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Now that my 2023 season (weddings mainly) is drawing to a close; all shoots in the bag, just 4-5 jobs still to edit and finish up, I am thinking about next year. I’m always thinking about ‘next year’ actually because one eye on the future and all that, but as is so often the case, thoughts and plans over the course of a season begin to stack up, the season ends and I’m exhausted/run out of enthusiasm to see all of those plans through. Year on year. But 2024 is going to be different… First of all, I am not carrying the fatigue off 33 jobs as I was at the end of last year with a more controlled 21 from this and a strict cap of 15-20 going forward. The two Covid years of ‘20/‘21 caused another kind of fatigue, a weariness due to lack of development, due to lack of work and funds; just 6 from what should have been 60 jobs over that period. So after 4 very inconsistent years job-wise; 1+5+33+21 and some kit and work practices that I am less than enthused about, I am not only making, but will be sticking to some fairly fundamental changes that I will be putting in place over the Winter. The first of these is volume of workload with 15 jobs as my minimum and perhaps ‘fully booked’ target but with the capacity to go as high as 20 depending on my level of interest. That is the point I have already hit actually… The second is tightening up what or rather who, I take on. Most of my clients and jobs are exactly what I was looking for but could still be tighter, so turning up the screws in that dept. Third, revising my approach to capture, ie, kit. My lighting is nailed down as is my audio but cameras and lenses less so and I have been frustrated with all the combos I have been using since…well since forever actually. The hybrid nature of my work requires not only a specific skill set, but a specific set of tools. Fortunately, those do now exist with various brands so it has become a question of who and what rather than hoping the next gen will deliver. All of the current main players deliver, it’s just which will suit me best. (It’s a Nikon/Lumix mash up for me BTW going forward). Fourth, workflow/edit. From the photo side of things, not unhappy and my only plans there are to refine a specific look over this Winter based on what will now be Nikon rather than Lumix files. On the video side, less than happy. Not unhappy, just not quite where I want things to be and whilst I could do an @kye and ‘learn colour grading you fool!’, it does not interest me enough beyond a point. I’m not even sure I’ll stick with log and may go back to shooting a profile because whilst it might not have the ultimate scope, there’s a lot more consistency (*for me*) with that approach. I love editing pics, but hate grading video! Possibly if I shot raw video, I’d enjoy it more and that is an option I am at least going to explore… So in a nutshell: 1. Take on less work. 2. Tighten up who I work with. 3. Brand switch including more compact set up/less tools. 4. Revise/refine output. 5. (Bonus Ball) All of the above combined = greater enjoyment = greater job satisfaction = greater output = leads to more of the same. How about you? What plans do you have? Any direction changes you might be making?

That's what I'm saying! The FX3 and FX6 are shockingly similar in terms of weight. This whole debate is a bit silly. Indeed. "Hate" is a strong word but I bet that's exactly how some ACs feel about the FX3. People in this thread underestimate how crippling the design of these more consumer orientated cameras are. Agreed. Especially as they mostly shot at night time. Exactly what I was suggesting, FX6 for the main cameras and the FX3 in a few supplementary roles such as drone camera. Exactly, the amount of time and weight savings with the FX6 is huge

I suspect that basically everyone can do significantly better than that colour grade if they follow a couple of simple suggestions when they're colour grading. The first is to find a reference image, or set of images, that they like, and to refer to them throughout the colour grading process. It's easy to adapt to what you're seeing and to make tiny little changes until you've gone far astray. The second is to apply small changes that each make the image a small amount better. Obviously you will need to convert LOG footage to 709 and that step will be a big improvement, but apart from that just make small improvements. When you make each change, you should be able to compare the before/after of that change and each one should make the image better. If you applied the above and just played with each control, even not knowing what they did, you'd find the occasional one here and there that made the image nicer in your eyes, and by keeping each one that is an improvement you'd gradually be making the image nicer, and I genuinely think you'd do far better than that grade.

