eatstoomuchjam

1 hour ago, Davide DB said:

Since the thread is somewhat pleasantly derailed....

My specialty.  Apologies to those who hate topic drift.
 

1 hour ago, Davide DB said:

I don't know if you have seen the series “Chimp Empire” on Netflix. Great cinematography made in many places of close-ups in the darkness and shadows of the forest but also of very dynamic scenes in which the two chimpanzee families give each other a hard time running through the trees. On YT there are several behind-the-scenes shots in which the video operators are seen running like crazy through the jungle. Situations you have to catch on the fly i.e. the classic “run & gun” applied to a very cinematic documentary.

I missed it completely, but it sounds like something I'd like a lot!  Thanks for the suggestion!  I'll probably start it today.

1 hour ago, Davide DB said:

C300s and C70s are seen. It's been a long time since I've seen a documentary filmed with these machines.
There is this very nice article about the choices the director made about the crew and equipment:

1 hour ago, Davide DB said:

In another article that I cannot find now, the director related that the most beautiful scenes were shot by the guide alone (a local girl who had taken a filmmaking course) to whom the crew in the off periods had left the C70.

That makes total sense.  It's a super easy camera to use and the majority the ergonomics are really well thought-out.  It just kind of gets the job done without any fuss and gives you a really nice image.  About the only things I'd change would be to add an EVF and some built-in wireless image transmission.  Oh, and if I'm wishing out loud, make it 4.6k to allow some reframing in post with no quality loss when delivering 4k.

Along the same lines as the above, I'm shooting a 48 hour film thing here in late June and the producer got me a first AC.  Since I have no use for an actual AC, I'll just be promoting them to second shooter and handing them the C70.  I just need to make sure it's straightforward to match it to the K-X which I'll be using (should be, the sensors are really similar sizes and Canon and Red both skew a bit magenta).

Please let us know how it goes for you!

4 hours ago, MrSMW said:

the pairing of a 24-70 and a 70-200 to get in the ball park but with that MASSIVE compromise of 2x bulky lenses and lens swaps I can’t do.

This is exactly why a lot of people doing events/weddings/etc just use 2 bodies, one with a wide angle zoom and the other with a tele-zoom.

Do you need the lens to be fast?  If not, if I remember right, Fuji have an 18-120/4 and an 18-135/3.5-5.6 for XF mount.  I'm assuming that the former is the "professional" version since it has a fixed aperture.  You're not going to get ultra-shallow DOF with F/4 on APS-C, but you'd have something that's close to a 27-180 on FF.  

4 hours ago, MrSMW said:

In my ideal world, I’d have a well stocked camera shop on my doorstep that allowed loaners or at least rentals and I could play.

In the US, at least, one can rent cameras and lenses by mail order through a company like lensrentals.com.  Their rates are, generally speaking, a lot better than my local rental houses - though you are at the mercy of shipping times so one needs to plan ahead a little bit.  Is there anybody like that in France/Europe?  Could mitigate the need for a local well-stocked shop.

I can't speak to the GF 45-100 or the 100-200, but the 32-64 is pretty shockingly good.  I don't know your workflow and how much work you're willing to do in post - but with 100 megapixels, just about every lens is effectively a zoom lens.  The GFX is about the fastest medium format I've ever seen (not counting things like the Koni-Omega Rapid series), but any Nikon or Fuji APS-C camera is going to be a whole lot faster, and the A7RV that you mentioned will still be faster.

Similarly, depending on the amount of post production you're wiling to do, you could capture in raw, extract your stills, and then re-encode it to h265/prores/whatever.  Seems like a big hassle to me, though.

2 hours ago, MrSMW said:

Also, anyone who has made stills quality frame grabs from any brand 6k or 8k

I've certainly done stills grabs from 6k and 8k cameras to put on social media or similar.  I'm not sure what I could possibly tell you about it that you don't already know, though.  If doing it from 10-bit video, it'll be a lot like a jpeg from a decent mirrorless.  If doing it from raw video (as a tiff or similar), in most cases, it will be a bit like a raw from a moderate/decent consumer camera (12-bit).

