cantsin

@Deadcode: an mp4 file can never span the complete color space needed for a good LUT design since its color is heavily compressed to 8bit 4:2:0 in Rec709 color space.

@Don Kotlos: Nice work, and thanks for sharing it! Tried your LUTs in Resolve, and they create beautiful results. - I encountered only one issue: your LUTs seem to cause color banding in blue highlights. Have you encountered this problem, too?

Would a $200 Flolight FL-110HM be sufficient?

Some of us need to monetize their videos online and are probably best served by YouTube, but some of us rather need a high-quality showcase for our work. I wonder whether a self-hosted WordPress blog, or a WordPress Premium subscription with VideoPress could be an alternative to Vimeo.

Another question is: Do we still need video hosting sites at all? When YouTube and Vimeo started, online video was technically complex and required Flash-based players. Today, we have HTML5 and the <video>-tag supported in all relevant browsers. Serving video is just a matter of encoding mp4 (or webm) and uploading it to your server. Data quotes aren't a real problem either; most hosters provide affordable unlimited data plans.

The overheating issues aren't too surprising since there had been many rumors throughout 2015 that the camera had been delayed due to heat issues. (Sony clearly prioritizes compactness of its APS-C mirrorless bodies over robustness. As a sales strategies, this surely pays off: Having APS-C bodies that are as big and cost as much as Olympus/Panasonic's MFT bodies and having full frame bodies that are as big and cost as much as Fuji's APS-C bodies means to win the customer in the camera store.

I keep repeating myself on this forum, but Vimeo's real business model today are password-protected videos that aren't publicly visible on the site. Practically every production company today uses Vimeo for this purpose, for example to provide screeners of feature films to festival juries or previews of commercials for corporate clients. Since you need a paid account for providing password-protected videos, and since YouTube doesn't have a comparable feature, this is what Vimeo now seems to be focusing on, and makes its money off. Their playback only needs to be good enough for corporate/professional clients to have satisfying previews on their screens. That means that other features do not matter so much to the site anymore. They let the community/discussion forums rot (with their major site redesign a couple of years ago) on purpose, mobile video doesn't work very well with Vimeo, and Vimeo's streaming support (on Chromecast and similar platforms) is broken, too. Btw., none of the issue are technical scaling issues since Vimeo doesn't use any infrastructure of its own, but runs all its services on top of the Amazon cloud (both storage and encoding servers). If Vimeo needed more computation power and/or bandwidth (for better encoding and streaming, for example), it would be simply a matter of changing its Amazon cloud services subscription plan. Did you use the trick of upscaling your material to 4K before uploading to YouTube? It's often used workaround to also get better HD playback quality, and less compression much, on YouTube.

The problem is that CRI values don't tell you very much because (a) they don't say which parts of the color spectrum are missing, (b) how linear the color spectrum of the lights is (i.e. where you get tints/spikes). But the real deal breaker is that you practically can't combine different LED lights from different manufacturers (or even different products of the same manufacturer if they aren't pro equipment makers like Dedolights) because each of them has their own tint and spikes, and mixing those lights results in something that is nearly impossible to color correct in post. @IronFilm, I agree that light "has seen the least amount of technological progress out of all those areas you listed", but would even argue that the situation has become worse: Ever since classical tungsten light has been replaced with energy-saving lights, light/color quality of consumer artificial light has gone downhill, and shooting in available artificial light has become a complete nightmare (were even the best camera doesn't help). IMHO, the quality difference between pro and run-and-gun amateur filmmaking has shifted almost 100% from camera to light.

What I recommend for shooting SLog2 is the following: - First set the camera to a standard or neutral picture profile. Use a grey card to set the white balance. - Now switch the picture profile to SLog2, Use the white balance values from above. - Quickly shoot a color chart (my recommendation: X-rite Color Checker Passport, since it is small and includes a grey card...) - Repeat the above (WB adjustment and color chart shooting) whenever light conditions change. - Import footage into Resolve. Use Resolve's color match feature - select X-rite as the color checker, select transform from SLog2 to Rec709, drag the color checker grid over the image of the color chart, click the match button - and your image will have correct colors. - Take PowerGrade snapshots of all color chart corrections you made, right-click the thumbnails and export the color corrections as 3D LUTs. Give them names that correspond to the scenes/locations you shot. - If you don't want to do your editing/color correction in Resolve, you can now continue to work in your NLE if it supports LUTs for color correction (such as Premiere CC with its Lumetri color module and FCPX with the Color Finale plug-in). - Import the SLog2 camera footage into your NLE and apply the LUTs for color correction. Here are two run-and-gun videos which I shot and edited this way; although I must say that I still wasn't happy with the level of color resolution/gradation. In the end, I'd rather have shot them with my BM Pocket... I ran into the blue highlight clipping issue of the A7s in both videos. btw. Well, I'm not complaining too much since I normally use the A7s as a stills camera, and it's fine for that if you shoot raw. Which, btw., can look great and shows you how much the codec and video signal processing degrades the sensor image. This is made from A7s high speed raw stills:

...and still, in your Slog picture, the reds look blown out while the blues are muted, and the your skin has a slight magenta tint...