This was my initial gut instinct when watching. I’m a naive user of NLE software and would be happy with that color grade. When I get the 15 I’ll be sure to check some tutorial videos and give it a go. The simplest process and workflow will probably be what I go with, whether it’s LUT and Dehancer etc. to me, the point is you can now create 80-90% of the quality a mirrorless does in most lighting conditions without the cost of equipment and burden of the size of equipment. Low light and DOF yes that will need some workarounds or acceptance of “good enough” and since I’m personally not being paid and the quality bump of a mirrorless with the cost of size and price - I’ll take the good enough phone at this point. someone in this forum made that point about 3-6 years ago and I, in my head, rolled my eyes at their words. Now I’m eating those words but won’t tell you if those words are carnivore or vegan 😉

Ha! I jinxed myself, a couple of days later I found myself working on a short film being shot with a P4K: Was a micro sized crew, myself plus two others (although, quite a lot of actors!). Was quite a chill day today, very enjoyable.

and this. Assuming quality is of a sufficiently high enough level, it’s repeatable consistency with the least faff in both capture and post, that appeals to me most. Log I find is great outdoors, but indoors is where it gets less so. For me. I’m going to do some proper ‘scientific’ trials over the Winter shooting and editing the exact same scenes as; a profile, log and raw, and then decide which one I will take forward into 2024 as my go to. I’m expecting the profile approach to ‘win’, but will do the process for confirmation. Photography is MUCH easier to the point where I sometimes wish I’d never gone down the video/hybrid route, but no viable alternative now. Love photo + like video. I don’t think I will ever turn the video side into love no matter how much I try… And that I suspect is part of the key to it going forward, - try less hard and spend less time on the side of things I like the least…

In 2024, I will be releasing five new products. Two for live production, one for virtual production and two for music production. In 2025, I will be having a series of long naps and returning to capturing images.

I agree - the colour grading looks to be with one of the film emulation suites, and is very very heavy handed. However, I think that this video shows a number of things... The shots included a wide range of difficult situations and held up. There were high-DR scenes, including the sun. There were low-light scenes, including a fire which wasn't clipped to hell. There was slow-motion, etc. None of it looked like there were any issues at all - sure it wasn't an Alexa 65 amount of DR but the images didn't really suffer either. The footage didn't break-up under an extreme grade. This is quite an accomplishment and anyone who knows what it's like to grade images from very small sensor size cameras know that when you push the image, especially to include huge amounts of saturation like this one has, the image very quickly shows its digital thin-ness and brittleness, but this didn't not happen. There were lots of skin tones pushed severely and no-one looked pallid-yellow or lobster-red. It's very difficult to push that amount of saturation without lips becoming glowing-red or there being yellowish areas (or both), and then when you try and compress the hues by pushing both sides towards the middle hues, it's hard to keep the right colour contrast - so many tools make people look like their whole face is covered in foundation by making the whole face the same hue. This is a real-world test by a real-world person. In the same way that the SlashCam test is valuable because it has been shot competently and hasn't been messed with in post, this is a valuable test because the person who made it obviously isn't a professional cinematographer or colourist, it wasn't shot in controlled conditions with pristine lighting catering to the exact weaknesses of the sensor and including models who had perfect skin even before they spent an hour in make-up. Any camera can look glorious if you do that. This sort of test indicates what anyone who gets the phone, waves it around, then colour grades it with Dehancer/FilmConvert/Filmbox/etc can expect to get. It's not a beautiful film, but it's a useful test of the camera.

A polish test site found the HD coming from the S1H to be pixel perfect in S35 mode. I imagine @kye would love the thick 200mbit HD coming from this camera.😊

This looks partially like Grading 1.0, some of the shots look like videos of the first magic bullet grading craze gone wrong. Now i begin to understand the screw up was so much less due to the slim 8bit 420 codec of the GH1 back then, but much more because of the decisions gone wrong by some overly "creative" color grading. This is the case with the video above. A few seconds look great though. Not the best example to demonstrate a cameras image quality all in all. Footage itself is shot pretty well. Stabilsation looks great and lenses seem well resolving and in some recognisable regards with good rendering. But colors, shadows, which are even partially inverted, and highlights look pretty awful. One wish, i have for posted videos, is to let the reader know the findings of the one posting a video in this forum, please. Otherwise to me it just feels a bit unmotivated and for me personally also a bit less joyful to participate in an evaluation or discussion. Thank you, cheers and best 😊

