Leaderboard

Indeed. I actually use MF over 90% of the time and with the S1H, close to 100%. The only time I need and use AF is with the S5, on a tripod, entrances, exits, confetti, ie, maybe 1 minute actual shooting time during a typical 9-15 hour shoot. The S1H I can't see being anything but MF this year as that's my more 'artistic', on me at all times, filmmaking camera whereas I class the S5 in it's use (as above plus entire duration ceremony and entire duration speeches) as my video camera. But...and it's the big BUT, that 1 minute or whatever per job when I need reliable AF is what counts. And based on my most recent tests, the S5 with the 20-60 with my current latest tweaks to the AF set up is not bad at all. In fact, it worked when my back up Sony ZV1 which has excellent AF, failed. Answer? Hotshoe mount the ZV1 on the S5 for those crucial moments and double-team it! Yep, I wouldn't trade my S5 for an A7iv as it's a sideways step and personally for me, if anything, a slight downgrade in various regards except AF. The business case for the R6 is very good for anyone with EF glass. Makes complete sense. As long as you can live with the potential or even just the fear of overheeating. I reckon I could take that punt if needs be and if I shot Canon, would use an R5 for 90% stills and 10% video and use a pair of R6's purely for video, but only one would run for extended periods of time so I could...pardon the pun, hot swap them if needs be. Providing they do bring out the next gen S1/S5 line, I'd say it would be suicide to do anything less so I'd expect the AF to not necessarily be PDAF, but simply 'really quite good and reliable', plus 6k 60p full frame would be my best guess. Probably asking a bit much for them to jump to full frame 8k 60p...and I personally don't want or need it anyway. I shoot 128GB SD cards and rarely have to use a second on any wedding day and that's over a typical 9-15 hour shoot. If it's been a pretty heavy day, I might swap the cards out before evening speeches because despite the bride assuring me, "oh it will only be 20 minutes", some 1 hour 20 mins later and the light has faded plus all my additional lighting has run out... 🤪

I have made some other small but significant progress ... Finally I can set up the sequencer of unreal quite fast and predictable, before there was always something that had to be done that I did not do that made me waste hours just understanding why it behaves in this way etc etc .. Then I finally understood how to create foreground plans in such a way as to increase the realism of the scene ... This bad example of animation really helped me understand this, and as always with unreal, it was not easy at all, at least for me ...;)

wow.... thats some rig my p4k and its smallrig is feeling a little insecure at the moment lol

As years go by, I seriously seem to love this camera even more. I've worked with plenty of cameras over the years, like many Gh5, A7iii, Bmpcc 6k, Ursa Mini, Eos R, etc and despite it's difficulties, at the end of the day, I always come back to it. The quality of the images, and the ease of use - in terms of editing - in Prores 422 (as I prefer to use it), is just magical. Newer entries like GH6, make me curious, but I still believe the BMMCC can easily be an a cam for narrative work. And this topic makes me realize it even more.

Just bought a GFX 50R by the way 😆

Got the R5c today, checked the video AF and it locked on fine. 512GB only last 30min of 8k50p, on 5.9k 50p it last nearly an hour which is more doable. Might have to use the speedbooster again for 5.9k raw 🤔 And battery life is much worse than R5, 4k50p last 40 something min so I guess I will be pairing with my 18w pd powerbank for long tripod shoot.. Btw absolutely no video on photo mode. You have to switch mode to do video and vice versa. Body and operating wise it feels like mini c70 when shooting video, better balance with lens than R5 I reckon.

Yeah the A7S3 is nice but nothing crazy. Its definitely not 13 stops if the Alexa has 14. I really think it depends on the scene. I can get a really nice shot on my iphone if the dynamic range of the scene is small. There are definitely times where my Alexa and any other given camera are hard to tell apart, but when you get super strong highlights it's game over. Even something like the BMPCC with lower dynamic range just looks better in high dynamic range scenes as the texture is so much better. Pulling shadows out of compressed H264 never looks great. RAW just looks better usually. My S1 has better dynamic range than the old RED Scarlet. But the Scarlet's shadows just look better. Over all the current full frame cameras are pretty crazy good for most people's needs.

