eatstoomuchjam

Does it have to be a camcorder with integrated lens? If not, you might consider a Sony FS5 II, Sony FS7 II, or Canon C300 II. With a little more budget, it might look like a C70. I'm not sure of the price of entry-level power zooms for any of them, though. I'm also not sure if the Canons support LANC, but I think it's really likely that the Sonys do.

I got a couple of Back-Bones-modified action cams - one was a Hero 7 and the other, a modified Insta360 1" edition. The one I should have got was the RX0 II since it's also a 1" sensor. The main problem is that the tiny action camera screens are awful for focusing. The Insta360 has no HDMI output so I end up monitoring with my phone and the connection has a lot of latency. The image can be really nice once I get the focus right, but it drives me crazy to get there so I only rarely take it out. It's too bad because the camera's a really nice match for C-mount and D-mount lenses. The Hero 7 (or maybe it's a Hero 8?) does have an HDMI port, but the latency is even worse than the Insta360 over wifi. Also the sensor is smaller which makes even wide angle C mount lenses into telephoto. The RX0 II has a usable HDMI port, but after not really using the other two, there's no way I could bring myself to spend $1,500 for it. I also had ripped the lens off of another old GoPro and got some M12 (or whatever size it is) lenses to use with it. It had the same problem with being hard to use, though I liked the look of somewhat less wide M12 lenses a lot more than the one that the camera had some with.

That said, if a new one comes out, my YouTube feed will definitely let me know - and there's not a lot of interesting conversation to be had around a new action cameras. "So this one is a bit better than the last one and still has an obscenely wide angle lens? Cool. Cool cool cool." (That and since I already have a couple of 1" edition Insta360 One R's (upgraded to the RS brain), it's also really unlikely that I'll be in the market for a new action cam any time soon, not unless someone comes out with something crazy good - 5.7k not-so-wide angle with a "Leica" lens on a great big (comparatively!) sensor is more than enough for the above mentioned gimmick shots)

Your site, your rules, of course! Though I would say that depending on the definition of action cam, I've used them on set any number of times - even more now that the Osmo Pocket 3 is so good. But even for the more GoPro style... Someone's going to open up an old wood furnace door and peek in? Chuck in an action cam. It gets covered in soot? No biggie for an action cam. Director wants POV of a fist hitting someone's face and their POV as they fall to the ground? Action cam. Director wants to get the wheels of a car rolling through the mud from up close? Action cam. Really, just about any shot that I think has a high chance of breaking a nicer camera or where a better camera simply won't fit, I'll just drop in an action camera. Half the time, the shot never gets used, but the other half the time, the director loves it. There's no way in hell I'd use any current model action cam (except the Pocket 3 if that counts) to shoot more than a cutaway/b-roll bit, but they keep getting better and it's easier and easier to match their footage in a way that's not too jarring. There are a lot of creative uses - many of which are arguably gimmicky or hacky, but that comes down to a matter of taste.

The used OG FX3 might also cost less when the next gen is announced, even more so after a bunch of current FX3 shooters trade in toward the fancy new model.

Either the next gen will cost substantially more or they'll keep selling the 3a at a lower price after announcing the next generation for close to the same price. But your main point of "don't buy an FX3 right now" is fully valid. It's a 4-year old model. Other vendors have cameras that are highly competitive and arguably better. Sony needs to understand that failure to innovate (or slowness in innovation) is how they took so much business from Canon in the first place - and if their best idea for a "new" camera is to swap the display on an old one, the pendulum will be swinging back in short order.

One could make the argument that it should be the Sony Beta FX3. 😉

That's not necessarily different from now. I spent a decent amount of time in Sao Paulo, Brazil since I'm dating somebody from there - and the prices for most media there are a lot lower than in the US, even pre-tariff. It makes sense - in a country where a lot of people make the minimum wage of $300/month, asking people to spend $20 to rent a new release movie is just going to result in a lot of piracy. Asking people to spend $1-4 to rent it will result in a lot less piracy and a lot more people paying to see your film. Basically, do you want 100% of $2 or do you want 100% of $0. So - movie rental is already a sliding scale price-wise, depending on the country/region - presumably based on some inflection point, real or perceived, where people will either just bootleg or not watch it at all.

