PPNS

On 6/14/2022 at 9:27 PM, webrunner5 said:

Looks really good to me, hard to beat a BM camera for a filmic look. Well done.

thank you very much! although i've expressed my skepticism before about inherent looks about cameras and sensors, it does help that the p4k lets you record raw/or if you're a bit anal about definitions, the equivalent of prores444 with metadata that lets you perfectly reconstruct the wb value. it also helps that it doesn't seem like it does any noise reduction which does make the images feel very natural compared some other cameras. 

for what it's worth i've used this filter for the film and added some of the stock davinci grain while color grading. but that's maybe more related to the behavior of the lenses...

22 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Looking great! Let us know, when your shortfilm is available. I like the framing, lensing and colours, also what´s in the frame. Great job! Did you shoot F2.8 on the Meikes? Did you compare them to the normal Walimexes / Samyangs, which are plasticy and the very entry into video lenses? How does the built from the Meikes feel? cheers

thank you as well, i will certainly post a link here once i'm allowed to! the t-stop kind of varied on a shot-per-shot basis, i tend to start at t/4 or t/2.8 and see whether i want more or less dof. some shots were done wide open at t/2.2, while sometimes i had to pull focus a alone on a shoulder rig, where i was more likely to be at t/4 or t/5.6. those shot-reverse shot frames at the school entrance were done at around t/3.5-4 i think on the 25mm for example, because i liked the background at that aperture.

i haven't used samyangs since around 2017, but i kind of remember them leaving a sour taste in my mind. from what i can tell their mirrorless lenses and newer options tend to be a bit better, but i'm skeptical about them as well. the meikes are super clean and sharp, which i can't really remember the samyangs being, and that also means that theyre super versatile. the 25 has the most chromatic abberation wide open, but it's completely ignorable by t/2.8. it's very trendy rn to have glass that's very quirky, which is cool too of course, but i think at this point i'd rather have a very compact, matching lightweight set thats made out of aluminium and that basically doesn't breathe at all. since i've stopped using focal reducers i've noticed that my image quality got quite a bit better without weird optical errors, so i can't go back to that either. that supermist filter can give me a similar to vintage low contrast look i tend to like, but without the weird flares and halos coming from light sources, while looking more intentful at the same time. its worth mentioning that i got them my set second hand, so 40% less than the price new (in which case they are still actually an incredible deal). if you're like me, and interested in (attempting) actual fiction filmmaking, i think this lens set and the camera are quite frankly some of the more interesting gear to get, especially for the money.

19 hours ago, kye said:

Footage looks good to me.  What is it about the shots that you don't like @PPNS?

probably a combination of quite a lot of factors, partially being very excited during pre-production, having a bit too much self confidence and expecting it look incredible, and not getting at that level with the finished result. there's also the fact that the acting isn't quite there (although that's not my responsability as a dp), and me only seeing that when watching the end result. most of the dialogue was in spanish, which i cant speak, and i only got to see the end result with subtitles quite a lot later. i tend to be pretty insecure about my skills as a dp too tbh, and i feel like i've done better looking stuff than this as well. there's also the fact that i was a bit selective with the stills. if you're interested, here's some stills of the stuff i'm less happy with for example: 

don't really know if it's really worth posting this, but i dp'd a little short by a friend with this camera. it's a coming of age film about an immigrant high schooler kind of finding his place in punk music culture. to be quite honest i'm not quite happy with most of the shots we've gotten, but i've decided to post stills of ones i like the most. maybe some of you will like the images. all done with the meike mft set if that's of any interest. i still think this camera rocks, even if it has quite a few shortcomings. 

6 hours ago, SRV1981 said:

Any thoughts on using this device for videography: 

 

https://youtu.be/DXe8Jj3dT38

none whatsoever

3 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Audiences also decide they want 40 showings a day of Marvel tripe at the cinema.

no they don't, that's mandated by disney. if you don't adhere to their mandates, you don't get to show any disney conglomerate movies. now its true that the general movie going audience tends to be pretty interested in disney films, but it helps that they're one of the most powerful companies in the world, and they have the marketing budgets that the theater distributors for films like "Madres Paralelas" or "RRR" don't quite get to have. 

3 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

He is basically a marketing guy. If you want to look to a marketeer product salesman as the ultimate authority on filmmaking tools that's your choice. I think it is a slap in the face to all the better qualified people who actually shoot, when the audience is obsessed with social media influencers.

I also can't stand the way Philip Bloom comments on every video, and Gerald pins it. The cynicism of that. It's a big circle jerk and the sheep love it. I want no part of it. If you enjoy his creatively non-informed non-shooting non-real world reviews I don't mind but it is a shame large audiences can't reward people with more principals and more talent.