One big difference is that when shooting still images, I usually just leave the camera in aperture priority all the time and adjust ISO up/down as computed shutter speeds suggest.  In video, I'm much less likely to use an automatic mode and always manually expose (and if I did use an automatic mode, it would be shutter priority).

One thing I haven't done/tried yet is to take out the K-X and use it as a motion-photo camera.  The raw video files seem to be a little more flexible than what I get from most of my mirrorless stuff.  There's no way it's going to compete with my GFX 100 II, but maybe it's enough for just stepping out and goofing around/street stuff.  I have an EF-S 24/2.8 on the way - might give that a try with the EF-RF adapter with internal vari-ND.

Having used neither so based entirely on images and specs, I would take the UMP over the Pyxis any day.  I gain a screen that makes sense, internal ND filters, redundant media (2xCF and 2xSD and USB-C), and a crapload of buttons and I lose 6K (but still have a little extra for cropping in post to 4k)?

I guess the mount options for the Ursa are also less good - EF, PL, F, and B4 - so no good way to use most vintage lenses (except Leica R and Olympus OM (and of course Nikon F since it includes vintage))...  but I bet I could design and 3d print something for that.  That's what I did for the Z Cam flagship series before they released some useful mounts.

Anyway.  I still haven't used either camera so it's really just navel gazing...  but for me, if you set both in front of me and said to pick one, I would hesitate for less than 1/10 second.

I would be really curious about that.  The Z-Cam E2 (and E2-M4) do some sort of HDR mode from the Sony sensor which works by doing some trickery with different exposures on multiple pixels of the quad-bayer sensor.  It works really well, but results in some funky artifacts sometimes.  They're mitigated by using a higher shutter speed, but never fully go away.

Sony's page on ClearHDR from Starvis 2 seems to indicate that it's more like a real DGO, though, so that could be pretty exciting.  A 16-bit output would also put things more in Red territory.  Most mirrorless systems only use 12-bit readout from the sensor in video modes.

From what I read, they handled it poorly.

2 hours ago, kye said:

my iPhone can operate under these situations just fine and can turn on and do AF and AE before I've composed the frame properly, and apart from delays in getting the camera app started from the Lock Screen, it's basically faster than I am

IMO the phone is exactly the right camera to use for those moments.  The quality on modern phones is so good that I would barely even think of it as a compromise.

2 hours ago, kye said:

Over the last 10 years both camps have started integrating the features and benefits of the other camp, with cinema cameras getting better ISO performance and now AF and IBIS, and video cameras basically getting a nicer image.

IBIS is still really uncommon on cinema cameras.  Komodo/K-X are global shutter which makes shake feel a little more organic, IMO, and if one can deal with higher shutter speeds, they also record gyro information so you could use gyroflow or similar.  Lack of IBIS can also be a feature in some cases - like I'd be unlikely to mount a camera with IBIS on my car before driving down a rough road.  I've heard stories of that sort of thing wrecking the IBIS mechanism.

But yes, they are converging for sure.  It'll be interesting to see the knots people tie themselves into to explain how it isn't "true REDcode raw" as soon as Nikon announces a camera (or firmware for an existing camera) which adds it.

2 hours ago, kye said:

Yes, I could walk around with the camera turned on, but I remember the day my wife and I went to Pompeii - we walked around looking at this and that for 3 hours, had lunch, then went for another few hours again.  Carrying a cinema camera around with batteries large enough to last that long simply wouldn't have worked.  I carried the GH5, F0.95 prime, and Rode Videomic Pro in one hand that day, and my arm was sore for a couple of days afterwards.

I'm coming from the perspective of hiking with the original GFX 100 for the last few years so my perspective on which cameras one can carry around all day might be a bit off.  The GFX 100 body weighs more than the K-X body (though the K-X weighs more with battery+screen)

2 hours ago, kye said:

From this perspective, a C70 might be a camera I could work with, but a Komodo would simply not be anywhere near flexible enough for me

It sounds like you might be frustrated by the startup time and weight of it too.  It's faster than the K-X, but probably not "take a shot in 2 seconds" fast.

