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Probably they are all waiting for the backups to finish...

Crap, I clicked on the Shane video since I have no idea who that is and now YouTube is going to haunt me forever because of it.

There's this one guy I follow that's always been transparant and sharing of his earnings, which gives an interesting insight: I suppose the same goes for a whole lot of other YouTubers. Hustle. Be smart. Find some side gigs. Profit. The most successful YouTube channel apparently is this kid Ryan that plays with toys... 23M+ subs and $26M yearly earnings. Fanbases are pretty mindblowing as well. Just take a look at the whole beauty guru thing on YouTube, it's insane. Social influence = monie$. Cringefest. That Jeffree Star fella has an estimate networth of $75M in 2019... probably more like $200M in 2020. Like... whut. lol There's money in YT no doubt. A little less perhaps for camera channels, because not enough people might care enough to geek over that kinda thing. But just the amount of sponsored video. I can't take any more Squarespace, Skillshare, Freshbooks, NordVPN, Audible, etc sponsored videos. You have YouTube Premium to fence off ads... and then you still need to skip the timeline! Ugh. I mean, I get it... but, argh. And with YouTube 'celeb' status, like red carpet parties where actual celebs get free 'swag bags' with like fashion and electronics (headphones for example), there's freebies too. Like... two or three years ago I suddenly started noticing people wearing 'Canada Goose' jackets all of a sudden. Apparently one of their ploys was to hand out their parkas to Hollywood celebrities. They'd get photographed wearing them = awesome promotion. In the camera world you'd get sponsored with free gear for promoting a certain product, store or service (plus possible sponsorship moniez; but usually not because YouTubers often claim not to receive straight up money (but they'll happily take the free gear as payment (ok, sometimes just 'on loan'), so...?) and can say whatever they want: give their honest opinion. Of course... if you want to stay in the good graces of the company... you're likely not to mention any downsides and just highlight the positives, that way you're not exactly lying, just withholding the complete truth; of course we see this happen in more industries... like car journalism where getting exclusive early insights is crucial). Btw. Also YouTube:

I occasionally watch this channel. His wife often comments on the lack of funds available to afford their own home due to his purchases.

This was quick math, but seems accurate: 1.89873417721 (4k DCI) 2.02531645569 (4k UHD) 2.70042194092 (2.8k Anamorphic) 2.89330922242 (2.6k 16:9) 4.05063291139 (HD) Round the numbers as you please.

Let me go and dig out the worst lens in the world and put it on my Pocket4K Back in 10

Honestly, you don't need an upgrade, maybe just a 4K side camera to fill that need. I have the GH5 as a 4K sidekick, but I now appreciate the Magic Lantern cameras more. They're better for my main needs, the gh5 is just for backup 4K if I ever need it. I have had pretty much all. 12, 14, 24, 35, 50 & 85 (never owned the 135mm although it looks nice). Now I just own the 35 & 50mm. Both great companions to the 5Dii and extremely sharp. They grade like Hollywood lens ? The 24mm was very nice, but the 24mm and the 85mm just feel like speciality lenses to use in certain situations which is why I sold them as I don't use them often. For landscapes and closeups, they're perfect! Might consider the 85mm again. I love both the 5D and the EOS M. The 5D is overall better with low light and dynamic range. The dynamic range gives the 5D2 a high end camera feel. Without an ND on a bright day, I'd have to stop the EOS M to about F22, with the 5D2 it's like F11. I love crop sensor cameras as well as the portability. The 5D2 I feel overall provides a more detailed and visually pleasing cinematic look. Really love it, won't give it away. With dual iso, it has 14 stops of DR, just need to get the settings working. Pentax K lenses also go well with the Canon Full Frame if you file the back correctly. Here is the latest eos m film I did, not sure if you've seen it, but it's probably the best work in terms of colour I have pushed on the EOS m: I use both the 5D2 & EOS M equally as much.