Gerald isn't creative, he can't even be bothered to shoot a single still let alone video. Either he has no interest in using all these cameras he has, or he is embarrassingly bad behind the camera and embarrassed to show his work. Therefore I won't be taking my advice from him simple as that because it's just pixel peeping and specs sheet pimping, without any real life usage of the tools.

How are you different Andrew? other than losing your clout throughout the years? which creative engaging videos have you made these last few years with your collection of image capturing devices? because you have a lot of links to your portfolio on this site, and i have trouble with finding that content you seek from other people. i agree with your criticisms about Bloom and Gerald, I think they're responsible for a lot of triple online that's only there to motivate people to consume more products. i agree that they (and especially Bloom in regards to his allegations) shouldn't have this level of clout either. 

i just don't think that the individual gets to decide in this economic system, Andrew, im sorry. 

 

3 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I will jump back on the Uncompressed RAW 4K wagon. If you don't mind a slight 1D-C style crop to APS-H (1.3x) you get an oversampled 7K image in RAW video mode up to 30p. That's going to look very nice in 12bit Cinema DNG. Better than BRAW. Real RAW. Huge sensor. So a clear upgrade from the original Fp which was pixel binning the RAW from 6K.

btw, how is "oversampling a 7K image into a 4K uncompressed sequence of stills" "Real RAW" exactly? dunno chief, seems like quite a lot of processing going on there to make that happen

i thought it looked very nice. i dont necessarily mind a more extreme color grade, and it fit the more formally daring visual style of the piece.

On 2/28/2022 at 10:47 PM, PPNS said:

not sure if anyone gives a shit, but since there's a new MFT camera out, i thought this could be useful for some people. a little 1 minute field of view comparison test from the same camera position using some of the nicest cine lenses for the money, the meikes, with only available light:

excuse my lack of acting abilities and general laziness, but i think they look nice, and they match really well. 

it's the long awaited sequel: man taking a hat and looking out the mfin window
 

kye, my man, i think you're taking me the wrong way here.

On 3/30/2022 at 10:45 AM, kye said:

I'm just guessing here, but you prefer 4K images don't you?

this is actually the opposite of what i'm saying. if you showed me an exported finalised 10 bit prores 422 file in 1080p and 4k, i probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. especially on like a flanders grading monitor. 

On 3/30/2022 at 10:45 AM, kye said:

I shoot travel, often on the more adventure side of travel too.  

I love it when people tell me to control the scene.  Please tell me how I can better control:

• a landscape being shot out the window of a moving helicopter
• a sunset
• the buildings and people in a large city
• a cave while taking the tour
• a museum or world heritage site (eg, Pompeii)
• an amusement park with rides
• a market in an emerging economic country
• etc

Next you'll be telling me I don't need a weather-sealed camera because I should just control the weather!

To directly answer your question, yes, I need more DR.  and more robust images where I don't have to choose between photographing the sunset or the scene in front of it.

can i ask you what the finalised results are of these shoots? 

all of these things you should be able to do fine with the cameras you already have, without having to choose between the layer in front, or the background. maybe the p4k would help in a cave with its second iso range 🙂 . if you want the people in front of the sunset to be fully illuminated, while they aren't in real life, you have to accept that you're maybe asking for more dynamic range than the best video camera can give you. maybe you have to accept that the tech isn't there, and it never will be. that's where you come in as the camera operator, and where you have to make creative decisions based on your imposed limitations. that's why people add lights, or flags for neg fill, or simulate the same principles on location. you can only do so much without controlling the scene. that's where truly good image quality comes from, intended differences in light, together with interesting composition that go along with the intended meaning of the creator's audiovisual piece. 

On 3/30/2022 at 10:45 AM, kye said:

I bought the OG BMPCC and BMMCC specifically to study their images, both for the colour science and for their mojo.  I have studied them at length - you can find a small proportion of the tests I have done littered all through these forums over a period of years.  I am yet to locate almost anything that accounts for these factors that you claim do not exist

so what are the variables of said mojo and said color science? what are the conclusions? 

On 3/30/2022 at 10:45 AM, kye said:

No, but I have shot both the OG BMPCC and BMMCC alongside the GH5 and tried to match the GH5 to the BM camera on many occasions (just search). 

