with their grain generator to see if I like the output.

Slight digression from the topic, but unless you really need the flippy screen, you might consider the RX100 V over the ZV-1. The V is even smaller, but weighs just a hair more (probably due to having more metal and less plastic in the body) (and I think the V is cheaper on the used market). The flippy screen was just about the only difference between the two cameras.

Congratulations on completely missing the point. That was really impressive and you should be proud. The pricing I listed for the 300D was representative of all of the lights that I have. For example, I also got a 600X during their BF sale last year. It was $1,691 and included barndoors + fresnel (and a free MT Pro). Looking at lensrentals.com, it would be $193 for a 7-day rental (light only) and an addition $28 for the fresnel/$24 for the barn doors. I've also used it on 2 shoots since I received it in December. If I use the light on 8-9 shoots over the course of owning it, I will have paid less than renting it, even if I never had a need for barndoors or fresnel. And again, in a few years, I'll also be able to sell it and recoup some of the investment. If I didn't wait for a sale to buy the light, it doesn't really change much - just the number of shoots that are needed before "own" beats "rent." Beyond that, in your example, for the two shoots I've done with the 300D, I'd have spent twice as much as I did and had more light than the shoots needed (if a 300C was enough, I didn't need a 1200D) (also, at least one of the shoots used RGB mode on the 300C which would have made the 1200D a stupid choice for that shoot). So the point, once again, is that if you actually use the gear on any sort of regular basis, it costs less to own it than to rent it - even before you factor in the cost of your time to keep driving to and from the post office or rental house.

That depends. If you use your lights daily, renting is far less affordable. If you'll use them only once every 5 years, renting is far more affordable. Somewhere in-between those two things is an inflection point (which shifts around depending on sales). My Amaran 300C was $455 for Black Friday last year and it came with a free medium-quality light stand. At lensrentals.com, the Amaran 300C goes for $87 for 7 days. So after I've used the light on 6 shoots, I will have saved money vs renting. Since it arrived in December, I've used it for 2. After the shoots ended, I didn't have to put it back in a box and drive it to the post office so it's also saving me some time. If I don't want it in a few years, I'll probably be able to sell it for $100-150. Plus I have that extra light stand going for me. That's pretty nice. 😄

Self-indulgence? 😉 Entertainment is probably an overly-broad category, but that's splitting hairs.

If you just want footage with no commentary, markr041 who is a user here has a YouTube channel and he tends to try a pretty decent number of the cameras that come out. They're usually decently shot and I don't think I've ever even seen one where he talked about the camera (or even showed his face). 😃

One of the things I find hilarious about YouTube is that a lot of the big camera influencers talk about leveling up channels and increasing production value, etc. A lot of the bigger names have between 50-200k subscribers and a lot of them had the advantage of being early to starting camera channels. Newer, theoretically popular people like Cam Mackey have like 65k. Meanwhile, a friend of mine decided to do something with his YouTube channel a couple of years ago after the news did a story about his having purchased the monorail for $1/car from our local zoo when they stopped running it and turning it into a private campsite on some land in Wisconsin. He mostly repurposes junk that he finds at garage sales and thrift stores into things like push-pull carts on railroad tracks and satellite dishes coated in aluminum foil. The cameras he uses are mostly potatoes - like 25-year old camcorders and Hero 3-type stuff. He has a pretty decent natural grasp of editing and story, though, and he's a funny guy. He also would freely admit that he neither knows a lot about cameras nor cares to know any more. Last I checked, he was at about 187k subscribers (including me - I like watching his stuff). So if the goal is just to grow a YouTube channel, the quality of the camera is probably the least important bit. Making half of your video be slow motion slideshow garbage so that you can put "cinematic" in the title doesn't really get views if the rest of the content is garbage. I buy too much gear for my own mediocre talent, but that's partly just because I want it and after a lot of years, I can almost always find something to trade in to make stuff more affordable. I have no illusions that buying a Komodo-X will substantially improve anything I do, but I might do it anyway. If I get it, I'll probably like it a lot for a while and then after a couple of years, I'll probably trade it in toward something else. Anyway, another thing to remember with these YouTubers that are in the business of making day 1 review commercials for various channels - when they're showing "what this camera can do," go watch their older stuff with a camera from last year. Most of the time, it looks almost exactly like whatever they're doing with the new camera because they're really not that different. One of the most laughable things that people say on various camera forums or YT comments is "I can't wait for (creator name here) to get it so we can see what that camera can really do." Wanna know what that camera will look at when your favorite creator gets it? Go watch the review they did of the camera before it. It'll look pretty much like that.

