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I have a new setup and pipeline and I'm really happy with it. GH7 shooting V-Log in C4K Prores 422 internally, at around 500Mbps 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens for daytime, 12-35mm F2.8 for night-time K&F True Colour 1-5 stop vND Pipeline in Resolve: CST to DWG as working colour space Plugin for basic shot adjustments Film Look Creator for overall look (and for taking the digititis out of the image) ARRI709 LUT to get to 709 output I went on a walk on Monday to test the full setup, and it was a crazy hot day (37C/99F) and direct midday sun, so seriously challenging conditions. Here are a few grabs (be sure to click-through rather than viewing the preview files embedded in the post). My notes and impressions - while shooting: Setup was GH7, 14-140mm lens, vND, and a wrist-strap and that's it I used the integrated screen, showing histogram, zebras, and focus-peaking to monitor I used back-button focus to AF before hitting record, so no AF-C going on while shooting (and randomly changing its mind about what to focus on) All shots were 14-140mm at F5.6 for constant exposure The K&F 1-5 stop vND had enough range, when combined with the DR of the GH7, so I never needed to change settings, despite going in and out of shadow (and even inside, which isn't included in the above images) The vND had a much more consistent sky and colour render than my old (crappy) vND, so I'm really happy with it I did ETTR and bring images down in post, but my tests indicated that V-LOG is very linear so there are a good few stops of latitude there The "tripod mode" of IBIS, which locks the frame completely, was very effective (despite me being hot and not having eaten for hours) and I could hand-hold past 70mm without it needing to drift, and even at 140mm (280mm FF equivalent) the shots will be fine with a bit of stabilisation in post (C4K on 1080p timeline) I shot about 18mins of footage in about 1.5 hours, camera was on most of the time with screen at full brightness, and didn't get any notifications about the battery, and didn't look to see how much was left since I have a spare My notes and impressions - in post: I chose a Film Look Creator preset and then just messed with it for maybe 10 mins, while scrolling back and forth through the footage, and I deliberately pushed the contrast to create a really strong sense of the contrast between the beating sun and the deep shadows Shots had exposure adjusted (obviously, due to ETTR) and some had contrast lowered and a few had slight WB tweaks, but that's it I never felt like I was fighting with the footage, and it didn't feel like work when creating the look.. I've shot with a lot of cheap cameras with tiny sensors and you always feel like you're trying to make gold out of lead, but playing in the FLC was more like choosing between a large range of high-quality options I used another copy of the FLC to adjust exposure etc per shot, with it set to not impart and 'look'. The advantage of that is that in Resolve there is a mode (Shift-F) that maximises the preview image and gets rid of the GUI except for the vertical toolbar on the right-hand-side where the DCTL and OFX plugins are, so it's a way of getting almost a full-screen view but keeping the controls visible.. very useful if you don't have a control surface or a second monitor handy. I'll talk more about my thought process and how I got to this setup in a later post, and also go into some of the technical stuff (DR, high-ISO, etc) but more importantly than that, I finally feel like the tech has come of age. What I mean by that is that I now have a setup where: I can shoot with a conveniently sized setup that doesn't need a rig and is ergonomic to use It has the right usability features, such as histograms, zebras, focus-peaking etc internally The monitor is bright enough The GH7 plus lenses (14-140mm F3.5-5.6 and 12-35mm F2.8) are long enough and fast enough to shoot what I see, without being too large, heavy, or prohibitively expensive It has enough spec that it can deal with almost all the situations that I actually shoot in, with enough DR for the sun, enough ISO for night-time, and fans so it doesn't overheat before I do, etc It shoots internally using a colour space and codec that don't look cheap/amateurish and make me think about upgrading It doesn't fight with me in the colour grade Resolve and the Film Look Creator are able to easily give me the flexibility in post to match images and correct any weaknesses from shooting (e.g. if there's a bit of movement when shooting hand-held at 140mm) Resolve and the Film Look Creator are able to remove the 'digital/video' look and instead give me a range of options that don't look artificial and most importantly, contribute a feeling to the footage without distracting from the content of the images (this is, after all, the entire purpose of what we're doing here.....) For the first time it feels like I'm getting the results I want because of the equipment I have, rather than in spite of it.

Maybe they meant their OWN FX3 rather than Sony’s.