In my experience, if you're editing on a laptop - and especially if you want to do it while not plugged in, modern Macbooks are really hard to beat. My M2 Max is good enough that I no longer see any reason that I'd keep a desktop computer around (I still have one for gaming and if selling it wouldn't be a big pain, I'd probably do that since I boot it up about once per month). On the other hand, if you want the highest price to performance (and absolute highest performance) on a desktop computer, PC hardware is more powerful - and in many cases, you will be able to upgrade pieces instead of needing to upgrade the entire unit. As far as your proposed spec, I think you'll be unbalanced in favor of a very high-end processor and a mid-range graphics card. You might consider a somewhat lesser CPU, again knowing that upgrading in the future will be an option if needed. Do you plan to overclock the CPU? If not, there's not much benefit to a K vs non-K variant. One other consideration might be whether you plan to use any of the "AI" features that are being added to Resolve. If so, it might be worth considering one of the newer Intel Core Ultra chips (if the price difference isn't huge) since the main "benefit" of them over 14th generation is that they have a coprocessor for machine learning. I have no idea if Resolve can even use it yet, but even if it doesn't yet, it's a safe bet that BMD will add support in the near future. Anyway, that setup will be night and day faster than what you're using now. You definitely won't be going wrong with it.

They finally put up the new video about the Eve cameras. I didn't watch yet, but I expect most of the content will be similar to before.

There's been some discussion on this here today. The main takeaway is that nobody even understands what it means. How in the fuck can you put a tariff on a film? It doesn't even make sense. And what is a "foreign import?" If I drive across the border to Canada, shoot 3 minutes of footage, and add it to a 90-minute film that was otherwise shot and edited in the US, what's taxed? FWIW, it also would be a torpedo to the Canadian industry - and I suspect the tariffs were partly driven by spite at Canada for voting so strongly against his agenda. Anyway, the major studios are going to hate this. Aside from reducing costs by producing abroad, if other countries retaliate in kind, International returns on films are going to crater - and that's a huge percentage of their profits.

The latest episode of PetaPixel is "Shot on ????????" so... probably this camera. The footage looks about as usual for Chris and Jordan.

... and this is part of the problem. A lot of people will think that they just need to pick up a Ronin and they'll remake Adolescence. And yet, they won't be working with 3-4 camera ops, an entire lighting crew, huge drone + operator, car crane + operator, multiple sound engineers, etc. Local film competitions next year should be a little wild. 😅

That's simply not true. The focus motor is an additional $270 purchase. The 6K version of the Ronin 4D also doesn't come able to shoot ProRes RAW or 4444 XQ. For that, you'll need to add the ProSSD mount ($200) and a 1TB ProSSD ($800). For most MF lenses, you'd also need to buy a mount other than the one included with the camera - I haven't seen many DJI DL mount to anything else adapters. A Leica M mount costs $300 new. Used prices on most of the above are about 2/3 of new cost. The 8K version of the camera includes the mount and a ProSSD, but (if I remember right) not the motor. And while almost none of the cameras that I mentioned include ProRes RAW (except the S1R Mark II), a majority of them are capable of shooting raw (many of them in a format that works in Resolve without conversion (additional $80 fee for Raw Convertor license if PRR). For those that don't, you can buy a used Ninja V or Video Assist 12G for $200-500. For stabilization, you can add a $400 gimbal - though compared with using the R4D, it will be much more of a pain in the ass. On the other hand, most of the other cameras can support lenses weighing more than about 1000g which is about all the R4D can support if you want to use the 4th axis. External 5" screen? If you don't already have one sitting around, you can get one of equal or better quality to the R4D screen for about $200-300. Any of those other cameras can also be set up in such a way that they will be small/light/unintrusive. That's simply not possible with the R4D. The closest you'll come is the Flex unit which costs $900 and then you'll be in a backpack ($200-300 if you buy the official PGY Tech one) and still carrying a pretty big/obtrusive camera. The main advantage of the Ronin 4D is the integrated 4th axis which eliminates a lot of footstep motion and helps smooth things out on a car mount, etc. In my experience, it's better than using an EasyRig with the springy arm or a ReadyRig Nimbus - and can be used with either for even more smoothness. The second advantage of the R4D is that everything is tightly integrated. If you get a Gimbal with subject tracking, that'll be on a separate screen and is usually driven by a second camera rather than through the camera's lens. If you get a DJI Focus Pro or other Lidar-based manual focuser, that'll also be driven through a second camera and another screen. With the R4D, you can draw a box around a subject and turn on AF and when you start tracking, it will do so uncannily well... about 95% of the time, and randomly lose the subject the other 5%. It's a great single operator camera - but again, it's far from the device I'd choose as my only camera. If I could have only one, I'd take something else for sure. It would be my first choice for my second camera, though... hands down.