Just wanted to conclude this thread. Thanks for those who championed the XS20 over the XT4. I think I will enjoy using it for the next few years to come. After about a day or two of minimal time to play and review some clips as well as setup, here are my initial thoughts. Cons first. It has taken a bit of getting used to the lack of extra buttons and dials (more on that later). SD card is back to the prosumer style over the XT3 of being buried in the battery slot. Viewfinder while quality seems usable to me, I find the actual viewfinder a bit small but also no nice eye cup and I think using a 3rd party eye cup would also cut out functionality of the few extra function buttons that for some reason is right near the EVF. I would prefer more navigational buttons over using combo of touch screen/single joystick, plus the actual menu/back buttons are physically small for someone with large hands. I need more testing but finally, I don’t like that when using my Fuji 2.8-4 kit lens, IBIS is automatically enabled when using OIS lenses. Now I’m going to assume based on what I’ve read it’s using a combination and perhaps need to test turning off OIS and using ibis, but I wish you could turn this off and JUST use OIS. The camera doesn’t come with a traditional battery charger but rather a usb c cable and wall adapter. Since my camera came with a free second OEM Fuji battery, I’ve opted to purchase the Fuji two battery charger as well. Finally, apparently shooting H265 10 bit 4:2:2, I can’t figure out a way to make those files play in QuickTime on my MacBook Pro running Catalina. I’ve been using macs for the last 10+ years so I’m used to plugging in my SD card and space bar playing through the files. Was a small bummer I had to open resolve to play the files but maybe there is something I can do to fix? Initial Pros: Some of this will contradict above, however I do love the smaller body size! The added grip fits like a glove, and I think allows more stabilization; even though I think the XT line looks better. While I miss the physical shutter speed/ISO and other functions, I’m finding so far I don’t really need them. Camera has built in ISO button and a Q button where I’ve expanded the full menu to just hit this Q button when I need to change almost anything involved in filming from frame rates, to Resolution to picture profiles to IBIS etc. Additionally, the touch screen has many useful areas from selecting items to even touch functions for turning off/on customizable things. This helps take away the above con about lack of physical buttons I feel. So far in the way I use IBIS which is not vloggy whipnpan, or running following an actor, but rather just handheld slow static shots - it seems to work great. More testing is needed, but for tripod like shots, or slow movements like I prefer to use, looks good to me. Overall I think this was a worthy upgrade from my XT3 and I’m glad I sold it and bought this to get additional shooting options, possibility of FLOG2, and while certainly not the best, at least ability to use IBIS.

I follow Florian (Of Two Lands) and his stuff is always good but this latest one looks, to use the modern parlance, 🔥

What a camera! WOW Looks like paintings! To me, these Blackmagic guys have delivered Jannard's promise, their offer is INCREDIBLE, so just my kudos to them! :- )

I've seen quite a few videos from the BMCC6K now, and they all seem to shoot and edit in 3:2, which I find quite strange.... CAN doesn't mean SHOULD! This one is an 8K YT upload:

Last weekend was shocking. Absolute pure evil and terror. A brutal loss of life in Israel. It is understandable they are out for revenge, but it should be Hamas and terrorist groups that get wiped off the face of the earth. Not women and kids. A lot of binary views out there, with people taking sides, that's the nature of war I suppose. This isn't my war. And it isn't even many of theirs. There are so many civilians in that part of the world who want nothing to do with Hamas and just want to live peacefully in their home without the threat of Israeli bombs falling and occupation. Surely we can all agree on this - that women and children should be spared. The Israeli government doesn't seem to want to do that. Many of the young Israeli victims at the music festival who were slaughtered in the prime of their lives also sympathised with the NORMAL people in Gaza who are NOT terrorists. Most people are not in nodding-dog mode USA-government style total adoration of the Israeli government and their politics. I also think it is darkly ironic that so many on the extreme socialist left of Western politics and even many in the LGBTQ community seem to want to think of Hamas as heroic freedom fighters. Actually if these people ever came face to face in reality with Hamas they would be the FIRST in line to get beheaded. I despise the actions of both Hamas and the Israeli government. Palestinian civilians as mere collateral, the occupation of their land, it is all so wrong. Before wiping out terorism in Gaza there should have been a MASSIVE humanitarian effort to evacuate the civilian women & children population by sea. By going ahead with a ground-invasion possibly as early as this weekend, is the Israeli government comfortable to be seen in the eyes of the world to be committing genocide? Does it want the death of nearly 2 million innocent people on their hands and to lose the support of the world's public? Yes they are entitled to destroy Hamas and defend themselves so that what happened last weekend will not be repeated. No, they cannot be allowed to take senseless revenge on Palestinians by bombing kids in their beds, it is the stuff of war crimes. Hopefully people in a binary view, blindly supporting ONE SIDE against the other will be able to come to terms with the fact that no binary argument is ever valid in war. As for the West, we seem to be standing by without any plan whatsoever to get the civilian population out of Gaza to safety. We are sending the navy, warships, no rescue boats, no proper safe corridor into another country, nothing. Of course it would be a big logistical effort, with massive number of security checks, but even a few large ships could save thousands of lives, even if you just take children or those under the age of 18 and their mothers, sisters, brothers. Leave the Hamas hardcore fanatics to fight, and get the kids out of there...

6K Open Gate handheld : FF BRAW looking great in this footage!