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  1. Certainly came out of the blue, did this from Craig. I wish him all the best. Sounds like he needs a break like me. If he sold the site to a good home, and took a good pay cheque from it I hope he can build something fresh and new out of that and use the money to take a good photographic adventure. Social media brings out the worst instincts in human beings. Tribal behaviours. Epidemic misinformation and lies. I didn't see what has been going on with Craig, but he seems to have completely deleted his Twitter and closed up shop there. The internet is fucked. Facebook can go out of business as far as I'm concerned, and they've ruined Instagram / WhatsApp too, so they can go in the bin along with the whole Meta group. Fuck VR as well. Nobody wants this shit. It's a distraction at best, at worst it can takes lives or destroys democratic political system. Facebook and social media has sucked so much life out of my own business - this forum would be busier too, if it weren't for the distraction of Facebook groups and Twitter. Thankfully $200 billion shaved off FB's share price this week so couldn't happen to a nicer company. I haven't always seen eye to eye with any of the rumours sites. But I genuinely do wish Craig well in what he does next
    4 points
  2. To be honest mate, he was more than happy to set his gang of rabid little shits off on you over the R5 overheating issue until he belatedly realised he had backed the wrong horse. That was grade A shithouse behaviour.
    3 points
  3. As I gradually get more serious about learning the art of editing, I've discovered it's a very under-represented topic on social media. There are definitely some good resources, but compared to cinematography or colour grading, it's much more difficult to find resources, especially if your interest isn't purely narrative film-making. A good strategy is to search for editors by name, as often the good stuff is just called "<name> presents at <event>" and no mention of editing or even film at all. However, you can search for editor after editor and find nothing useful at all. As such, I've now started analysing other people's edits directly, hoping to glean interesting things from their work. My process is this. Step 1: Download the video in a format that Resolve can read I use 4K Video Downloader for Mac, but there's tonnes of options. You're probably violating terms of service by doing this, so beware. Step 2: Use the Scene Cut Detection feature in Resolve Resolve has this amazing function that not many people know about. It analyses the video frame-by-frame and tries to guess where the cut points are by how visually different one frame is from the previous one. It's designed for colourists to be able to chop up shots when given a single file with the shots all back-to-back. This isn't a tutorial on how to use it (the manual is excellent for this) but even this tool shows useful things. Once it has analysed the video, it gives you the window to review and edit the cut points. Here's a window showing a travel video from Matteo Bertoli: What we can see here is that the video has very clear cuts (the taller the line the more change between frames) and they occur at very regular intervals (he's editing to the music), but that there are periods where the timing is different. Let's contrast that with the trailer for Mindhunter: We can see that there's more variation in pacing, and more gradual transitions between faster and slower cutting. Also, there are these bursts, which indicate fading in and out, which is used throughout the trailer. These require some work to clean up before importing the shots to the project. Lastly, this is the RED Komodo promo video with Jason Momoa and the bikers: There are obviously a lot of clean edits, but the bursts in this case are shots with lots of movement, as this trailer has some action-filled and dynamic camera work. I find this tool very useful to see pace and timing and overall structure of a video. I haven't used it yet on things longer than 10 minutes, so not sure how it would go in those instances, but you can zoom in and scroll in this view, so presumably you could find a useful scale and scroll through, seeing what you see. This tool creates a list of shots, and gives a magic button... Then you get the individual shots in your media pool. Step 3: "Recreation" of the timeline From there you can pull those shots into the timeline, which looks like this: However, this wouldn't have been how they would have edited it, and for educational purposes we can do better. I like to start by manually chopping up the audio independently from the video (the Scene Cut Detection tool is visual-only after all). For this you would pull in sections of music, maybe sections of interviews, speeches, or ambient soundscapes as individual clips. If there are speeches overlapping with music then you could duplicate these, with one track showing the music and another showing the speeches. Remember, this timeline doesn't have to play perfectly, it's for studying the edit they made by trying to replicate the relevant details. This travel video had one music track and no foley, so I'd just represent it like this: I've expanded the height of the audio track as with this type of music-driven edit, the swells of the music are a significant structural component to the edit. It's immediately obvious, even in such a basic deconstruction, that the pace of editing changes each time the music picks up in intensity, that once it's at its highest the pace of editing stays relatively stable and regular, and then at the end the pace gradually slows down. Even just visually we can see the structure of the story and journey that the video takes through its edit. But, we can do more. Wouldn't it be great to be able to see where certain techniques were used? Framing, subject matter, scenes, etc etc? We can represent these visually, through layers and colour coding and other techniques. Here is my breakdown of another Matteo video: Here's what I've done: V6 are the "hero" shots of the edit. Shots in orange are where either Matteo or his wife (the heroes of the travel video) are the subject of the video, and pink are close-ups of them V5 is where either Matteo or his wife are in the shot, but it doesn't feature them so prominently. IIRC these examples are closeup shots of Matteo's wife holding her phone, or one of them featured non-prominently in the frame, perhaps not even facing camera V4 and below do not feature our heroes... V4 either features random people (it's a travel video so people are an important subject) prominently enough to distinguish individuals, or features very significant inanimate objects V3 features people at a significant enough distance to not really notice individuals, or interesting inanimate objects (buildings etc) V2 are super-wide shots with no details of people (wides of the city skyline, water reflections on a river, etc) V1 is where I've put in dummy clips to categorise "scenes", and in this case Green is travel sections shot in transport or of transport, and Blue is shots at a location V2-V6 are my current working theory of how to edit a travel film, and represents a sort of ranking where closeups of your heroes are the most interesting and anonymous b-roll is the least interesting. You should adapt this to be whatever you're interested in. You could categorise shots based on composition, which characters are in the shot, which lens was used, if there was movement in the shot, if there was dialogue from the person in-shot or dialog from the person not-in-shot or no dialog at all, etc etc. Remember you can sort between tracks, you can colour code, and probably other things I haven't yet tried. NLEs have lots of visual features so go nuts. Step 4: Understand what the editor has done Really this depends on what you're interested in learning, but I recommend the following approach: Make a list of questions or themes to pay attention to Focus on just one question / theme and review the whole timeline just looking at this one consideration I find that it's easy to review an edit and every time you look at the start you notice one thing (eg, pacing), and then in the next section you notice another (eg, compositions), and then at the end you notice a third (eg, camera movement). The problem with this is that every time you review the video you're only going to think of those things at those times, which means that although you've seen the pacing at the start you're not going to be noticing the compositions and camera movement at the start, or other factors at other times. This is why focusing on one question or one theme at a time is so powerful, it forces you to notice things that aren't the most obvious. Step 5: Look for patterns We have all likely read about how in many films different characters have different music - their "theme". Star Wars is the classic one, of course, with Darth Vaders theme being iconic. This is just using a certain song for a certain character. There are an almost infinite number of other potential relationships that an editor could be paying attention to, but because we can't just ask them, we have to try and notice them for ourselves. Does the editor tend to use a certain pacing for a certain subject? Colour grade for locations (almost definitely, but study them and see what you can learn)? Combinations of shots? What about the edit points themselves? If it's a narrative, does the editor cut some characters off, cutting to another shot while they're still talking, or immediately after they've stopped speaking, rather than lingering on them for longer? Do certain characters get a lot of J cuts? Do certain characters get more than their fair share of reaction shots (typically the main characters would as we care more about what main characters think than what secondary characters feel while they're talking). On certain pivotal scenes or moments, watch the footage back very slowly and see what you can see. Even stepping through frame-by-frame can be revealing and potentially illuminate invisible cuts or other small tweaks. Changing the timing of an edit point by even a single frame can make a non-trivial aesthetic difference. Step 6: Optional - Change the edit Change the timing of edits and see what happens. In Resolve the Scene Cut Detection doesn't include any extra frames, so you can't slide edit points the way you normally would be able to when working with the real source footage, but if you pull in the whole video into a track underneath the individual clips you can sometimes rearrange clips to leave gaps and they're not that noticeable. This obviously won't create a publishable re-edit, but for the purposes of learning about the edit it can be useful. You can change the order of the existing clips, you can shorten clips and change the timing, etc. You could even re-mix the whole edit if you wanted to, working within the context of a severely limited set of "source footage" of course, but considering that the purpose of this is to learn and understand, it's worth considering. Final thoughts Is this a lot of work? Yes. But learning anything is hard work - the brain is lazy that way. Also, this might be the only way to learn certain things about certain editors, as it seems that editors are much less public people than other roles in film-making. One experiment I tried was instead of taking the time to chop up and categorise a film, I just watched it on repeat for the same amount of time. I watched a 3.5 minute travel film on repeat for about 45 minutes - something like a dozen times. I started watching it just taking it in and paying attention to what I noticed, then I started paying attention to how I felt in response to each shot, then to the timing of the shots (I clapped along to the music paying attention to the timing of edits - I was literally repeating out loud "cut - two - three - four"), I paid attention to the composition, to the subject, etc etc.. But, I realised that by the time I had watched a minute of footage I'd sort-of forgotten what happened 30 shots ago, so getting the big-picture wasn't so easy, and when I chopped that film up, although I'd noticed some things, there were other things that stood out almost immediately that I hadn't noticed the dozen times I watched it, despite really paying attention. Hopefully this is useful.
    2 points
  4. I might get a lot of hate here for saying this....but he came across as a complete prick to me and I personally will not miss him one bit; I will miss the rumors site and information itself but his behavior towards me IMO was not much better than the behavior he is saying he received from others. When the Canon R5 overheating fiasco happened I was the first one on that site to really tell it like it was. I wasted many hours getting into endless debates with the Canon fanboys on that site who swore the overheating wasn't a big deal and wouldn't affect the camera's useability. I kept everything respectful, simply stated my opinion and basically said the camera would be completely useless for even light professional work (which turned out to be right in a big way), and Craig banned me for it and labelled my account a troll. Incidentally, getting banned from there helped me discover this site so for me it all turned out fine. Craig made it clear that on his site any post that wasn't worshipping at the feet of all things Canon would get the user banned; not even a warning.
    2 points
  5. MrSMW

