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Some tough love. They will always suck. There is no such thing as a good one. The way they work is by degrading your image. The sooner you accept it the better. I long ago went to straight or internal ND. Do I occasionally use VND? Yeah. But I can count on one hand the number of times in a year. I suspect you need to hear this because you wrote a post about it. Not everyone will agree but throw away the crutch and never look back

Man, reading this thread tells me we need more artists and less engineers. In the world AND in this thread.

The extra DR from the R5C vs the R5 would have to been substantial for it to match with the C70. As I said, I shot R5 and C70 on set over the weekend and the difference seems substantial to me. I have no reason to doubt that the R5C (and R5) offer benefits at ISO 3200, but thankfully I'm not lighting for that on set. In my case, the R5C also gets a 1 stop boost because I've screwed on the EF speed booster. That'll cover me most of the time. As far as matching color between them, I have a color chart taped to the back of my slate and ask the PA to flip it around after calling the shot. I just use the color chart tool in Resolve on the first or second node and other than DR and noise, I'd be hard-pressed to say which camera is which after that. They both look great. Unless the R5C changes the colors a lot, I can't imagine that it would be too hard to match to the C70 or C300II.

All well considered points it's just that as you say I think the z8/z9 is the latest and greatest regarding image quality and would be excited to use it - the R5c image to me looks very similar to the R6 I was using a while back, nice but kind of Canon vanilla - more of a sideways step. Anyway they both shoot lovely footage so can't really go wrong either way

I have been spending too much money on equipment in recent years, and WAY too much time researching it. I really don't need anything else in terms of kit. What I do need is to replace my wardrobe and make some repairs to my home and my vehicle. Also, I'd like to spend more time producing passion projects. So, I'm making a commitment that I will not buy any new gear between November 30th, 2023 and November 29th, 2024 (got to give myself the option to take advantage of Black Friday deals). If I need a specialty piece of gear, I will rent it. The exceptions are expendables and direct replacements, should anything I'm using break down. I've never done this before and I'm posting this to help keep myself accountable.

I keep assuming that others have done it before, but I don't see it! On big productions with pro colorists, it's probably a waste of time, but on the sort of small productions that I work on, it feels like a cheat code - especially if the editor/colorist is using Resolve and can nearly instantly get the cameras to have a matching neutral grade to start from. 😄

For me, it's a kitchen remodel and some new clothes. Your reasons are much less selfish. I'm two weeks in and still holding strong! Lol.

Probably this will be a (almost) no gear for me too. Have to work out my personal finances and prepare for to future (and my daughter is in the last year of public school, probably will have to pay - a lot - for education next year..). Spent almost a year searching for a LX100 II and/or an Olympus Pen F with reasonable prices, and now BOTH appeared...but have to stick to my plan. At the same time, my camera usage is down to a minimum (working double for income in TI / finances), hence it would be a very bad expense. And my current X-S20 and lenses is, by a big margin, the best kit that I had. More than enough for my current usage.

In the comments of the react video all the situation was explained. "Hey Kai & Lok, Bloody producer here. First thing first the videos have bene restored (there’s a post on DRTV channel explaining what happened). Long story short, no one is monitoring the channel so things decay. I wish you’d reached out to me first, but I also understand why you do what you do. I haven’t been back to our old channel for years, and this certainly brought back memories. I still remember the hundreds of weekly meetings we had together, exchanging banters and ridicule each other’s haircuts. I remember our shared love for Top Gear, and Lok our shared Apple fanboyship. Those were the most fun 7 years I had work-wise, and I still miss those days a lot. I’m sure you’ll agree that those were also our most creative years, daring to think big (nothing compared to today’s Mr Beast era but those were some big ideas on YouTube back then!). I’m glad we got it going for so long. I’m also glad you guys continue carrying on making these videos. I have reached out personally and hopefully you got my messages. Would be happy to catch up whenever you guys are back in Hong Kong. Please do more of these reaction videos. I’d be the first one to watch! And thanks for bringing back my memories, and renewing the interest in our old channel and content. Cheers, Richard (Bloody Producer)" After that, Kai posted: "UPDATE: Good News! Thank you to the Richard/Bloody Producer and DR for making all the videos available again What also happened is that I ended up speaking to the Bloody Producer; he made the point - both publicly and privately - that he wished that we’d got in touch before publishing this video. But I want to clarify a few things first: First thing I’d like to say is that primarily this was made as a reaction video; the purpose of it is to SHARE the old content that we had on our hard drives with the public because it wasn’t available anymore, and hadn’t been for more than one month. Simple as that. Although the mystery of why they were taken down in the first place has since been explained by Richard/BP, it wasn’t our core objective to find out. Nothing shifty. We wanted to make the videos available for all to watch via a fair use/reaction video sort of thing. Another thing about Richard/Bloody Producer mentioning that he wished that I’d “reached out” makes it sound like we have been on good terms ever since and I simply didn’t want to mention it to him. The last communication we had was in 2016 when I didn’t sign the last contract and it was made quite clear how things were at that point and there’s been no communication up until now. Long story short: things haven't been cool between us for quite some time. We both have had chances to chuck out an olive branch at many opportunities, but ultimately didn't. I felt that we were releasing this purely for the sake of sharing content with you - the people watching - not to do the dirty on DR or to stir up a controversy. People have written about this news over a month ago; blogs asked me for interviews about it; Tony Northrup made a video titled “DigitalRev DELETED!” On 2nd November 2023 with over 80k views. If either Lok or I wanted to jump on the Hot Controversial News bandwagon, we could’ve done it much, much earlier. Alas, I have apologised to Richard/Bloody Producer directly for not attempting to contact him before hand. And the good thing is that, as Richard and I are both grown-ass men, we can talk again, bury the hatchet - let bygones be bygones - and just move on. And even more importantly: the videos are back online on the DRTV channel and, well, Richard/BP has encouraged us to make more reaction videos if we want, which is great because we really enjoyed watching those old videos together and I hope you have too! Thanks for the support, everyone! Love from Me"