Got my S1RII and like I thought, I'm a bit disappointed. Stills are great with very good resolution, the Dpreview studio test is odd because the camera is very sharp even when using not so sharp lenses like the 28-200mm. But there are better cameras for photography, AF implementation is weird, AF-S is only DFD and the buffer is a joke when shooting high fps pictures. Video quality is the same than S5II, a bit less sharpening but still the same video engine, it still looks worse than the old gen, the resolution just feels not as good, no matter the mode or resolution used the image doesn't look really sharp in a good way, lines are not straight, some details are missing like if a filter or blur in some part of the image was added. The image looks like there is a slight oil painting touch softening the image at the core. Like on the S5II the rec 709 profiles are worse than V-log. So it is a bit ironic from Lumix to say "discover unseen details" for their S1RII tagline. Because of this the moire is not too much prononced. Some will like this tradeoff. I tested Prores Raw 6K Pixel to Pixel and the image is much better, the weird processing is gone. But I can't get the image right when using Premiere Pro, colors are off, I don't think Prores Raw is really fully supported by Premiere. The crop and the data size also makes this mode hard to use and it is not supported at all by Resolve. Using the Canon R5 or Z6III for raw is much easier as the files are better supported and there is no crop. The rolling shutter is just bad when using the DR boost, I didn't think I could see it but I can see jello even with relatively slow movements. In addition 24fps is the max fps we can use with DR boost and Open Gate. I can't select 30fps, maybe a bug. I think the best modes are 6k or 4k 60fps, there is only a slight crop, worse DR because no DR boost and the image quality becomes even slighltly worse but there is not a big difference with the 30fps and the rolling shutter is better. I quickly tested the 4k 120fps and as if it isn't enough that the 4k30fps was not great, the 120fps is even worse : blurry, bad details, just unusable. When selecting Pixel to Pixel, the quality is better but again these crop make these Pixel to Pixel modes hard to use and feel like we are using a S35 camera. Stabilization is the best in the market and for me it's the main reason I still use Panasonic (with Open Gate too). But the S5II is as good ... The S1RII feels like it was created for people taking mostly photography of still subjects. And for this the camera is good, not the best DR performance but nice colors and impressive 177MP handheld mode (the image makes a very long time to create though, much longer than on the S5II). For video it comes with marketing bait as 8k and 4k 120fps. The 8k like every other modes except raw is too much processed, it has high rolling shutter when the DR boost is enabled and the 4k120fps is not good at all. Yes we can do a lot of things with this camera but with big penalties most of the time. The added Prores Raw is questionable too, the files are not supported in Resolve and the crop is really disappointing. The fact remains, however, than the S1RII is the only affordable high resolution camera with acceptable autofocus for L mount. However, I don't see anything which could attract new users to Lumix or L mount, the S5II is a much better value for Youtube and other social media creators. And the A7RIV is much cheaper and has better AF for stills. 3600€ is a lot of money but I would have happily spend a bit more to get better video engine, better rolling shutter and 8k raw. As things stand at the moment with the current firmware, I think the right price should be more about 3200€. About the reviews available online like the one from Northrup, I think the best is to always wait for some Chinese or Korean reviews, they provides much more informations and are much more unbiased than any Northrup or Undone reviews. Here is an exemple of a good and accurate review :

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you definitely won’t get either in that Blackmagic presentation 😀

One that would be interesting is if they took the original UMP12K Super35 sensor and put it in the Pocket 6K Pro body. Though I suspect they would need to add too much power to make it viable. I’m hopeful that they have a firmware upgrade for the Micro Studio 4K G2 that allows the use of the USB-C monitor they make for the PYXIS. Or at least one that switches on the Bluetooth module we all know that’s in it but they inexplicably won’t let us use!

I pick mine up from the store on Monday, excited to check out my own files.

These kind of posts are always my favorite. Thank you for sharing!

HA! I didn't notice that until you pointed it out, as I hadn't hit play on that shot yet. I guess nothing is immune to moire, although this was worse than I would have thought. The GH7 has no crop in its full resolution modes, and none in the 1080p modes, but the 4K modes do have slight crops - with the C4K having slightly less crop which is why I chose it, so I wonder why that is and what tom-foolery might be going on with that. The bitrates for the native resolutions are pretty brutal without Prores LT, so I'll likely stick to the C4K mode unless it starts being an issue. Thanks! I didn't get the LogC upgrade. I haven't seen any tests that were done properly so am assuming that it's not worth the cost unless proven otherwise. I also figure that even if there is some magic in there, I'm taking a hammer to the image with the FLC anyway, so it's not like I'm precious about it. The only thing I am precious about is getting images that have the right aesthetic to support the subject matter and get out of the way rather than being distracting. When I saw Goodfellas and a bunch of film trailers projected on 35mm film, the two most stunning things about the images were: 1) how fundamentally flawed they were from a technical perspective 2) how quickly and completely those incredible flaws evaporated and you saw effortlessly through and into the scene I'm still at the beginning of my FLC journey, but I'm convinced this pipeline is capable of removing the digital distractions from the image that bug me so much.

Part 2... how did I get here? I've written about this previously, but the summary is that I went through a sequence of trial and error, continually bumping up against the limits of the hardware, the software, my skill, and mindset. Setup: GH5, fast manual-focus primes I shot a bunch with the GH5 and a set of very fast MF primes. I chose this setup as it had 10-bit LOG, IBIS, and the fast primes gave good low-light and some background blur. I knowingly sacrificed AF, essentially swapping a fast / accurate / robotic AF for a slow / human / aesthetically-appropriate focusing mechanism. The MF worked, but not always (especially for my kids, who wait for no-one), and took time and effort to operate the camera away from the things that literally every other crew member does on set. The 10-bit LOG worked, but wasn't a properly supported LOG profile so didn't colour grade flawlessly in post. The primes provided the low-light and shallow-DoF but the shots I missed because I couldn't change lenses fast enough were more valuable in the edit than having shallow-DoF. The DR was lacking. Setup: GX85 with 12-35/2.8 I owned the GX85 and 12-35mm zoom, so I did some testing. I loved the speed of AF-S, and the deeper DoF meant that the number of shots unusable due to missed focus dropped to almost zero. I tested it with low-light and for well-lit night-time areas, like outdoor shopping malls, it was sufficient. The Dual IS (IBIS + lens OIS) was absolutely spectacular and a welcome addition, and having a zoom made me realise why doco and ENG shooters have them as standard issue. The DR and 709 profile was a real limitation though, and I really felt it in the grade. It was around this time I figured out proper colour management, and the Film Look Creator was released. These made a huge boost to grading the GX85, despite its 709 profile. The mindset shift The fundamental pivot was in mindset. As social media became faster and more showy, I noticed the gulf between it and 'real' film-making more and more. I went minimalist, thinking more and more about the days before digital where the process was to shoot as best you could, cut it, do sound-design, and that was it. The focus was on what was in-front of the camera, how the cuts made you feel, and sound design that supported that vision. Even those shooting docs on 16mm film could make magic. Without throwing away the baby with the bathwater, I decided to re-focus. To shoot what I could shoot, to learn to cut with feeling, and to simulate a film-like colour grading process where the look was applied and only very basic adjustments were made. Setup: OG BMMCC with 12-35/2.8 I owned these already, and on my last trip to South Korea I took these as well as the GX85. My shooting moved from shooting people I knew to shooting more general scenes, giving me more time and taking the time pressure off. The setup was large (comparatively!) and very slow to work with, but it validated my mindset shift. The images were organic and rich, but in a way that drew you into their contents, rather than towards the medium. The DR was finally sufficient, and the colours were delightful. But the monitor wasn't bright enough, the lack of IBIS meant that the OIS stabilised tilt and pan but not roll, so the images all needed to be stabilised in post, but had roll motion blur due to the 180 shutter. The low-light wasn't ideal either, even with fast lenses. The moire from the 1080p sensor was real and ruined shots. I also got a lot more comfortable shooting in public with a more visible camera setup. New Setup: GH7 with 14-140 and 12-35..... So what I wanted was the best of all worlds. Dynamic range. I knew the OG BMMCC and OG BMPCC were the same/similar sensor, and I knew the GH7 had more. What I didn't expect was how much more that would be in real life. Here's a high DR scene from Monday. Here it is without the FLC, which I set to add contrast. Now with the shot raised by 3 stops. Notice the detail in the railings and under the eves on the right. Now with the shot lowered by 3 stops. Notice that the roof, and even the body of the car are still not clipped, with the only clipping being the sun reflecting off the car window. In grading, there is more DR than you can fit in the DR of the final shot - assuming you haven't developed Stockholm Syndrome for your LOG footage that is. Low light. I had previously established that the GX85 and 12-35mm F2.8 were good enough for well-lit night locations. I also knew that the BMMCC at ISO800 and the 12-35mm F2.8 set to a 360 shutter was good enough for semi-well-lit night locations. I also knew that the BMMCC with my 50mm F1.2 lens was passable at the darkest scenes I shot in Korea - which were from the hotel window at night. I've compared the GH7 vs the GX85 and BMMCC and the noise profiles are all very different, but I concluded that the GH7 had probably 2-4 stops of advantage over those. This means that I might be able to shoot well-lit night locations with the 14-140mm lens, and might be able to shoot from the hotel window at night with the 12-35mm lens. I'm still contemplating if I should take my F1.2-1.4 primes on my up-coming trip, but if I don't I'll still be able to shoot 99% of what I want to with the zooms. Camera size. Perhaps the only drawback when compared to my previous setups. I'll be taking the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens as the pocketable tiny camera. This combo is no slouch by itself, so although it lacks some of the specs from more serious cameras, it is easily in the capable category, especially when helped by Resolve+FLC and from a shoot-cut-sound-publish mindset. Absolute speed. When it comes to absolute speed, nothing beats a smartphone, which is always in your pocket, can be pulled out and rolling in seconds. This is also a serious tool when combined with Resolve+FLC and a shoot-cut-sound-publish mindset.

The EOS R50 V is a loss leader out to encourage lens sales with a huge army of social media influencers and Youtubers. On the face of it, it's definitely a step forward from Canon in the value for money stakes. Sure, they will want you to buy loads of expensive glass for it. Thankfully Sigma is doing some nifty APS-C lenses so we don't have to. I do like the built in LUTs, C-LOG3, AF should be decent although maybe perfect, but it does lack an EVF and IBIS.

It was missing a question mark as I was looking for confirmation if it was or wasn’t 😀 I don’t disagree but by the same token, the S5 has garnered the reputation as being a much nicer image than it’s successor the S5ii from people who own both bur I only have personal experience with the latter so I have no idea. Keeping the resolution of the camera in all names means It has a whiff of the file naming abyss you fall down with “FinalEditUltimateRevisionDeliveryVersion.mov” that quickly becomes “FinalEditUltimateRevisionDeliveryVersion_v2.mov”

Yeah its pretty exciting as a Canon shooter myself to see a new product line emerge, especially one dedicated to video. First flat top Canon design ever. I don't know about no overheating as this is an entry-level product aimed at social network content creators so usually very short form content but the video below states they worked hard to avoid it. In any case rest assured this is the first product of an entirely new V camera line dedicated to video so its pretty much a given pro FF version will come. Here is a rare glimpse into the R&D folks at Canon HQ talking about it: R50V also has filters, custom LUTs, false color, aspect markers & 2.35:1 cine mode. Pretty cool for a $695 camera!

OK, so we have until Friday to indulge in baseless wild speculation about what the new products will be. Watch along live here.

"The S1RII feels like it was created for people taking mostly photography of still subjects." I guess I don't understand how anyone thought it would be otherwise. I mean, that's what the R stands for. I continue to be amazed at how the online crowd managed to psyche themselves into thinking camera was going to be something it was never intended to be. It's a photo-centric camera with a massive video bonus. It's not an S1HII. It's not a Sony A1II. Especially considering only 6 weeks ago we all thought it was going to be just a cheaper Leica SL3 (cue the moaners saying 'I wish it was' as if there wouldn't be a horde of complaints). I just got mine and it's exactly what I wanted. Now I can get off the terminally negative online train and get snapping.

I don't know if the 16TB media module for the Ursa Cine series has been officially announced yet. If not, I'm sure it will be there. Though I'm not completely sure who the target market is - people who really want to cry when they 15 hours of footage to a media failure? Along those lines, a hope is that they'll announce a smaller media module reader for an individual module - one that costs less than like $1k. Right now, when using the media module, offload options are USB to the camera, 10gE to the camera, or the expensive rack-mounted media module reader. I think a lot of people are hoping that they'll announce a 6K or 8K camera using a cheaper variant of the UC 12K sensor.

Flirted with the idea of selling my S1 and go for the S1RII but eventually decided to keep it for life. Parting with this kind of image quality in such a tank built body for 800€ is a crime 🙂

There is something to be said about how my S1 still comfortably covers all my needs 7 years later...

Just watched the first episode. Very good stuff. The single take is extraordinary but almost seamlessly unnoticed at same time.

Thanks.. To be honest I just find it baffling that everyone is throwing the word "cinematic" around and yet all the colour grades look like they haven't been converted from LOG to 709. It's one of the easiest changes you can make in post to take your footage from video to cinema, and yet hardly anyone does it. Pushing as much contrast and saturation as you can was the best film-making advice I ever got.

My Sony RX1R had developed some coating marks on the screen. Turns out it just peels off to reveal a pristine glass LCD underneath. Indeed the upper layer is a factory-installed layer of anti-reflective plastic! Daft decision from Sony and effects a lot of models... But at least now if it happens to you, you know what to do.

Regardless of whatever pipeline you ultimately use, I really like what you're willing to do with the blacks.

Now I am in no way comparing the 5Diii with ML Raw to your more expensive cinema cameras, but I do agree. The first time I looked at the screen after installing Magic Lantern onto my 5Diii, I saw something a little nicer than anything I had seen on an LCD before. With a few very minor tweaks in post and I was able to get images I had no business getting with my skill set. When I tried the same thing with the FP, I didn't see it and I wasn't able to get the same level as easy in post as it was with my 5Diii. Weirdly, I noticed it more with the 4K 8bit cDNGs than I did with the 12bit... although I admit that the 12bit is a superior image... if only Sigma would turn off the damn NR in their raw files. Anyway, it was definitely easier to see than any run of the mill mirrorless I have used since, though. Although the R7 amazes me in some ways. From what I have heard from various people online, @Mattias Burling included, that quality is there with Redraw, Redcode... whatever it's called. That doesn't mean that modern mirrorless cameras aren't capable of creating amazing images. They obviously are. With the advent of raw codecs and post workflows, I agree that the gap is getting smaller, but... That said, I have no business owning a Komodo, so it doesn't mean much to me and more than likely, depending on what the R6iii looks like, I'll probably buy a Z6iii next... of course I have been tempted by the FX30, so I may give that a shot in the meantime.

Impressive @kye no idea what this forum would be without you, really. Food for thought. You're such an asset and a few people here, if no more or/and elsewhere, miss you when you're absent : ) You've summed up the whole thing : ) it's all about that, no more no less, one of the reasons why people love (and use) anamorphics :- )

Underrated, but the same type of tripod plate on each camera, with each tripod head and any type of "grip" matched with the appropriate head or clip. For instance, whilst I have a Manfrotto 501 style fluid head, I have adapted it to accept 200PL plates. Same with my gimbal. It means I can go from tripod to gimbal to handheld without faffing with plates and having to rebalance.

That's a good feeling. Nice to see you posting again as I always like to hear what you have to say. The shots look really good! So, did you get the Arri LUT add-on?

Not to mention that Museum Of Modern Moiré building.

Dr. No Clue Blofortune Scaramaga

How about a fat fucking cunt named Donald. Would make a great soviet villain.

Was catching up with my new favourite magazine The Atlantic today They have some neat AI articles https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/ Like this one about the kind of scale of piracy the tech giants are doing in order to train some of their mainstream AI models. There's a link to a tool called LibGen, where you can put in an author name and see if his work has been harvested up by Meta and used to train their large language models. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/ Sure enough I put "Andrew Reid" into it and up comes the GH4 guide. So we can confidently say the Meta's Llama 3 knows all about shooting 4K with a certain 2014 Lumix camera. When do I get paid and how much?

To save you bothering to watch that video (as pretty as the visuals are) here is what it ended up being about.

Everyone is talking about how they used the Ronin 4D on the "Adolescence" and how well it did. I bet they only used it in like 4 shots though.

I have a friend who still shoots GH5 professionally and his clients are happy. Really the GH5 represents insane value these days.

Might also be that they dropped the 4k Cinema price so they can sell them off. A OG Pocket siced 4K o 6K cam would be fun.

Maybe they were going to launch it yesterday but realised the joke wouldn’t be very funny

It would be interesting. One thing that I got from the Shane Hurlbut video was that one of the reasons that they built their own media module for the UC12K is that with the UMP, especially in 12K mode, they got lots of complaints about dropped frames due to media not keeping up. It's a little surprising since the data rate at 8:1 isn't all that crazy and in my testing so far, my pretty basic Sabrent CFE cards kept up just fine, but I don't know if I'd have that confidence when shooting for a full day. Anyway. The 9K mode on the UC12K is fantastic. Instead of the 12K UMP sensor, I wonder if they'd do a 9K S35 cut-down UC sensor for it. If they did that with a mirrorless mount (and ideally built-in ND's), then Black Magic would have their second camera I was interested in after the original BMPCC.

Here it is, the camera i have wanted 5 years ago! https://www.canon.co.uk/cameras/eos-r50v/ A strange time: so many options: a cheap red komodo for that indie movie, a supersmall canon camera with 10 bit codec - things everyone would have dreamt of 5-8 years ago.

Each time I think to change my two GH5 I check again the old work of Filippo Chiesa with his GH5s and... I save a lot of money 😉

What a ride this was. Episode 3 especially... Peak TV. Direction, writing, acting, sound design, everything just falls into place.

I've learned a lot about film-making over the years, most of it came through discovery and experimentation, but the best film-making advice I ever got was this... See how much contrast and saturation you can add to your images This probably sounds ridiculous to you, and I can understand why it would, but hear me out. Not only is it deceptively simple, but it's hugely powerful, and will push you to develop lots of really important skills. The advice came from a professional colourist on some colour grading forums after I'd asked about colour grading, and as I make happy holiday travel videos it seemed to be a logical but completely obvious piece of advice, but it stuck with me over the years. The reason I say "over the years" is that the statement is deceptively simple and took me on a journey over many many years. When I first tried it I failed miserably. It's harder than it looks... a lot harder. The first thing it taught me was that I didn't know WTF I was doing with colour grading, and especially, colour management. Here's a fun experiment - take a clip you've shot that looks awful and make it B&W. It will get better. Depending on how badly it was shot, potentially a lot better. It took me years to work out colour management and how to deal with the cameras I have that aren't supported by any colour management profiles and where I had to do things myself. I'm still on a learning curve with this, but I finally feel like I'm able to add as much contrast and saturation as I like without the images making me want to kill myself. I recently learned how the colour profiles work within colour management pipelines and was surprised at how rudimentary they are - I'm now working on building my own. The second thing it taught me was that all cameras are shit when you don't absolutely nail their sweet-spot, and sometimes that sweet-spot isn't large enough to go outside under virtually any conditions, and that sometimes that sweet spot doesn't actually exist in the real-world. Here's another fun and scarily familiar experiment - take a shot from any camera and make it B&W. It makes it way better doesn't it? Actually, sometimes it's astonishing. Here's a shot from one of the worst cameras I have ever used: We're really only now just starting to get sub-$1000 cameras where you don't have to be super-gentle in pushing the image around without risking it turning to poop. (Well, with a few notable exceptions anyway... *cough* OG BMPCC *cough*). Did you know that cinematographers do latitude tests of cinema cameras when they're released so they know how to expose it to get the best results? These are cameras with the most amount of latitude available, frequently giving half-a-dozen stops of highlights and shadows, and they do tests to work out if they should bump up or push down the exposure by half a stop or more, because it matters. Increasing the contrast and saturation shows all the problems with the compression artefacts, bit-depth, ISO noise, NR and sharpening, etc etc. Really cranking these up is ruthless on all but the best cameras that money can buy. Sure, these things are obvious and not newsworthy, but now the fun begins.... The third thing it taught me was to actually see images - not just looking at them but really seeing them. I could look at an image from a movie or TV show and see that it looked good (or great), and I could definitely see that my images were a long way from either of those things, but I couldn't see why. The act of adding contrast and saturation, to the point of breaking my images, forced me to pay attention to what was wrong and why it looked wrong. Then I'd look at professional images and look at what they had. Every so often you realise your images have THAT awful thing and the pro ones don't, and even less often you realise what they have instead. I still feel like I'm at the beginning of my journey, but one thing I've noticed is that I'm seeing more in the images I look at. I used to see only a few "orange and teal" looks (IIRC they were "blue-ish" "cyan-ish" and "green-ish" shadows) and now I see dozens or hundreds of variations. I'm starting to contemplate why a film might have different hues from shot-to-shot, and I know enough to know that they could have matched them if they wanted to, so there's a deeper reason. I'm noticing things in real-life too. I am regularly surprised now by noticing what hues are present in the part of a sunset where the sky fades from magenta-orange to yellow and through an assortment of aqua-greens before getting to the blue shades. The fourth thing it taught me was what high-end images actually look like. This is something that I have spoken about before on these forums. People make a video and talk about what is cinematic and my impression is completely and utter bewilderment - the images look NOTHING like the images that are actually shown in cinemas. I wonder how people can watch the same stuff I'm watching and yet be so utterly blind. The fifth thing it taught me was how to actually shoot. Considering that all cameras have a very narrow sweet spot, you can't just wave the damned thing around and expect to fix it in post, you need to know what the subject of the shot is. You need to know where to put them in the frame, where to put them in the dynamic range of the camera, how to move the camera, etc. If you decide that you're going to film a violinist in a low-bitrate 8-bit codec with a flat log profile, and then expose for the sky behind them even though they're standing in shadow, and expect to be able to adjust for the fact they're lit by a 2-storey building with a bright-yellow facade, well... you're going to have a bad time. Hypothetically, of course. Cough cough. The sixth thing it taught me is what knobs and buttons to push to get the results I want. Good luck getting a good looking image if you don't know specifically why some images look good and others don't. Even then, this still takes a long time to gradually build up a working knowledge of what the various techniques look like across a variety of situations. I'm at the beginning of this journey. On the colourist forums every year or so, someone will make a post that describes some combination of tools being used in some colour space that you've never heard of, and the seasoned pros with decades of experience all chime in with thank-you comments and various other reflections on how they would never have thought of doing that. I spent 3 days analysing a one-sentence post once. These are the sorts of things that professional colourists have worked out and are often part of their secret-sauce. Examples. I recently got organised, and I now have a project that contains a bunch of sample images of my own from various cameras, a bunch of sample images from various TV and movies that I've grabbed over the years, and all the template grades I have developed. I have a set of nodes for each camera to convert them nicely to Davinci Wide Gamma, then a set of default nodes that I use to grade each image, and then a set of nodes that are applied to the whole project and convert to rec709. Here's my first attempt at grading those images using the above grades I've developed. (This contains NO LUTs either) The creative brief for the grade was to push the contrast and saturation to give a "punchy" look, but without it looking over-the-top. They're not graded to match, but they are graded to be context-specific, for example the images from Japan are cooler because it was very cold and the images from India were colourful but the pollution gave the sun a yellow/brown-tint, etc. Would I push real projects this far? Probably not, but the point is that I can push things this far (which is pretty far) without the images breaking or starting to look worse-for-wear. This means that I can choose how heavy a look to apply - rather than being limited through lack of ability to get the look I want. For reference, here are a couple of samples of the sample images I've collected for comparison. Hollywood / Blockbuster style images: More natural but still high-end images: Perhaps the thing that strikes me most is (surprise surprise) the amount of contrast and saturation - it's nothing like the beige haze that passes for "cinematic" on YT these days. So, is that the limits of pushing things? No! Travel images and perhaps some of the most colourful - appropriate considering the emotions and excitement of adventures in exotic and far-off lands: I can just imagine the creative brief for the images on the second half of the bottom row... "Africa is a colourful place - make the images as colourful as the location!". In closing, I will leave you with this. I searched YT for "cinematic film" and took a few screen grabs. Some of these are from the most lush and colourful places on earth, but..... Behold the beige dullness. I can just imagine the creative brief for this one too: "make me wonder if you even converted it from log...."

So its not the X version and its not the new Z mount version but still its a lot for a lot less. https://www.red.com/stories/komodo-price-drop

DJI just dropped prices for the Ronin 4D series. The 6K version is now $4,999 (down from $6,800) The 8K version is now $9,999 (down from about $13,000) The raw license just went from $979 to $1. Wish I hadn't bought it just a few months ago, but that's great news for existing owners who haven't bought it yet. Note that with the base 6K package, the RAW license is likely to be useless without buying an overpriced DJI ProSSD ($800 for 1TB). https://www.cined.com/dji-ronin-4d-price-drop-raw-license-now-1-instead-of-979/ If I'm guessing, I'd say that DJI are both aiming for a big sales bump with all of the press the R4D has been getting lately (especially with Adolescence) as well as finally undercutting the Komodo-X, C80, and Ursa Cine 12K. I'd still say that it wouldn't be my choice if I only had one camera, but since I got it, it's been to set with me for every short film that I've worked on and I've used it every time. The image from it is really nice, especially from the 8K.

When FLCs were introduced in Resolve I had seen some tutorials on how to apply them. I had never actually played with them because I was only working with underwater footage at that time. Some time ago I took up the subject again and realized that several YouTube videos gave wrong directions on how to apply them and the results are very different. I am certainly stating a trivia and I apologize in advance. This should be a correct example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwcItNYhOV4

What's interesting about the LogC license is that it was probably mapped for that specific sensor. The vLog could have just been tossed in. Maybe. Either way, cool camera and shots.