It really is an amazing camera and although I sometimes think I need an upgrade, I really couldn't be happier. I have the 50mm 1.4 Samyang and for the money, I don't know if there is a nicer 50mm lens around. I think my next lens purchase will be the 24mm but I hear that lens suffers from copy variations so it may take a few tries to find a good copy. Which Samyang lenses do you have? Also do you prefer the 5D2 more than the eos-m? A friend of mine recently bought an eos-m based on your videos. He left 4K and IBIS behind with the change.

Double Osmo Pocket performance for half the price: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/vmate-palm-sized-gimbal-camera-with-all-your-needs#/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2019/11/22/snoppa-points-out-the-differences-between-the-vmate-and-dji-osmo-pocket-gimbals

Look at the amount of money on screen here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJe8uQhM2G4jJFRWiM89Wg/videos I am not making any comment on the quality of the channel, clearly people like his content. I might even like it. Haven't watched any yet. But what is amazing is the relentlessness and the amount of money in the gear he has used in just 1 month. - C500 II - Macbook Pro 16" - EOS R and new RF Speed Booster - Arri Alexa (a snip at $6000) - Mavo LF - 90D - Insta360 - Moment anamorphic And that is just in 1 month, a little under 1 month in fact. Hardly anyone can compete with this relentless pace. And even fewer can afford to. It looks like the doors are swinging closed to YouTube as we speak.

I think one thing to remember is that flashing/reviewing/showing off all the new gear is part of the business model some of these YouTubers use to make their living. It's the affiliate links. The key for channels like Potato Jet, Matti Happoja, Crimson Engine, Peter McKinnon, Kai W, etc, etc, etc, is to get reviews up as often as possible, especially when flashy new gear comes out, to pull in viewers. Yeah, they only make pennies per view, but they make a lot more through affiliate link purchases. The next $ tier up is the big brand deals that people like McKinnon get to fly somewhere posh like Dubai and shoot ~10 minute advertorial/blog videos about products. And the bigger the channel gets, the more likely big companies will loan or give away gear for a video review and little/new/Chinese companies will just send random product to them in hopes of getting a mention. Matti Happoja has mega swag-opening sequences pretty regularly on his channel that highlights this phenomenon. I wonder how much of brands' marketing budget has shifted from TV commercials, magazine ads and other traditional media purchases to social media placement. For marketing people, it's all about the impressions per $ spent.

Haha, I don't think I even NEED a 4K side camera... I probably need to be happy with what I have, put my head down and get some work done. Lol. My friend bought a GH5 and I had a chance to mess around with it and I must say it's a fine camera. The IBIS and waveforms are enough to make it a very fun camera to shoot with. Good to know about the Samyangs. I tend to shoot with one lens so maybe the 50mm is enough for me. But you're right about the sharpness. It has an interesting mix of modern sharpness and vintage creaminess. I used to have a few Pentax-M lenses and a couple SMC K versions... the original K lenses are interesting because most of them are identical to the Takumars with the new mount. How does Dual ISO work? That feature has been around for a while but it was my understanding it's at the cost of extra noise... or something that made it impractical. That eos-m video looks great... you really found the secret sauce with that camera. I just watched your Beach Vibes video as well... did you process and upres that in the MLV App or in Resolve? Whatever you did, it looks fantastic!!!

Personally, I like Potato Jet. I think he has a funny personality, I like the way he puts his content together. I also like that he runs the gamut of everything from covering a 360 camera to buying a used ARRI. It personally makes for entertaining content on a subject I like. Is he making his living in part by getting brand deals, partnerships? Absolutely! But I do think on the surface level looking in, as others have stated- he seems to be fairly transparent. That said, if someone offers you a sneak peak at a big product to make a video review or let’s you keep it, even if no money is involved and you transparently state that, you are being used as a marketing arm for that company. Companies have taken to all the big youtubers so that on launch week, everyone suddenly has a review up. I think this goes both ways. It’s cool that we as consumers can get a look at said product, but it is consumerism. It is shoving paid promotion content at us. It also feeds a mentality that we need product xyz or everything we have is inferior. When it comes down to it- I like his stuff. If you’re asking about affordability- his vlog channel stated he has at least another roommate (besides his gf) at his house. I don’t think he’s living that glamorously. He probably is in debt (topic for another convo) unless he’s just a brand/product mastermind negotiator. But hey, makes for an entertaining watch every now and again.