Ha, just been going through a similar kind of quest really… I have a decent desktop PC with a 25” Benq monitor. I have a new 14” MacBook Pro for work on the go. I shoot 50% stills and 50% video so both of equal importance. All was fine ‘on paper’ until I tried editing video in the MacBook. Screen real estate. It has nowhere near enough! So I bought a 15.6” portable monitor to use on the road (I work out of my caravan/travel trailer roughly 2 months per annum) which solved the issue as rather than a ‘mirror’, I have set it up to keep Premiere Pro tools on the MacBook and the actual video window full screen in the monitor. But then we hit another problem which is it is impossible to calibrate them to be the same. I use Xrite and you cannot calibrate a MacBook Pro with it so what I have done and do is as follows: 1: Calibrated my desktop using Xrite. 2: Manually calibrated my second monitor to resemble visually as close as is possible, it’s bigger (and better) desktop brother. It’s not perfect, but not too far off. 3: The MacBook itself I can’t get anywhere near like the second monitor or the Benq, so what I am doing instead is: A: Doing the assembly work on the MacBook Pro on the road, but stop short of grading the project and instead… B:…wait until I get back home to my office and then transfer the project to my desktop PC and do the colour grade, final tweaks, export and upload etc. Conclusion. With hindsight, I would probably have been better off going with a Mac Mini and so when I get home, plugging that into my big Benq. But it’s no biggie and the only real difference is a portable HD between the 2 systems. When my PC finally needs to be consigned to the scrap heap, I will go Mac in the studio which will provide better consistency. I have only one other option to try and that is when I get back from a job, connect the MacBook itself to my Benq. I’ll work out the most efficient and best workflow as this year progresses…

Yes I can see how that would affect you so it always comes back to the same 3 choices: 1: Give up and don’t try and fight the tide. 2: If you can’t beat them, join them. 3: Remain a beacon of resistance. I face similar choices in my business as I am well aware that newer, cheaper folk come along and approach the same venues & planners I am in with and say, “hey, I’m half the price of that guy and for every booking I get that you punt my way, I will give you 10%/x amount”. Even with some of my more rock solid venues and planners, someone gets in at some point and I drop off their radar as the work dries up. Ultimately no one gives a shit, except for ourselves. It’s just business and it has always been a fact for thousands of years that you have to go after your slice of the pie, then defend that slice as hard as you are willing to, but the one thing you will never win against is the tide. Maybe it’s not enough to occupy the moral high ground and keep your integrity but I think there is (an argument for doing so) and it then becomes a case of being niche and not mass market? I dunno and am just musing really while I loll about on a Saturday afternoon in my deck chair…

Nothing wrong with buying a used one. They have no moving parts so unless it was dropped from a high height, I see no reason other than a newer model being out not to buy one.

Thanks for the huge amount of knowledge @kye Sorry to re ask my question, but I don't want to wait to long to buy. Is it bad to buy a used callibrator? Anything that can go wrong with them? A used Xrite eye one pro package going for slightly cheaper than the i1 display you suggested. Eye one pro is quite old though, better to go with more recent models? I noticed some calibrators can be used to calibrate projector. That can be handy in the future, as we might go for a projector instead of a tv in the living room.

As much as I agree with the statement that if it looks good, it is good, I must question the point of shooting with an S1H if you're not using vLog? You're probably losing at least a stop of dynamic range. So it's very possible you're getting around 10.5 stops. You may as well shoot with a Canon or Sony and get excellent AF. Why make life difficult when there's money involved. The bride couldn't care less about the cool waveform feature.

