Axel

You are describing the delivery codecs. Even if raw was common in every smartphone (you'd have apps to apply a lut, log and look and then probably the original will be deleted automatically, like with the 'HDR' photos of the iPhone), people wouldn't store and watch it like that, but as mp4 (then perhaps H.265). This is the difference between - if this is the right term -'acquisition format' and delivery format. Keep in mind that even the DCP's codec, JPEG2000, uses compression, or otherwise the file sizes (they are often sent via satellite!) wouldn't be manageable. But compared to really uncompressed analog projections everybody, including experienced projectionists, prefer digital, compressed but 'visually lossless' images. These cameras have raw already, under the hood. You are right, people don't want to be bothered with tooo much creative decisions, they prefer easy pre-defined looks. I think, once cards get faster, bigger and cheaper and once consumer NLEs like Magix, AP-Elements or FCP X (which I don't consider a low-end software, but in fact the majority of the clients are consumers, due to the low price) will deal with DNGs (or some more compressed raw) and make workflows more fluid, people will first dump common DSLR-videography and from there on. If not, again, the resolution lie wins and people fall for the 4k+ buzzwords! Thank god. I like the idea of being an enthusiast whose strife for better video pays off in comparison to what anybody can have with a fully automatized little camera. Let's take the mp3 analogy. Even if I knew everybody was to listen to my song as an mp3 on an iPod with tiny $15 earphones, I like to record and mix in an uncompressed format - if affordable. And there is another distorted perception: That compression is the devil. With decent earphones or decent monitors, mp3 easily beats consumer-level HiFi of vinyl discs. And pop music is also compressed and gives away dynamic range to sound more powerful on the said devices. Just as we will leave the hype of grading for HDR (let's see the full orchestra on our tiny, shitty 8-bit crap-o-vision monitors!) that dominates now and turn back to grading for expression.

Of course we shall compare the characteristics of various cameras, but better under the perspective of how we deal with them. Because if the relative video quality is the only measure, this would all be about the cameras and how we deem ourselves better equipped by the minute, which I think would be naive fallacy.

A notrious error. It's true, Boyle used the XL1, a 4:3 miniDV (only the XL2 had a 16:9 sensor), but mot DV. He captured the raw signal from a modified camera.

The most impressing video (for my taste) of the Pocket I found so far is this: Happy again. By the way: Did anyone notice a peculiar thing happening in many other Pocket videos, looking as if the exposure abruptly changes? I hope this is only with Pana & Oly lenses ...

Yes, I think I give up video altogether and turn back to where I came from: photography :) Joking. Looks good. Glad I opened this thread. Thank you all.

I didn't get this the last time. You didn't set 'crap-o-vision' between quotation marks. Tell me you meant it at least ironic. Or is this indeed the 'latest&greatest'-forum, hyping only today's 'nerd-o-vision', which trivially becomes tomorrow's 'crap-o-vision'? I am the last person here who is against quality, and I always said that resolution was about quantity (size, actually) and that we needed to pay attention to colors and tones. But a better technical quality means nothing if there never is a creative use of it other than posting more landscapes and flowers. You will know them by their fruits. By their cats, dogs and front gardens. Basic instinct. Simple, primitive. Reminds me of a girl we met when shooting a music video. She was strikingly beautiful. I made the remark. My friend said, but she is thick as a brick. I said, remember, she's only seventeen. He asked, do you mean she will ripen? Another truism: You can't f*ck inner values. We all judge a book by it's cover. But we judge differently. If the title font is veeery big, embossed and gold and if there is a sticker beneath it shouting best novel of the year, I know it's a barbecue igniter.

Obviously craft is responsible for 90% of the success. It's absolutely more important to exhaust all ressources in front of the camera than higher resolution, bit rate, bit depth, film look parameters asf. You can see it everywhere: People think without the latest big thing it's not worth the effort. But Andrew doesn't like these discussions very much, and I think I understand why. It's a truism, like the 'inner values'-moral. Who raises this topic at a fashion show certainly has chosen the wrong place.

@all This helped a lot. I don't see myself shooting a wedding with raw, so for any practical reasons AVCHD (GH2, G6) suffices. Nor would I ever use the H.264 of the Canon (had the 7D before, have access to the Mii, have tried to talk my friend into trying one of those 'nightly builts' of ML, which answer the FAQ 'will it damage my camera?' with 'hopefully not'). I am not interested in shooting landscapes or flowers. Actually the availability of raw is a torture for me. Because I see how much images can be enhanced, I am postponing my more ambitious plans. It was especially one Miii-BMCC-comparison (the Kendo-teacher with the moire-suit) that made me worry. Thank you for your input. Go on.

Hi friends, sorry if this was posted already, I just need a place to express my disappointment. I am on the verge of cancelling my BMPCC-order. What could be seen of 'test shots' of the Pocket's raw so far didn't convince me at all, whereas the Miii's raw just shines. Am I missing something? If not for the different price tag, what other reason should I have to look forward to the final arrival of that camera? Please share your thoughts.