Oops. Quickly, delete it from your watched history! ?

I think it's a couple of things, possibly a combination of them: A lot of YouTubers come from money. Some come from wealthy families, others had/have good paying jobs that allow them to indulge in an expensive hobby, etc. Even if they have gotten to the point where they're self sustainable off of YouTube revenue and freelance work, it's likely they started from an advantageous position to begin with. Living in NYC or Los Angeles isn't cheap, you need a lot of money just to get set up there. I also think the ease in which you can get credit to buy stuff probably has a lot to do with it. Literally every time I order something off of Amazon, eBay, B & H, etc. I get credit offers. Wouldn't shock me to find out a lot of YouTubers are going into debt. Then there's the freebies/sponsored content. A lot of them have built up relationships with B & H so they'll get loaners, which I don't really object to and prefer over them getting freebies. But a lot of them just get stuff sent to them. I remember Tom Antos did a video where he unboxed like 30+ things he'd been sent and had been sitting on that he never bothered to review. No clue what he did with all of it, probably sold it? But it really opened my eyes to how freely all this equipment gets sent out and is viewed by the companies as the cost of doing business. Then of course you've got your Canon, Sony, etc. sending people review copies, flying people out, etc. Potato Jet I think probably comes from a well to do family, because even though I know he's a working professional it's very hard for me to believe that he can afford everything he has while living in Los Angeles, even with a profitable YouTube career and his freelance work. His house alone has to cost half a million or more! But in general I feel like he's honest, and he gives away most of the stuff he reviews. Once a YouTuber starts to feel like they're compromised I start to gravitate away from them and their content. It's why I enjoy smaller channels (see my thread dedicated to them ?) because they're not big enough to be getting stuff from companies and instead use/review things they've spent their money on. In general they're a lot less biased. Yeah that's another thing he has to his benefit by living in LA. The availability of equipment, whether it's from rentals or friends, is on a completely different level. He seems like a very kind person so I don't wanna come off as too critical. There aren't a lot of people that'll go out and buy equipment for their friend that's starting a YouTube channel, and then give that same friend his bike as a gift.

Potato Jet has access to all that gear through a variety of ways. He is an active video producer so he has access to rentals and other equipment used for that. He has many filmmaker friends that loan him stuff. He has many sponsors that send him items for review. And he is has a healthy case of G.A.S as well that leads to many of his own purchases. If you watch enough of his videos, he eventually tells you how/why he has basically every piece of kit. Sometimes he'll reference a RED he rented or borrowed for a video from months prior, for example. TBH Potato Jet is my favorite Youtuber right now. He feels very genuine and I legitimately like watching his stuff.

I think we've seen this for the past 2-3 years. Instagram turned into a platform for selling you stuff a few years ago and now Youtube is exactly the same. This is rampant consumerism at an all-time high. And honestly, camera gear and electronics are one of the worst offenders. There is a large selection of Youtubers who seem like fine people but are making a good chunk of money by promoting incredibly wasteful consumerism. I believe our current widespread depression and addiction epidemic is based on these false "social" channels and "relationships" that are actually more about envy, greed, and jealousy than actual real human connection. Maybe without knowing it (but some of them do), these Youtubers and Instagram "influencers" are contributing to people's increasing unhappiness.

I absolutely love the images the 6k is capable of producing. Other than the fact I only own MFT lenses, it just doesn't suit my needs/ desires currently. Neither does the 4k model, but I want a DR Studio license and it seems too cheap not to buy the camera as well!

Seems plentiful stock of them new as well, unlike the Pocket4K. As someone who has been working his bollocks off creating an intricate workaround to get remote focus over bluetooth working for the 6K this doesn't please me at all !

If anything i've seen the 6k used at crazy low prices, even CVP have had a few between £1600-1800.

