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Looks like a new camera will be announced soon. Nikonrumors claims it’s the Z8…but I’ve heard that’s pretty expensive still. Nikon need To come out with an answer for the Sony a7iv, canon r6 ii, etc.

You pipped me to the post by minutes, was just about to mention this! It's illustrated well in the video (skip to 5.55). Specifically, in human/face detect mode when there is more than one person in the frame there's no ability to stay locked on an individual person. The AF will hop randomly back and forth between people which makes it unusable in that situation. However, someone posted that "You have to make sure you click on the screen again after you have chosen the person to focus on. The yellow box around the selected person will then change to have 4 crosshairs around the box. That locks in the AF to that person only." I did not know that! The other thing he talks about which I agree with is that there is no easy way of tapping on the screen to focus (and then track), like there used to be with the GH5. Multiple clicks are required and it's cumbersome. A bunch of people have been grumbling about this on FB groups and someone close to Panasonic (Dan Hopkins) has hinted that they are working on a firmware update to address some of these issues.

If there is enough light indoor to play sport, there is more than enough light for an FX30 to get decent images.

That's a bit of an old trope. Sony color science has made tons of progress and now with chunky 10-bit codecs you can get really nice IQ. As for overheating, not a problem on FX series which have active cooling. AF is definitely ahead of Fuji/Panny.

Check out this new music video shot on A74 24-104 and UV light.

Doesn't sound like nitpicking to me but rather valid concerns. Every time someone brings criticism over anything on YT now people call it clickbait but this guy also praises the camera where it shines so I really don't think its that. @hyalinejim has had the S5ii for a while too and agrees with him so again seems like genuine observations. Anyways, I don't have a horse in the race but I do think its pretty widely accepted that Sony is the new king of AF (especially now with all the crazy AI processing). I still prefer Canon UI but that's entirely personal. Panny is making breakthroughs within the Panny system and will surely improve over time, but Sony level it is most certainly not as of today. Of course YMMV depending on your overall video AF expectations..

It's not nitpicking, he's 100% right. That suggestion in the comments doesn't work.

It just feels like nitpicking to me (and meh, you can find plenty of people complaining about Sony AF too! People can nitpick anything). And as people in the youtube comments point out he's mistaken with some of his points, he was just using it wrong. Heck, the YouTuber himself admits workarounds exist! But he just doesn't like them. A rather weak objection, just doing it for the clickbait and the views? As he himself says, the AF is very powerful, and he likes it and uses it all the time. Feels like 90% of his objection is with the UI, rather than the AF. That's certainly one of the easiest firmware fixes. (welllll... if the objections are genuine, sometimes UI "flaws" are more to do with personal preferences than objective flaws) And Panasonic is better than most with firmware updates. Thus the key takeaway is: Panasonic's best AF is already very good, and is only going to get even better.

I just did a quick test using a photo of people and actually I'm not sure that this works at all. So it looks like Panasonic still has a bit of work to do.

Nah dude. The AF on S5ii is still a gen1 PDAF. It has numerous issues and is nowhere close to Sony's. Here are a few of those issues from a guy that has had the S5ii since launch:

Except in recent years they've been brought out and gone downhill. ("As many will know, Rycote Microphone Windshields — previously a small family-run but world-renowned business on the outskirts of Stroud in the UK Cotswolds — was sold to the Vitec Group Plc back in 2018. The management team stayed on for a few years before leaving in 2021.") If you dig into it, is kinda crazy just how many of the brands we know and use in the film industry are all owned by Vitec Group (now called Videndum) Rycote is still a good brand, just don't expect that past history will necessarily predict accurately future performance now. 2018 was an interesting year, also the same time Chris Woolf joined Røde: https://audioxpress.com/news/rycote-lyre-inventor-chris-woolf-joins-rode-microphones-to-work-on-the-development-of-new-shockmounts-and-windshields Many of the former people of Rycote have gone off and formed their own new company.

Rarely does it make sense to record beyond 24bit 48KHz (in my line of work you can for all practical purposes read "rarely" as "never")

Early days and as with the S5 that preceded it, like it but don’t love it. To be fair, it’s not it’s fault but more my use case for it which is long static stuff and a tiny amount of gimbal. Edited one shoot so far with it and no idea what the critics are saying about it…but as above, fairly limited and controlled use so far. Shot another job but not edited it yet and then a third later this week. Really, the S1H is my workhorse for the greater part of my video work and that is a case of ‘love’ over simply ‘like’. Has a certain mojo to both using it and the output. In other news, my pair of S1R’s came back today and just in the nick of time as I leave tomorrow for my next job. I’ve tried selling one of them once previously but came to the conclusion last week, without going Sony or Nikon (both with native or adapted Tamron lenses), I just cannot get from my current need for 4 working cameras, to 3. Not without chucking 10k into the mix on top of all my trade in kit…and I cannot justify the cost right now. Or this year. Not complaining though… In my ideal world, I would flip to a 3 camera system without hesitation but also unless any future camera has internal ND, using any system for hybrid work is a pain in the arse! I know because I have been wrestling with it for about 12 years and still have not found the ‘perfect’ solution. Does it exist? Nope. Could it exist? Yep. Easily, if we mashed up a few of best bits of several manufacturers… Will it exist? Probably soon. I think we are one step away and it will become reality if internal ND’s can become a common thing. In the meantime, I will ‘soldier’ on with my pair of S1R’s for stills (and emergency video use), S1H for primary/creative filmmaking and S5ii for the more static stuff, gimbal and anything requiring good AF.

I'm fed up with Atomos, I wasted a huge amount of time doing tests for them for the stuttering issue in ProRes RAW. They didn't even try to replicate it. I reported the problem at the 8th of February, since then I provided tons of test material. And where are we now? They still think it's my unit, or my SSD or my HDMI cable even when I told them I tested with multiple units, multiple cables and SSDs. Unbelievable. In the meantime some other guy asked BlackMagic about the same issue (so apparently this is related the the X-H2s), and they sent it to their engineering team right away, they reproduced it and notified Fujifilm about it. HUGE difference between the two supports. Seriously, even Fuji is better than Atomos, because they don't reply at all, so you won't waste your time with them 🙂

Keep in mind A7IV has very poor RS (26.8ms) so not really ideal for sports/action. 4K60p also has a 1.5x crop so it basically becomes APS-C & 4K120 is absent. If you add to that the overheating that makes A7IV a rather poor choice if you're planning on shooting beyond 4K30p..

I'd also suggest a background that is a distant hue from the puppet and then just use a key of that hue to create the mask. It doesn't have to be the exact opposite of the puppet, just distinct from it. Tools like the keyer in Resolve can pick out quite specific hues. Just be careful not to let any light bounce off the background onto the puppet or you'll have an un-natural halo on the puppet of the background colour.

With a dark teal subject, it should be possible to remove a key green or a key blue background. Many digital keyers come with parametric filters that allows selection of a precise keying range in regards to hue, saturation and luminance. Of course, the same parametric controls can be used to key out other colors than key green or key blue. If your camera can be locked down, you could use a difference mask. In this method, one shoots the background without subject, and, then, with the camera still locked down, the subject is shot in front of the background. The difference mask then keys out any part of the image that is identical in both videos. So, the unobstructed background becomes transparent. Here is a video that shows a few other possible keying techniques using After Effects:

Sounds like a fun project. I'd buy a cheap red tablecloth, hang it from the wall, and steam out the creases.