Andrew Reid

Guest posts by email or proxy, no, because there are plenty of other blogs that do this and sitting at my emails all day isn't my idea of filmmaking fun.... but moving out of Berlin and getting a real team of talent around me, shooting stuff and producing EOSHD content together for YouTube... YES to that. One of the issues I've found in doing this though, is that nobody has the time or money, or the willingness to exit their day jobs to commit to doing so, because we're all slaves in an oligarchy.

That film is damned talented, a great find, pressing all the right emotional buttons with just images and sound alone, no words, just really nice audio/visual poetry. Loved it. The Digital Bolex also has one of the most 'emotional' images in the same sense... incredible colour, dynamic range and a sensor size perfectly matched to pre-1980's Super 16mm vintage lenses. I just wish the D16 cost $999 and was available in great quantity... but that in a way is not the point of it. It is a camera that has a habit of getting into a disproportionately high number of talented hands, which means they're building a really special community around it. Also, it's one of the few cameras you can shoot jerky handheld footage with and it still looks great, for whatever reason - the CCD and global shutter having a hand in that magic motion candace of course.

The crux of it is this - We are a community, a part of the larger photography city, inspired by cinema and hollywood. The DSLR revolution was truly a moment of magic, unleashing all kinds of passion. Passion is a motivation, it gets things done. What has happened to this community is that Corporate America and Corporate Japan have segmented it in half, like slicing a neighbourhood in half with a wall. We have the NewsShooter and Cinema5D managed communities on one side with their C300 Mark IIs and paid work, NoFilmSchool with their venture capitalist funding and team of staffers. On the other side we have the artists. Yes, artists sometimes make bank commercials!!! (Disclaimer) Anyway the point is, that EOSHD and the forum is a great community but it's really up against it now. The premise that anyone can publish gear-orientated opinion pieces has lead to an over-supply of content, much of it rushed, in order to make it timely, because on the internet and Facebook timeliness is everything and a 2 day old post is trash. The internet started as a resource base, a researcher's tool which acts like a big encyclopaedia. For better or worse, since it became mass market, the internet changed and evolved into an entertainment platform and a social network "CelebrityNet" In order to combine the two - entertainment and information, you need to present the information in an entertaining way, no shit huh!? But you also need passion to drive it. I'd like to think that in the DSLR video world myself and Philip Bloom have succeeded in doing this. But eventually I lose my passion and Philip dedicates himself to work. It's a shame, but it's on that path. What needs to happen is that EOSHD becomes a team of people rather than just me, and that it puts on a good show for YouTube, in the mould of Top Gear or The Grand Tour where presenters travel the world and shoot really beautifully entertaining short films, with the latest camera kit. It's exactly like driving a car through spectacular scenery and presenting the information with wit. I'm amazed nobody has done this yet, however when you consider this... This is one of the most expensive and time consuming form of content there is. I'm up for doing it. It's very difficult though and I don't yet have a team, I don't have the enormous amount of money and I don't have the platform behind me (like Amazon). Yet! Until then there's Lok at Digital Rev. I agree with you completely. Actually when EOSHD began, it was more of a 7 posts a week site and a few rumours too, sometimes from good sources, and it grabbed attention and inspired me to build the community and put interesting stuff out there, like a band of GH2 pirates fighting the Canon flagship. When you want to increase the quality of the content by yourself you have to spend weeks or months on it and then your 1 article per month gets buried under a ton of shit. The internet is just like that. You may have noticed some of my recent articles have also been shit, or lacking in inspiration. That's what happens when you try to compete with the internet.

OK so great value in shooting 30-90 second demo with new camera, I get your point now... Well isn't that similar to what I've done many times on EOSHD blog posts over the last 5 years, actually 4 minute videos rather than 30 seconds, so far too long for modern audiences!! I did enjoy doing this but it depends on having something interesting and instantly accessible to film, otherwise it is going to be ducks and cats Every.Single.Time. Also what I loved to do was to create mood pieces for any music of my choosing, but the whole Vimeo copyright match bullshit put paid to that 'artform'. No more haunting Radiohead music videos of Buddhist temples thanks to that. So now what you have to appreciate is that 1 - I live in probably one of the dullest cities in the world to shoot, my own fault I guess and 2 - the effort required to find actors and interesting subjects in Berlin at short notice for free to make a 30-90 second demo reel shot with a hot new cameras and published in a matter of days whilst still newsworthy just after the camera comes into EOSHD HQ.... well that effort is tricky to maintain for one person, not to mention overkill given that this time and effort would be better spent actually making a proper film? So I either maintain a passion somehow for continuing to walk into a shop, buying a GH5 or whatever, then using it in my work, shooting music videos for the bands here in Berlin and my own artistic projects, or shooting whatever is available on the day in order to get the YouTube video out before the competition does.... but if you are late in releasing the content even by a matter of a day or 2, nobody really notices it or shares it, due to it being buried under a thousand other videos about the same thing but made more quickly with less effort, which have now taken pride of place on the entire internet thanks to Facebook and Instagram. It's a race to be first to the bottom my friends. In fact, I don't know why anyone bothers to create anything these days, the internet just makes it a waste of time. Whatever you do, someone else will do it first

I think you might be getting the videos I made confused with the 30 second buzz unboxing video for YouTube there, which is what Aaron was referring to. As I said, people are pathetic They seek comfort and justification in material objects by watching other people buy the camera, open the box and say on YouTube "look isn't it great!" I am not in that market.

The camera which Panasonic can't decide what to call (GX80 in Europe, GX85 in the US and GX7 Mark II in Japan!) really excites me. It's the first time that anyone has put 5 axis in-body stabilisation in a 4K camera which exceeds the performance of the stunningly good Olympus 5 axis system. It's not quite as effective as a gimbal for sweeping handheld movement, but that pain-in-the-ass tripod you can certainly dispense with now, along with that Olympus 1080p mush too!! GRAB A CUP OF TEA, PUT DOWN YOUR F***ING IPHONE AND READ THE LONG ARTICLE!!

I'm just not interested in doing that... I think it's a pathetic attention seeking ploy

Yes the bargain super specced equipment can be a motivation, but without anything decent to film, that soon fades. Like I say, I need to get out of Berlin and start a new chapter... try to capture some magic somehow. Until then, I'll continue to update the blog, there's no chance of me stopping because this stuff is my life-long passion. I can't tell you how much I appreciate those who appreciate the blog and forum. Let's hope that the ugly competition to EOSHD and boring corporate mentality of other blogs and 'managed communities', as well as the sheer lack of good content out there doesn't bury the whole endeavour along with my motivation with it. Not a single day doesn't go by without emails in my inbox offering sponsored content and gear for review... it's soul destroying and debases the entire internet.

Nice sentiment but I am little bit confused why you think the problem revolves around money and monetizing the blog. The reason I haven't been writing as many blog posts recently is because I'm demotivated to do so. Slapping some ads up won't change that. The whole internet culture needs to change. Due to the sheer amount of content out there, slung out in a rush, completely taking away any motivation for me to add to the pile, for people to ignore the long-form content in favour of all the small bitesized chunks of shit. I haven't stopped blogging due to a lack of advertising revenue!! Never sought it in the first place. I am glad the forum is growing. In many ways, it's a good stand-in for the blog whilst I take a break. Got the first GX85 article coming soon BTW Yes I know that feeling. I believe that guys like me and Mattias are more of the cinematographer mould than the writer-director. Our strength is our feel for mood and our eye for the aesthetics of atmosphere, so when you're more of a cinematographer than an all-out filmmaker you're in need of good content to shoot, an interesting mood to create. Sometimes you might not have that content. Also I take a lot of inspiration from shooting the world immediately around me, which is why I live in an exciting capital city, however it's not inspirational to shoot the same location again and again over 5 years, especially not when that city (Berlin) has chosen to change into an ugly homogeneous gentrified hipster hell hole since when I moved here 5 years ago, and the light has been appalling due to climate change for the past 3, rarely any interesting light, weather or sunny afternoons for huge chunks of the year. What I need to get interested in cameras and blogging again is to take my ass out of Germany and go somewhere more interesting and more inspiring, perhaps back to Asia where I did my best work with the GH2 all those years ago. Sadly the blogging I want to do isn't as easy as just filming cats for YouTube and raving about image quality... if it was, I'd have an article ready by the end of every single day. It doesn't interest me. When I'm not feeling it as an artist, there's no point me blogging, it would just be shit! Call it cinematographer's block?!

Buy my books if you'd like to help Money isn't the problem though. As Eric said above, this isn't the internet any more. It's celebritynet. You just watch from now, things are going to go dark. Meaningful and independent long-form content is going to be an endangered species. If you want proof, then see what happened to DigitalRev TV's audience when they put the camera guy with no presenting talent (or even English talent) in front of the camera on their YouTube channel, with Kai seemingly moving to the UK and not appearing as much. Lok's a nice guy but sorry, this video was pure dogshit. So what happened to the audience? They stayed. Didn't go anywhere. Millions of views continue to roll in. The quality of online content is truly a race to the bottom in 2016... zero benefit from quality. It's celebritynet now. I don't think ads are the answer to helping my motivation to write more blog posts either... if anything that is a full time job in itself, I am sure Tony Northup has employees working behind the scenes on that kind of thing. As soon as EOSHD becomes "work" I am stopping it.

I actually think YouTube is the future of television, so I do have great respect for those in the YouTube review community doing a good job. The disingenuous ones hyping products and doing sponsored content I have no time for, unfortunately it seems a lot of people do though! It will all be unboxing videos and nothing else unless people start using more discretion and maybe the system could help them out as well by putting the quality stuff on a pedestal so it is right there to watch and you don't have to seek it out and troll through the shit to get to it. Sadly I think "not worth caring about a blog" is an attitude which has got us here in the first place, having a complete lack of good content online. If people did use more discretion in what they watched and where they got their information from, they would encourage the creation of more entertaining content, better quality and better researched information. It's because joe public just clicks on the first video he sees after typing "GH4" into YouTube or Facebook, that any old shit has been allowed to float to the top of the pile. Same is happening in filmmaking too, it used to be that the cream rose to the top. Not so sure now. Have you seen what's at the top?!

