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Sometimes, not even that. Met one of my former wedding clients at another wedding last weekend and 3 years after theirs, they have not even watched their wedding film a single time. So in some cases, we could present just a thumbnail and 10 minutes of blank content… 🤔🤨😂

@John Matthews @EduPortas @MrSMW @Kisaha This conversation reminds of a couple of pretty important aspects of film-making that are often not discussed as often as they should be, audience and longevity. I feel these have a fundamental role in considerations of specs and outright image quality. The audience, in the context of this discussion, seems to be predominantly people who know the people in the film. I think this is important because trying to make a film that engages and entertains people who don't have a personal connection to the subject is, I think, many many times harder. For wedding / engagement work, and for the personal work that I do, the intended audience is people who know the subjects in the video, and for that, the outright technical quality isn't so much of a defining factor. Longevity is the other major factor that I believe is at play here - this content has almost an infinite shelf-life. Most content becomes less and less relevant the older that it gets, but not this. Corporate work is fundamentally different in this sense, and is mostly about looking modern and fresh and new, to which the aesthetic quality of the images (clean, modern, professional, etc) can be vitally important, at least in the clients eyes. When you're filming a wedding (or other key family events - not sure if you guys do other family related work like mitzvahs, etc) or the "family videos" that I make, you're acting as a historian. Older rich families have entire departments of people who keep the family archives, and this is the creation of that material. In a sense the value of this content goes up over time rather than down. If I had a choice to send videographers back in time to film a key event of my ancestors, earlier would be of more interest than later. I've tried to maintain a clear distinction in my technical efforts: capture and preservation first, aesthetics second. Even when it comes to aesthetics, what is the aesthetic of a wedding or historic family event? It's nostalgia. Sure, you absolutely want to try and capture who the people are, with their own styles and character, but even if your client is demanding 12K video because it's the latest and they always have the best, in 50 years time the 2D linear sequence of images will look antiquated regardless of what you do. I would also suggest that the sharper you make it (as distinct from resolution - they're independent aspects) the more quickly it will age, rather than appearing more modern. Aesthetics, even when I concentrate on them, push me towards a less 'trendy' look. The modern look is high-resolution, clean and noise-free, colours so pure they seem electric, and sharpened to the point you could fillet a fish with it. This is the exact opposite of nostalgia. The aesthetic of nostalgia, especially of positive events which is what we are trying to achieve with weddings and family content, is the aesthetic of the dream, the warmth of remembering people you loved, especially people who are gone - either because they have grown and aged and who are not who they were or because they have passed. The aesthetic of warm remembering is fuzzy, which requires very low sharpening and often diffusion, it is noisy and organic, the colours are of an older time, a time when colours were less 'pure' and more likely to have come from nature somehow rather than single NM LED lights. It's also lower resolution just because the tech of the past had lower resolution. The more I learn about film-making, the more I prioritise content and then colour. From a practical point of view, in my own work documenting family trips and moments, my priorities are (starting with the outcome): To create a great final edit that is deeply sensitive to the subject matter (people and places) In order to do this, I must have a great editing experience with footage that is easy to edit and makes me feel inspired in the editing process What inspires me in the editing process is getting great shots of the people, having great colour, and having enough content to allow freedom and options in the edit If you think about those things in reverse order, for me who shoots without permission and without re-dos or direction, it means I have to have a small camera that doesn't get barred by security and doesn't influence the people I'm shooting too much, it means it has to operate well hand-held, and must be a workhorse that is always ready and doesn't get in the way. Once I have narrowed my options to those that can do that, it means I want the best quality colour I can get from that camera, and it means I should shoot a lot. I find that most camera talk exists in absence, or without discussing explicitly, the end goal of the entire endeavour. Contrary to what people might think, I think that more resolution is actually a good thing, all else being equal. The problem is that all else isn't equal, and any extra resolution actively hurts the things I value that are more important to the end product than the resolution itself.

