PPNS

Now nikon gets to be the patent troll. Red will probably get to pretend to remain a company for 2 years and then nikon will probably fire the entire workforce, and we get to hear about “the constantly changing landscape of media” in some press release justifying the gutting of the company.

theyre marketing themselves in a way that makes the tech seem special to try and gain infinite investor money just like any other tech company does

I really enjoyed your material and quality you achieved as a dp. The editing imo does not show that to the fullest potential. Editing reels is a pretty thing and art by itself, of course. Your cinematography still shines through. @PPNS

finally finished that reel.

finally finished that reel.

finally finished that reel.

finally finished that reel.

Thank you for your honest and vsluable post and glimpse into the hardships of an upcoming DOP @PPNSHopefully your hard work will pay off a big deal this year! I had a branch fall on my head when setting up a butterfly with the gaffer. Whenever i was being the gaffer i took great care of my lighting people. That accident made me decide to stop working on sets of narrative features in the low budget world in Germany for sure as most of the films made here are not dear to my heart at all. Wish you the best and good choices and instinct regarding projects.

I’m working on a new reel and website. I had a weird year.
Jan 23: got fired from my full time job
feb - sept 23: got fairly depressed due to being rejected after around 350 job applications.
at the same time i tried out freelancing while searching for a new job, done a little decently paid corporate work, a lot of barely paid and unpaid work as a dp, gaffer or colorist on short films and music videos.
oct - dec 23: got lucky due to a cinematography bootcamp i followed and ended up working as a DIT on a feature.
income wise it ended up being almost the same as 2022, so hopefully the freelancing thing will pick up more steam. I’m going to try making some spec ads with some directors i know this year, so we could get work that way.
 
 

I’m working on a new reel and website. I had a weird year.
Jan 23: got fired from my full time job
feb - sept 23: got fairly depressed due to being rejected after around 350 job applications.
at the same time i tried out freelancing while searching for a new job, done a little decently paid corporate work, a lot of barely paid and unpaid work as a dp, gaffer or colorist on short films and music videos.
oct - dec 23: got lucky due to a cinematography bootcamp i followed and ended up working as a DIT on a feature.
income wise it ended up being almost the same as 2022, so hopefully the freelancing thing will pick up more steam. I’m going to try making some spec ads with some directors i know this year, so we could get work that way.
 
 

I’m working on a new reel and website. I had a weird year.
Jan 23: got fired from my full time job
feb - sept 23: got fairly depressed due to being rejected after around 350 job applications.
at the same time i tried out freelancing while searching for a new job, done a little decently paid corporate work, a lot of barely paid and unpaid work as a dp, gaffer or colorist on short films and music videos.
oct - dec 23: got lucky due to a cinematography bootcamp i followed and ended up working as a DIT on a feature.
income wise it ended up being almost the same as 2022, so hopefully the freelancing thing will pick up more steam. I’m going to try making some spec ads with some directors i know this year, so we could get work that way.
 
 

Thanks largely to Andrew's original post, many people here already know that Shane Carruth shot 2013's excellent indie feature Upstream Color with a pair of hacked GH2s. At the time, aspiring filmmakers everywhere found inspiration that such a masterful film was created with such an accessible consumer camera. It still stands up today as a beautiful, challenging, thought-provoking film:
I just happened across some behind the scenes photos on Reddit posted almost a decade after the film's release. I've always wondered about the technical particulars of how this film was made and even though what was posted is pretty low-res and deteriorated further with early Instagram filters, it does show some pretty bare-bones camera rigs and a lot of natural light.
As I enter my forties and the dream of creating a meaningful narrative film in my lifetime seems to slip further and further out of reach, this is just the kind of inspirational kick in the pants that I needed. If 8-bit, 4:2:0 AVCHD from a Micro Four Thirds sensor was enough to create an immersive story like this in 2013, then the never-ending pursuit of marginally improved gear and software really is just a giant, capitalism-fueled distraction -- one that I know that I use to put off the very real possibility that when I buckle down to make something deeply personal, I might not have anything to say. But I also know that it will be my deepest regret if I never even try.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that my own thoughts and ideas aren't particularly novel or unique, so maybe others on this board will connect with this too.

you’re performing the correct task in this case. if you were to set your WB to 3200, you would neutralise your tungsten lights to white, which is almost never really the point of tungsten. By setting it somewhere between 4000-4800, you’re opening up the possibility of color contrast within a shot where modern sensors tend to perform the best. Everything with a lower color temp than 4000 will be some degrees warmer than your neutral point, and everything with a higher color temp will be cooler.

