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50% video, 50% photo work almost all action related. Paid, YT + social media + local TV, professional level: Equestrian, Ice hockey, MTB, Trial bike, Ski & Snowboard alpine/freeride, motorsports GT & Rally. Hobby: Wildlife, Aviation, Family A cam: R5c B cam: R5 C cam: Insta360 1 inch, Insta360 RS and Insta360 GO, iPhone My biggest usage for the iPhone is on top of my R5c especially when I’m using long lenses >=300mm to have a wider pov, for equestrian it is my standard setup. Or in places where a normal camera is too cumbersome e.g. some b-roll inside a cramped helicopter. Btw I’m pretty sure that all the “YT guess iPhone 15 vs best camera in the market” they start with the best conditions for a phone, then grade what the iPhone can take and then have the more pro camera match it. The inverse would show a different story imo. Again, it is incredible the progress that iPhone had in the last years but still not comparable to a good camera. Imo it sits closer to a Gopro than a mirrorless camera. Super useful feature are the 3 focal lenses, good stabilization, log and you have it always with you.

I got my iPhone 15 Pro Max (upgrade from 13 Pro Max) and some early observations: Quality is good when in shooting good conditions but breaks quite quickly if you miss exposure, in low light, etc. Log files can be graded easily and have no over-sharpening, can take some post processing but way less than R5c RAW files, the difference imo is night and day as it should be. The same for details compared to R5c is just worlds apart. BMD does not allow you to use 2x lens, zooming 2x with the 24mm lens the quality is quite bad (very blotchy, full hd at max). I did not test yet with the apple camera and the 2x “cropped” lens to see if is better. No Log + Cinematic in either Apple Camera or BMD H265+Log is a good compromise size vs. Quality and you can record all fps internally. 120mm lens I find it a bit better quality than the 77mm of the 13, and a more useful focal range for what I normally cover. I have BMD set to save to Files, then I connect a USB-C CFexpress or SSD and move the files in Files, is the quickest and easier method for PC users. Much better that the previous phone that was a nightmare to get the footage out from a PC. Action button is useful as you can set to start or even start recording in the BMD. Still need to get use to the BMD UI, with no hw button/wheels changing things rapidly is a bit of a pain for me. Overall, with Log and the 120mm is big update and I will use it even more than my previous phone, especially as B or C cam. Using it as a main camera is a big stretch and I think I will be mostly disappointed. Frame grab 4k Log 120mm.

No, don’t think so. Above 4K res the file sizes alone become huge. No. BRAW is a widely implemented standard. Why continue with an older inferior codec - From BMD’s perspective - Not my opinion, just channeling how Blackmagic see it…. I mean 264 is a widely supported codec too and we’ve only just seen it introduced for the first time and I’m assuming we’re only seeing 264 because of future cloud workflows ProRes RAW is pretty popular and they don’t support that in Resolve either…see where this is going?

@kye indeed. My own preferences regarding any scene is a wider establishing shot or picture that basically tells the viewer ‘where’. Then a tighter ‘mid’ shot that introduces ‘who’. Followed by tighter still ‘what’ imagery. I may end any chapter going wide again but as with all these things, rules can be broken. The above is really all the focal length stuff and next up is handheld, floaty, or locked off… For the wide stuff, always locked off. For candid, steady handheld. I detest the ‘handheld jittery’ look personally as is used in a lot of modern productions. Hate it. The camera/production should be invisible and not intrusive ‘found footage’ style. Personally. Couple stuff, especially walking, gimbal. Warpy backgrounds do my nut. Guilty, but back to using the gimbal 100% for this next year. And then we have all the stuff such as lighting and grading etc, the latter being very individual indeed. Personally, I prefer a more modern rendering rather than the softer and more granular older style, so prefer say full-frame over say 16mm, but again, just personal taste. I can’t abide the camcorder look though which is why in the past I have always used a lot of slow mo as it’s an easy fix (partially anyway) to removing that look. Going forward, I am backing off quite a bit from the slow mo approach and using capture techniques and grading instead to eliminate that ‘digital’ look. The one thing I can’t blame is the tools however as they are all ‘perfect’ for my needs so it’s just a case of what I can produce with them…

No Apple don’t take a fee. They are very strict about compliance though and each model has to go through an arduous process to be “approved” which can take a long time. This has been a barrier because it requires the manufacturer to open up their code and manufacturing to Apple for an unspecified amount of time for a maybe, maybe not. You can’t even announce it as having ProRes support unless it’s been approved. Understandably a lot of these companies can’t just sit around for 6 months on a finished model waiting for Apple to say yes or no before they announce. I believe that this is strategic. BRAW is their codec now, it’s widely supported and there’s even decent ways to work with it in FCP. BM don’t see the point in supporting ProRes anymore. BRAW is better with lower file sizes. We users feel differently of course but I would be amazed if any more BM cameras have ProRes. I don’t think that since the 12K they’ve even introduced a camera with ProRes have they?

