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I hear ya, but also, as has been the case for a lot of us, we have had an extremely unproductive last 2 years. I don't want to go on about it (too much), but speaking for myself, just 10% of my normal workload. On top of that, some jobs just don't allow for the same opportunities as some others and from the 6 (out of what should have been 60) jobs I have had in these last 2 years, pretty much all of them were compromised in one way or another. I have expanded my video portfolio by just one job in now what is 2.5 years (ie, only a single one I have felt was anything better than anything from 2019) and ditto my photography portfolio. I'd normally expect to finish any year with maybe 12 of each I could be proud of, so these last couple of years should have moved my personal game/portfolio on with 48 finished jobs, not just 2. The net result of that has been deep, almost indescribable creative frustration. Also speaking personally, I don't have any photo or video interests outside of my paid work, ie, my paid work IS my interest. Believe me, I have tried some 'creative projects' of my own over the last couple of years, but to be honest, each one is like pulling teeth and does not inspire. I'm a wedding hack and have been for 20 years. There are other things I could do with photo and video, but again (without making excuses), the last 2 years in one sense would have allowed the time, but the means and sheer ability to do so, were removed by the circumstances. On another note...and this goes for forums, YouTube channels, any social media and that is anything gear related, funny stuff, general mass appeal stuff, will always massively overshadow anything far more meaningful. There is something utterly wrong with that, but at the same time, it just is what it is. I rarely show my work other than from a marketing perspective to prospective future punters. Why? Two reasons I have established over the years and these are: 1: Outside of peddling my wares to my very specific niche market, no one gives a shit other than; me, my clients, my wife and my mother. 2: I've never sought the limelight or the stage. I'll participate in something I'm interested in participating in, but beyond, I don't give a shit whether anyone values my work or opinion. I really don't. I will go and at least look at the Lightweight thread 😜 or whatever it's called and see if it's something I could participate in...

forum /ˈfɔːrəm/ noun A meeting or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. "we hope these pages act as a forum for debate" Forums always have and always will be full of diverse people. We have a community of professionals and non-professionals and all have different requirements, opinions and tastes. The moment any forum (or other platform) gets super-controlled to the point where it is unnecessarily over-modded or the 'Topic Police' come along to give you a ticking off for even going slightly off topic, I lose interest. Most topics veer off at some point. (Guilty) Every gear topic gets compared with other gear. (Guilty) Folks are always speculating about what's coming next. (Guilty) That's just how it is.

Great topic! I have been researching projectors for just such an application. Here are some of my findings. 1. Laser projectors have better contrast ratios as compared to lamp based projectors, so Laser projector blacks are less grey and preferred. 2. Laser projectors have better color consistency and degrade predictably and uniformly over time and typically are good for 20,000 hours, so Laser is preferred over lamp as a projector light source. 3. You can damage your vision by looking into a laser projector lens (when it is on of course) so using a short throw projector that the subject stands so that the projector is behind them or rear projected is the safest configuration when shooting human or animals subjects etc. Some Laser projectors have proximity sensors and dim when an object gets too close to the lens, others do not. 4. DLP vs LCD. DLP can produce a rainbow effect when filming the projected image so LCD is preferred. 5. DLP vs LCD. LCD has better color brightness and saturation over DLP so LCD is preferred. 6. Home vs Commercial Projectors. Some commercial projectors offer "projection mapping" capabilities, which is a sophisticated means of combining the images of multiple projectors, blending the overlapping image edges and compensating for geometric issues as well as offering image calibration across multiple projectors. If you plan to use more than one projector to make a single large image, you will want commercial projectors with projection mapping capabilities. 7. Lens shift and throw distance. Short throw projectors seem to be designed with a narrow through distance range with limited (if at all) optical/physical lens shift capabilities. Many commercial grade projectors have removable lenses with remotely operated motorized lens shift, zoom and focus capabilities. For creative and projection mapping applications, a commercial projector with a detectable lens provides greater placement and screen size options. 8. "4k" projection . True 4k LCD Laser projectors are far more expensive than 4k enhanced LCD projectors that use LCD or DPL imaging element shifting to create the perception of about half the resolution of true 4k (like the LG Cinebeam or Epson LS500 do). Here's what a 3 LCD (1080px1200 native HD) ultra short throw Laser projector with 4000 lumens of light output looks list under trade show conditions front projected and rear projected. It is the Epson PowerLite 700U and Is about $1,400 refurbished. For those who would like to consider using multiple projectors and doing projection mapping, the Epson PowerLite L1100U (6000 Lumens and can take a 4k signal but does not do the 4k enhancement when projection mapping) would be a good entry point at about $2300each refurbished. Here's a video on how a room looks mapped with multiple projectors. I imagine an ALR (ambient light rejecting) screen would help in trying to achieve a useable ratio of screen light to subject light along with higher ISO cameras. @BTM_Pixsuch a great topic. Thank you! I will be following this thread closely.

