bjohn

I kind of think you should turn your question around: if you're shooting narrative films and short documentaries, you should be focusing on learning about lighting and buying the gear that will help you adequately light your scenes, rather than looking for a camera that can handle poor lighting conditions. People constantly focus their budget and attention on cameras and ignore lighting, which is backwards. Lighting is 95% of what makes an image "cinematic." Any camera can look good with good lighting. Nowadays even a single "run and gun" operator can use portable lights; you don't need a crew, C-stands, etc. If I had to do it over again I'd spend 2 years learning how to do lighting before I even started thinking about which camera to get.

It's very expensive, but the Sonosax M2D2 is a small, extremely high-quality preamp that has two mini-XLR inputs. It outputs line-level stereo analog to a camera; it also outputs a digital signal via USB or AES. It has some of the best preamps and converters available anywhere. It's powered by one battery and can run for hours even with phantom power on both inputs. Sonosax doesn't sell a camera mount for it but you can download a 3D-printable file for one from their website. I use it mainly for music recording (I recorded our last album with it) but might use it for video one day.

The ideal (for me) if you can't record from the mixer is to put a separate sound recorder and mics on a stand at the back of the hall or somewhere else where they won't be disturbed or bumped into. When you use a camera-mounted mic, the sound changes as you move around, which can be distracting for viewers and disrupt continuity. (If your camera is on a tripod then no worries).

I forgot to mention that many digital mixers nowadays can record directly to a USB key or an SSD; I use the QSC Touchmix, which can do this. And as a bonus, it records the individual channels so you can remix in post. Not all mixers can do this, though, so it's not something you can count on being available.

Recording from the mixing desk can work, but it depends on what you're recording. In many smaller venues, not all instruments go through the mixer. For example, drums may not need to be amplified, so there won't be any mics on them. An electric bass or electric guitar player may bring their own amp and not run it through the mixer. I'm doing sound for a jazz quartet tonight where the only things going through the mixer are the vocalist and possibly the keyboard player. In situations like that, recording from the mixer will only give you part of the sound. The other complication is that the engineer is not mixing for your recording; he or she is mixing for the room. The ideal would be to record the ISOs (the individual channels), not the mix, and do your own mix in post. Some digital mixers have the capability of outputting each channel, and you could use something like the Sound Devices MixPre 10 to record those individual channels. All of that depends on whether the engineer is willing, and often they're not because they already have enough to do and to think about without having to set this up on their end. If all the instruments are going into the mixer and you're willing to live with the room mix, you have plenty of options for recording from the mixer: any two-channel recorder will do the job, from Zoom, Sound Devices, or others. Most mixers have multiple outs and you just have to talk to the engineer to see if he/she is willing to route the main mix to another output for you to record from. You could even record from a spare headphone output if the mixer has one. For on-camera recording you could use any of the small camera-mountable recorders with 32-bit float, where you don't need to worry about clipping.

I actually dug in and just bought two new MFT lenses (the Laowa Argus cine lenses, which are fast, relatively light, and should match well with my existing MFT lenses). For me, as a single operator who prefers using manual lenses, small sensors are the most practical choice. Since I'm forced to use wide lenses, I get more depth of field, which means focus is more forgiving when I'm trying to maintain focus on people and other things that move. If I used autofocus I'd go fullframe or APS-C, but based on a few experiences shooting dancers on full-frame with manual lenses I'd rather stick with smaller sensors. I'm using the BMD Super 16 cameras (OG Pocket and BMMCC) for now, and if I ever upgrade it would probably be to the Pocket 4K or possibly the GH7.

It does involve a crop, and for best results you need to use a shutter angle of 45 or 90 degrees, not the more typical 180. This will make your footage look a bit choppy but that's easily fixed by adding back motion blur with Resolve. An advantage is that gyro stabilization also reduces rolling shutter artifacts. As always, the best stabilization is external: tripod, gimbal, or steadicam. Not even the best IBIS or gyro stabilization can beat it, although IBIS can stand in for a tripod on non-moving shots. It's once the camera starts moving that external stabilization beats everything else.