Ha, I literally just finished watching that 2 minutes ago! Bored in a budget motel Northern France on my way to a job in Germany… All being well, an incoming XH2S with a pair of XH2’s. I wish they had called the latter the XH2R as it would make identification so much easier!

Sorry if I missed it, but what editing system are you using? I had 5DtoRGB for the longest time, but gave it up when I left FCP7 all those years ago. Proxy editing kind of makes 5DtoRGB sort of unnecessary in my post workflow.

And also the fact that most of digital media today is being consumed on 6 inch screens at 480p or 720p where a higher resolution is almost impossible to differentiate. That goes for movies and YouTube "content". We lot are doing this camera stuff for the pleasure of actually holding the damn camera or videocamera (not talking about the high-end production professionals, of course)

If you're a DP/Camera op bringing in enough monthly to more than justify the cost of a modern high-end production camera then cool. But it seems the general consensus is that the diminishing returns of camera bodies has most smaller production companies and freelancers own their lower-value base kit (your Komodos, R5c, lumix cams, sony alpha cams etc) and rent the higher end models of the same system for the demanding projects that warrant them. I invested in Topaz too, and am a believer in the concept of older cameras being good enough. But, how often are you going to add AI upscaling as a viable process to your workflow/pipeline? It helps in a pinch when you want your C-cam Blackmagic Micro to match your big boy units for a couple shots, but upscaling doesn't sound fun to do all the time. Unless you are only upresing the final render, it doesn't sound efficient adding possible hours of overnight upscaling your clips in your home render farm.

I just watched a video where Kraig Adams (who is a professional travel film-maker on YT) sold his A7S3 to swap to using the iPhone 14 as his main travel camera (except for his drone). He's got 700K+ subs and used to be a professional wedding film-maker, and really knows how to edit footage with music etc. He's shot with 5D/ML etc so does know what good images look like. You could say that phones have gotten so close to prosumer cameras that they're replacing proper cameras, but I'd say it a different way - that prosumer cameras have become so shit and everyone has gotten so used to it that you may as well go to a phone because there's so little difference in image quality. I don't think that there will be a fourth phase. There are huge parallels here between audio and cameras. In audio, there were three phases. At first, everyone used analog because digital didn't exist or was awful. Then high-end pros used high-end analog and everyone else used mediocre transistors / digital but weren't happy about it (unless they were spec-heads who claimed to be happy because the specs said it must be good). Now, solid-state and digital has gone up enough, and expectations gone down enough, that everyone except the true high-end uses digital and solid-state electronics. The parallel doesn't end there either, as not only does the majority think that the 'old stuff' is worse because the specs on paper are worse (which happens if you measure the wrong things) but also people aren't aware of how good the high-end really is. Aesthetically, the vintage stuff was 'musical' but not 'impressive', and the modern stuff was 'impressive' but only moderately 'musical'. The super-high end is both and has to be heard to be believed. To give you a sense of it, I'm talking RRP of $400K and up. I think of it as emotion vs brain - which translates directly to cameras - emotions translate to motion and colour science and the right amount of sharpness and brain translates to resolution. I think that the mediocre spec-driven market will get better and better to the point that everyone will settle. I don't know what will happen once 8K is ubiquitous, as pushing 12K or 16K seems like it is completely pointless, but having said that, if blind tests show that most can't tell the difference between 4K and 2K then 8K is beyond pointless already. But the two things you should never make the mistake of underestimating are: the creativity of marketing departments to come up with new things you should care about, and 2) the gullibility of consumers to adopt these things, even in direct contradiction of their senses.

I watched this some time ago and unfortunately can't find my notes (I did it blind and made notes before I got the answers). I've done a number of these tests before and normally they compare a number of cameras at a similar quality level and of a similar vintage, and in those cases I rank things mostly in order of ascending price! This test was different though and tended to correlate with the cost of the camera but also how good the codec was, with the low bit-rate bit-depth codecs not looking as good. This is great advice but no-one wants to hear it. We've gone through three phases that I can see: At first non-Hollywood wanted higher resolution and higher quality digital because digital was inferior to film. During this phase Hollywood just shot film. Then Hollywood went to high quality 2K (Alexa etc) and the consumer market was justifiably dissatisfied with their low quality 4K cameras with poor codecs and colour science. The manufacturers were pushing higher resolution to try and sell more TVs and the consumer market bought into the hype, demanding more low-quality pixels rather than understanding that they needed better pixels rather than more of them. Unfortunately, Hollywood has now succumbed to this resolution hype as well (largely kick-started by RED and Netflix purely for business purposes with nothing to do with image quality itself). Normally I'd say "to each their own", but unfortunately it means that those that want to buy a new camera have to pay for all the BS resolution that the gullible market has demanded. To get a great looking 2K timeline you have to either: Use a low-resolution high-quality camera from 2010-2015 with their support issues, crap battery life, poor pre-amps, and lack of modern features Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to record ridiculous file sizes like 4K uncompressed RAW, 8K uncompressed RAW and then put those on a 2K timeline, costing you a heap in storage and computation Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to send ridiculous resolution images to an external recorder that downsamples to something sensible and then uses a high-quality codec (like 2K compressed RAW, 2K Prores 4444, or maybe ~2.5K Prores) The missing combination here is for the camera to downsample in-camera and to write a high-quality but sensible-resolution file onto the card, but this option is very rare You can post about image quality until you're blue in the face, but people either can't (or don't want to) see past the marketing BS from TV companies that tells them that they need to quadruple the resolution of their camera every 5 years, even though it has almost zero effect on image quality.

I shared this in another thread recently. I made a reel of newly-graded old hacked GH1 footage of mine from 2011-13. Graded with FilmConvert Nitrate simply using the default sRGB color since they don't have a GH1 camera pack, and exported in 4K from a 1080p timeline straight from Premiere Pro CC. I didn't even know nearly as much about lighting then, so most of it is natural light and 100w tungsten practicals/clamp lights (with frost diffusion).

Yeah that's definitely an added bonus but not the main appeal to me when deciding in between those two. For me it is a balance of convenience & reliability during the shooting experience, and the final image output and workflow in post. The C70 with its DPAF, NDs, battery life & XLRs in combination with DGO sensor and RAW capabilities really ticks a lot of boxes and for run & gun, corporate work, docu etc it is really a slam dunk of a camera for such usage. Which is why I had it at the top of my next camera purchase list. The Komodo again is a sensor in a box. You will need to rig it although the dual hot swap batteries, PDAF, touch screen, iOS RED app & RF mount (that will allow Canons vari-ND adapter) are all great things to have on the field and are often missing on most cine cams. The simple yet effective traffic light exposure system also seems awesome. These are all features that have pushed me into considering the Komodo even for run & gun applications. And then of course the IQ from the footage. The file sizes of the compressed RAW. The global shutter. The image does feel 'just right' as you say. The 6K doesn't feel over sharp. The motion is beautiful. The CS, the noise. The R3D raw settings. The image also holds even under extreme grades which allows to get more subtle and creative I find, there is great nuance. The LUTs that RED provide are also great. Overall the whole experience just seems to take you closer to that high-end polished "ARRI" cine look. But that's just my reasoning and playing with files, not actual hands-on field experience. A lot of operators here or on YT that have both C70 & Komodo seem to favour the C70 for solo jobs and fast turnarounds. That is a major chunk of my work, I have to think practical too. But then again a lot of higher end clients keep asking for more cinematic look. They want the IQ they see in advertising on TV, Netflix etc. I'm also planning on getting back to music videos and more artistic projects with higher production value. So right now, I am really leaning towards Komodo. I also think working with that footage will excite me and that's also always a good thing!