This thread really reveals how light is the one important component in DIY/low-cost filmmaking where we are lacking affordable, high quality, portable solutions. In the last decade, we got affordable large sensor cameras, even affordable raw video, affordable high quality external video recording, affordable high quality lenses, some even with cine gears (Samyang, Veydra), cheap high quality audio field recorders (Tascam, Zoom), cheap high quality microphones (Rode), affordable high quality cine rigs, follow focus, video field monitors, affordable high quality video tripods, affordable or gratis professional-grade editing and color grading software (Resolve), affordable workstation computers,... - But when looking for affordable light, you're stuck either with tungsten Fresnels that do not have the native color temperature of modern camera sensors, draw a lot of power, generate a lot of heat and aren't easily transportable, but produce high quality light. Or you pick some kind of LED light which, however you want to turn it, produces inferior color and is at best good for TV/documentary work. (Even CRI 95 doesn't say much if the 5% of lacking color spectrum are your skintones, and if you get different tints from the different LED lights you use, resulting in a nightmare in post.)

Sorry, but I couldn't help laughing after reading your comment and then actually watching the video. This must be ungraded log footage which the filmmaker either didn't know to correct or left uncorrected to achieve an extreme visual effect. There are no blacks and whites in this video, only greys, and hence the web video might have 6Bit color depth at best....

Sorry, but right the first pictures - the forest looked like it was a SciFi set, completely artificial, unnatural and un-nuanced colors...

As said before in an older thread here on Vimeo, Vimeo has shifted its business model in the last couple of years. Their core business is no longer to provide a YouTube alternative and community platform for indie filmmakers. Nowadays it's mostly been used by film production companies for non-public, password-protected screeners from Pro accounts. This is where Vimeo makes its money, being paid for Pro subscriptions by nearly every film production and distribution company in the world. The public side of the website has become more or less a shell. It's become standard practice for film festivals, distributors etc. to work with password-protected Vimeo videos. Since this is all about quick previews, not web video as the delivery medium, the switch to auto playback quality makes a lot of practical and business sense for them.

The problem is: both arguing parties in this debate are right. ;-) Yes, in terms of exposure measurement, f2.8 is the same for every camera, no matter the sensor size. But: f-stops are relative, not absolute values for light gathering. They describe the factor between the incoming and the outgoing image circle of a lens. In absolute terms, however, the image circle/sensor surface of full frame is twice the size of APS-C and four times the size of MFT (if you factor vertical and horizontal dimensions). That means that a full frame lens at f2.8 captures four times as much light as an MFT lens at f2.8, because it has to project the image onto a four times bigger surface. This is why, for example, a f2.8 full frame lens can be speedboosted to an f2.0 APS-C lens - essentially, by taking the superior light gathering quality of the FF lens and focusing all the light/image it gathers, in the manner of a burning glass, onto the smaller image circle of an APS-C sensor. With a conventional lens adapter, you would lose 50% of the light the FF lens gathers since this light will hit areas outside the APS-C sensor's smaller surface and hence not be captured. This mathematics also explains why, in the old times, almost all Super 8 cameras, with their mini image size, had f1.8 superzooms while it was impossible to build such lenses for 35mm stills cameras. Indeed, those lenses only gathered about 6.25% of the light gathered by an f1.8 lens for a 35mm photo camera. In practical terms, the superior light gathering of larger sensors can be used in two ways: increasing pixel resolution (the recipe for cameras like the Sony A7R, Nikon D800/D810, Canon 5DS): compared to an MFT sensor, you can have 4 times as many pixels on the sensor yet still with the same signal/noise ratio (=dynamic range/noise level/image quality) per pixel. So, taking the GH4 with its 16MP MFT sensor as an example, you could theoretically cut a 64MP FF sensor from its die and have the same per-pixel photo quality, but four times the image resolution, and effectively four times the light on each picture thanks to the superior light gathering of both FF lens and FF sensor. increasing pixel size (the recipe for Cameras like the Sony A7s and Nikon D4); when a FF sensor as the same amount of pixels as an MFT sensor, and if the FF lens has the same aperture as its MFT equivalent, each pixel will gather 4 times as much light, resulting in better dynamic range and ISO sensitivity. Tony Northrop is right suggesting that camera manufacturers play an unfair marketing game when they advertise cameras with FF-equivalent focal lengths but native f-stops. For example, the lens of the Sony RX10 does not have - as the product advertising page says - an "expansive 24–200 mm zoom range" with "F2.8 aperture over the entire zoom range", but really is a 8,8-73,3mm/f2.8 lens for a 1" sensor which, in absolute terms - but also in terms of visual depth of field - gathers as much light as an f8 lens for a full frame sensor.