P4K footage looks like GH5 footage, but better.  Neither looks much like the OG.

i have used the sony fs5 a lot and it sucks. this also means that the sony f55 is a terrible camera. 

this statement is incorrect, yet it's based more in reality than whatever you said here, since the sensor should be the same and theyre made by the same manufacturer using allegedly the same color science.

this is also the case with the a7s3 and fx6. allegedly the same manufacturer, sensor, and color science, yet... they behave completely differently. one is a total piece of shit (and allegedly has a better dynamic range), and the other one is pretty pleasant to use.

you could have just said that you had no experience w the p4k instead of essentially, talking out of your ass, based on collective internet hysteria. 

i understand that you might have had trouble with matching the gh5 to the pocket, with its weaker codec and dr, but if you would shoot a scene with both the original and the 4k, and you cant match them, that says something about your skill as someone who's post-processing the footage. which is fine btw, i'm not the best at it either! the data should be all there in the negative. 

you could shoot something in 16mm and its going to have some cool ass grain, but if whatever you're shooting sucks, what's the point of the cool ass grain?

On 3/30/2022 at 10:45 AM, kye said:

You don't like videographers do you?

I see this kind of dismissive prejudice all the time from snooty "film-makers".  The general tone is that "real film-makers" shoot in controlled conditions and should be free to create images that have nice colour and background separation and images that are expressive, and the people that don't shoot in controlled conditions should be happy with footage that looks like it was shot with a smartphone from 6 years ago.

It's kind of like when people say "go back to wherever you came from - you're not welcome here" only instead of 'here' being a place, it's a level of image quality.

a lot of the work i do could easily be considered videography, so this would be considered counterproductive. yet a lot of videographers work in very counterproductive ways, and it's frankly a bit frustrating. 

great example here btw, how do you get expressive images with background seperation?

i mean you could be a hack on an oversized sensor with a wide open lens, or you could just backlight the subject. suddenly even that little change in whatever your seeing, could invoke a certain meaning or mood in the image.

once again, image quality is not decided by the camera anymore. if you're doing documentary stuff in tough conditions, people tend to make the compromise of perfect looking images vs. getting the actual shot. an alexa wont save you. ive seen enough dogshit filmed on an amira back in my editing days. your data capturing devices are almost at the same level, youre missing something else.

also going back to camcorders is objectively good advice for a lot of people!

13 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

I get that 4k is never going to look like 1080p. 

i disagree, a good 1080p file doesnt look much different from 4k. 

8 hours ago, kye said:

You said "some would argue that is a bit of progress" and I pointed out that the DR hasn't increased and the battery life also hasn't really increased.

That was 5 years after the OG BMPCC.

Personally, I think that given the huge increase in size and the time elapsed they could have made more substantial improvements to it.

If you can't see it then that's fine - more power to you, but just because you can't see it doesn't make it fake.

well as you said, they did improve the DR a tiny bit. would i have loved a tiltable screen and internal nd's? sure. would i ever want to go back to the og pocket screen? hell no.

in a lot of ways, the original pocket was kind of enough. the cameras itself are basically good enough to capture a wide dynamic range and contain enough color information to make good looking, malleable moving images. 

sure an alexa, an ump, or whatever canon cinema camera might have even a bit more DR, but do you actually need that kye? or are you fixated on the wrong things? if you're striving for better looking images, you should try to control whatever is in front of the lens. 

maybe you should operationalize the variables of the mojo of the original pocket if you think it's still the best thing to record moving images with. maybe you'll learn to recreate whatever it is that you're missing on more modern cameras. maybe you will realise that some of what you're experiencing is some collective online confirmation bias. 

have you used both the 4k and og on the same shoot?

in regards to the original topic, i think videographers should go back to ENG camcorders instead of fighting against what are essentially photo cameras. 

10 hours ago, kye said:

Battery life is similar if you use current battery tech - I have personally recorded 49 minutes of uncompressed RAW from a single battery on the OG BMPCC.  Depending on which SNR figure you look at, the P4K has either 0.4 or 0.2 extra stops of DR.

Plus the P4K is almost 3x the size of the OG.

Definitely sounds like a decade well spent......  *cough*  *cough*  *cough*

i mean i dont get your complaints in this particular context, you can still get a really nice camera for a fairly cheap price. i agree with the sentiment that manufacturers got better at convincing people to buy bad cameras especially when they dont need them by using sales people and influencers.

13 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Plus it lost the filmic Mojo look of the OG. It looks better than a lot of cameras but it is not better.

i disagree. that shit is fake. the newer one collects more data, if you cant shape that data to look a particular way, that is frankly operator error. 

its not like the alexa is the thing that kye is missing. you can pretty easily search "alexa classic in 2022" in youtube and find a fairly recent video of a guy making that camera look like ass in even a controlled environment!

if whatever you're making doesn't look good through a cheap camera that can record in 12 bit and has decent dynamic range, whether it is an og pocket, or a p4k, it wont look good on an alexa either.

