A new Super 16 Cinema Cam: the GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILS?

[John Matthews]

I know we’re not supposed to talk about action cams, but this action cam is not! Why is no one talking about the Mission 1 Pro ILS? This thing looks so good. Have I bought into the YouTube shill hype? I just sold another camera and a couple of lenses to get it. Is anyone else going to pull the trigger on one?

[eatstoomuchjam]

I think we had some discussion about it!

I'm very pro-Mission 1 ILS.  I've bought a couple of Backbone-modded cams over the years (well, the first one I bought as a conversion kit for an existing previous-gen GoPro, which I promptly screwed up and then sent to them to help me fix nice guys!).  The thing that's kept me from using either one is that monitoring is bad on them.

The HDMI output on the older GoPro lags.  We're not talking 3 frames...  more like 1/4-1/2 second.  And the monitor output on the Insta360 One RS... isn't.  There's no wired display option for it and the wireless display to the phone is also laggy, even in an area with no wifi interference.  Neither was made for pulling focus.  And holding a wee little action camera right up to the eye to focus on its little screen (very little on the One RS) stinks - and tools to punch in, while available, are clearly an afterthought and are clunky.   So they're most usable for something where you focus once and then just roll - which doesn't fit a lot of my use cases for a smaller sensor.  Though they were great for the eclipse that came through the US a few years ago.

Anyway.  The M1P ILS seems to fix that problem.  The screen is as big as you'll find on an action camera.  Wired monitoring is possible and (from what I've seen) low-latency.  Dynamoc range is, by action camera standards, good.

The only reason I didn't buy one when I got the "in stock" notice from B&H was that... well, I just got a Pyxis 12K because the current sale is crazy.  That and it's GoPro - they'll be on sale for at least $100 off within a year.  That's how I got my M1P non-ILs.

[John Matthews]

10 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Anyway.  The M1P ILS seems to fix that problem.  The screen is as big as you'll find on an action camera.  Wired monitoring is possible and (from what I've seen) low-latency.  Dynamoc range is, by action camera standards, good.

The only reason I didn't buy one when I got the "in stock" notice from B&H was that... well, I just got a Pyxis 12K because the current sale is crazy.  That and it's GoPro - they'll be on sale for at least $100 off within a year.  That's how I got my M1P non-ILs.

Thanks! I didn’t see the other discussions. I haven’t been here in a while, as I’ve been busy installing solar panels on my roof and taking care of some other upkeep.

This camera seems very quirky, which is a bonus for me. I’m looking forward to learning how to use it and figuring out what it’s good at. I’ve never had the ability to shoot at some of those frame rates, and 8K isn’t really my thing, but I’ll give it a try. It reminds me of the BMPCC OG days.

Just so you know, I sold my GX800 (amazingly, a bigger and heavier camera) along with some kit lenses. I’ll probably let go of my Leica 15mm f/1.7 as well, since it won’t be of much use to me with this camera.

I have a few plans for this thing, especially using some of my vintage glass, which could be a lot of fun. I’ll definitely report back once I’ve had a chance to play around with it.

[eatstoomuchjam]

14 hours ago, John Matthews said:

I’ve never had the ability to shoot at some of those frame rates, and 8K isn’t really my thing, but I’ll give it a try. It reminds me of the BMPCC OG days.

For me, 6K is ideal - I don't lose detail when reframing and even with some denoising, a lot of the fine detail sticks around.  Really, for anything from 4K through 8K, it's fine for me.  4K just means I have to be more careful with my frame and 8K means using a bit more disk space (which I have plenty of for now, hope hard drive prices come down someday, though).

But yeah, the frame rates are fantastic.  They're one of the big reasons that Camera Conspiracies loves his M1P ILS so much.

[kye]

Thinking of it as a Super-16 FILM camera represents an incredible opportunity when combined with the high-resolution sensor - zooming in post.

My experiments with emulating S16 film showed that even a moderate amount of blur applied in post hides a huge amount of detail in the image.  This means you can crop into the source image significantly and the blur will hide it.

For example:
If you were to put a 12mm lens on it, then you'd get a ~35mm FOV at 6K, which you then blur.
If you were to put a 12mm lens on it, then crop 2x you'd get a ~70mm FOV at 3K, which you then blur and the blur hides the zoom in post.
If you were to put a 12mm lens on it, then crop 3x you'd get a ~100mm FOV at 2K, which you then blur and the blur hides the zoom in post.

Depending on how much blur you applied (if you were going for a vintage 16mm look or a more modern 16mm stock emulation) I suspect you could zoom up to 4-6x in post before the digital nasties started being visible through the emulation.  I don't know what kind of digital zoom the camera offers, but if it allows it then you could frame in-camera and not be throwing away bitrate when you crop in post.

This gives two advantages:
1) It turns any prime into a zoom, perhaps even a 4-5x zoom - much more than the 2-3x fast zooms like 18-35 etc
2) if you crop in post then you can apply additional stabilisation, making it feel a lot larger than the tiny camera it is

I suspect that mostly this advice will fall on deaf ears, as people are drastically afraid of softening their images, like they'll be punished in the afterlife for it.  When I saw Goodfellas in the cinema on 35mm film projection, it looked like somewhere between 720p and SD - and that was a 35mm feature film!!  The amount of blur to accurately reproduce even a semi-ballpark 16mm film emulation is beyond most modern thinking, but if you can wrap your head around the concept then the ILS can become a drastically useful camera.

[kye]

GoPro ILS vs BMPCC OG...  not a completely scientific test, but lots of shots in different scenes, so a good real-world comparison.