Davide is 100% correct. Pair that GH7 with one of the cheap Panasonic/Olympus kit servo zooms and you have a tiny camera that works great for street work. Or bring the Olympus 12-100 if you're willing to tolerate the extra weight. Add a couple of fast primes for shooting at night and you have a fantastic usable kit. Otherwise, if you just can't stomach micro 4/3 for... some reason, there's nothing wrong with the A7S III. If light weight is a concern, I'd swap for the f/4 versions of both lenses. You'll still be able to get pretty nice shallow DOF and the lenses will be substantially smaller/lighter. Plus if you're shooting on the street in some of the cities, having smaller lenses won't be shouting "rob me" as loudly as a big white f/2.8 70-200, for example. I'd also give serious consideration to super 35. Fuji has a lot of great options and Sony has the FX30 (or whatever the non-cinema camera version of that is - A6700? Something like that?).

Well, the 8K sensor for the X9 is generally acknowledged as superior to the 6K one and it's (as far as almost anybody can tell) the same sensor that is used in the Panasonic S1R Mark II, a $3,300 camera. That camera compares favorably to the EOS R5 without being enormously better. You can get a used EOS R5 for around $2,000. Having both an EOS R5 and both versions of the X9 (having bought the 6K and upgraded), I can safely say that the image from the EOS R5 is pretty close to the X9. Plus if we're talking about shows on Netflix, Chimp Empire (recommended to be by another forum member here) is gorgeous. That one was shot on the Canon C70. Someone listed one in the local Facebook buy/sell camera group today for about $3,500. The Creator was shown on theater screens everywhere. It was shot on the FX3. The Sony ZV-E1 which is available used for about $1,700 uses the same sensor. In a recent short film contest, a film that I shot tied for best cinematography - mine was shot on a combo of Komodo-X and C70. The one that tied it? Shot on a Panasonic S5, a camera that is available used for about $800-900. Even if I cared about awards, I wouldn't be upset about the tie - the other film looked great on the big screen. So... I'm not really sure anymore what point you're trying to make about the Ronin here. Yes, it was used for a Netflix show. Other high-end prosumer cameras have also been used for Netflix shows before so this isn't really novel. Nearly every camera on the market right now is superior technically to the Red One M-X (also available for under $2,000 on the used market) - the camera used to shoot films like The Social Network, Ché, and District 9, all of which were shown on cinema screens worldwide. All of this means it's a great time to be a filmmaker, but that's hardly unique to this one camera. 😃

Just like the Zhiyun light, they will come with silly fake leather trim and Cam Mackey's name plastered over every square inch of the camera, the strap, the case, etc. They'll also have a filter that you can't turn off that gives everything a yellow tint. The x model will come with a hat and it'll have built-in wheels and a special "X" button that makes the camera itself start doing sick burnouts in the sand. There will also be a special Gerald Undone edition of both cameras that will have a special extra-super-hdr mode that increases the rolling shutter to 41.5ms. On this model, the leatherette will be purple. Finally, there will be a Matt Granger special pocket edition which is the same as a normal edition, but comes with some extra large pocket cargo pants.

And the footage from it, when shown, also looks like all of Cam's other footage. At least now the mindless YouTube zombies won't have to write angry letters to Panasonic that they should send a camera to CM "so we can see what it can really do."