2 hours ago, kye said:

these "I just bought a RED!!!!" and then "Why I'm selling my RED" aren't surprising at all

I still would say "a bit weird," but not so much "surprising."  😄

7 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

For instance, I just convinced a neophyte documentarian I'm working with to stop invading the space of his subjects with his "A Crew" Which is him, his cinematographer with a RED and all the rigging gak-gak that goes with it, a sound guy with boom pole and harnessed multi-mixer, an RF video village, and assistant producer.  Trying to parachute in and get useful naturalistic footage of a person ON A HALF DAY SHOOT with that nonsense?  C'mon.  By the time they're in and out they maybe put in the can only about 30 minutes of footage, it's all stagey as hell, and if there's 10 seconds that's compelling it's a minor miracle...they got lucky with what the subject's personality delivered, not with the process of their craft.

RED gear and crews are built for certain situations.  Docs of a certain type?  I say nope.

That may depend on the camera.  I have no experience with their older stuff, but DSMC3 isn't nearly that slow to use.  I've even been taking the K-X on hikes and from my shoulder bag to recording takes about 2-3 minutes.  Of course, I'm not running with a sound person, video village, etc.  If I were on a half day indoor natural light docu-type shoot with it, I'd bring it with the EF 24-70/2.8 on a focal reducer.  Camera setup and teardown time would account for 5-10 minutes of the day.  I'd probably have to swap a battery midway through.

The problem may not be the camera in this case, but the person who is using it.  😉

That said, if someone didn't insist that I use it, I'd be far more likely to grab my C70 for that kind of shoot (also with 24-70/2.8 and focal reducer).  It's hands-down a better camera to use in a fully uncontrolled environment.  Setup/teardown time would be almost identical.

The latest Fuji mobile app can do the same thing or at least something similar, even with the GFX series.

Could also do something in the style of "Our Robocop Remake" where we take a single script (they remade something that existed, we could do something new) and each shoot a scene from it in our own style.

7 hours ago, kye said:

Long startup times

Yes.  About 60 seconds, I'd say...  but my batteries last 2-3 hours so while I'm shooting, I just leave the camera on.

7 hours ago, kye said:

Poor non-native ISO performance

If shooting raw, the camera is fully ISO invariant (that is to say, capture is at native resolution and ISO is raw file metadata).  I haven't shot anything in ProRes to comment otherwise.  I'd be a little surprised, though, given that the display output looks fine.

7 hours ago, kye said:

Lower resolution outputs crop into the sensor, so if you want to shoot in anything less than 871K then all of a sudden your whole lens collection has shifted FOVs, and your 6K RAW files are ridiculous if you're shooting for socials which are 1080p max and people are watching on their phones

Yes.  Though you could mitigate this by shooting in the lower quality 6k modes which make the files substantially smaller.  Disks are pretty cheap these days so I'm not too concerned.  I set the camera to MQ (170MB/s) when I got it and unless shooting some SFX thing, I wouldn't anticipate ever changing it.  LQ is around 110MB/s and ELQ is about 50-60MB/s, I think.

7 hours ago, kye said:

• Higher frame rates are only available in lower resolutions, so a FPS change is now a lens change, which is a DOF change, and might be an exposure change, which combined with poor-non-native ISO performance is a lighting change......

 

Also yes.  Though it depends on your definition of "higher," I suppose.  Full resolution 6k can go up to 80fps.  5k is only a slight crop and can do 96.  But if you need 120, 4k is a noticeable crop - and while I haven't used 240fps at 2k, that's a pretty huge crop.  If you make frequent use of frame rates > 96 fps and don't want to work with a crop, it's definitely not the best choice you could make.

Other things worth mentioning that don't bug me much yet, but might bug you:

• Manufacturer recommends black shading sensor any time there's a ~20 degree (Fahrenheit, guess that'd be about 11C) shift in temperature which could be annoying if moving in and out of buildings on a hot day, for instance.  On the K-X, it takes about a minute.  I think the OG Komodo is a bit slower and older Reds would take more than 15 minutes IIRC.
• Not a lot of buttons on the body for quick settings changes
• Wifi with the included antenna is hot garbage so monitoring by phone/iPad isn't usable.  After swapping to a better antenna, I'd describe it as "tolerable"
• if not using the phone as a wireless monitor, there's no HDMI - just SDI.  If you want 4k for crisp punch-in focus confirmation, that means 12g sdi...  so if you don't want to spend $1k+ on a monitor, you'll be using a Video Assist 12g.  Though the nice thing about that is that you can use the VA for a 4K ProRes backup of what you're shooting.