A massive part of the internet has gone mobile, which means people's usage and interaction with the medium has changed. I used to really look forward to spending hours researching a camera, reading an enormous Philip Bloom review with a coffee handy, or watching a nice long informative Camera Store TV review, truth is... how many people are now doing this on a phone, in the 30 or so seconds it takes to distract themselves on a commute to work? We glance and shim and swipe like hell through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It's really sad and pathetic actually. The internet should be much more than that. I want to find my passion again for the gear, but that too is a little dimmed right now. i enjoy reading a review from someone who's pumped up about a camera or lens, like Steve Huff always is, but more often than not I'm feeling increasingly cynical about this, that somehow it's futile because no matter what is around today, there's always something better right around the corner, eventually it becomes exhausting and really dulls your excitement for new releases. Plus all this gear is costing me an arm and a leg!

Hey Michal. I am glad someone has noticed this. I have all the rumors sites in my news feed and I visit some of the other blogs, the truth is these are majorly demotivating for me. It seems the general direction of the internet is going away from long form reviews and articles, into quickly thrown up deals and clickbate, along 2-3 minute quickly knocked up youtube video which are nice to have on in the background as you have a cup of tea in the morning, but contain very little actual useful information. If all the attention is going into the wrong content, so what motivation do I have to carry on with EOSHD? There's still some great stuff out there but it's few and far between, and getting worse. So I actually share your depression with the state of affairs. EOSHD articles I used to do are almost unviable today... the formula is broken... the amount of effort required versus the lack of reward in putting so much information out there for free. Geez. Thanks for the support... not. Facebook and Instagram content is where it's at, sadly. A finger swipe, 2 seconds, next. In the end the audience will regret allowing the internet to dissolve into a trivial social network where appearances are valued above substance.

I'd go for the 1D C. The only thing the 1D X II has in its favour is the AF. The 4K/60fps produces unmanageably large files and will be extremely difficult to edit on any current CPU, besides I'd rather shoot 120fps 2K if it were slow-mo I was after. 60fps doesn't really look that dramatic and there are a ton of cameras that can do 60fps at lower resolutions for a fraction of the cost. Moving onto the 120fps mush on the 1D X II, obviously just about any other cheaper camera shooting 120fps is a better choice for that, there's nothing special about the image in comparison to the A7S II's 120fps that I can make out so far. Any other advantages over the 1D C apart from the AF? Nope.

If the 1D C is anything to go by (it is, the 1D X Mark II has no advantage in low light over it), then the C100 Mk II isn't quite as good in low light, the larger sensor 1D X Mk II will be a bit cleaner at ISO 6400

What's in the 'other'? Seems a big piece of the pie to be all mysterious about

Wow, works well with the anamorphic. What aperture?

So let me get this straight... Samsung brought their firmware team out of retirement to make sure the NX1 was definitely dead, they don't like the idea of mods bringing it to life again!

The Sony stabilisation isn't on par, way less effective.

In a quiet room, automatic gain control ramps the gain up so high you can hear a pin drop, so it amplifies the sound of the IBIS operating to a dim hum. Using a proper plugin rode mic or in a normal shooting environment you can't hear it.

Love mine so far... It's all about the stabiliser, leave the tripod at home... It's basically an Olympus E-M5 II with 4K video, none of the Sony menu troubles, decent physical control layout, good EVF and tilt screen.

Charging the camera... via USB! Nice. 5 axis IBIS works well with the EF Speed Booster with primes.... Not much luck with zooms or IS lenses yet, maybe Metabones needs to update firmware. Loving the 4K image so far.

Thanks to @Cinegain for the heads-up. Tons just arrived in Berlin at the Alexanderplatz Media Markt store for anyone interested. 799 with the kit 12-32. However they also had one body-only at the other Media Markt for.... 599. Total bargain. These however are in very short supply, so it may be easier just to get the kit and sell the lens. Remember it's GX85 in the US, GX80 in UK and Europe... not a big fan of those model name changes! UPDATE: WEX in the UK have the body only in stock for £509 http://www.wexphotographic.com/buy-panasonic-lumix-dmc-gx80-digital-camera-body/p1595526

I tried it today. The 1080p is ok, nothing that amazing. Seems similar to the D7200. The 4K seems good, nice codec and high bitrate, records to SD, very sharp but shame about the crop. Can upload some original files if you like?

Depends on how much patience and money you have. GH5 likely double the price and 4-5 months away. I'd be tempted to have the GX80 in the meantime anyway and sell it when the GH5 comes out.