    What to Buy?

    Meet in the middle and agree on 'somewhere around 3/10' 😜
    2 points
  6. Bail. Good call. Things seem to be built for 13 year olds. There needs to be an evolution of internet culture in order to healthily engage with it. Might not even happen in or lifetime, but it's okay for some of us to be content on the sidelines.
    2 points
  7. Davide DB

    GH5 Video guideline

    Hi all, I was shooting open gate and trying to set display video guidelines (markers) on my GH5 with latest firmware. I see Andrew on his old post has these nice blue lines while on my camera they are thin and grey nearly visible. On the GH5S I can set band color, transaprency etc... Is it possible on GH5? Am I missing some menu? Thank you in advance
    1 point
  8. All people say crazy things about each other on social media. Thats not the main story. Name calling and ugly conversation came after Craig attacking youtubers for the fact they're stealing his work and pretend they're making original content. Its about money after all, because the videos that contain CR materials are getting more views, so making a lot of money for the channel owner. He was very angry that he does the job, he has the sources, but a bunch of Not_Even_A_Photographer "influencers" take most of the money. He lost his control when they told him "we owe you nothing", in many different ways. I would handle this better, but I'm not him, and its a tricky situation. Because.. well.. you you can't copyright rumors 🙂
    1 point
  9. 1 point
  10. lebigmac