What makes the Komodo special is the look of global shutter and 16bit raw, but more than this a terrific OLPF. I'm not in the market and agree it's not as convenient as mirrorless setups, so here's hoping that Nikon puts a strong and well engineered OLPF in their upcoming cameras focused on video. I owned both the Z8 and the Z6III, terrific cameras, usable in most situations but plagued by moiré.

I think the new price might give many people looking to buy a PYXIS some pause for thought. Although from what I can see on here at least, the lack of discussion about the PYXIS seems to indicate that there has been a lot of pausing about buying one even before this. Everyone wants a box camera until it comes time to buy one.

https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/RN_e.htm After you selected the camera, click on the name above the chart, it opens the table As you see in R5m2 all points are triangles, meaning noise reduction on RAW at all ISO settings.

Assuming that you're talking about the price of the lens that you have, sold item search on ebay puts it between $700 and $1,000 depending on condition. I'd guess that the simmod mount swap would put you near the higher end of the range.

I’d rather wait for the Nikon/RED version https://nikonrumors.com/2025/03/13/new-nikon-z-video-oriented-camera-rumored-to-be-announced-later-this-year-similar-to-the-sony-fx3.aspx/

I've shot long enough with small sensor, 8-bit rec709 camera's that I got used to "just try to get the recording as close as possible to what you want the final image to look like". So don't drop saturation and contrast to the bottom during recording, only to pull them up in post. This would only make sense if there is a lot of reserve DR in the highlights, and when you are working on a camera where you have to try these tricks, there never is. Never use auto WB (or auto exposure) as this may make the colours and exposure shift during the shot which is very hard to correct afterwards. It's easier if they are off with a constant error, that's quite easy to fix as long as you are not too far off. When using these cameras with limited DR I was quite fanatical with setting the whitebalance manually as these cameras tend to exaggerate differences in colour (and contrast). With mixed lighting, artificial light may seem fiercely red while daylight is fiercely blue at the same time. Now that I've got a camera with good DR (Lumix S5) I just set the WB to cloudy when outdoors and incandescent when indoors. Only when encountering weird artificial light (LED, fluorescent or sodium) I might set a custom white balance. Minor corrections might be required in post but nine out of ten times it looks perfectly natural to me. In daylight, shadows are slightly blue, sides exposed to direct sunlight are slightly yellow, just as it is in real life. Only when all image content is exposed to either shadow or sunlight and the shots are of considerable length I might adjust the WB to the specific light just like how my eyes (or brain actually) would adjust to the colour of the ambient light. It is not so much direct advice that I got but when doing a course on making videos the most important thing I took from it is that people are more predictable then you might think which is especially useful when doing event videography. People are animals of habit and a lot of things we do are ritualized. This means you can always try to think ahead of what might happen next in the coming 10 seconds/minutes/hours and ask yourself what is the most interesting part about that, and how to best visualize that. The result of this is that you will find yourself more often in the right spot at the right time which is I think the most important quality of an event videographer. I remember once recording a wedding video for a friend (I'm not a professional videographer in any way) who also hired a photographer who was just starting out as a wedding photographer. Well, the photographer was actually just a colleague from work for whom this was a nice opportunity to build a portfolio to get started in the business. But I noticed that it happened several times that the photographer had to sprint to the spot where I was already waiting as he realized he was in the wrong spot for what was about to happen next. Always keep anticipating for what might happen, decide what the interesting aspect of that is, and how to best visualize that. You will not always get it right, but the number of times you get "lucky" will increase.

Yep. Every time I have tried internet ‘advice’, my result looked shit. And nothing like I wanted it to look like. I recently discovered log. No really. Up until last year, Fuji or Lumix profiles all the way because I could get a ‘better’ SOOC image and the look I was after, and more consistently. But this year I switched to log and now have the SOOC look I am after with a bare minimum of tweaking needed. A SOOC look of course is a combo of factors: sensor, lens, any filters, exp, WB, LUT, in camera tweaks, etc. A consistent WB is key for me also and all my cameras are now set up with 3 custom settings: Log outdoors 5500k 640 iso VND Log indoors 5000k 4000 iso VND Flat profile low light 5000k auto iso removed VND The key factor for me now is workflow and consistency because that allows greater creativity in every other area.