On 3/27/2022 at 1:09 AM, kye said:

Yeah, I keep saying this but no-one wants to hear it.

We had the OG BMPCC that shot RAW internal, had 13-stops of DR, and was under $1000, a decade ago.  What we have now - lots of cameras that barely improve upon this spec, except in resolution.

At the time there was the OG BMPCC (the camera we had and could afford) and the Alexa (the image we all wanted).  The Alexa had barely more pixels but staggeringly better quality pixels.  

What did the manufacturers do?  Basically zero improvement in pixel quality, but now we have 16 times as many of them.

BUT....  say that around here and the "progress is progress" people just shout you down.

Andrew was right about us getting what we deserve....  and what we got was manufacturers that just bamboozled people with BS and then everyone swallowed it.  Even with Yedlin proving that no-one could even see more than 1080p in most situations.

I mean the p4k does have a bit more dynamic range than the original pocket. and twice the battery life. some would argue that is a bit of progress, even if it costs a bit more than 1000$ now.

looks good man! some things could be simplified in the edit, and if you had a bigger crew you couldve polished some shots a bit more. glad to see some people are actually trying on here

23 hours ago, mercer said:

Good find @Emanuel that Augusto short film looks gorgeous. 

what if they'd shot it at like f/5.6 though, imagine how much better it would've looked. maybe they might have even missed focus less?

full frame video and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

not sure if anyone gives a shit, but since there's a new MFT camera out, i thought this could be useful for some people. a little 1 minute field of view comparison test from the same camera position using some of the nicest cine lenses for the money, the meikes, with only available light:

excuse my lack of acting abilities and general laziness, but i think they look nice, and they match really well. 

53 minutes ago, TomTheDP said:

Yeah it could be a nice camera for S16 lenses. Seems to have the best DR of M43 cameras. I do prefer when you can use the whole sensor though. A 6k or native 4k S16 camera would be neat. Pretty niche though.
 

i mean thats basically an ursa 12k, but yeah its not m43. 

15 minutes ago, kye said:

The Media Division review contains a test short near the start of their review.  It was in the tunnel they use for testing, and isn't exactly a nicely lit environment, but the footage looked pretty nice actually, so that's worth a watch if you haven't seen it yet.

The GH6 isn't an "upgrade" to the P4K, they're fundamentally different cameras.

 

frankly i was a bit disappointed with that media division short, because i've seen them do much better. seemed more of a test of flailing around a gimbal in high frame rates than an actual short. i also dont think it looks very nice considering its mostly shot using available light in a tunnel and you can kinda see some nasty clipping going on occasionally (due to the change in HFR codecs and dynamic range modes i presume). 

i will also agree on mft being great. it's slightly smaller than 3 perf academy 35 film, and quite a lot bigger than super 16. you can get a set of optically great cine mft lenses for the price of one ff cine lens or one of those stupid sony ff photo zooms where you can't repeatedly and reliably perform the same rack focus. you can open up most of your lenses to f2 and not have everything turn to complete mush. don't get me wrong, i love a wide shot with a shallow dof which is a lot easier on a ff camera, but theres more important aspects to moving images. 

^also that's called CMOS smear superka, and is prevalent in somewhat every cmos sensor

6 minutes ago, Video Hummus said:

Why? It has hardware in it to do ProRes encoding. Not that much of a stretch to think ProRes RAW is in there too.

 

because it's pretty obvious that red, apple and atomos all have a deal going where red allows the capture of so-called raw data in a codec by apple, but only on external recorders. this is where apple and atomos have reached a deal where atomos get exclusive rights to record said codec on their recorder, along with what i assume are some other stipulations. since atomos is founded by former disgruntled bmd employees, i assume that has something to do with why Resolve is the only NLE where you cant work with prores raw files. even though it was probably in apple's best interest to allow the most popular color correction software to be compatible with that format, but now effectively rendering it a slightly more efficient prores 444 equivalent that has to be transcoded first. but from what i've heard is that the metadata support for pr raw was more or less non-existent in the first place, which makes it kind of a silly 'raw' codec to begin with.

that short looks pretty good, couldve maybe even been a good piece of art if they got rid of 65% of the slowmo shots and let the film speak for itself. i think thats a more convincing way to sell something at least.

anyway the camera seems decent, but i'm not going to 'upgrade' from my p4k. 

has anyone made any comparisons to what seems to me like an obvious similar product, the p4k? or has anyone tried to make anything resembling something a well lit and good looking short? or has anyone tried to record some intentful footage using cine lenses?

also expecting internal prores raw is goofy. glad they did regular prores, something that should be a bare minimum on any camera tbh

i shot this a while ago on the original bmpcc: