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I may be completely wrong here, but it seems like a lot of people are overthinking the workflow of this camera... from exposure to color... I don't know if it should be this problematic. Perhaps I am so used to workarounds with my 5D3 and ML Raw, so I don't understand the issues. But it shouldn't be this difficult.

Yes, agreed - just protect the highlights and shoot good stuff. Do the work figuring out where the sensor clips, and expose accordingly even if you can't see that while monitoring. But we have been spoiled by being able to monitor a LUT-ted log image so we can see while shooting exactly what we will see in Resolve, if the colour pipeline is transparent. I have that with the Digital Bolex and fundamentally it's the same in that it just shoots raw DNGs. As for imperfect scenarios, I do find that there are so many stressful factors when shooting a creative low budget project with some friends that having to babysit the camera is a real killer to the spontaneity, rather than just being able to confidently know what you're getting. I think what possibly interests me is shooting with an ND and using the exposure compensation to see if that would allow capturing the highlights but at least viewing for the middle. Would need to try it out. I personally don't like the whole ETTR approach because your shots are all over the place and IMO you then really need to shoot a grey card to get back to a baseline exposure, otherwise you're just eyeballing it. To your larger point, this camera really does seem like something that can just spark some joy and spontaneity because it's so small to be carried around in your pocket and whip out and do some manual focus raw recording, with some heavy hitting metrics in comparison to a Red or a Sony Venice. I get that. I do really feel though that Sigma would not have had to do too much work to make it more objectively usable at image capture, and after its announcement I was interested to give feedback prior to the release, but I didn't know how to get my thoughts up the chain to the relevant people. Then when it was released, they seemed to have made all the classic mistakes.

Thank you! I used the "crappy" Vivitar 25mm F2.5. Part of the that mojo comes from the lens and its imperfections. I say crappy because for general use it has too many imperfections like very clear ghosting, and crazy lens flares.

Understand that with video you have to pay more attention as well to the series of shots. So that they look as similar as possible. ETTR for each and everything might not be desirable. Let us assume the following if that camera has 12.5 stops and we refer to the exposure values (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value) all scenes with more DR than the camera can capture would need a sacrifice. In my opinion, and this is very personal, I would rather try to get all highlights in which matter, like clouds and sky outdoors, and let the rest be black below the DR range of the camera. That feels cinematic to me. If I now would underexpose even further the highlights will go darker and even more in the shadows comes black. So nothing to win here unless I misunderstand something. Sure on a big set you can light up the blacks, or indoors you might decide to let go of a window or parts of it to have more light on the rest but that is a creative decision rather than technical I suppose.

Definitely a valid opinion. I don't think it's as bad as the EOS-M, but there are issues for sure. Although the original BMPCC had a decent colour workflow that was a bit more predictable. The main issue for me though, was that BMD did not actually publish their log curve/gamut, so it was still a bit of a black box. I find the Sony alpha cams (a7sIII/FX3/FX6) to be great and predictable, and the most like an Alexa in their workflow, although having about 2 stops less DR.

Are you referring to my idea of using the built-in exposure compensation? Of course, without having the camera I'm making assumptions about how it would work and if it would work at all. But I think broadly speaking, I was thinking that the sensor clips too early in the highlights, but that the shadows were very clean. So the whole range could probably be pushed easily by +3 stops. So say, shooting 800 for 100 which is what you say it does anyway. But that could be pushed further. Beyond the fact its internally pushing 100 to 800, I'm saying maybe shoot with -3 ND and compensate for that in the light meter reading and the exposure compensation on the camera, so that it displays the image at +3 so middle grey looks correct. Again, assumptions. What this could synergistically offer is that if you can toggle exposure comp off then you could see the highlights without them clipping, then toggle it back on on and see the image exposed correctly for middle grey. Given the quirks of the camera, I don't know if this workflow is possible fully internally, or if a Ninja V or an external monitor and a separate LUT would need to be applied. Theoretically, outputting an underexposed image via HDMI could then allow a LUT to do the exposure difference and roll off the highlights that would otherwise be visually clipped while shooting. Yes PR Raw should absolutely be linear raw. I noticed the way it looks on the Mac can be interpreted as log or some other thing, but that's to do with metadata tags that are non-destructive. The underlying data in unclipped linear raw. I'm not sure about ISO invariance though. I'm taking a stab and saying that it only looks different based on whether the camera is using one or the other of the base ISOs, and then the "intended" ISO is just metadata. The overall idea is that I'm proposing shifting the highlight range beyond what Sigma recommends with their ISO/DR chart via a fixed underexposure (not ETTR with a histogram on a per-shot basis), to the point where you're still just about comfortable with the raised noise floor - and even then you can consider pushing it past that and applying a bit of denoising with Neat Video.

You're right, they are defined and that's what allows us to transform in and out of them to other colour spaces. It's not like we have to work in linear floating point in ACES gamut, Rec2020 or Alexa wide gamut, but to me working in ACES is a kind of lingua franca where the mathematics behave in a simple predictable way that is the same as the way exposure works in the real world. And under the hood, the Resolve colour corrections are still applied in a log space (ACEScc or ACEScct). I'm not saying it's perfect, but it makes a lot of sense to me. The caveat though is that more often than not, an image that is represented as sRGB or Rec709 has had a linear dynamic range compressed into the 0-1 range not just by doing a transform from linear to sRGB or linear to Rec709, because that would cut out a lot of highlights. So there's some form of highlight rolloff - but what did they do? In addition, they probably apply an s-curve - what did they do? Arri publishes their logC to Rec709 transform which is via their K1S1 look, so this is knowable. But if you transform logC to Rec709 with the CST it will do a pure mathematical transform based on the log curve to the Rec709 curve and it will look different. So basically, to say an image is sRGB or Rec709 isn't accounting for the secret sauce that the manufacturer is adding to their jpeg output to most pleasingly, in their mind, shove the linear gamma/native wide gamut sensor data into the "most pleasing" sRGB or Rec709 container. Sorry if you knew all that, I'm not trying to be didactic. Just as a side note, Sigma apparently didn't do this with the OFF profile, which is both helpful and not helpful (see below). I stated before, that the work Adobe did with CinemaDNG and the way a tool like Resolve and a few more specialized command line tools like oiiotool and rawtoaces interpret the DNG metadata, is based around capturing and then interpreting a linear raw image as a linear-to-light scene referred floating point image that preserves the entirety of the dynamic range and the sensor wide gamut in a demosaiced rgb image. Not that Cinema DNG is perfect, but its aim is noble enough. What you're describing with shooting a chart and devising a profile is what the DNG metadata tags are meant to contain courtesy of the manufacturer (not Adobe), which is why it's a pragmatic option for an ACES input transform in absence of the more expensive and technically involved idea of creating an IDT based on measured spectral sensitive data. If you look in the DNG spec under Camera Profiles it lays out the tags that are measured and supplied by the manufacturer. Separate from that is the additional sauce employed in the name of aesthetics in Lightroom, and above I described the process by which the manufacturers add a look to their internal jpegs or baked Rec709 movies. And what does it matter if there's something extra that makes the photos look good? Well I'd rather have a clean imaging pipeline where I can put in knowable transforms so that I can come up with my own workflow, when Sigma have kind of fucked up on that count. What I will say about sigma's OFF profile that was introduced after feedback, is that as best I can tell, they just put a Rec709 curve/gamut on their DNG image almost as malicious compliance, but they didn't tell us exactly what they did. I mean in this case, they did not do any highlight rolloff, which in some ways is good because it's more transparent how to match it to the DNG images, but also unlike a log curve the highlights are lost. So the most I've been able to deduce is that by inverting a Rec709 curve into ACES that I get a reasonable match to the linear DNG viewed through ACES, but with clipped highlights. But for viewing and exposing the mid range, it's usable to get a reasonable match - ideally with another monitoring LUT applied on top of it for the final transform closer to what you would see in Resolve. And I absolutely don't want to say that we all must be using these mid-range cameras like we're working on a big budget cg movie, thus sucking the joy out of it. But like it or not, a lot of the concepts in previously eye-wateringly expensive and esoteric film colour pipelines have filtered down to affordable cameras, mainly through things like log encoding and wide gamut, as well as software like Resolve. But the requisite knowledge has not been passed down as well, as to how to use these tools in the way they were designed. So it has created a huge online cottage industry out of false assumptions. Referring back to the OG authors and current maintainers pushing the high end space forward can go a long way to personal empowerment as to what you can get out of an affordable camera.

I didn't mean any disrespect to you or anyone specifically. I've been very interested in the FP since it was released. It seems like a natural progression for me, but it also is too similar. But it also seems like the true successor to the OG Pocket. With that said, the FP is basically a camera with 12 stops of DR and 2 native ISOs. As long as you protect the highlights, the rest can be tweaked in post. As far as color... there seems to be a dozen different ways to get to a similar point. You can use the Camera Raw Panel in Rec709 and adjust your exposure, WB and saturation. You can process the clips as BM Film, then use LUTS or grade from hand, or you can do a CS/ACES Transform and process as LogC. Anything more than those 3 are probably more complicated than necessary for a $1500 camera. I process my footage through Resolve as BM Film or sometimes as a LogC CST... depending on the footage... then export as ProRes 4444 for a final color and edit in FCPX. I've also found that processing the footage as BM Film and then use the Ursa 4.6K to Rec709 LUT really opens up the waveform and utilizes most of the available DR of the image. At that point you can adjust your skintones where you want them to be in the Raw Panel... etc. An aggressive highlight curve can usually add some depth to your highlights Anyway, just my two cents.

Just trying to find the ideal color workflow. I am sure for the majority of people this is pointless discussion.

I'm looking at this, and looking for some alternative solutions. https://www.smallrig.com/smallrig-holder-for-portable-power-banks-bub2336.html

I shot some EOSM 14-bit raw clips of a fitness instructor, and threw together this video: This is not a 8mm nor 16mm crop mode -- it's full APS-C, "1080" crop. However, it is the first time that I have seriously shot raw with the EOSM. Mostly I have used Tragic Lantern's all-I h264 mode with boosted bit rate.

@aaa123jc and it is one of the cameras besides the F3 and the BMMCC which has a fascination on me. I own them three but have only used the Bmmcc. But the latter one at least for a legit 5min narrative piece. Great image, even better when lit. I have posted a bit of my stuff lately. So always eager to see footage from the EOS M and the these classic digim indy cine treasures! Keep up coming, friends!

I tend to agree more and more with Dave @webrunner5 that smartphones have taken over completely as money making video content machines. Tiktok and the likes are hungry for content with sufficient image quality. Content is queen and sufficient image quality is her best friend and convinience her mate. Smartphones deliver all that. Would be interesting to compare revenue from Hollywood with the ones from Youtube and influencers.

You need to keep that "crappy Vivitar 28mm F2.5" and put it in a vault. That really helped the look you got. A great look, well done.

@Josue Nunez Looking great! There is a certain mojo to this image! The nice edit, grade and framing in your piece helps to appreciate the image from this camera, of course.:) What lens did you use? My mini SDI to SDI cable ripped so I got a good exuse not to use this camera, since I need that tasty external 10bit.:)

Hi, I know it's been a while since you posted your question. It's the first time I've visited here in a long time. You may have better luck asking your question at the B4 on M4/3 group on Facebook (I know, ugh): https://www.facebook.com/groups/B4onM43