Ouch. I love the cameras that I have from them, but they're going to need to clean up this shady garbage if they want my continued business. It's not that hard to spot the shills, regardless of sponsorship disclosures, but I still don't want to patronize somebody who is trying to hide it... partly because it's insulting to the intelligence to think that somebody with a day 1 video doesn't have a relationship with the company. I'll also note that iphonedo is hardly innocent in this regard as well. While his agreements with companies like DJI don't specifically remove his editorial independence, he also knows that if he's too critical of their products, the sponsor dollars will dry up. One can definitely see that he tries harder to be positive in his reviews of their gear than he tried, for instance, with the Karma drone that he mentioned. It's not a bad quality, necessarily, but just another data point to keep in mind when watching any of the reviews on his channel.

There's a lot more to the question than just which lights to use. If you're indoors and feel like you're fighting the sun and if the windows will be mostly out of focus in the background, you can just put ND gel over them - it's fairly cheap and fast. If they'll be in focus, IMO ND gels look a little bit like shit so that might not be your best option. If you're outdoors and fighting the sun, especially for close-ups, a collapsible reflector or two (or three if you have one which can give some negative fill) is often a lot better than trying to compete with the sun with your light. You can get a pretty big reflector for about $30 from almost any photo store in the world. Otherwise, short of going with really big lights, if you're trying to blast a light through a window and have it compete with the sun, it's going to have to be a pretty big light. In those cases, I'd probably try to find a way to shoot the scene differently. 😄 These days my main kit consists of 1xAputure 600X, 1xAputure P300C, 1xAmaran 300C, 2xAmaran 150C - as well as the B7C lunchbox, MC4 mini-lunchbox, and a few scattered MX's. It's more than enough for almost anything that I shoot. I'll probably continue adding some stuff here and there when Aputure have huge sales (their Black Friday sale is legit - I got a huge discount on the 600X plus a couple of bonus things). If I need to go bigger than that, I'm more likely to rent it or to just hire a gaffer to roll up with a box truck full of stuff. For shooting on the go, I just also put together a kit with 3xStellaPro's with their Bowen mount - they're tiny and run off of USB-C so I can plug 'em into a V mount plate or even a battery bank. Only disadvantage? Above 30% or so, the fan runs constantly. I'm excited to actually do a shoot with 'em. I also picked up a Molus X100 for the cases where I want somebody to hand hold a light. It's alright, but the reflector in the Bowens mount seems to do some funky things with my softboxes.

My guess is that the difference in actual user experience of a system receiving a 923 and one receiving 893 will be negligible. Between the two, I'd choose the one where I get a better deal.

By the time you add the size and weight of a converter box, you should probably just get the Z Cam EVF or the Portkeys OEYE and save money.

My guess is that Sigma and Tamron paid Canon to license the mount. They have enough profit margin that they can afford to give either a single pretty big upfront payment to Canon or to pay them a royalty/percentage on each lens sold. Canon makes a lot of money selling lenses and know that over time, they'll fill in any existing gaps in their lens lineup - but if they can also make money through licensing (with no need to even build/ship a product), why throw away the chance?

If you're in the PC world, you're definitely better off editing on desktop vs laptop if you're working with high-res footage or doing effects, etc. Most laptops throttle down a lot when not plugged in and (in my experience) make a jet engine noise when dealing with a prolonged load on CPU/GPU. And as ac6000cw says, the mobile GPU's are almost always lesser versions of their desktop counterparts. Also when on battery, life tends to be very short because CPU/GPU pull a lot of power. My M2 Max, on the other hand, can handle 8k Canon raw acceptably - and I got the weaker variant of it. Performance is almost the same whether plugged in or on battery. Fans do ramp up when working it hard (now that I've added denoising to most of the scenes that need it, the 14-minute short I'm currently working on/grading definitely has the fans running full blast when I run an export). Basically, in absolute performance numbers a high-end PC desktop will beat any Mac currently on the market and at a fraction of the cost of a Mac Studio ($3k for a decent Ryzen + RTX 4090!). A top-of-the-line PC laptop plugged into the wall will also outperform the MBP in absolute numbers (except whoooooosh fan noise)... but if you want to actually be mobile, the Mac is the hands-down winner.

