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I have been playing with the AFC on the S5 recently. Mainly in Human Detection mode and verifying who to focus on by clicking on the box. It has worked quite well in many situations. These were mainly fairly static fashion shoots with a few moving shots (subject or camera). I wouldn't use it for anything critical but for events (weddings, company events etc) where I have to shoot hundreds of shots I think I'll start using it at non critical moments where I think it'll work and thus give my eyes a rest from MF for hours on end. I've used it with the 24-105 and 50 f1.8. But please Panasonic, give us top notch AF in the MK2 versions. I really don't want to go to Sony or Canon as the cameras have everything else I need for the right price.

Can't help with the hat or jacket. If you branch out with into wedding car rental, also doubles down as crowd control. I know a guy... 😉

If you're looking for color accuracy, you'd probably be better off looking at a Sony camera and use one of their picture profiles. Their neutral profile always seemed pretty accurate and allowed a little wiggle room to adjust contrast and saturation to taste. Or maybe grab a camcorder. I feel a lot of people would be better off with a camcorder for video than mucking around with Log profiles in photo cameras.

Had to let y'all know about this great deal that Adorama emailed me. Better jump on it before they change their mind

That's Yankee for: "You are correct, sir!"

Yep. Very important to me also. I’m not opposed to change other than when it’s change for change sake or because the new latest thing ‘might’ make a difference. Another yep. That’s one of four options potentially that I may sometime in the future switch or upgrade to: Fuji XH2 Panny S1/S5 line ii OM-1 Sigma FP next gen But as above ONLY if there is a compelling enough reason for me to do so that makes it worthwhile as changing an entire system is a pain in the ass on so many levels, but principally familiarity. GH6 is also potentially on the table, but right now, the OM Systems option has slightly more appeal… For video, either of the current 4/3 options could easily meet my needs, it’s just the stills side that concerns me. I have had various 4/3 cameras before but they fell slightly short compared with Fuji APSC I was using at the time, so compared with 24mp full frame, never mind my 47mp S1R… I could easily switch back to 4/3 for video without testing as it’s a known quantity for me, but for stills, I’d need to run some tests. Fortunately, all/any change is off the table until at least this next Winter!

On what I shoot I'm everything... director, cinematographer, audio tech, editor, colourist, and Head of Distribution. You'd think that would make things easier, but it just means that instead of a room full of people all blaming each other and feeling good about their own work, I just sit quietly wondering what went wrong and wishing I was better at literally everything! That's probably pretty easy. Shoot a few test shots, then just adjust the curves to get the right output. Specifically, Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Sat and Hue vs Lum. You'd be amazed at how powerful those are. if you start with Contrast/Pivot/Sat and then do a pass on those Hue curves you can really get a good grade very simply and easily. I use them a lot when grading videos from here in Australia where the grass is almost always patchy and somewhere between lush green and straw yellow, and trying to get a shot-to-shot match when you're pointing in different directions and seeing different bits of lawn. The final season (and one episode especially) of the show was so dark that it was difficult to follow what was going on in the show - it was a social media shit-storm, the cinematographer blamed the viewers: https://mashable.com/article/game-of-thrones-too-dark-cinematographer and websites got a lot of mileage talking about how to re-watch it so you could actually see it: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/18522550/game-of-thrones-got-season-8-hbo-battle-of-winterfell-long-night-fix-tv-settings-darkness In reality, it was a large-scale test of how content is consumed in the real world because they pushed how dark the final grade was (which was appropriate to the narrative and subject matter), and the answer was that basically the entire pipeline isn't setup for dark things to even be visible, let alone somehow .. "accurate".

they have opened up travel here in aus. Dunno about nz ? but it would probably be worthwhile ducking home for a visit, getting a camera and avoiding the import duty. If its anything like aus 🙄

Walter Volpatto also mentioned that he's never been asked for a HDR output that wasn't limited to the P3 colour space, so it seems that you're right that 1000 nit P3 is becoming the standard. Colour accuracy is a pipe dream and (besides "how can I get my iPhone to look like an Alexa") is the topic that gets the colourists the most excited. The best approach that I've seen the colourists take is: grade on a calibrated display keep a calibrated consumer-grade 709 display handy and check it every so often to make sure you're not doing anything stupid get whatever display the Director is viewing your work on and check it on that too once it leaves your studio, forget about it whenever someone important (other than the Director) starts yelling at you incoherently about the colour being completely screwed, arrange to have them visit your studio and show them what it looks like on your reference display and make sure to explain in great detail how expensive and calibrated everything is If you want to talk about accuracy, let's start the conversation discussing the final season of Game of Thrones...... It seems to be an approach taken by other manufacturers too - shoot a scene at "correct" exposure on multiple models of their cameras using their standard log profile and you should be able to pull all the footage into post, apply their LUT or CST, and everything should match across all the cameras. Canon did that with the XC10 - matching it to the C-series line, which was why it took the same ridiculously expensive media as the C200/300 but didn't use the cards to even remotely near their performance, and used the C-Log profile but didn't use the full 0-1024 values but instead mapped the XC10 limited DR to where that DR lined up with the same values coming from a C500 or whatever. In the case of the XC10 it meant they basically crippled the camera for the sake of compatibility, but it would have been great to be able to use these for BTS and reference use (which seemed to be something they did) and not have to have a separate colour pipeline in post, which would have been really useful for the VFX folks who might want to see the setups and might also want a colour reference from that.

