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Well, I think that skies that are more cyan than purple are nicer but I'm not sure that lighter is better for things like sea and sky. When it comes to skin, darker reds and yellows is definitely not good as it makes skin blemishes more obvious. This is a specific problem of the S5II, though. It has darker reds than the GH6, for example. The GH5 has lovely bright reds, they're just too pink! Fuji emulations - I haven't looked into them at all, other than seeing some examples online that looked nice. I'd expect that the manufacturers of some of the most famous film stocks in the world, as well as some of the most famous digital colour workflows (I'm thinking of the much-praised colour output of the Fuji Frontier film scanner) would be able to create some pretty decent film emulations! But who knows! Maybe they're erring on the side of caution a bit too. But it's great to see a manufacturer offering an interesting colour profile for video. Panasonic's set of creative LUTs for V-Log are disappointingly crap. Yes, it's a very interesting question. For me, the colour palette is the first thing to get right. Then, do I want the split-toning (as he calls it) or not? All films have a colour cast in the highlights and shadows, none is perfectly neutral. And it varies from one stock to another, and it varies with exposure level. If I'm doing something stylised, then I'll keep it, if it's a nice cast (for example, Portra 400 exposed at +2 has extremely pink highlights such that some labs tell people not to shoot it like this). But if I'm doing a corporate video I definitely want neutral greys all the way through from shadows to highlights. When it comes to grain, I love it for still images. But for video it will get lost unless you can view a very high bitrate file, so I usually don't bother. I really like halation, but I haven't found a good way of accurately emulating it. Part of the problem is that it proceeds from highlight levels so bright that it exceeds the dynamic range of a digital sensor. Here's a GH6 Iscorama video that I've posted before, with film colour emulation, split toning (in this case blue shadows and orange highlights from Kodak Vision 3 - and I'd guess this particular stock is the source of the orange-teal look, as all speeds of the film seem to have it) and grain that didn't really survive the transition to Vimeo. You can download the original if you're a grain fetishist!

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the results I can get, at least when it comes to still photography when shooting RAW. Here's Portra 400 at box speed and a digital RAW still with a custom emulation that I made: I can get pretty close with 10 bit log as well, and I use a slightly cleaner variant of this for my corporate videos. It's probably overkill for my clients who would be happy with a digital look, for sure, but it makes the colour grading part of the job much more enjoyable for me. I've mentioned this before, but I think that the people who are delivering colour to the consumers have been playing it safe. They're more concerned with providing colour that is free of artifacts and problems than they are with accurate colour. For example, in Camera Raw and Lightroom the default color profile for each camera is Adobe Standard (the others, Adobe Color, Adobe Neutral etc. are all based on this). Adobe Standard for all cameras has seemed to me get a lot more anaemic looking over the last 10. The reason for this, I would guess, is to avoid ugly colour artifacts like colour blocking, clipping etc. The Canon DSLRs used to have very accurate and properly saturated colour, but they would sometimes demonstrate colour problems in extreme conditions like concert lighting. There was a big thread about this on the Magic Lantern forum at one point. Nowadays, Adobe Standard is a lot more conservative. It's instructive to go to DP Review and download RAW samples of earlier DSLRs and compare them to recent models. I know that the Pacific Northwest (where recent samples were shot) is a bit grey, but so is London (where earlier samples were shot) 😂 Recently, I've been looking at Panasonic's V-Log to V709 conversion LUT which, presumably, is a good starting point for a grade. It's significantly inaccurate for recent Lumix cameras. In this image, the circles are an overlay of the reference colours according to X-Rite: Nevertheless, it's a conversion that is fairly robust. Colour integrity is pretty good in terms of colour blocking and clipping. (It's better on some cameras than others. In this pic, S5II, the reds get a bit blocked up, which you can see in the red lego block, appropriately). I haven't investigated Canon and Sony's log conversions, but I assume that their colour is similarly on the conservative side. If so, it seems that manufacturers are for the most part playing it safe when it comes to colour and leaving it up to the user. This makes sense as it can be damaging in reviews to have a colour transformation that is accurate, or pleasant, but creates colour artifacts. And if a large proportion of users are happy with conservative colour, or don't notice that it is conservative, then why rock the boat? I also think that the anaemic look is in vogue: contemporary TV drama sometimes looks like it's barely been de-logged. So, low contrast and low saturation is rife. In 10 years time this will be dated. It will be like the bleach bypass look of early 00s TV, or the "piss filter" of 00s gaming, or the orange and teal look of blockbuster movies. Of course, Fuji offers film emulations in-camera, so well done to them!

Do I want it? Yes. Do I need it? Actually also yes. Yes if I am to take my work to the next level which is to go from 3 to 2 cameras with true hybrid capability. ‘True hybrid capability’ for me = being able to shoot video and stills with the same unit but also pull stills from the video that could have been shot as stills as the latter deletes the need for that 3rd body for me. The Z9 however is really the only current body that offers me that with 8k 60p internal raw so as things stand, the benchmark. Paired with a Z8 and a pair of zoom lenses (28-75 and 70-180) and that’s it for me, all my needs met. L Mount really is going to have to have the equivalent available early 2024 or I can’t see any other option to go back to Nikon after a 12 year hiatus. I would not shoot 8k 60p all the time however, just at certain specific times. I’m not totally bonkers!

Correct. You need to find a mic that can handle that high SPL. Or think more about your mic placement, that would be the easiest/best fix. This is also true for wireless, you distort that, there is no way to recover it.