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I won’t be shooting another film without it

Have thousands and thousands of clips to sync with tight deadlines and I bet you'll start to think of TC as being "mandatory" too.

If you want to match your camera to an Alexa it’s the best tool for that job. I personally love it on my Panasonic S1. Makes saturation and highlight roll off really pleasing.

The LUT is made so you expose at normal exposure. Exposing higher will result in cleaner footage though I would say it’s not necessary like it was on Sony cameras with Slog.

Thank you!!! And just so I understand, is it suggest that one DOESN'T overexpose as they normally would with LOG footage? Or is it still suggested to overexpose when using LOG to avoid noise? I guess in certain situations you have to over or under-expose...

There are exposure conversions for -2, -1, -.66, -.33 and the same with overexposure. Of course you can expose lower it just doesn’t guarantee the same color accuracy.

I own a mac with a nvidia card and the latest IOS platform doesn't support nvidia drivers anymore. Basically, program obsolescence is a problem for many mac owners. I don't see myself with a mac in the near future. I also have a PC, all the pieces can be replaced. For a environmentally friendly workflow, it makes more sense to repair and reuse. Mac is in the philosophy :" Buy expensive product every 5 years and throw away via there buy back option and start again."

That's wild generalizing. You can't narrow a whole field down to one piece of software.

I think you could grab pretty much any camera now and make the audience believe it looks like a “real film”. @kye notifies sone great points. It’s more about what’s in the scene, and how that is coloured and lit. Sure, cameras like RED, Blackmagic, Arri all have a special feel to the motion. No doing about it. But the audience will barely notice. At the same time, most consumers have “TruMotion”, “Smooth Motion” switched when watching films on TV. They rarely notice it, but they notice production design, colour and performance quality above all else.

Q: When will digital catch up to film? A: When you learn to colour grade properly. With a few notable exceptions (you know who you are), the colour grading skill level of the average film-maker talking about this topic online is terrible. Worse still, is that people don't even know enough to know that they don't know how little they actually know. I have been studying colour grading for years at this point, and I will be the first to admit that I know so little about colour grading that I have barely scratched the surface. Here's another question - Do you want your footage to look like a Super-8 home video from the 60s? I suspect not. That's not what people are actually looking for. Most people who want digital to look like film actually don't. Sure, there are a few people on a few projects where they want to shoot digital and have the results look like it was shot on film in order to emulate old footage, but mostly the question is a proxy for wanting nice images. Mostly they want to get results like Hollywood does. Hollywood gets its high production value from spending money on production design. Production design is about location choice, set design, costume / hair / makeup, lighting design, blocking, haze, camera movement, and other things like that. If you point a film camera at a crappy looking scene then you will get a crappy looking scene. There's a reason that student films are mostly so cringe and so cheap-looking. They spent no money on production design because they had no money. Do you think that big budget films would spend so much money if it didn't contribute to the final images? I suggest this: Think about how much money you'd be willing to spend on a camera that created gorgeous images for you, and how much you'd spend on re-buying all your lenses, cages, monitors, and all the kit you would need to buy Think about how much time you would be willing to invest on doing all the research to work out what camera that was, how much time you would spend selling your existing equipment, how much time you would spend working out what to buy for the new setup, how much time you would spend learning how to use it, how much time you would spend learning to process the footage Take that money and spend half of it on training courses and take the other half and put it into shooting some test projects that you can learn from, so you can level-up your abilities Take that time you would have spent and do those courses and film those projects People love camera tests, but it's mostly a waste of time. Stop thinking about camera tests and start thinking about production value tests. Take a room in your house, get one or two actors, hire them if you have to (you have a budget for this remember) and get them to do a simple scene, perhaps only 3-6 lines of dialog per actor. It should be super-short because you're going to dissect it dozens of times, maybe hundreds. Now experiment with lighting design and haze. Play with set design and set dressing. Do blocking and camera movement tests. Do focal length tests (not lens tests). Now do costume design, hair and makeup tests. Take this progression into post and line them up and compare. See which elements of the above added the most production value. But you're not done yet - you've created a great looking scene but it is probably still dull. Now you have to play with the relationship between things like focal length / blocking / camera movement and the dramatic content of the scene. Most people know that we go closer to show important details, and when the drama is highest, but what about in those moments between those peaks? Film the whole scene from every angle, every angle you can even think of, essentially getting 100% coverage. Now your journey into editing begins. Start with continuity editing (if you don't know what that is then start by looking it up). You now have the ability to work with shot selection and you should be using it to emphasise the dramatic content of the scene. Create at least a dozen edits, trying to make each one as different as possible. You can play with shot length, everything from the whole scene as one wide shot to a cut every 1s. You can cut between close-ups for the whole scene, or go between wides and close-ups. Go from wide to mid to close and go straight from wide to close without the mid shots in between. What did you learn about the feel of these choices? What about choosing between the person talking and the person listening? What does an edit look like where you only see the person talking, or just the person looking? Which lines land better when you see the reaction-shot? Play with L and J cuts. Now we play with time. You have every angle, so you can add reverse-angles to extend moments (like reality TV does), you can do L and J cuts and play with cutting to the reaction shot from some other line. What about changing the sequence of the dialogue? Can you tell a different story with your existing footage? How many stories can you tell? Try and make a film with the least dialogue possible - how much of the dialogue can you remove? What about no dialogue at all - can you tell a story with just reaction shots? Can you make a silent film that still tells a story - showing people talking but without being able to hear them? Play with dialogue screens like the old silent films - now you can have the actors "say" whatever you like - what stories can you tell with your footage? Then sound design.... Then coaching of actors.... Now you've learned how to shoot a scene. What about combining two scenes? Think of how many combinations are now available - you can now combine scenes together where there are different locations, actors, times of day, seasons, scenarios, etc. Now three scenes. Now acts and story structure.... Great, now you're a good film-maker. You haven't gotten paid yet, so career development, navigating the industry, business decisions and commercial acumen. Do you know what films are saleable and which aren't? Have you worked out why Michael Bay is successful despite most film-makers being very critical of him and his film-making approach and style? There's a saying about continuity - "people only notice continuity errors if you film is crap". Does it matter? Sure, but it's not the main critical success factor. Camera choice is the same.

Heres a 'music video'. I shot using the Blackmagic 6k. It was very low budget and shot adhering to local covid lockdown guidelines. Production We used a Sigma 18-35mm, everyone already knows how much of a great all round lens this is. I prefer shooting on wider lenses anyway, (25mm being my go to prime). I didn't really find myself wanting to swap lenses. Also used a Hoya ProND 6 Stop on some shots, this ND does show IR pollution. I wish I had a 3 stop aswell. (Ive since sold the Hoya and picked up Nisi IRND 3 & 6 stop filters. They are cheaper and better performing than the Hoya. We shot 6K Braw Q5 on to 2 128GB Cfast Cards. This codec is incredibly efficient we used about 450GB over 2 1/2 days. I didn't have the camera rigged at all, the camera was powered by LPE6 Batteries. The camera burns though them, I needed more than the 6 we had! The only item attached to the top of the camera was a wireless video transmitter. I aimed to expose 'correctly' at 400ISO. A majority of the shoot was overcast so the DR wasn't stressed much so I found that I was often 1 stop over. In the grade I pulled the exposure on most shots down at least a stop and sometimes as much as 2/3. I recommend underexposing this camera at least a stop anyway. Even exposing for 800 shows almost no noise especially in a 4k timeline. All the exteriors were lit naturally. occasionally using a bit of diffusion in close ups. I just tried to use the sun as backlight as often as possible. The interiors, we used the affordable Godox SL60 and a ring light for fill. We used a variety of grip equipment (Tripod, Glidecam, Handheld, Jib). Grade/Post I also graded the video on a baseline 2017 13inch MBP, we imported the timeline from premier and used the camera originals. I shot to a Kodak 2383 LUT in camera but decided to grade from scratch. Gen5 colour Science in resolve is a treat to use. It reacts incredibly naturally to contrast a saturation changes. Skintones (with tint set to 0 in the raw tab) are very natural and lifelike. On a sidenote: Gen 5 Ext Video and Video gammas are totally usable now, much more than the Gun 4 versions. Other than basic adjustments, I just adjusted the hue of greens to remove IR in shots we used ND. I also added a subtle glow to the highlights and DaVinci's built in film grain. I set exposure for each clip using the exposure slider in the raw tab and the false colour effect on a timeline node, it really helped with matching shots when the lighting was constantly changing over the 3 shoot days. I am still shocked by the image coming out of the 6k, it has huge dynamic range, beautiful colour science and can be pushed and pulled more than you would ever without breaking. The extra resolution meant we didn't have to rent a dolly/silder on some shots and allowed us to crop and reframe in post without degrading IQ.