In the real world (as always) things are more complicated.
Getting things right in camera is normally considered good advice because it's assumed that the results will be higher quality than not getting it right in camera and then adjusting afterwards.  It can also be good advice from the perspective that depending on the situation it can take significant time / effort to process in post, and there's a risk that the desired results can't be obtained, and by then a re-shoot might be very difficult.
On the other hand, some situations will be made better by getting in wrong in camera, but in some way that provides an advantage.  ETTR is getting it wrong in camera, and can improve the image once adjusted in post.  There are other situations where this might be the case, depending on the situation.
Your shot might have benefited from being exposed normally and then be pulled down in post, assuming nothing was clipped.  Your shot might also have benefitted from being shot at a normal WB, and then having the red and green channels pulled down to make the image blue (ETTR but only of those channels).
Good old fashioned "movie magic" involves trickery from time to time, sometimes by a huge margin (e.g. shooting day-for-night) and sometimes getting it wrong in camera can be advantageous to aid in the illusions.  

Astonishment by the sheer sensation of a blue hour magical moment, dreamyness, a story possibly to unfold or having end. You got that right in(front) the camera. 🙂 @PPNS

getting things right in camera is one of those things im not sure how to interpret. Ive posted this still before on here, to put it in context, it was shot around blue hour, but it wasnt quite as blue as it was here. I maxed out the white balance, to get it this blue. is that getting it right in camera or am i being a hack? 

getting things right in camera is one of those things im not sure how to interpret. Ive posted this still before on here, to put it in context, it was shot around blue hour, but it wasnt quite as blue as it was here. I maxed out the white balance, to get it this blue. is that getting it right in camera or am i being a hack? 

goddamn it looks bad in 24fps, but it looks truly dogshit in 60

i want to bypass af100's internal avchd 24mbps weak codec. i already have inferno, ki mini, nano flash, i want to try uncompressed to see how much it can improve the grading. 

I've made my decision and placed an order with B&H.
After a lot of thought, I decided to take a 180 degree turn and get a Fujifilm GFX100 II. 
Why? One thing I didn't mention in my original post in this thread was the fact that when my wife and I go out, video is only part of what we do. Stills photography makes up perhaps 70% of our outings with video about 30%. I didn't want to mention this at the start of the thread to avoid influencing anyone's opinions.
The GFX100 II does 8K video in ProRes 422HQ, which is probably more than good enough for my tastes. I've looked at a lot of sample video from this camera and it looks really good on both my computer and on my 4K projector. It also is a 102MP stills camera, which is a big improvement on the 20MP camera we currently use. That should help with the large prints I like to make and hang on the walls.
In the end, I just couldn't justify spending the amount of money I did on a pure cinema camera that doesn't also do stills. I also realized that even if a camera had features like SDI outputs and timecode, I'd probably never use them. It only has a 3.5mm audio input, but I'm used to that and if I eventually want XLR inputs Tascam sells an adapter. The GFX is new, so it uses the latest cards and is likely to continue getting firmware updates for the foreseeable future.
Thanks again for everyone who participated in this thread and offered advice. It certainly helped me make a decision.

I would still like to see the 2 forum members who were fairly dismissive towards my suggestion their video work or ideally their reels. I’ve seen some stills of Tom’s work and here and he is more than able to produce great images, so I think his opinion is definitely worth reading.
to clarify my suggestion, which imo, I shouldn’t have to do to this extent, my reasoning is simple:
- op was considering an fx9 originally, and i think ironfilm recommended an fx6 at some point.
- We know that the p4k uses a sensor from the same family of sony dual iso options, and that they perform about the same in non raw codecs (and you can easily find that on cined too). 
- braw has a highlight recovery option, which can yield you an extra stop of highlight data, which means its actually better performing than both those (and i can actually speak from experience. Way easier to blow a highlight on an fx6 than a pocket cam). The DR argument is now invalid
- in regards to rolling shutter: from what i’ve read, the p4k performs about the same as the c70 from what ive read. The fx6 performs better, and the rolling shutter on the fx9, which is what op originally considered, performs way worse. so what’s the point of bringing this argument up? 
- what is the point of a bigger sensor if you want more reach and don’t care about super shallow dof on wide angle lenses? Its easier to get those results on mft.
- why are you already thinking about upgrading to different lens mounts? This person might quit within the year? What end result is a potential upgrade going to bring?
 
i dont have any experience with canon cameras. Im sure the c70 is great, but it seems like a waste of money unless you’re a docu DP who already has a bunch of bigger canon cameras and you needed a slightly smaller one as a bcam.