Hey, Sorry for the late reply, just saw your post. That is a C/Y mount Zeiss 50mm 1.4 with a C mount adapter. If you push the little silver button/lever on the back of the lens down or back (towards the rear of the lens), you should be able to unmount the lens from the C mount adapter. After it's loose from the adapter you can get other adapters to mount it onto your Samsung NX, Canon EOS, or pretty much any other camera you'd buy in the future.

A lot of the time in promotional clips the footage being displayed isn't even shot with the product advertised... and they show how you can use it to vlog... but I've yet to see anyone actually share any actual vlog footage, pointing it at themselves, which adds to my suspicion.

No, they are dng stills. I've attached them if you want to have a closer look. Just pressed record in all BRAW modes with a Sandisk Extreme 128 v30 U3 10 SD card and it didn't explode. Archive.zip

OK, this is a quick and dirty test so ignore the framing and white balance differences ! So, the Computar 12.5-75mm f1.2 isn't strictly a Super16mm lens but we can use it as a guide to sensor coverage versus the OG BMPCC. This is it at 12.5mm with the Pocket4K in 4K DCI so you can see how much its covering. This is it in the 2.6K 16:9 mode And this is it on the OG BMPCC If you look at the vignetting, you can see that the BMPCC has a fraction more than the Pocket4K so the conclusion is that a lens worked for you on the BMPCC it will be fine on the Pocket4K in the 2.6K 16:9 mode as it appears to have a marginally bigger crop.

Oh man, I just sold my OG Pocket, otherwise I could have checked and compared for you. Sorry about that. Hopefully someone else around here can double check it.

They're so close to each other I'd suggest confirming somehow, rather than relying on the accuracy of their marketing department!

Thanks, I asked because the OG Pocket was often referred to as having a S16 sized sensor but the actual crop factor was a touch less at 2.88x so I wasn't sure if BM followed the traditional S16 crop in the P4K or the OG Pocket crop of 2.88x.

15:29 dat autofocus elite

This thing looks useful... So, S16 looks like it's a diagonal of 14.33 and FF is 43.27, which makes the crop factor of 3.02

C200 and 1Dx III have the same price: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1512601-REG/canon_eos_1d_x_mark_iii.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1340800-REG/canon_2215c002_eos_c200_ef_camera.html Advantage of the C200: Internal ND filter Proper audio with XLR Exposure helps like waveforms EVF More customization 30% smaller RAW file with proven workflow DPAF in RAW 4k 60p SDI Movable LCD Advantage of the 1Dx III: Can take picture, actually this is the main goal of this camera. FF vs. S35 5.5k RAW vs. 4k RAW FF FHD 120fps with DPAF vs crop and no AF Middle codec 10bit 4:2:2 Weather sealed Smaller and a bit lighter More gimbal friendly More future proof memory cards and a bit cheaper What we don’t know yet: Low light performance DR Rolling shutter 1Dx III RAW workflow Again if you do only video c200 is probably the better choice other than gimbal work and harsh conditions. But if you do photo and video then it becomes more interesting especially if you are in the action/sports etc.. area.

The specs are really nice, but 13 minutes or so on a 256GB card is crazy. It's nice to have the option and it's great there's a ton of codec options in there but that's a serious cinema camera bitrate for serious productions. Maybe it'll be used as a B or crash cam on some bigger productions. I'm not entirely sure who this is for to be honest. It's a couple more grand more expensive than the C200 I bought a couple of years ago. My hopes for a middle codec have completely disappeared, but I can't see myself seriously requiring more than the Canon RawLite format. Once you start shooting in these really nice, thick codecs it quickly shows up other areas of your production that could be improved like lenses, lighting and sound. I'd argue that if you have a camera that can shoot decent RAW and you like shooting with it, there will be no real reason to upgrade for a long time. It's going to be too big for a lot of shooters used to mirrorless, and it's too expensive to be used as a B cam. I'm currently using the BMPCC4K as my B cam and gimbal cam and it pairs really well with the C200. You would have to have a very particular use case to warrant splashing out on the 1DXIII as a B cam. Serious hybrid photographers maybe?