5 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Now, how we gonna start it anyway?:)

Do we all want to shoot a single theme/genre?  Come up with a single script that we all shoot in our own styles?  Seems like there should be something to tie them all together - if not, what is there to make it different from what we'd all normally be shooting anyway?

4 hours ago, Dave Maze said:

As for making money off views, I actually made a video that got more views than most the other people who were at the S5 II release last year. I made $100. I didn't make the video to even make money. I made it for fun

Many of the YouTubers that are doing these reviews do a sponsor readout as part of it.  Adsense might not be making a lot of money, but I'm guessing that Squarespace or NordVPN or similar pay alright.  Maybe you didn't do sponsor readouts, but a lot of those people do.

So the equation for them would become "How many videos will I get out of this free trip where I can do a sponsor read vs how many would I make at home with sponsor reads in the same time?" and not "How many pennies will YouTube share with me from AdSense?"

3 hours ago, kye said:

Then they get the darn thing and realise: 1) pure cinema isn't magically channelled onto the media card, and 2) it's a PITA to use.

I'm slightly susceptible to this "RED fever" myself - I'll think of the images coming off the Komodo and how stunning they were, and start thinking about how maybe I could use it, and then I remember that literally almost everything about it is completely wrong for me.....  but part of me still wants one!

I have terrible news for you.  The Komodo-X, at least, is just as easy to use as many of my other cameras, right down to having mediocre autofocus/face tracking (I'd say a little below Fuji level, definitely not Canon/Nikon).  I never used the OG Komodo, but enough is similar that I'd assume it's about the same, generally.

(That's not to say you should get one - just that usability is really pretty alright)

I would never claim to have any sort of Redcode "prowess."  With the K-X, just like most of my other cameras, I'm kind of a hack.  😉

13 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

I mean if you think it is wild to sell a Komodo to get instead a Blackmagic Pyxis, then you'll blow your mind if you watch these videos of people selling their RED Komodo for instead a Sony FX3 (or an a7Smk3, or even a FX30):

I don't think I ever said "wild."  Just "weird."  It's a lot less weird to me to go from Red to Sony (or almost anybody else).  It's just weird to me that anybody would move from any non-Black Magic brand to Pyxis, in particular - I just think Pyxis is pretty lame and there are a lot of better options at the same price or lower.  Heck, other than "shoots internal raw" and "has lame high-res touchscreen on the side of the camera," the E2-F6 from more than 5 years ago is a far more capable camera.  Anyway, this isn't a Pyxis thread so I'll stop.

Anyway, for a certain YouTuber crowd, it seems like their business really is making videos every few months about why they're changing to a new camera from the old one.  Then they make a series of videos extolling the benefits of the new camera and selling their guide for it and/or lut pack or whatever.  Then a few months later, they move to the next shiny new camera and repeat.

Videos about "Why I sold my ________ and changed to _______" are right up there with someone calling their camera a "beast" in terms of things that will inspire me to ask YouTube to stop suggesting their channel to me.  😅

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

So if this YouTuber was feeling the financial pressure, then it makes a lot of sense for them to sell the Komodo-X while it still is holding up in value on the secondhand market and instead get a cheap Blackmagic Pyxis. 

You got me curious enough to watch it.

"I'm just gonna sell my Red Komodo-X because this is absolutely fire."

He mentions that it's a cheaper camera near the end, but he really seems to be pumped for the Pyxis.  Like I said, still seems like a weird choice to me - but he's welcome to do what he wants for a camera.
 

2 hours ago, John Matthews said:

So he's not saying he an expert, even on a subconscious, non-overt way? He's visiting many popular YouTubers and saying he's "grading" them, with a "promis" of some sort of evaluation at the end. I think there's something there.