Thanks for sharing your impressions. Your description is pretty much how I was expecting it to perform. I think, for me, the take-aways are: you own one and have real-world experience in uncontrolled conditions it's not as good as a real camera it's good enough to use in professional gigs, even if only in a limited capacity

Just NDs thanks! I'll throw my SmallHD Focus on it as a monitor

No idea, I assume it's per unit but that's a total guess.

Yeah, next to the support for a BM "box camera" there's a lot of people wanting a P4K Pro with NDs and a tilting screen etc.

That's the dream, a BMD camera with a mirrorless mount and NDs! So very few affordable cameras do this. You're either looking at ones secondhand, or likely paying for at least as much as a Canon C70 / Sony FX6. So if BMD kept the L mount but added in NDs (either eND, or at least a clear + 3 stages of ND), say boosting the price up by a few hundred but still sub US$3K then it would be a pretty easy win as the best camera for me at that price point. Ahead of Sony FX3 / Panasonic S5mk2 / etc (I might still rate a preference to get the Sony FX30 instead though, it would after all be half the price. Is why what I really want to see is the standard P4K with ND!)

Second image has a lot more detail each time but that certainly could be the lens. The GH5 resolves a lot more detail though as its 5k downsampled to 4K or HD, over just straight up HD. I am still a fan of HD as unless its a side by side it looks detailed enough. Though the GH5 was great with having no moire.

Are you using colour management of some kind? ACES / RCM? Once you've learned that, almost all footage is the same. I can't believe that people still grade and don't do this - I was never able to get anything to look good until I worked this out. Sadly, it took me far longer to realise this than it should have! I think this is why there are 50,000 YouTube videos from amateurs on "How I grade S-Log 2" and "How to grade J-Log 9" and why every second video from professional colourists (the few that share content online for free) is about colour management. It used to drive me crazy hearing the same thing over and over again until I realised that it's the key that unlocks everything, and that getting really good results is incredibly simple once you've figured it out (getting great results becomes super complex again because colour grading is an infinitely deep rabbit hole, but that's well beyond these discussions). The other variable is what the individual shots were. It's not uncommon for me to go shoot something, with one camera and one lens, and then some shots just drop into place and look great and other ones are fiddly and I can never get them how I want. This is a hidden trap for downloading footage other people have shot.

I have definitely found RED easiest to work with color wise. But the C300 MK3 is way more run and gun friendly. Have you considered the URSA 12K. I know BM doesn't get the hype that RED, Canon and Sony do, but the image is really good. The crop of the camera is 1.3x, between S35 and full frame. I'd download some footage from that and see what you think.

Biggest difference is the one looks softer, would assume it's the Pocket. The color of the foliage also looks different but it's not as noticeable.

Translation: the people who graded the Sony footage aren't as good at colouring than the people who coloured the Canon and RED footage. Seriously - there's the Dynamic Range, Bit Depth, Low light, and Frame-rates, but the entire rest of the equation is the skill of the people in pre, prod, or post. Ungraded and poorly lit ARRI Alexa footage looks like home videos until the colourist gets involved.

As a Nikon user you really need to follow these two men on YouTube: Hudson Henry and Steve Perry. They're wildlife photographers 99% of the time, and don't shoot video a lot, but they have a tone of info to offer about how your camera works.

FX9 or C500 II would be more comparable. Still why not a C70 i think for a one man band is a better buy than a C300 III?

When i graded with directors at my side almost all gave great input elevating my work in a substantial way for the narrative and the quality of work itself. But it was only fun and to the good of work when they had a understanding und emphathy for the passion and quirks i am embodying sometimes when i burn for a project. When a director is not appreciative of the process it loses all its magic and the project better be paid well enough. The shots above look good enough to not to invest too much work on them.:)

Indeed, being untruthful is never a good look is it. Standard par for the course in marketing land though.