You misunderstood me because I phrased it poorly. I was saying that the prices from the builders like NZXT are going to be higher than Dell's prices, to the point where the MBP is a lot closer. 😃

That makes total sense. One would expect a professional colorist to groan a bit if handed 8-bit log footage vs 10-bit log (or 12-bit raw). I'd imagine that most want the most flexible image to work with when possible - there's a reason that Hollywood tends to shoot most stuff on Arri and it's not ease of use or portability.

For the most part, if somebody is looking at an Alienware prebuilt, they're probably not the target audience for BYOPC. At that point, it's better to go with somebody like Maingear, NZXT, or Starforge - they all use off-the-shelf parts, but you'll also pay more for the same specs as you'll get in a prebuilt from one of the big players. I'd be willing to bet that for a similar price to what you'd pay them for the above system, you'd be able to get a 14" MBP with M3 Max - and then you'd be able to edit on the go too. 😉

Without having shot 12K, I'll say that system looks like more than enough (and if it's not, there won't be many systems that are). The RTX 4090 is the most powerful consumer GPU on the market and that's a really decent CPU. It might even be overkill (though overkill also means you probably won't be shopping for a better system in 1-2 years). If you aren't already familiar with PugetBench, Puget Systems have a nice database of results that people have achieved with various systems. https://benchmarks.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/ What's not clear on that is how expandable the system is - which was a problem with the Alienware that I had for a while. There seems to be only one more slot for NVMe beyond the boot drive and the USB ports are only 3.2 and not 4. The Alienware that I had only had a single free PCIe slot as well. In my case, it was enough to add a 10g network card and that was about it. If you want to put 12K footage locally on the machine, 2TB is going to get cramped fast. Fast USB 3.2 storage will be able to keep up, though as of a year or so ago, flash-based USB 3.x storage arrays were not so common - at least at a reasonable price. If it were me, I'd look for something with 2-3 additional NVMe slots beyond the boot drive to be able to add more local storage and I'd look for something with USB 4 since it will be compatible with most/all Thunderbolt devices which gives a lot of better/more interesting options for external storage/devices.

The internet says CP-16 - maybe Auricon.

I was out-of-date and it's not as bad as I remembered, but still not great. But yes, I'd say it's a stretch that professional colorists are spending a lot of time in Nitrate. https://www.filmconvert.com/blog/filmconvert-nitrate-for-aces-workflow/

The budget is just for the body and not for the body+glass? 1) Used GFX 100S - the video is good enough for vacation and the stills are incredible 2a) C70 - looks nice SOOC, built-in ND's, nearly the perfect camera for a fast turn-around 2b) GFX 100 II (Love mine) 3a) C70 - as before and the raw from it is flexible enough for anything I do 3b) Used Monstro 8K VV - I haven't actually shot with one, but they seem pretty nice and I sometimes consider doing some trade-in toward one - used models are now about 6k for the brain on reputable used sites

In general, the stills stuff is a really close match for the film stocks (differences in the production are tiny)... and we weren't talking about a small difference, especially in the greens. Meanwhile, FilmConvert and Fuji's own Velvia profile both look quite a bit like my slides. 😄 As you said, though, a lot of the people using it have never actually used the film stocks that it claims to emulate - and some of their emulations look nice. If you won't suffer cognitive dissonance from many of them not looking a lot like what they claim to be and/or want to use ACES as a starting point, it's a decent product. Unless something changed recently, FilmConvert really doesn't have a good story for ACES (I think that last time I checked, it was "transform out of ACES into something else, apply FilmConvert, and then transform back").

(Looks like I was wrong! So there you go - as others have said in this thread, whatever the specs on paper, the grade afterward is even more important 🙂 )