    A7IV opinions

    Here for some first impressions (I did not posses the A7iiI, some things might be familiar to you that are new to me). I can’t say anything substantial about the IQ just yet. But I’d like to share what I think about the overall handling in comparison. First of all, the package does not look like a Japanese gift at all, more like for a north korean showel. Strange for a product of this price. Maybe it is due to environmental considerations, but there was no label or explanation of sort. Weight and size: All seems more balanced, smaller and lighter than the nikon z6, although that might not be the case. The body gives a kind of hollow impression, which is not unpleasant. The feel of the buttons and dials: Cheapo. All feels like plastic parts from an 3D printer were stitched together afterwards without fitting to 100%. All dials and buttons give you a sort of resistance like they don’t want to be used. No comparison to the refined feel of superior material of an Z6 or the NX1. EVF is okay, but you always have to hit the center with your eye, otherwise it gets unsharp very quickly to the sides (like on the gx80). I tend to press my eye bone to the frame of the evf all the time, in order to get it right, and that starts to hurt after some time. LCD screen ist okay, but certainly not as brilliant as the one from the NX1 and it’s smaller than the Z6’s. It has a huge bezel, so why in the world is it not possible to make the screen a bit bigger as 3’’ ?. A digital camera is an optical tool in the end, and this one competes with smartphones to a certain extend, which offer a brilliant bright screen twice as big as the Sony A7IV’s one. It think, it is all a bit outdated, and it is a prospect of things to come. Maybe, it was not the best idea to design digital DSLRs on the basis of its analogue predecessors from the 60ties at all, which sported no LCD obviously. Maybe future cameras will have to look different. Menu is good, I had no problems with the one from A7 mark I though, but it is definitely a revelation compared to the classic NEX menus. Focus peaking implementation is great, you can switch it on and off easily and when it’s on, it doesn’t intrude too much in the picture (like it does on the z6). Button and dial assignment is straightforward as well, it’s a quick and easy affair. A great feature is that you can use the lcd screen as a touchpad for focusing while looking through the EVF. It works not as snappy as on the gx80, but it is definitely usable. In terms of heat, I can’t say anything, ( I shot 1 short piece outside without any problems) yet, but I noticed that the camera gets noticeably hot while charging the battery.
    1 point
  11. Its that hypocrisy that gets me.
    1 point
  12. Oh yes. I'd forgotten about that. Crazy fanboy lunatics. I had daily anonymous threats via my contact form with fake email addresses. Found the guy by looking up his IP address and comparing it to previous website use where he'd used his name and email. I think the reason I forgot about the Canon fanboys was because most of all I remember the Philip Bloom defenders coming after me in their hundreds.
    1 point
  13. [Small correction] I'm getting old and my memory can't remember exactly: They were 2x12 min at 800 watts. I add a photo of one of my bags. They are very hot, you can barely touch them with your bare hands after a few minutes. It exhales a lot of water vapour, probably toxic because the smell is not like water at all. In a recent project, I put a temperature/humidity sensor with a cheap IOT module, so I can check real-time data over the internet from my smartphone all over the world and see graphs of my historical data. If someone is interested I can recover the project
    1 point
  14. kaylee

    The Aesthetic

    resolution (2001)
    1 point
  15. Yeah, social media has become such a detriment to society at this point. I'm constantly blown away seeing adults, some in their 50s and 60s, acting like children and reveling in their ignorance. It's frustrating and depressing all at once.
    1 point
  16. I have big silica bags (1kg) I'm my gear closet. I usually reused every 1 or 2 month following the manufacturer instructions: Microwave at 800watts during 15min, turn upside down and another 15min.
    1 point
  17. Michael S

    The Aesthetic

    I believe the point OP is trying to make is: "A part of the people who are shooting video have specific ideas about what a good image is but I think they are wrong. These people often have their origin in photography more so then cinematography which would explain their preference for specific visual attributes. Cinematographers however have very different criteria to judge an image and should not take their cues from these people." I do think that photography and cinema do each have their own language. Being a good photographer doesn't make you a good cinematographer or vice versa. An image which works as a photo might not work as part of a narrative sequence and a great scene from a movie might very well fall flat as a still. However I think this distinction has nothing to do with a particular aesthetic. A good photographer may just as well "dirty-up" the image as part of his work. The significant distinction is intent. Professional photographers and cinematographers first think about what they want to achieve with their images and then use anything in their toolbox to achieve that, be it softening, sharpening, fish-eye distortion, rectilinear (distortion), vintage aberrations etc. The not so professional doesn't think it through that much and uses what he has, or simply uses what he saw others using because it worked really well or looked cool without thinking about how appropriate it is for what he is trying to do. The starting point should be intent, why do I shoot this image? Everything else should follow from that. And then there is the distinction between those who want to lock a look in camera (so it becomes harder to mess with your intent during post-production) and those who prefer to capture it all as neutral and pristine as possible to allow for maximum flexibility in post (so you can change your intent I guess?).
    1 point
  18. now I am scared 😅
    1 point
  19. TomTheDP

    The Aesthetic

    Almost all theater stuff ends up on streaming, sooner rather then later these days, sometimes immediately. They are technically different sensors but it is the same exact same tech, just bigger. Aside from the size of the noise which obviously decreases as the sensor becomes larger, the images are identical. Any other company is using completely different sensors in their S35 vs full frame cameras, which is incredibly apparent when shooting side by side with them. Maybe its not an intentional statement but anything ARRI does is a statement in the industry by default imo. Most content is going to end up in the trash so the idea of future proofing is extremely silly to me. Content is more disposable then ever. Consumerism is driving most things rather then necessity. All the hype over 4k and I have never even noticed a difference between IMAX and standard theater projections. But my opinion doesn't matter and if I was shooting for Netflix or any major studio I would be using an LF not my Classic. Confirmed to be 4k. About YouTube its more of a bitrate issue then resolution from what I have noticed. 2k videos uploaded in 4k look much better then 2k videos uploaded in HD. It's always been an annoyance for me, where the original capture looks much better then the compressed or shitty screen you are viewing it on. Internet compression hates saturation, noise, and shadows.
    1 point
  20. Andrew Reid

    The Aesthetic

    They have all missed a trick there. Should have shot everything in 12K and just cropped instead of using lenses!
    1 point
  21. I am equally shocked that the "g" word was ever mentioned by you 🙂. I will admit I went through the full gambit, started out on a tripod (real estate work), moved to a monopod (events), discovered gimbals (tried to shoot everything on them), then got fed up with how fiddly they are and with the IBIS being so good I now love handheld. The S5 is so steady that I add camera movement just to add back some motion to the footage. Mind you, that's for standing only or taking one or two steps at most; anything more than that and I suffer through the gimbal rigging and setup. I absolutely hated the R6 for anything video related but that's just me. For short un-complicated gimbal work it could be a good solution though. If you can, I'd try to go to a local retailer and hold one and play with the menus a bit in the store. Unfortunately, you can't find all of the problems that way, but the R6 is really cheap feeling in the hands. The grip is great but the material is several notches below the S5 IMO. With the Sony, would you need to buy Sony lenses to use the CAF?
    1 point
  22. The C70 is a great image. In the right setting, it definitely looks great. Arri beat it in skin texture, color detail in the shadows, over exposure, color separation, etc. I’ve shot very consistently with the Canon C300 Mk2 for the last 5 years. The C70 is such a close image. I’m sure the OG C300ii would feel very close to the Alexa as well. The DGO sensor is great and all, but the C300 Mk3 / C70 is also 5 years newer than the C300 Mk2. I’m honestly a bit underwhelmed if anything. It’s just so similar. Cleaner... but again, it’s 5 years newer. Things like false color, better auto focus, long GOP, cleaner C-Log2, 4K/60p are all things that impress me more than the DGO sensor. I’ve shot projects where I used the C70 and C300ii next to each other for interviews. For better or for worse, I very much doubt anyone could tell the difference, even when looking at the raw source material. The highlights are great on the C70, but anything pointed into the sun sucks. You get the clipping blob in really bright sources or the sun. Once you see it, you know what to look for and it is always there. Pocket 6K probably does it worse. Komodo a little better. Film handles it by far the best. Ive said this before... but the Long GOP 4k codec on the C70 is so great. You get a cleaner, sharper image than the older generation Canon cameras and it looks really great. The files are also almost 3x as small. I’m interested to see what effect the CRL files will have on the image. If the files are even a little sharper and just a bit noisier / textured, that would be great.
    1 point
  23. Below is a short excerpt from his post but this is not surprising as so much goes on behind the scenes that most don’t know about. https://www.canonrumors.com/thats-all-folks-for-me-anyway-canon-rumors-will-live-on/ This has sort of been in the works for about the last year or so. I haven’t had much fun with this site over the last 2 or 3 years, a new demographic of people have exhausted me. I think a lot of this change started with the proliferation of YouTube personalities over the last 5 years. Nothing is about information anymore, it’s only about whose saying it. This is true for all forms of media and I really don’t want to be a part of it. However, yesterday they came at my children and my wife. They came at my family….. little fanboys of certain YouTubers that have obviously been raised horribly. What was in my inbox I won’t even show my wife. I’m tearing up writing this with absolute disgust for how horrible people are becoming. All of this is created by the personalities (I refuse to call them creators), they feed off of it, they profit off of it and they don’t care
    0 points
  24. Has anyone here attempted using the HDMI output on their a7iv? I bought one to use both for photo and for video, and for video I was planning on using my ninja v that I use with my a7siii. When I plugged into the ninja the camera immediately overheated, within 15 min. No recording, just sitting idle outputting hdmi. I've tested with every resolution, frame rate, af setting, and no change. Even with 1080p it heats up quickly, and even with auto-shutoff set to high. If I don't hit record internally it will last over an hour outputting, but if I record a single minute of footage it immediately overheats. This is my second a7iv body, I exchanged for a new one because of this exact issue, and the new one is identical. And this is middle of winter. If I ever try to use it during the summer or in a warmer room it will be unusable even for just external output.
    0 points
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