For the mounting thread, are there locating pin holes?

This seems to be the clearest frame of it. It's not really giving much away, though.

This is a topic that comes up in this forum frequently. I don't think you'll get any argument from the majority of people here that there are a number of sub-$10,000 cameras that will get you really close to Arri quality. But for a majority of Hollywood productions, they're not reaching for this camera. As I said in another message above, it's extremely polarizing among people who have used it. If your use case is shooting an hour-long oner and you can run 14 takes of it to choose your favorite, it may be the best cinema camera on the market. If you're shooting nature, it's a pretty awful camera - lidar autofocus doesn't work that far out and the focus motor can only go about an inch past the lens mount, not to mention that balancing a lens longer than 130mm or so will definitely put you over the 4th axis' weight capacity. If your use case is putting the camera on sticks and using Arri Master Primes, it may be the absolute worst camera on the market. I'm not even sure that they could be mounted, even using the Flex + a cage to add rods. It's a really cool niche camera that is finding success (and will continue to find success, I think) for specific use cases in Hollywood... and in my own short films too. But if people at Arri are losing any sleep, it's not for the DJI chicken head camera.

I have said before on here and I'll maintain it, DJI's taking one of the smartest plays here. Especially on mid-high end productions, regardless of any other factors, it's going to stay primarily Arri. If you make a traditional camera and try to compete, you'll have a huge uphill fight. On the other hand, if you make a camera that takes something that's a pain in the ass, whether it's Arri or another decent camera system, and your thing makes it really easy, your camera might get used in parts of films that are shot on Arri or Burano or similar. Putting cameras on a gimbal is legitimately annoying. Wanna have that gimbal-based camera track subjects? Time for hacks like putting a second camera on the gimbal and needing to use multiple tools to track and monitor. One of the Ronin 4D's real superpowers is integrated tracking based on what the camera is seeing. Today, a friend and I shot some tests with mine while between blocks at a local film festival. In the first, I experimented with an "impossible" shot where I tracked her walking and then had her pause while I pulled the camera back, planning to do a faux dolly zoom by reframing in post. It's imperfect, but with some practice and a less ambitious distance, I think it could play. For the second, I recently got a Hydra Alien and wanted to see how it would work. My car is a worst-case scenario for rollers - the Wrangler has an extremely stiff suspension. Yet, after 40 minutes of stumbling around with putting the Hydra on my car for the first time ever, I mounted up the camera and had my friend drive while I operated. There are some micro-vibrations, certainly, and I might experiment with the alternate/softer shock plate, but it's kind of amazing how turning on autofocus + tracking on a random car on the road resulted in such great footage. The last shot was to see if I could do a Tarantino-style shot spinning around the subject. If doing this on set, I'd want to set up something to ensure a consistent distance to the subject(s), but similar to the others, given the results after doing no planning or setup, the results are a bit unbelievable for just getting to the parking lot and saying "Hey, I bet we could do this. Let's try!"

Why stop with spraypaint? Hose that sucker down with line-x and never worry again about scratches!

Thanks for the link! I stand corrected - so that's about $25k instead of $30k by my above estimates. That's a surprise about the 6K vs the 8K version! I suppose that'd also be a great counter-argument to people who complain about cameras with rolling shutter speeds > 20ms. The 6K is 22 or 24 or something like that. Gladly! Here are a few off the top of my head (some codecs/frame rates may vary with the 6K, mine are based on my 8K): - Recording modes are either a mediocre H.264 or a very nice ProRes HQ or ProRes RAW. There's nothing in-between. The 6K has 4444 XQ available if you don't buy the raw license. The 8K does not. - To record in the nicer modes, you need to buy DJI's overpriced SSD ($800-1000 for 1TB), it doesn't matter if you have super fast CF Express cards. - You can choose from 17:9 (full sensor width) or 16:9 recording modes and nothing else... unless you go to the high frame rate mode when it will go to 2.4:1 (or something around that) and nothing else - When the 4th axis is enabled, if you have it set to "lock" and you're standing still, sometimes it has some sort of freakout and the gimbal starts going up and down like crazy. Numerous people have reported it on various forums, setting it to "follow" seems to result in fewer freakouts. This seems to have been around since the start. It definitely happens with mine. - There are tripod mount holes on the bottom, but even a narrow Arca-Swiss plate partially blocks the 4th axis cameras/depth sensors, people have complained that this makes their 4th axis work weirdly. I have just avoided putting a plate on it since most of my uses for it don't involve putting it on sticks - The object tracking is really good... most of the time. If it loses the subject mid-take, it is difficult (and it might be impossible) to re-select it on the touch screen - The autofocus is really good... sometimes. Sometimes it seems to lose the subject (even when in tracking mode) and drift to infinity. Then it picks them up again and comes back. It's also laggy. This is less noticeable with wider angle lenses and when stopped down a bit, but it's clearly visible with a 75mm lens at f/4. If I set it on a box on a shelf in my living room and walk slowly toward it, the label on the box will become unreadable until I pause for a half second and then the AF catches up - that's even with the AF sensitivity set to high. I noticed this at first when experimenting with a tracking shot using a 90mm Summicron-M at f/2. I bought the DJI 75/1.8 since native lenses focus faster than mechanical lenses and turned off AMF so the only motor would be the lens' focus motor. Still visibly out of focus when approaching/retreating. The lag when stopping is less than the manual one, but it's still there. I stopped down to f/4 or f/5.6. Still visibly laggy. If I use their 17-28 and zoom to 28 and stop down to f/4, the label stays acceptably sharp - but so far, I don't see any way to use AF if you want the subject sharp while approaching/retreating. Trying to dial in focus in those instances using the thumb wheel is too fussy for me (it's like 3mm of turning from 1.5m to 4m away, the look is similar to the AF with the subject in focus at the start and end and maybe for part of the walk). This weekend, I'm going to experiment with a friend to see if it can do better with a person. If not, looks like that 75 is getting sent back next week. Professional productions probably address this with the 3 channel follow focus (add another $900). - The first-party Sony E mount is actually made by a third party and doesn't update firmware through the body like every other part, you need to do it separately. Many people think it doesn't work well for this reason. - The internal microphone is completely unusable and has lots of high-pitched motor noises. Many people say that the XLR ports on the port expander plate randomly stop working. I think the 3.5mm input is reliable, but for a run and gun shoot, this is very limiting for audio. For me, the internal mic has been at least been good enough to sync up audio to an external device. Then I mute that track so I won't get a headache. Timecode works when available, but you will need the expansion plate for that too. I'm sure that I could add more if I spent a little more time thinking or I wrote this up after the next time I have it out on set. If you read any discussion thread of people who have used it, you'll find that it's an extremely polarizing camera - a number of people who have used it hated it and described the whole thing as an ordeal - and the others generally loved it. I'm more in the latter camp.

FWIW, if you watch the BTS, they were most likely over $30,000 on the camera package alone. I'm not sure if it was specified whether they used the Ronin 4D 8K or 6K, but I'm assuming the more expensive one. $10,000 - camera $5,000 - lens $280 - focus motor $400 - DJI transmitter Then add in the set of master wheels that I saw in at least one BTS photo and at least 3 high bright remote monitors + handles that I saw in another. $10,000 - DJI master wheels $1,700 - monitor (x3) $730 - handles (x3) And then add in the car mount and a drone strong enough to carry a 15 pound camera, and it's not out of the question that that all would total about $50k. If your definition of "serious film project" is $1m+ budget, then that is indeed a small portion - but it definitely ain't cheap. I can also say that as an owner of a Ronin 4D and a person who loves it, it would not be my choice if I could pick only one camera. To say it has quirks would be the understatement of the century. As a second camera? It might be top of my list. And I'll be in that "wave of new pro and amateur projects" filmed with one - for the feature that I've been asked to shoot, it'll likely be UC12K as the A camera and Ronin 4D for most of the handheld, car-mounted stuff, faux-jib (Flex mounted on a monopod), etc.