Then I recommend the following workflow: Preparations: a) Connect your card reader to the iMac and an external HD (preferably an SSD with Thunderbolt). Open FCP X, select the external drive (by clicking on it) and choose "create camera archive" (choose a name). This will backup the content of your card and you can edit right from the archive, disabling "copy files in FinalCut event" (translated from german, you will find it). You find this option as well in general preferences "import" as well as in the import dialog after you hit "import". If you don't copy the clips, there will be only aliases in the FCP event folder, keeping your project small. BUT: You always need to connect the external drive when working on the project or else your clips will be offline. OR b.) Assign your sytem HD or any external HD/raid for the >New Event (choose a name), preview the clips you want right from your card, make selections with i & o or by the range (click & draw a yellow range within the thumbnail, you can select various portions of a long clip by keeping "cmd/⌘" pressed), and then you do check "copy files in FinalCut event". OR c) Have both archive and event copies for maximum security. OR d) Edit right and exclusively from the card. No fail safe option then, and if it's only a USB 2.0 connection, the skimmer will invite the much-hated "beachball of death". Don't copy your card in the Finder! FCP X then doesn't recognize the folder as a camera, and you'd lose the very good "filmstrip view" in the import window. In either case, uncheck "create optimized media" (=ProRes). ProRes at this stage is only needed for slow machines. Organize your clips: FCP X has the most advanced tagging system, allowing you to find any of your clips with very little effort. However, with the manageable project sizes you describe, you can as well skip this procedure and use the skimmer instead (hotkey "s" toggles this cursor behavior, it's very useful in the event window, often not so much in the timeline), I recommend you use the "view clips as filmstrips" (instead of "list", blue highlighted icon right beside the gear icon on the bottom of the event window). You can hover over all your clips, and you see them right in the viewer. Also, if you had recorded external audio, you can synch it in the event browser automatically (as an example of how powerful the tagging works, you can filter your search by the rule "synchronized clips", and FCP X will only show you the newly wed video & audio). Edit: 1. In preferences >playback, disable >background rendering. Reason: Your machine is fast enough, you can render complex parts deliberately by selecting them and hitting ctrl + r. We'll come back to that render issue later. 2. In the project window (filmreel-icon bottom left highlighted blue) first assign a volume by clicking on it once, then create a new project by hitting the "+" button. Make it ProResHQ with the image size and frame rate of your original clips. After this, enter the timeline by clicking on the filmreel-icon again. 3. Make a rough cut by throwing all the selections from your clips into the timeline. Use only "e" to move them from event to timeline (as recommended, use the skimmer in the event (shortcut ⌘1) and the old-fashioned playhead in the timeline (shortcut ⌘2). This of course is a matter of personal preferences. 4. Trim your edit using the trim tools (if you don't know, view a tutorial about trimming with FCP X). 5. Add b-roll and music asf. by "connecting" them to your "one-track" timeline with "q". 6. Grade / color correct your clips, apply effects and titles. 7. View your video, for now neglecting the audio. Everything should be fine. 8. NOW enable background rendering in preferences and choose ⌘ + shift + r (render all). 9. Work on the audio. Every time you pause for a few seconds, FCP X will render the video. 10. After this is done, do one of the following: Export a) Create a ProRes HQ master on your harddrive by hitting ⌘ + e. From this self-contained, high quality video, you can use several tools like QT7, MpegStreamclip or compressor to encode an mp4 or mov for Youtube or Vimeo. I recommend the free x264 plugin. OR b.) Simply >file >share >Youtube or >Vimeo. I hope this is helpful.

First of all, I need to know whether you are talking about FCP 7 (FCS 3) or FCP X. For FCP 7, there is more or less only one workflow. For FCP X, there are many. If you use FCP X, I need to know how fast your iMac is, it's connections, the harddiscs you have, how long and how complicated your projects will probably be, how you plan to grade and polish the sound.

  History repeating. The first HD cameras (consumers as well as professional cameras) made so many compromises, that we no longer consider them HD at all by current standards. Surely the resolution topped old SD cameras, but resolution wasn't everything.   As soon as 4k will be a widely known standard, all current 4k cameras will lack either resolution or other shortcomings will become apparent. That will be - when? - 5 years, 10 years from now? If ever. Remember that UHDTV is pushed mainly by the japanese industry (like unnecessarily fast and big cars are promoted by the german industry and reasonable speed limits are anathema to german government, protecting this industry). So if resizing in post is the argument, go for it.

The term DSLR means that the image is reflected from the closed mechanic shutter lid (excuse awkward english) and projected onto a ground glass. As EVFs will get ever better, with almost no latency, better resolution, true to the image they actually record, there will be no point in building a DSLR. I guess right now most photographers think a professional camera needs a mirror, although they never see what their sensor sees - but then again, that's an old tradition, because in analog times, they also didn't see what their emulsion saw. It's conservative thinking everywhere. What if they took the BMCC and changed the design so that it resembled, say, a Sony FX 1000? Many would think secretely, why, I need a rig anyway, the form factor isn't such a big issue. All 'reasonably' designed cams with exchangeable lenses and bigger sensor, such as the FS-100 or the AG-101, didn't sell as expected or even very poorly. Perhaps in ten years we will still buy video cameras that look like ancient SLRs, just because. Or our smartphones have Blackmagic-Apps for 4k raw, with LUTs.