@PannySVHS: Just to clarify (also for other readers), your problem has nothing to do with DaVinci Resolve, but to the fact that your PC shuts down under maximum system load. You didn't experience it yet with other software because, apparently, you never ran applications that created system maximum load on your PC.

System shutdown under high CPU/GPU load means, almost with certainty, a hardware problem. Most likely, your power supply is too weak, or the cooling of your PC is insufficient.

Thinking about it more: It would make a lot of sense for Panasonic to introduce a Full Frame camera with an 8K sensor and 8K video recording. 8K is about to become standard in Japan anyway, and such a camera would give Panasonic the same competitive edge with higher video resolution on a consumer mirrorless camera as the GH4 did when it was introduced. Panasonic could make MFT lenses fully adaptable to the full frame camera and offer 4K recording in MFT crop mode. Since MFT has exactly 50% horizontal coverage of full frame, this would result in a clean 4K image.

But who would then produce lenses for the full sensor area? Try to look at it from an economic angle. Either Panasonic introduces a new line of APS-C covering lenses (=not economical) or Panasonic gives up full APS-C coverage to adapted lenses (=not economical either, because then Panasonic would lose its lens market for the camera). Aside from the fact that it's completely unrealistic to think that a mass market consumer electronic producer would tell its customers to adapt third-party lenses. What is realistic, from an economical point of view, is that Panasonic sooner or later introduces a mirrorless full frame camera which can also shoot in APS-C and Four Thirds mode (just like Sony A7 cameras can shoot in APS-C mode with all existing APS-C e-mount lenses), and will offer an adapter with which MFT lenses can be put on the full frame body.

Here's my 2 cents: I think it's completely unrealistic because all existing M43 lenses would not cover that sensor. It would be too expensive and logistically too complex (think production lines, warehousing, retail shelving) for Panasonic introduce an entirely new line of APS C-covering M43 mount lenses. They would be too expensive to develop, too difficult to market, create a lot of confusion among consumers, and would mean that Panasonic would have to give up some of the compact size advantages of M43 lenses. The alternative, that Panasonic wouldn't create any native APS-C lenses itself, but offer the APS-C option only for people who adapt third party lenses, would be business suicide, since the whole point of an interchangeable lens camera system is that people buy your lenses.

@sanveer: Yes, I implied nothing else. But could it be that you are confused about the difference between Super 35mm (equivalent to APS-C) and 35mm full frame?

I wouldn't bet on it even then, at least not on internal raw recording. The problem is the consumer market. A buyer of a Panasonic camera will expect that any SD card s/he buys will work in the camera. Blackmagic already has major issues with buyers of their cameras who disregard its official guidelines for compatible SD cards and SSDs. (Even those who are informed will blindly buy some card with a 95MB/s label only to find out that it won't work or drop frames.) Companies like Panasonic, Sony, Canon can simply not risk dealing with masses of people returning their cameras, or sending them in for 'repair', because of such issues. For their mass market products, they need to cater to a low common denominator of available technology on the market. [Remember people's troubles with the h265 codec of the NX1 ...] Seems you haven't carefully read the article. He explicitly and cleary writes Super 35mm sensor size with 1.5x crop, which would require new or adapted lenses, and electronic in-camera crop for legacy MFT lenses.

I wouldn't be so sure. On the German Slashcam forum, we have a highly competent member who works in the central buying department of Europe's biggest consumer electronics superstore chain, and says that in Europe, Panasonic and Olympus faced serious drops in the camera sales last year, which even their new models couldn't compensate, because consumers are now as fixated on sensor size as on megapixels. Panasonic for sure will not abandon M43 short-term, but might move to full frame for its high end cameras. In the photography market, it will become increasingly difficult to sell M4/3 cameras for $1000 and more. (To tell you the truth, I wouldn't buy a stills camera with a 4/3 sensor for more than a few hundred $ either.)

With $1000 full frame bodies, APS-C is on its way out, too, for anything but the consumer market. If manufacturers like Panasonic want to stay competitive with Sony, but also with Canon and Nikon with their sub-$2000 6D and D750 bodies, they have to offer full frame. The stills market, not video, will drive this demand. The full frame Leica SL has Panasonic technology inside. So I wouldn't be too surprised if a lower-price variant of this camera will be released this year by Panasonic and replace the GH4 as its flagship mirrorless camera.

AFAIK, the different packages of the Spyder (with their vastly different retail prices) only differ in the bundled software, not in the color meter hardware. You can buy the cheapest package, and it will be as good as the "pro" versions if you use DisplayCAL. Or even buy an old Spyder3 off Ebay for $50 or less.