Actually, here's my nomination for best-bang-for-buck camera nowadays - the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 just announced by BM. Here's why: It's tiny, and fits the entire ecosystem of the previous Micro models, including battery type (Canon LP-E6) It can record BRAW up to DCI 4K60 to USB-C.... so you don't need a big expensive external recorder, you can use any old HDMI monitor you like! BM specifies 13 stops of DR, the same as all their previous cinema cameras, and up from the 11 stops they quoted for the previous Micro Studio camera It has AF (it won't be fast, but the previous BMMCC didn't have AF, and the OG BMPCC one was quite useful) It's $995! So, it's smaller and cheaper than the P4K, but appears to only have one native ISO. Interesting.

Have they ever??? Even when REDs were more popular on production, a few years back, it was still easy enough for producers (especially in big markets such as LA or NYC) to demand the latest. Because there was a big oversupply of RED shooters vs jobs suitable for a RED. Their RED Raven and RED Komodo pushed them rather close to consumer territory RED even at the best of times never really gained heaps of traction. Their market segments were: 1) RED fanboys 2) cutting edge experimenters, who would dabble with the the RED ecosystem when it was new. Probably got burnt by RED. And would move along to abandon RED as soon as something better was available. Be it a Sony PMW-F3 / Sony FS700 / ARRI ALEXA / or whatever. 3) people who needed a compact cinema camera , be it for a drone / gimbal / crash cam / whatever 4) people who want "higher quality" but can't afford the best. (i.e. ARRI ALEXA cameras, or Super 35 film, or something similar-ish such as Sony F35 or F65) #1 has been in decline for years. #2 has completely disappeared. #3 got very gradually chipped away at with the likes of better mirrorless cameras + BMD's BMCC & BMPCC. But the release of the ARRI Alexa Mini almost completely demolished this niche for RED. Then the P4K / VENICE / FX6 / etc killed whatever small teeny remaining niches RED might still have in this market. #4 initially this gap for RED to live in used to be very big. As when the RED ONE was released the ARRI ALEXA didn't exist at the high end, not even the Sony F35 existed yet. And the HDSLRs didn't exist on the low end. So RED had all to themselves a massive huge market between the likes of Panasonic DVX100 etc on the low end and shooting on Super 35mm (or perhaps the Sony PWM-F900R) on the high end (which is VERY expensive!). Maybe RED's most direct competition was Super 16? (it's a middle ground between DVX100 vs S35) So it was easy to make a strong case for RED. But within a couple of years things very quickly changed: ARRI ALEXA & Sony F35 etc got released, which meant the very high end for digital was no longer RED's. HDSLRs & HD camcorders such as the Sony EX3 got released so that the low end HD was no longer RED's. But as each year went by, it became worse and worse for Sony. As quickly you got RED being squeezed and attacked from all directions: 1) HDSLRs / mirrorless got better with 4K and even 10bit, killing even more of the low end market for RED. A filmmaker that in the past might have been happy to financially overstretch themselves to the max to try and get Scarlet-X for their thesis film, is now happy to shoot it on a newly released Panasonic GH4 with an Atomos recorder. 2) Mainly Blackmagic (but to a lesser extent ZCam/Kinefinity/AJA/etc as well) killed off a lot of appeal for RED in the low end raw/ProRes niche of the market. And even attacking them hard in the mid range once the URSA Mini came out. Plus once the likes of ALEXA XT etc got released, making older ALEXA Classics increasingly more affordable to rent, then that too killed away the mid range for RED> 3) The low/mid end for slow motion got killed by Sony FS700, and once the Phantom cameras came out they killed the high end for RED. And with time this just got worse and worse for RED, as more and more cameras could do better and better slow motion. 4) compact cameras (for gimbal / steadicam / crash / cranes / etc) on the high end got killed once the ALEXA Mini was released, and had already been chipped away at by the mirrorless and BMPCC on the lower end 5) the low/mid range for documentaries / corporate / advertising / etc got massively eaten away at with the release of the Canon C300mk1 & C100, and then full on demolished once the Sony FS7 came along, almost no point for using RED at all. What was once a big area for RED between S35 level vs DX100 level filmmaking when the RED ONE was released has shrunk now to almost nothing. Remember too, that the camera rental is a very small part of an overall budget for a production in many cases. The difference between renting a RED Gemini vs an ARRI Alexa Mini is a rounding error for them. So why choose the RED?? And if someone is super strapped for cash, will they want to splurge on renting a RED Gemini or will they be happy to settle for the likes of an URSA Mini Pro or a Sony FX6 or Canon C300mk2 etc? (and probably, these cameras will be even better suited to the nature of this type of filmmaking) Indeed, you might have missed the boat on getting your hands on your dream camera! They're unaffordable now. ah right, two totally different sensors Would make more sense to compare a Epic-X vs Scarlet-X that are both using the same MX sensor.