Step 3 - Start your engines.. So, a few days on and where are we up to ? I'm happy to say that we have moved forward but, obviously, its a very long journey so the extent of that movement is all relative. I'm happy to see though that @majoraxis has put together a good primer regarding the projectors for when (or if 😉 ) I get that far. First step forward was installing Unreal Engine and the first decision there was whether to use the current version 4 (4.27 to be precise) or the early access version of the upcoming version 5. Both versions are free so the choice for me really was to stick with the current v4.27 release version as its more of a known entity so the learning resources are more plentiful, which is important whilst I'm just paddling in the shallows. There is also less of a resource requirement in terms of the machine to run it on which, as I'm using a MacBook pro that is really long in the tooth, is a big factor. Going into this, I am well aware of the limitations of the 1.5gb built in Intel graphics of my MacBook so there is no point trying to explore what v5 brings to the table as judging by the hovercraft noises coming from it when I'm running v4.27 then I'm guessing running v5 would require a fire extinguisher to be at hand. You can have both versions installed on your machine though so if you have a suitable machine then go for it. Just to briefly touch on why v5 is a big deal, the primary aspects are two elements called Nanite and Lumen which offer huge advances in terms of detail and lighting control as discussed here : Obviously, v5 will be the ultimate destination but thats some way off yet, particularly considering that a wallet damaging computer upgrade will be required. As what I'm interested in doing first is applicable to both versions then it can wait anyway and I'll be working in v4.27. OK, so just circling back to the fundamentals of what the hell Unreal Engine is and using very broad brush strokes to discuss it... (apologies for the baby steps) It started as the engine used to produce a game called Unreal back in the late 90s (the clue was always in the name 😉 ) and was then licensed to other game developers over the subsequent years using various licensing models to its current status where it is free of charge in terms of royalties for products grossing less than $1m. Which means its definitely completely free for us ! You can read more about its history here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine Such is its longevity, ubiquity and support of all gaming platforms, its fairly likely that if you have played any games more graphically challenging than Pong in the past few decades that you have already experienced something created with Unreal Engine. If, like me, you have been playing more recent titles such as those that have had you running around Midgar lashing Materia at anything with a Shinra logo on it then you will have noticed how much more cinematic everything is. There have always been the pre-rendered cut scenes that have always looked cinematic of course but now the real time in game content is also taking on an increasingly cinematic look thanks to the simultaneous advancement in machines we are playing them on with the tools in Unreal Engine to simulate the aesthetic. Bringing this down to two very basic elements, Unreal Engine offers you the ability to build and light the set and then provides you with the camera with which to capture it. In real time. And of course, as this emulates the exact paradigm of real world production, the advancements in those two elements is what has sparked the interest in using it for virtual production. From my point of view, the creation of the set is secondary at this point as I don't have the skills or the time at the moment to be creating the assets but, fortunately, I don't have to as there is plenty of starter content that is freely available from the Marketplace for Unreal Engine that we can use to get going. For me, this is all about the virtual camera as this is what we will see the scene through and what we will be looking to match to a real camera so all the initial work I've been doing is using very simple sets and seeing what I can do in terms of operating the virtual camera. The virtual camera has all the same elements of a real camera in that you can not only move its position, change the lens focal length and aperture etc but also control its processing elements such as white balance, ISO and shutter speed. In the parlance of Unreal Engine, this virtual camera is referred to as a Cine Camera Actor and here is an example of how you see it within the editor. So as you can see in this example, we have the Cine Camera Actor pointing at the figure inside the set that has been created and in the bottom right you can see its generated viewport of the scene based on its current settings. The Cine Camera Actor has all the same elements of a real camera in that you can not only move its position, change the lens focal length and aperture etc but also control its processing elements such as white balance, ISO and shutter speed and all these changes that you make will be reflected in the generated viewport in real time. So, if we change the focal length to be wider then we will get the matching field of view, if we move the position of the camera we will see a different part of the scene, if we open the aperture we will get a shallower depth of field and so on, exactly as it would with a real camera. How we make those changes in real time as we would with that real camera will be covered in the next enthralling episode 😉