^ in that case i can still safely recommend a pocket 4k 

im not yelling? i could make the argument that this consumerist driven attitude is more toxic? 

i think the 50/100k arri/venice setups are actually necessary for the context theyre made for, and i think there’s a decent argument to be made in regards to getting those and making a profit from renting those out.
Almost every camera now performs almost exactly the same. this means that theres no little to no difference in image quality between the lower budget options (pockets, fx30s) and the mid tier (canon c-whatever, fx9, red). you’re not going to see that price difference in the end result.
if you’re going to be shooting basic stuff in nature where you dont need a bunch of bells and whistles, you might as well get the lower cost options that let you record in a good or decent codec, which also happen to be light. your back will be much happier afterwards. you can save some money with which you could buy a decent set of lenses, nds and a great tripod.

1) there is no "settling", the 4/3 sensor (especially a bit larger than average 4/3 sensor, such as in the P4K and GH5S) is quite close to the industry standard S35 
2) the MFT mount is not dead. Both Blackmagic and Panasonic just released this year a couple of fantastic cameras for MFT mount. And of course there are all the other camera companies which have supported MFT mount, such as: OM, Z Cam, DJI, Kinefinity, Chronos, Insta360, Kandao , and more.  And many many more lens manufacturers which have supported the MFT mount! (more so than any other mount)
Really good DR you meant to say
Definitely not what I'd describe the P4K as! The original one?? Yeah sure, ok. But still, not even for the OG BMPCC do I think it was the deal breaker people thought it was. As I'd just slap a BP-U30 battery mounted to the top of my BMPCC and I'd be able to shoot for ages and ages. So just do that, and treat the BP-U30 (or NP-F970, or a mini V-lock, or whatever else you prefer) as your "main battery". 
Ditto for the P4K, just think of the internal battery as an awesome feature that allows you to always hot swap the main battery! Nice! 
Or you could get the battery grip and be able to shoot for two hours with that. 
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1472973-REG/blackmagic_design_grip_ccpoc4k_pg_pocket_cinema_camera_4k.html
(the battery grip for the Pocket 6K Pro allows three hours of shooting: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1625668-REG/blackmagic_design_pocket_cinema_camera_battery.html )
 
So? Lots of other cameras have been discussed as possibilities in this thread which also don't have an internal ND, such as the RED Dragon X, or Panasonic BS1H. 
 
 
1) basically any cine lens on the planet can be adapted to MFT (well, except maybe a few B4 mount cine lenses which are tricky for that. But it's a far better idea to use B4 cine lenses on a MFT camera than another other modern cine camera!!)
2) there are plenty of great cine lenses purely designed for the MFT mount, such as from DZOFilm, SLR Magic, Kowa, and Meike
 As even you yourself say, the P4K is sufficient. Arguably even more than sufficient. Would a 20 stops of dynamic range 20K resolution camera that has 1 million ISO low light with 18bit raw files truly make a major difference to the images produced? Nope. 
It really puts into perspective that debating over if this camera with 1/2 stop more DR or slightly cleaner shadows is basically a bunch of navel gazing. 
But still, there are lots of different cameras here that are "the right answer" for @Jedi Master, I've myself in this thread advocated for top end premium cameras such as the ARRI ALEXA Classic or Panasonic Varicam LT, and even mildly advocated for the likes of the RED Komodo (although, I don't think it's a great choice, just the best out of the pick at that price point if buying a new RED).
But yet, even the humble BMD P4K (or 6K Pro, or the new Cinema 6K camera with the L Mount, or a Z Cam E2 series camera, or the Panasonic BS1H / S1H) could be a great pick! The ease of use and portability will be benefits when getting the shot. 
And the lower costs shouldn't be overlooked either, that can be put into getting perhaps a bit better lenses than was otherwise planned (I feel this hasn't really been discussed enough, which lenses did you in particular have in mind @Jedi Master? Or at least a lens budget?), or experimenting a bit more with accessories and extras. Perhaps buying a wide range of 4x4 filters to shoot with for instance, having a spare grand or two to put into that could make a real difference. Or splurging on a Sennheiser MKH8030 & MKH8040 for a M/S microphone setup could really make a big difference on the final video. Or getting a few other microphones. Or spending a grand on a weekend trip away to a stunning location to film. 
 
Don't be silly, the Canon C70 would depreciate more in just the first year than the entire purchase price of the P4K!!

If this helps, you technically wouldn’t be using the full potential of the pocket 4k either, you would just be wasting less money.