I checked and I actually applied a Technicolor emulation from RNI on most of my color photos in this shoot (I also did some B&W using Ilford emulations). Straight out of camera with the standard Sony A7s raw profile the colours were very good, but I sometimes experiment with emulations and in this case Technicolor was perfect: it accentuates the reds in a nice warm and soft way. And I did a wee bit of color grading to punch up the blues as I wanted to accentuate the echo of the blue in the shirt that the male dancer in the foreground was wearing with the same blue that was in shirt of one of the dancers farther back. I liked how the pattern of plaids/stripes vs. solids echoed across some of the couples, that was just a happy accident!

Actually I misremembered: this was shot on the OG A7s. But based on my experience and the ISO sensitivity charts I've seen, the A7iii matches the A7s in low-light performance right up until the very highest ISOs, which I never use anyway. I used the A7s because this was a non-critical shoot, I was just shooting for fun and wanted to have a lightweight camera, no IBIS, and just shoot and enjoy myself. I brought two lenses: the MC Rokkor 58/1.2 and the MD Rokkor 28/2.

No worries...as I noted it was a still shot with Sony A7iii. I am foolish enough to attempt taking photos of dancers with manual lenses in dimly lit halls. To keep ISO down I use fast lenses wide open or close to it, which means I rarely nail focus. But the dancers love these photos, especially when focus is not spot on. On this one I used a Minolta Rokkor 58/1.2, probably wide open based on the shape of the OOF highlights.

Like I said, maybe noise doesn't bother me as much as it should. Here's an example of a still shot on Sony A7iii (uncompressed raw, but only 24 megapixels); I have my ISO capped at 12,800 and that's what the EXIF shows but it was at least two stops underexposed so I had to bring it up. I did no denoising myself although Capture One applies a bit of denoising automatically (and adds a small amount of film grain) so maybe that's what's going on. The level of noise here doesn't bother me at all. For video I'm using Blackmagic cameras, none of which apply any noise reduction in-camera; they leave that up to you in post so you can dial in as much or as little as you like. In low light those cameras are super-noisy and even if I crush the blacks I usually have to denoise every clip.

I must have a higher tolerance for noise than most people, because I rarely denoise my photos (and I mostly shoot concerts and dances in dimly lit environments, usually well over ISO 12,800). I'm shooting raw on Sony, though, so some denoising is applied automatically in-camera. I have occasionally had to denoise concert photos, but overall I'd estimate that out of every 20,000 photos I apply additional noise reduction to about 15 or 20. Video is a completely different story: no noise reduction is applied by my cameras so I do NR on everything except footage shot outdoors in good light.

Another type of filter that gets used frequently in cinema is ultracon filters. The name suggests that they increase contrast, but in fact it's the reverse. They don't cause halation or soften the image in any way, they just distribute more of the ambient lighting toward the shadows, reducing contrast. They come in a variety of strengths; 1 is subtle; 2 is more noticeable, but they go all the way up to 6 I believe. I have #2 and got it specifically to tame the high contrast of the Sigma 18-35 when shot outdoors, where it can produce very ugly footage. I have an OLPF on my cameras that softens the image a bit already, so I'd rather not soften it further. I found a brief demo of this filter at #1 strength on the Sigma 18-35 here: The only drawback to these filters is that a very bright light source, such as sunlight reflected off water, can wash out the image and make it milky.

For LTM, the Canon 50/1.4 LTM (aka "the Japanese Summilux") has gorgeous ring flares and ghosts.

Could do that, but I use the cheap, effective ring adapters from LTM to M. I like using M and LTM lenses with a close-focus helicoid, which allows me to create bokeh effects and get a lot closer than I could otherwise; they push the lenses beyond what they were designed to do, with often beautiful results.