Not to criticise, however that can't really be done, but they are absolutely 100% linked. If you only see the centre crop of a painting, the composition is different, the brush strokes are different, you're not able to discuss the aesthetics of the whole thing So you can't discuss a lens without adding sensor size to the discussion, or at the very least the sensor format it was designed for.

That cat looks a bit Sheepish to me?

i object... cats are easy targets. So are brick walls come to think of it.... My cat is most spritely in the morning after about 9am, he's not much faster than the proverbial brick wall. Besides that, has anyone asked the cat, how he / she feels about all this objectification ? just to mix it up abit here's something not about cats or brick walls however i did manage to include a few bricks to keep it relevant. 😉 Ignore those weeds i have yet to pick up

i dunno, personally i reckon you might be cheating if you rented something. However if all you own is something like this then i'm sure points will awarded for being ambitious or enthusiastic perhaps. 😉 i think its more about getting out and doing something with what you own regardless of camera type it is. i'm looking forward to other peoples footage and then the behind the scenes approaches to the criteria others have taken.

@BTM_Pix You've surely seen this already but I guess it deserves being posted as its basically identical project (VP with VIVE/UE and short-throw projector):

I have long suspected the latter two don’t really care and are just cheerleaders…

I still think back to when we put the Contax Zeiss 35-70mm on your GFX100 and how fantastic it looked. In the spirit of that particular trip, I would've attempted to buy it off you even though it was actually mine.

Can't believe I forgot to put these gems in my previous post:

No, a lot of them cover 44x33. Especially 85mm or longer. Sigma ART 85mm F1.4 EF mount for example barely even has any brightness fall off at, in corners. Canon FD 85mm F1.2L is sublime. It's nice enough on full frame but on medium format takes on a whole new dimension. DPR wouldn't even bother to scratch the surface of these kinds of combos in their videos. Also Minolta tended to design a larger image circle, for better corner sharpness on full frame - side effect of that is they don't vignette as much on an even larger sensor. One thing to bear in mind with some of the really fast full frame lenses is they're not very sharp wide open so a crop sensor will magnify the aberrations and softness. That's why Contax Zeiss 85mm F1.4 on GH2 back in the day was always best at F2 for detailed shots and ninja star bokeh, and F1.4 for softer portraits and people shots. It was two lenses in one with two completely different looks at different apertures. So it is not just about sensor size but aperture as well. Not even talking depth of field differences but bokeh as well. Plus much lighter to carry round than a 170mm F1.4 on full frame would be. It gave the GH2 a handy leg up in dim light.

OK, I'll give it a go, but my smallest ILC is my S5, which kind of feels like cheating, so I'll go ZV1 and explore the creative opportunities it has there in some form or other. I've got an idea...

For sure, cinema is a combo like every artistic medium, requiring technology, is : ) Let alone the more complex ones... (EAG :- )

Fascinating stuff! As an occasional gamer who recently acquired a PS5, i can only say games using UE engine and other next-gen engines (Detroit, God of War etc) are simply mind blowing with the realism of the environments and real-time rendering of bokeh, rack focusing, lens flare, lighting etc. Also having recently produced a filmed project with augmented 3D assets done in Blender/Unity, this topic is of interest. It was fascinating to me how seamlessly my VFX unit pulled the metadata from the RAW filmed footage to recreate the scene environments respecting focal length, aperture, WB etc. VP is complete next-level, here's another ILM promo from season 2 where they took things even further: Mega-million budget for sure but it would sure be interesting to see if/how this tech can somewhat trickle down..