Should've used the Panasonic batteries instead of V mount! As the EVA1 can be quite a small camera

Yes, the Neumann M149 is for recording vocals in our little home studio. My girlfriend has been wanting to get this mic for a few years. Seriously, for $6499 I can even get a Tube-Tech CL 1B Compressor, a nicer addition to the home studio IMO. But we are not doing it professionally, so it is hard to pull the trigger. The appearances matter phenomenon is really strong in Hong Kong. I guess people are so used to the images of cinema cameras and TV Cameras that they think anything smaller is not impressive enough for them. A Sony FS700 and an external monitor is like a perfect combo for me. For shooting A Roll for performances, it is more than adequate. As for B Roll, mirrorless is so much better. Much lighter and more mobile. I've shot a charity event using an EVA-1 with a big V-mount battery, mostly handheld, for ten hours. My client was impressed, I was not ?.

Well, seems this time Snoppa fights back when DJI did the same with their precedent Atom gimbal... Here's a few footage taken from their revenge now:

Indeed! Sub $1K Wish there was an "Atomos Samurai V", would be the perfect partnership. Currently, an original Shogun is the cheapest pairing. It's true that "appearances matter", unfortunate, but true. Handy to have a "big pro camera", even if it is just for the sit down interview stuff. Then grab a secondhand a7Smk1 or a6x000 to run around and grab the B Roll / gimbal / specialist (such as crane / car rig) shots. Probably what I'd do if I got back into the camera dept side of things. Saw the Panasonic EVA1 for as low as US$3.5K-ish brand new greymarket on eBay a year ago, sadly prices seem to have gone up since then. For studio work? As on location shooting a Neumann KM185D + Neumann KMR81i would be far far more useful Neumann mics to have.

Looks very impressive! I can't believe Canon actually allows RAW recording in their non-cinema line. And as long as there is Canon Log and DPAF, I will be very happy. Oh, wait, it's $6499. Can't afford ?. With this money I can get a proper video camera. I'm looking at an used Sony FS700. It is quite cheap on eBay now. It also looks very massive and bulky which my clients always like. I can even get a new EVA-1 or C200. I can buy lenses. I can buy pro audio equipment (a neumann M149 will be very nice). Or I can pay rents for a few months. I guess I'm just not professional enough to own this kind of camera. I can see why this can be considered as one of the best hybrid camera, but I don't think mirrorless like A7R4, SH1, Z7 or even XT3 are much inferior to it to justify the price difference.

Mmmkai, so the campaign just got extended by another 12 days...

Awesome Mercer! The 5D3 is such a great cam even in 2020! I have the 5D2 and the 14 bit raw amazes me still, especially with the Samyang Primes. 14 Bit RAW I also feel is better than the lossless. The lossless feels like a .png and 14 Bit feels like full raw with more colours to play around with and more detailed too, considering you're getting more bit rate mb/s. Some people can't tell the difference, but I can feel it when I grade and am sure you can too.

Let's ignore 32bits for now, as in my world this won't ever get used. Could be literally years until I get asked that I must do a 32bit recording. 24bit 48khz is 99% of what gets done when you're on set recording dialogue. 32bits is more for the videographer who is doing everything (sound post as well) in house, or similar scenarios. So now for dynamic range, that would be the signal to noise ratio from the pre amps. Both Zoom F series and Sound Devices pre amps are very clean, you will not be able to tell the difference between them in a blind A/B test (however the Zoom H series.... yes you could spot them, they're much worse). If you're finding either of them to be too noisy then I bet what is really happening is you're doing something wrong. (like recording with your boom from 4m away & expecting it to be clean, or the problem is earlier in the signal chain such as due to using Boya wireless)