If anything is different to a calibrated monitor then it doesn't look "better", it looks "inaccurate". My Dell panel was also factory calibrated, but oh boy did it change when I calibrated it. This might lead you to question how good calibration really is, but when I calibrated my MBP display and my external display I could move an image between the two and the colours would look very similar indeed. The main difference was that the MBP display changes quite significantly when you change the angle of the display, so getting a perfect visual match on brightness / contrast / saturation is impossible. Think about it this way... if I made a custom LUT and applied it to your laptop display, you'd want me to remove it wouldn't you? Even if you were doing videos on planes/trains/automobiles. The fact that it's not controlled lighting doesn't mean you're happy to colour your videos through my LUT. That's what having an uncalibrated display is like - an unknown LUT applied permanently to that display. Besides, it's actually very easy to arrange a controlled lighting environment. The only thing you need is to have is relatively low-level temperature ambient lighting. For that I recommend MediaLight bulbs: https://www.biaslighting.com/en-au/products/medialight-mk2-dimmable-e26-110v-a19-bulb They fit into a standard light socket and are completely neutral in temp/tint. Put one of these into a lamp, ensure that it's shining on a relatively neutral surface, close the blinds, and you're fine. I agree that for rec709 most displays should be fine, if they're calibrated. One colourist mentioned that after calibration the image on their consumer-grade GUI monitor was very close to their super-high-end reference display, so unless you're doing mission-critical work then (for rec709) you should be fine with a calibrated monitor.

ok, so who's review did you watch ? 😉

your right mostly. The video from the em-10 mark two is pretty ordinary, the mark three is definitely a step up as witnessed by andrew reid and his blog about it. However i'm complaining about the the photo side of things. The mark 3 doesn't have a port for a remote control shutter whereas the mark two does, although its my own fault i didn't investigate its ability for tethering at the time. call me cynical, however it seems to me, since the camera already has usb on board, it should a small matter or expense to implement tethering on it. Its just another usb mode right ? Its easy to imagine that somebody high up felt that it may impact sales of its big brother. We have these things called smart phones, their like electronic swiss army knives. Not much you cant do with one. Honestly i cant say the same about cameras, it appears there's no such thing as a smart camera. Camera manufacturing is in a hole, mostly because they lack vision or maybe their just a bunch of greedy buggers, not that i am asking for a phone or google drive on my camera. Best example so far is canon, sure you can use it to take a photo, but then magic lantern came along and showed us there's truckloads more that could be done with the same equipment. Thats all i want, the same equipment with all the usability that can be thrown in. Until camera manufactures learn that basic lesson, some of them will keep travelling the same path as the dodo. Sad but true.

How's that been working out for them ?

Good to know. The 1440p was already giving me pause

Congrats! Where did you order from (and what time of day)? I'm still waiting for mine.

C70's raw file size is much more manageable than c200/c300's 1gbps monster and that's only 10bit in 4k50/60p vs 12bit on c70. The 2k raw is even usable in wedding too lol (for ceremony, not sure about reception cause of lowlight on s16 crop). This raw update really makes c70 attractive! No need bulky external monitor + battery if you want compact raw cinema camera.

Yeah but there is and was a reason so many company's used a Sony sensor was they had good DR. A Barbi Cam had better DR than Canon cameras had years ago.

I quite like Mr Huff and his understated enthusiasm, especially for Leica and Sigma products…though I think he might have gone off Leica recently, or for a while. Personally I don’t care what any of them get or receive from any brand. Whether they are a brand ambassador, a paid shill, an unpaid shill, a genuine enthusiast or a complete fuckwit, I take it all with a pinch of salt and make my own mind up. I think with Huff he can be a little bit ‘kid in the sweet shop’ at times over new kit, as so many can be, mainly only finding the new good stuff, but you need to live with something long term to get a more balanced picture.

Yeah I was into to it also for 10 or more years. High end audio is like owning a 40 foot power boat, endless money pit. And what is funny by the time you can afford to do it you are already losing your hearing. So a big waste of time and money.

Couple shots of my BMPCC with my 14x Fujinon.

The news shooter article says that normal retail price will be $3,500 or so, which seems reasonable. The price of mechanical and electronic components has plummeted over the lsat few decades thanks to centralisation in China. The factor that makes or breaks products these days is the design of the physical unit and the software that controls it. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, so I would reserve judgement until there are units in the wild, and of course, all PR materials that are real (it's common for even things like car commercials to be 3d renders now) will be under the absolute best possible circumstances. Anyone who has ever used a GoPro knows that you'd have to be luckier than a lotto winner to get shots like they put in their promos.

I thought this video was interesting...