I'm on to it kye, don't worry, picked up a piece of corflute probably 600 x 900 that should make for a bunch of reflectors. I also bought some cheap silver / gold reflectors off ebay, bit bigger than a hand. I'm hoping they can contribute as well. Next time i go up to warwick, i will buy one more small light which will take my tally up to three. That will give me a key light, fill light and back light. They are only small lights and for a small lego set they should do ok, i hope. I figure i can experiment with position and distance to create a look, for close up shots. Yet to figure out how that equates to wide shots of sets. I doubt my 3 lights will give enough light to fill the set evenly. I presume i will need to buy 3 more larger lights to take it further. Baby steps first. You will of course notice i have acquired a 2400 x 1200 laminate table top. That is the basis for my workspace. At the moment that wood sheet sits atop a couple of sawhorses. Got a mate who can teach me how to weld. If that fails i'll either beg or blackmail my brother into welding up a base for it. Couple of more characters have arrived to help fill out the space. These guys need no introduction 😀 i have one more little guy in transit somewhere, I have plans for a little brick film and i need to add some more characters as funds permit, need six characters all up, not necessarily the above mentioned characters, they where an impulse buy when i saw them lol. Next challenge is to create a walk cycle. Every time i step outside with a camera, the wind picks up, its hard work taking a decent photo of a flower. To remedy that i bought a cheap vase and cheap lazy susan. Had some photography clamps, and a black material backdrop arrive. The plan is to hang the backdrop behind the table and shoot some still-life's. Construction has started on the 2nd shed, film studio / sound stage. Whom am i kidding... my brother with try use it as a carport for his bus converted to motorhome. Still I'm claiming a corner at least for my own nefarious plans. Trying to do a lot more with my cameras and other equipment this year. Considering we seem to lurch from lockdown to lockdown, setting up a small studio is a good idea i think. A short brick film will force me to learn resolve more quickly i feel. The whole lego thing should work as small set, what works on a small set should apply on a large set, maybe im wrong . Not that i have any plans of a feature length movie.

@kye"I am just tired seeing great contributors wasting their talent in bloated debates and become bloated themselves." Great contributors means people who have greatly contributed. There is a lot of appreciation in that sentence. Talent implies, I enjoy their display of talent. A lot of appreciation in my heart, mind and statement. I stand by that. And of course I would love to see you participate in the "weight loosing shooting challenge".:) This thread is a complain as much as it is giving some of my suggestions, giving examples of great stuff, expressing gratitude for the huge archive of quality writings but also expressing my view of the state of things. I believe in this conversation. @MrSMWYou are also guilty of having a great website and work for weddings, with best in town photography and wedding films. So guilt and pleasure are a wedded couple in the human ways. I don´t wish for super control. Otherwise I would have not even been able to express and discuss with you. Curation means structure of forum, suggesting things for display. Expressing what stuff we would be grateful to see from others.

It sounds like you're suggesting that I also get into the weightlosing challenge too, with all my "bloated debates and become bloated themselves". 🙂 I'd enjoy more discussion about footage and lenses too. Maybe you should post some? I've posted multiple threads including lens tests, camera threads, and colour science / profiles. You've only created three new threads since mid-last year and one of them is this thread which just seems to be complaining about the other people on the forum... If you want the forums to be better, then go right ahead and start a good conversation.

Simply making observations made on a real-life comparison test video. Not even arguing about the thousand hours you put in post to emulate the look of the 65+DNA Prime by adding vignette, barrel distortion, grading ETC. No disrespect to your skills but again sorry, you're being off-topic. (Personally, I think I'd rather use a speed booster to achieve any bigger sensor lens look than muck around in post all day with bigger sensor reference footage you never get irl to emulate it, but to each their own.) That is not what I'm saying. What is even a "nice" lens? That's so subjective. Some like modern tack sharp, others soft with vintage flair. What is for sure is that FF has the biggest lens selection 35mm being such an old & popular format. But again, your deflecting to an entire other side conversation. I'm saying a FF/MF/LF lens will give its full characteristics on it's native sensor size, regardless of how "nice" a lens is. On a crop sensor, only the center of the optic will be used, losing some of its inherent characteristics. Its pretty basic stuff really, not sure what you are arguing about. And of course I'm talking about lenses, I thought it was established pages ago that sensor size AND lens pairing go hand-in-hand. Anyways I kinda feel you're being purposely dense and obtuse for the sake of argument winning, I've noticed this in many other threads that seemed to aimlessly go on forever, so let's maybe save up some bandwidth and just agree to disagree on this topic? 😉 Cheers

@Django @PannySVHS You guys are hilarious. I wonder if you can tell me what the colour science of the next canon camera will be like? I mean, I know you haven't seen it, but you also haven't seen the Mini adjusted in post to match the 65, and you're confidently speaking about that! Maybe you can compare the GH6 to the next Canon camera? If I promise to take a video of the lottery numbers next week, can you tell me what that video contains? That'd be great, thanks!

My favorite short film: And a bunch of other favorites: Darkness/Light/Darkness by Jan Svankmajer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1THMc9g5SaU&t=2s Also Antoine and Collette by Francois Truffaut. Not on youtube it seems but I believe is on the Criterion Channel.

Emanuel, of course, I know fuzzynormals stuff from Lumix GM1 to Oly Em5. Have been a fan of the approach and results, filming with little for great effect. Also a great fan of the Gx7 colour footprint. I love the posts and wish for more stuff in that spirit. What i get tired about is eternal and mega lengthy back and forth over specs. Even much moreso i get tired of megalomanias of misunderstanding and misinterpreting within uberlong and repetetive posts, bloated glibberish. Fun fact, Mercer posted Fuzzys BW piece in the 8bit BW thread I have mentioned above. Gorgeous footage! Not so fun fact, footage does not get recognition when buried in the sub section. Until some time ago people were exited about vintage lenes. Not so much anymore in our lens thread. I posted there about the Konica 35 to 100mm F2.8, an exiting piece of glass, which i hunted on ebeach three times to get a great sample. So i know and love fuzzy, mercer and all you great artists and enthusiasts and nerds. It just feels like the art of posting needs some redirection, curation, inspiration and better and tighter communication. I am just tired seeing great contributors wasting their talent in bloated debates and become bloated themselves. Also I would love to further develope a structure of the forum to inspire posts from anamorphic, footage and raw section. After all it's a pity that gems from Tito Ferandes, Seb Farges and others are hidden and lost for an audience. Also, giving people feedback, encouraging creation is something we did much better until some time ago. I will post a bit soon. Just like all of us a bit too busy with life to do so. But i am always exited when some gem of writing is contributed. Thanks for all the great contributions over the years.

I think this is the way to go. MFT will always kinda suck in lowlight. Would much rather have expanded dynamic range.

There isn't any confusion at all involved because math isn't applied. Perception doesn't need to be less scientific than math.

You have to set peaking to a custom button, once you do that you have to press it before you hit record for the peaking to work. Took me forever to figure out why peaking wouldn’t work with my vintage lenses. It’s in the movie menu under the customize buttons setting.

Autumn Leaves Creative Style -3 Contrast, 0 Saturation, -3 Sharpness Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 Rokinon 14mm T3.1 Cine Metabones EF-E Adapter mkIV Edited in FCP X

Hey, I hope you don't mind but I linked to your trailer in an old B&W thread because not enough people check out the footage section anymore. Sadly. But I just noticed that you have it Unlisted on YouTube. I can try and delete it if you want? @fuzzynormal

Fantastic! You nailed it!! B&W truly is the great equalizer with camera equipment. I'm always half tempted to only make B&W films.

Hi I am new here, just thought I would share my first youtube video. I used to shoot video with Canon DSLRs and stopped for sometime, mostly focused on photography, but recently I moved toward sony mirrorless camera and started to test out the video capabilities. This is mostly an experiment I did with a Sony a6600 and anamorphic lenses (Sirui 35mm and 50mm) as well as a Sony 10-18mm.

I single-handedly shot an entire narrative short film during the first lockdown, using the original BMPCC. The camera performed magnificently but I did have it fully rigged out. Shot using two SLR Magic primes - 10mm T2.1 and the 17mm T1.6. A one-person crew and one-mother cast, this is a film featuring my poor mum, who’s never acted, and a very, very unlikely hero… Jean-Luc Godard once said “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” My mum doesn’t speak very good English, so I had to do without dialogue. I didn’t have a gun so we had to do without that too. We couldn’t leave the house, so I shot it all there. And I had no crew to help me, so I did everything myself. If anyone has any feedback or questions I'm always happy to hear! https://youtu.be/SBwje8EDl84

I'm happy to discuss the relative merits and aesthetics of lenses, but that can be done without sensor size being part of it....... but sensor size was the premise of this whole thread, so that's what I was talking about. I have a very particular interest in learning about how this stuff actually works. Fluffy discussions that conflate various things together and confuse one thing with the next prevent tangible things from being learned. I'm getting philosophical here, but you questioned my approach to discussions, so it's relevant. Steve Yedlin put it wonderfully in his spectacular essay "On Colour Science": That applies to all of film-making, not just colour, so let's unpack that a little. "identify, isolate and understand any of these underlying attributes so that we can manipulate them meaningfully for ourselves" The idea here is to identify things we like and things we don't like. Things that work for a particular aesthetic. Then we isolate the underlying attribute. We do this all the time when actually making films. We film something from two different angles and then choose the one we like better. We do this in isolation by looking at a frame, taking a step or two to the left and looking at it again. We position the subject in the centre of the frame, then position them to the right and then the left, examining the effects of changing just one isolated variable. We do this in post by choosing a warm or cooler WB, but putting more or less contrast. etc etc. If we made a list of every individual aspect that is decided when making a film, most of us would have some idea of the effects of these and could talk about them. We then understand these underlying attributes so we can manipulate them for ourselves. I'd imagine that most people into cinema in one way or another would realise that a romantic comedy would be high-key, warmer WB, less sharpened, smoother camera movement, slower editing, happier music. A horror/thriller would be low-key, cooler WB, sharpened harsh image, jerky camera movement, fast paced editing, with ominous music. This is about understanding the aesthetic impacts of these individual aspects of film-making. To turn back to this discussion, or others where you feel I'm being particularly "dense or obtuse" it's actually about trying to drill down using this identify/isolate/understand approach. As far as I can tell, I'm one of the people working hardest on these forums to actually pull apart the specific elements of film-making and understand them. If there are others, they're not sharing their efforts or findings much. @BTM_Pix is an exception of course. This idea of trying to isolate variables is one of the fundamental principles of science, and its taken us from the dark ages to space exploration. Not quite all of human knowledge, but a good deal of it, and it's not anally-retentive about details just for the hell of it, it's because it actually matters. But, I get it. If you're not trying to drill down and get to the specifics, then it's fun to just hang out and say things with loose words and may or may not be true, and just agree with each other for the sake of being nice. I'm not here, posting detailed responses in a thread about the look of various sensor sizes to chew the fat and hang. I'm here to try and learn WTF is actually going on. This discussion has actually been useful for me, counter to how it might appear, I've learned a great deal in terms of sharpening my understanding of the topic, further developing my understanding of how much other people actually know, and the overall psychology of humanity. I also get it that most people here are just looking at cameras as a thing you buy to shoot, edit a bit, adjust the colour a little, export, get paid and move on. From a business perspective it makes total sense. Choose the best package and then just go use it. That's not my approach. I spend more time in post than most, and am willing to put in more effort to develop my skills for post as well. If I can do that and get an advantage then that's worth it for me. My "obtuse" posts are trying to sharpen the conversation to be more specific (seemingly against the wishes of the other participants it seems) to understand concrete things. Sorry if you were just here to speak loosely and draw conclusions without having your logic checked, but that's not what I thought the focus of these forums were. The entire idea of the DSLR revolution was trying to get the best results we can with modest affordable equipment, but that takes specific knowledge, and that requires rigour and questioning.