Yesterday finally after an exhausting day arguing with unreal engine, I managed to get a video with a credible tracking, and the merit is all of a free application for smartphones called blendartrack. I have never been able to use the blender camera tracking, moreover if there are moving subjects you have to stay there to delete the points by hand where there is the overlap of the subject, then you have to align the planes etc etc .... With blendartrack all this is really a walk, from when I open blender to when I export for unreal it takes no more than 15 seconds, truly a liberation ... In this example the tracking in my opinion is not even at its maximum potential because in the rush with my son who wanted to do something else, I forgot to add markers, but it is already very good ... What surprised me then is that the focal length used by the mobile phone is also exported, and that the world of unreal (or at least the one used in this example) responds perfectly to the movements of the real world, without having to scale anything. The only big drawback at the moment is that the video taken with the mobile phone has a very low quality compared to what I can get with the a6300 and its dedicated optics .. I have to figure out how to track the file with my mobile phone and then use a file taken with the mirrorless.

Yes I started off using face tracking but switched to one area + face and found that to be the best of all of the available options. Tracking AF is generally garbage. Tap to confirm focus makes a difference but I can’t remember off hand if that option comes up with one area + face or whether it is a purely face tracking option only…but it does improve things if available. The lighting situation and background plays a part in this due to the nature of how DFD works. Also not shooting wide open on say those f1.8 primes helps. Going forward (and my season starts in around 4 weeks and is then pretty relentless until early Oct) I have reverted my S1H into being my static (ie tripod) B cam and the S5 as my A cam which is on me at all times, handheld or monopod. Why? The S1H can do 30+ minute recordings without resorting to dropping to 8 bit and despite me preferring it in almost every way to the S5, there is one area I do not and that is weight. So it’s S5 back to A cam with Sigma 35mm f2 for indoor work which is switched to Sigma 65mm f2 for outdoor so shooting 4K 50p which is my go to, effectively shooting with a 50 indoors and a 100 out. I am keeping the kit zoom 20-60 close by though for those few times when I need the best tracking AF that I can get, ie, entrances, exits etc and shooting that at f4 or 5.6 at it’s widest focal length, ie, a ‘30mm’ equiv. Finally, in order to mitigate some of the chunk of the S1H, I’m welding on the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 as that thing is tiny and very lightweight yet offers an equivalent field of view of 27-75mm so pretty flexible. This unit is pure static manual AF anyway. I’ll report back if I find anything new as this week is designated as another week of testing. More to keep some familiarity going than anything as even a couple of weeks off produces a surprising amount of initial ring rust.

Here you go, try it with this thumbnail to tick all the boxes that will get you on the front page.

It's all such a missed opportunity really. The internet has morphed from "we put ads around what you watch, that keeps it free" to "literally everything is an advert". It all ties up with the false narrative of infinite growth, the endless destruction of resources in order to replace goods with intentionally shortened lifespans, the rewarding of the most narcissistic and least intellectually and emotionally developed people with the greatest prizes... I've had VR since very early on, it's cool but full of flaws, I hope more people do good things with it. But what's supposed to be the draw with a highly corporatised "metaverse"? I get to watch even more invasive adverts, have lowest-common denominator borderline-educationally subnormal "influencers" shouting and pulling WIDEMOUTH WIDEYES face directly injected into my eyes hahahah, all the while being somehow exploited for data in ever more dystopian ways? Why would I bother? On Canonrumors chap's meltdown on Twitter, I find camera YouTube remarkably depressing because it's just endless clones of the same #content over and over saying the same things. Every person with pastel coloured backlight, every person with a softbox off to the side, every person saying the same things and doing the same tests, hoping to get their scraps from the table. Then you buy a camera and actually use it to make stuff and it is NOTHING like any of them said it would be cos they only scratch the surface and move on to pulling pogface beside the next piece of gear... I was thinking maybe I should make a vid that is a "2 years in" review of the S1H cos it'd be a bit different, but I bet the algorithms would just hide it because it isn't selling the latest trending model. That's how disheartening it is, it just makes me think "why bother".

Worse than that I had it actually "crash" my camera. The tracking box turned red (it is supposed to be yellow) and autofocus stopped. Couldn't change to a different autofocus mode, either. had to turn off and restart the camera. Not as far as I can tell... maybe if there are two different faces in the one area box it might??? But normally you can't "confirm" focus on a face by touching the facial recognition box or by pushing in the joystick.