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Awesome! P.S. I'm so glad to finally be reading about something other then the Hobbit and HFR. ;-)

  The "audience" argument is very relative, as it can be great but it can also completely ruin the experience.   As for bashing popcorn movies, speaking for myself, even though I'd rather have 10 Moonrise Kingdoms a year than a Battleship as I said before, my problem is not with the popcorn movies, my problem is with BAD popcorn movies.   There's something people seem to have forgotten when defending popcorn movies, which is the fact that POCORN MOVIES DON'T HAVE TO BE BAD MOVIES.   In order to enjoy a blockbuster movie these days you need to check your brain at the door and not ever question or even think about anything you've seen. You're just expected to drool and go "wow" multiple times and then forget all about it. And repeat. Every single big movie I've watched lately has had massive plot holes, ridiculous characters and silly repetitive stories, and most people act like that's ok "it's just a popcorn movie". Well it's not ok!   The first Indiana Jones movies were great, so was Big Trouble in Little China, or Back To The Future... These were all popcorn movies, good ones too. Back To The Future is extremely clever, I don't see anything like it in present day blockbusters, instead I see the same ideas from the highest grossing films being recycled over and over again, that's what producers want in their movies, the same exact sequences they saw in movies that made a lot of money.   Pirates of the Caribbean was a great popcorn movie, a huge surprise to me, but then the sequels were just awful. Why? Because they didn't have anything else to say. They weren't driven by a new idea to advance the saga, they were driven by the money made by the first movie.   I just watched the trailer for GI Joe 2, not that I was expecting it to be remotely good, but seriously, why bother? Every single shot in there has been done several times before just in the last few years. You could cut that exact same trailer using only stuff from other recent blockbusters.   The case with The Hobbit and so many others nowadays is that it's just a technical showcase, 48fps and 4k were driving the making of the film, the story wasn't. Back in the day, they were inventing new techniques and tools in order to tell the story of Star Wars, these days it's the other way round, story is not driving these movies at all, it probably even gets in their way.

Contrary to your statement, the GoPro Hero3 Black Edition uses line skipping and cropping extensively. Just film a resolution chart at the various settings and you will see how severe the cropping and line skipping is. I'd be surprised if the measured resolution exceeded 500 lines in ANY setting, including the alledged 4k mode.

I want manual exposure control! Or exposure lock or something to that extent

  You are talking about the latest FCP X vs. Premiere CS 6?   Knowing FCP X and Premiere until CS 5.5, it is quite clear that FCP X is the better editor. But in version 10.7 it still has bugs, and there are some things you just can't do. You can't, for example, change the project settings to cinemascope. Not yet at least. For 300 bucks, it is more than useful, and many find it sufficient. It's strenghts are the organisation of your footage, the speed with which you can edit and how well it responds (granted you have a fast machine and enough RAM).   Adobe has the integration of After Effects, Audition and the new Speedgrade on it's side. High price, and the editor is outmoded with it's track-bound timeline, which many experienced cutters prefer nonetheless.     For Adobe, you can rely on the said Speedgrade, for FCP X you would export XML for the free DaVinci Resolve Lite or buy the Magic Bullet Looks Plugin (there is a high quality color corrector integrated, but it's tools are limited, i.e, you can't keyframe grades, which is a no-go for serious colorists). In any way, buy tutorial DVDs (not books) for the application of your choice!     Not the cheapest, but the best in this price range is the Sachtler ACE.     New is the Eclipse as an ND-Fader. You heard, that you need a bigger diameter than your lenses filter mount? Or a set of NDs like 2,4,8.