Maybe we're just coming from different backgrounds of what words mean, but my background is studying optics at university. So I feel I'm using the right terminology here. Theoretical value means what you calculate using values you know from the specs (such as looking up what is the focal length and the diameter), while the T Stop of course is different because it is taking a specific lens and putting it on a test bench to measure the damn thing when you shine light in vs what you get out at the other end. Thus theoretical vs measured values. Fascinating when you see the Samyang lenses (which should be all identical, aside from the different lens mounts) return results varying from T1.4 to T1.8 That indicates quite a large sample variation from Samyang (assuming dxomark is doing their measurements with precision), but perhaps not so radically surprising when you consider that Samyang is a low budget lens making? Precision quality control isn't their #1 priority. But still, I'm surprised at the variance. I wonder what the variance would be if you took half a dozen identical (but each from different production runs, so the serial numbers can't be close together at all) Sigma or Canikon lenses. My guess is Samyang is making lenses which are say perhaps f1.36 but because they know their quality control is sloppy they realize it is smarter to advertise them as lenses rounded up to f1.4 than to exaggerate it rounded down to f1.3 Then dxomark perhaps measured a T1.44, which gets expressed in their limited space as a "T1.4", thus you then got a drop (in this example I'm making up, the reality could quite possibly be even less extreme) from F1.36 to F1.44 (a drop of 0.8) which seems quite reasonable in the stituation of them getting a really good quality sample.

Of course, after all this, does anyone actually pay attention to this figure anymore? I mean, in most situations you're using an ND anyway, so throwing away the vast majority of the light. Then in those rare cases when there's no ND because it's low light (scene lit by candles, outdoor night scenes, etc) we simply adjust aperture / ISO settings (according to the priorities of the production, equipment performance, and artistic direction of crew) and then adjust the NR processing in post to match amounts of grain. Even in cine-lenses, I'm only looking at the T-stop and thinking "the F-stop is at least that large" to try and understand what DoF the lens will have when wide open.

The X-T3 is already a damn good camera. The best Aps-c mirrorless according to me ? Except IBIS and an articulated screen, I can’t see what they could improve. I’m not talking about evolutions that we expect at each new release, as better AF, better burst mode, or ISO performance. Maybe a new battery. Of course, 4k120 and 6k60 would be a nice bonus ?

Supposedly: 6K 60p in 10-bit - everything recorded internally. Anamorphic aspect ratios. IBIS. Fully articulated screen. https://www.fujirumors.com/fujifilm-x-t4-registered-and-coming-with-ibis-in-march-and-about-that-6k60p-video-rumor/

This video is a master class of how not to film yourself. When your too lazy to compose and frame your subject with your environment... I know it’s not cinema, it’s a YouTube video...but it was incredibly hard to watch and listen too. Hopefully Tony continues to use this style in 2020 ?

Let's say you're a pro earning $50k/yr, you want to live on a modest $35K/yr. That leaves $15k/yr to put into your business, which needs to cover running your website / advertising / repairs / transport / software / training courses / insurance / legal / etc and all the other gear purchases you might want to make that year. Suddenly it starts to make you pause and think which to choose when you're considering a camera bodies which will cost you $700/yr vs $1200/yr. This is true across all businesses. (especially business which are in the same areas which people do for fun, often the serious but rich amatuers are using nicer gear than the hardworking pros!! Unless the pros are getting gear sponsorship, which for example in the case of sportspeople is often the only reason they can afford gear nicer than what your casual weekend warrior is using) For example in my own world of production sound mixing, there is a shockingly large number of people (working on big shows too!) still using Cantar X2 / Sound Devices 788T / Zaxcom Deva 5.8 as their main production recorder. Doesn't mean they're not still spending heaps on of repairs and new gear each year, just its not being focused on their recorder. (kinda like working pros who are not bothering to upgrade their main camera body every single cycle) Yeah, no mention of that. The Panasonic S1H will hold onto that crown of being a "Netflix Approved" DSLR/mirrorless for a long time before Canon joins them. What is the over/under on the bets that this is the hidden "gotcha" easter egg Canon has hidden away for us? There always is "something" that Canon screws up.

I'm going to give a camera analogy to help you understand: Imagine if the only cameras which offered S35, 4K raw, 10bit 422, SDI outputs, TC, dual card slots, swappable mounts, LUTs, great AF, slow motion, NDs, waveforms, etc were cameras which cost $6K or even more. Then a camera came along which could do all of this for $2K, would you call that "a game changer"? YUP! Hmmmm... now I think about it, we don't have anything in the camera world like this!! Sadly. Perhaps a JVC LS300 mk2 would get more than half way there (if they managed to stick to the same price as the LS300 is currently). Or if BMD did a repeat of "the summer Pocket half price sale" but with the UMP G1 instead, that would kinda get most of the way to this dream scenario with a pricing only somewhat over $2K.

As promised, the Sigma fp centered release of slimRAW is now out, so make sure to update. SlimRAW now works around Resolve's lack of affection for 8-bit compressed CinemaDNG, and slimRAW compressed Sigma fp CinemaDNG will work in Premiere even though the uncompressed originals don't. There is also another peculiar use: even though Sigma fp raw stills are compressed, you can still (losslessly) shrink them significantly through slimRAW. It discards the huge embedded previews and re-compresses the raw data, shaving off around 30% of the original size. (Of course, don't do this if you want the embedded previews.)

Ha ha very nice Sony, now get back to work https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51015921

Wow, too many things to address. This forum is getting fun again! Thank you so much for all the input and keeping the argument civil (we have all seen how these conversations can go). I can't disagree with you on everything. If you're here on EOSHD and you have an opinion, you're not a vanilla shooter. ? After too many years of shooting with adapters, what I look for in a lens is not really the end result but a framework that supports improvement. The Sirui has it (so does the Iscorama). Last night I slapped in an oval insert at the aperture and made bokeh 2x. It got a lot better. Then threw in some focus and iris gears just for the fun of it and some filtration. The image is on the sharp side, so I mounted a vari-nd (since I don't want the ovals to change with the aperture) and a BPM 1/4. Things got more interesting when I put on a 0.8x wide angle adapter, which works great and degrades sharpness a bit more. The image is looking a lot more organic and that's what I wanna show on my next video. Now to beat down the Iscorama a little bit more, 1.5x is not that much squeeze either for bokeh, plus minimum focus at 2m and rotating front/extending body make life a lot harder. It's not a perfect lens from the start. The pre-36 also has that weird box-shaped flare. Nonetheless we have solutions for most of these problems. The Maxiscope/Proxiscope addresses minimum focus and focus gears, plus mounting to rails to speed up lens changes, the newest Van Diemen rehousing fixes the rotating front and the long focus throw, another mod fixes the box flares. But still, paying $2k (cheap!) for it only puts you at the bottom of a hill to climb and make it "perfect" (lots of airquotes here). It also only goes as wide as 40mm on FF and no one fixed that one yet. hehe I agree with this too. I'm drafting a new series of videos for next year, focused more on the anamorphic feel than the gear itself and the cornerstone aspect of it is that by embracing scope we're embracing artifacts and losses in IQ. That's what we want. Fortunately, if a lens is sharp there are plenty of tools to unsharpen it. The other way around is a bit trickier. You can always blur a focused shot, but you can't recover one that was shot out of focus. ? Bringing this lens to the indie people is what makes the difference. Anamorphic has always been the snob aspect of cinematography and I strongly disagree with "this is expensive to keep the masses out". That's the core thought that got us in bad shape about... everything in history. As for preferences, we shouldn't dismiss someone else's style just because it's not what we are trying to do. (Unless that person is the owner of The Anamorphic Store. In that case, dismiss them immediately. Ripoff) This is EXACTLY my point in this whole thing. Some people might not like it (I still don't like Blackmagic Cameras very much), but it's important to acknowledge their importance in the grand scheme of things. This lens is an evolution of a movement that I'd say SLR Magic started, by manufacturing new, cheap anamorphics. That improved with the GH4's anamorphic mode and it took a sharp turn up when Atlas came into the game. Vazen is also part of it, and Sirui brings this into the hands of people who couldn't afford any of the previous options. Competition is the only way to make anamorphic cheap and I'm super glad to see it happening. I hope we soon see other focal lengths or other brands jumping onto this train.