I'm no psychologist and I don't know the guy personally so I am no more qualified than anybody else to talk to motivations, but I took it as fully tongue-in-cheek, but if you take something else away from it, you're at least equally right (and maybe more right, who knows?).  😃

1 hour ago, mercer said:

I don't know... I think all of these YouTube personalities are full of shit, on some level

Sure, but so am I - and so are you, and so is every other person.  The most important thing is to understand how people are full of shit.

1 hour ago, mercer said:

To add... anytime gear becomes the center of discussion, there always ends up being flame wars. This camera is better than that camera. The features on my camera beats the features on your camera. My dick is bigger than yours. Blah, blah, blah. And the videos from YT get celebrated for it.

This is a huge problem.  Factor into it that for a lot of people, especially if they could only afford one camera, they might have done research for months before they finally got it.  For a lot of those people, a suggestion that they didn't make the right decision can instantly put them on the defensive and cause them to lash out.  I'd guess that a huge majority of online dick waving contests about cameras stem from this sort of sensitivity.

To follow on that, at least for me, any time anybody refers to their camera as a "beast," whether it be YouTuber or commenter or whatever, I instantly devalue most of what they said before/after.  Cameras aren't beasts.  They are tools.  One should understand the positives and negatives of the tool and base purchase and usage decisions on those things.

16 minutes ago, John Matthews said:

YouTube setups (he walks around with a clipboard grading them)

I always took that as tongue-in-cheek and as a device to add a bit of humor to what would otherwise be relatively dry videos of somebody showing him a bunch of lights on lightstands, etc.

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

With the amount of leaks coming out of there about the S9, it’s more likely the panic came from BM rather than the other way round.

You think BM panicked about the S9?  Did they have bad intel?  I really can't think of any potential customer for a full frame BMPCC who would be jumping ship for the S9 - though I'm sure there that once it starts shipping, there will be at least some YouTubers who will make videos about how they're dropping their current camera for the S9.

Similarly, there was at least one who made one about how he was selling his Komodo-X to buy a Pyxis.  I didn't watch the video, though - just saw the headline, shrugged, and thought "that seems like a weird choice, but you do you, buddy."  I probably blocked his channel from my recs too since that's my default behavior when YT suggests "Why I'm changing from ______ to ________" videos to me.

I'm no fan of Gerald, as a general rule.  He's not a filmmaker and he has a tendency to harp on and on about fairly unimportant flaws in cameras in his reviews.  One of the reasons that he doesn't share much footage is because he's not out there making footage.

But I do applaud that video and I appreciate the peek behind the curtain of camera reviews.  I hadn't thought before about the angle of trip reviews being biased toward positive partly because of camaraderie, food, and drink (hearing a list of positives and having limited time always seemed logical to me).

As others have pointed out, there are some weird inconsitencies.  He mentions that his early look videos don't do a lot better than his later-released videos...  but then he also makes comments about how if Panasonic doesn't work with him, it could cause him problems.  Why?  I'm sure that his sponsor spots pay well enough for spend $150 renting the camera for a few days and still have enough to support his lifestyle.  That's what most of us schlubs need to do if we want to test a camera before buying it - plunk down some money and rent the damn thing.

Anyway, if nothing else, hopefully having a bigger YouTuber saying it inspires the legions of people who breathlessly click on release videos and get super excited by the hype to start thinking more critically about launch PR videos and remembering that the people who set them up are the marketing team.

Nice!  I thought it must be using OneInchEye at first, but then I saw that you mentioned StarVis.  Apparently the same guy who makes OneInchEye also makes StarLightEye.

https://www.tindie.com/products/will123321/starlighteye/

Could be worth messing around a bit - the cinemapi sensors are getting really decent, finally.

Oh yeah, definitely a good deal.  If I were at all interested in the Black Magic ecosystem or weird form factor, I'd jump on it.  

10 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I wonder if that indicates they've ceased production of this camera?

My guess is that sales were really low at the normal price to start with and that the announcement of a box camera dropped them to approximately 0.  Better to make a bunch of sales at break-even or even a slight loss than to write off a bunch of inventory.