Most issues come from the fact that VND is not ND. Which should be obvious: 2xPola is anything but ND, except someone with an inclination for marketing thought it clever to call 2xPola "Variable ND". Pola filters are special purpose filters and it makes no sense to use them for general purpose light levels reduction. There are too many variables involved in filtering polarized light, starting with light falling angles and reflective surface characteristics, for this to be a reliable levels reducing method. Not to mention the adverse side effects of filtering out some reflected light more than other, e.g. preferentially filtering out skin subsurface scattered light otherwise known as "skin glow".

There are some physics involved about how shorter it can be. Most flash brands don't even report t0.1 number in their spec sheet, they know it doesn't look good.

NICE! That sounds like a great way to really help out the folks downstream in the image pipeline without much extra effort. I've never heard of anyone doing that before, and yet it seems so obvious..

This is totally in keeping with the circumstances that Brian Eno was in when he invented(discovered?) ambient music. https://www.openculture.com/2021/03/brian-eno-explains-the-origins-of-ambient-music.html The sounds from outside became part of the music.

Back then I worked for a company that made controller ICs integrated into SSDs, so I went through the teething process! Getting OS developers to change their code to properly support SSDs was sometimes an ordeal. For example, there were lots of complaints of poor write performance, and much of this was due to an OS not issuing trim commands to the SSD. Unlike magnetic disks, SSD blocks need to be erased prior to writing, and erasure is a time-consuming operation than can really slow down writes on a well-used SSD. A trim command tells the SSD which blocks are no longer in use so it can erase them during idle periods. This greatly speeds up writes that are targeted at those erased blocks. If I remember correctly, MacOS was one of the last OSes to get support for trim.

Its flash on hot shoe. Using any wireless system limits the speed to 1/500s.

Poor man / DIY from Grimor industries 🤣🤣 It's a gardener Stilh Harness (with 90° aluminum tube) and a cheap rope ratchet with upgraded cord. I buy all the parts for under 100 euros and you can adjust rope length with just one hand. Never use the real easyrig thing, but I think the main difference is mine has no suspension mechanism.

How's performance from that tiny USB drive? Not great, I'd imagine, but perhaps good enough for your needs. I remember when SSDs first became available. Operating systems were written to use rotating disks as storage, which don't have write-cycle limitations, so the OS would perform write-intensive operations like paging to an SSD and wear it out prematurely, especially since early SSDs that more primitive wear-leveling algorithms than today. Nowadays things are much better with OSes optimized for SSDs and the SSDs themselves are better (except really cheap ones, which tend to fail more often than mainstream drives). I find those tiny drives really handy for some things. I have my entire CD music collection ripped to FLAC files and stored on one of those tiny drives, which goes into a USB port on my car. It doesn't stick out very far, so less chance of it getting snapped off if something impacts it.

Yeesh. Performance from that type of USB drive is usually terrible. Glad it worked out for you, but load time for applications must have been unpleasant. One mitigation (but not solution) for the cable problem is to use one with a right-angle connector going left or right depending on where you attach it. Velcro to the back of the screen is smart - I should probably do that (and get some right angle cables). That'd go a long way to reducing my irritation when editing from an external drive that's flopping around every time I want to get up. 😅

Right, if we gave a machine learning model only movies, then it would have a limited understanding of anything. But if we gave it a more representative slice of life, similar to what a person takes in, it would have a more human-like understanding of movies. There's no person whose sole experience is "watching billions of movies, and nothing else." We have experiences like going to work, watching a few hundred movies, listening to a few thousand songs, talking to people from different cultures, etc. That was my point about a person's life being a huge collection of prompts. We can observe more limited ranges of artistic output from groups of people who have fewer diverse experiences as well. Defining art as being made by a living person does, by definition, make it so that machines cannot produce art. It's not a useful definition though, because 1. It's very easy to make something where it is impossible to tell how it was made, and so then we don't know whether it's art. 2. We now need a new word for things that we would consider art if produced by humans, but was in fact produced by a machine Perhaps a more useful thing in that case would be for you to explain why art requires a living person, especially taking into account the two points above? Jaron Lanier wrote an interesting book 10 years ago about our value as training data, called Who Owns the Future. Worth a read for a perspective on how the data we produce for large companies is increasing their economic value. I don't disagree, but I also believe that learning art is also a process of taking in information (using a broad definition of information) over the course of a lifetime, and creating an output that is based on that information.