  Michael Cioni, post production supervisor and workflow advisor for quite a lot of fat cinema releases (see imdb), appears in a vimeo clip dealing with "noteworthy innovations in production & post". The whole video is quite interesting, but particularly what he says about FCP X. Starting at 13'42" he explains that this is the only NLE so far that actually intelligently organizes your sources from the moment you plug in your card(s) or SSD(s).    The instant preview without useless folder structures but instead with the most advanced tagging system conceivable makes editing so logic, that even starters (perhaps better than experienced cutters) learn it within minutes, and, quoting from this article:     That is what the new MacPro will be good at: Editing. There are really much faster beasts on the market when the render benchmarks count. And it will be not so good with Premiere. There is not yet clarity about CUDA vs. OpenCL, but aside from this, Premiere can't at the same time preview, qualify, tag, import, backup and edit the sources - and switch at any time between connected volumes. It is, like AVID, a timeline that happens to have an, er, media browser. http://vimeo.com/73797466#

Let's include shorts. The first narrative films were shorts. The brazilian short Tyger (2006) is one of my favorites, although it is rather a poem. Minimalist technique? At least it's still manageable on a budget, and I think, had this been my work, I would be proud.      Explain please.

The first Tarkovsky I ever saw was Andrej Rubljev (didn't check the spelling, it's different in every language anyway, like Tarkovsky). I didn't expect much, to be honest. But I was mesmerized by the pace of the storytelling, by the photography, by everything. And in the last scene, there was a key moment for me I will never forget. I love all Tarkovskys. I recently saw 'A Field In England' on youtube. Happens to be black&white as well. Then the 1962 poetic science fiction 'La Jetté', also b&w. It's the story that Terry Gilliams 12 Monkeys is based on. Short doc to give you an impression: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO21XtLOsD4   To be continued.

Everyone from our little community in this forum has a distorted perspective. The profile of the quality-aware, lowest budget "indie-filmmaker" doesn't concern Son, Can, Nik or Pan very much. This profile is taken care of by BlackMagic almost exclusively.   It's primarily that profile that needs an update. The world is changing, and we are mentally blocked and don't see it. Both cinema (our holy grail) and TV are becoming niches in the eyes of the young. They couldn't care less about the niceties of aesthetic distinctions we try to nail down comparing (see thread) GH3 with BMPCC, for an instance. They also don't care about resolution.   The big business, the world of Hollywood and it's 3D- CGI-heavy- 24-channel-videos doesn't even notice our existence, and, let's face it, we'll never be able to reach their technical standards, let alone their implied 'production value'. By no tricks we will convincingly become Goliath.   The situation is daft. There is an ever growing (literally) audience, profoundly missed by the ones best equipped (technically: already, in spirit: no) to get their attention. These kids from the smartphone generation are held hostages by an industry that sells them entertaining bits and pieces, leftovers from once independant popular arts. Doesn't anybody share my impression that there are only 'cover versions' everywhere? In music as well as cinema?   The distrubution chains are changing radically. The 20-year-olds starve for drama, they want to get some sense, but they are denied it. The whole internet, the biggest platform imaginable, is filled with rehashed content. And we long to produce more rehashed content. What is that good for?

  There have been heated discussions elsewhere. Let me give a résumé:   • It's not a workstation, as Schiller said. It has comparatively low render performance through single CPU. People made a list, that besides Thunderbolt you can screw together the $3999 MP with the original parts for $1500, including assembly by the shop. Inside an ugly PC tower with two fans, internal SSD raids, making it an actual workstation. You can safely run OSX on it, best and without 'issues' as a virtual machine. They have experience with Hackintoshs and guarantee, the only difference in usability would be that it had no 'sleep mode'. On or off. And the virtual machine would consume ~ 2 GB RAM.   • This ignorates the concept, as I see it, of a media hub for FCP X. It no longer is a server. You don't copy all your big video files blind on a server. It's plug in, view, edit, export and eject. The FCP X way. That's what all the external Thunderbolt-connectivity is for. Makes no sense for Premiere. I like the idea very much. In theory.   • For most contemporary tasks, it is too much. As long as you really don't want to start with 4k, which I really see as a meander and cul-de-sac, you'll never exhaust it. A faster MBP would have been more appropriate. Or the fastest iMac. And in four years, when you will exhaust it, the graphic cards may well start at 12 GB. And then you can't upgrade that system.

For my purposes, adding some graphic power really seems enough. It's just about Resolves real time.   However, I can't help but being very impressed by the extreme power of the new MacPro. 16 simultaneously running Multicamera streams in 4k?    Some PC tinkerers boasted they could build such a machine with the original components (which are third-party) for a fraction of the price. They ended with 2/3 of the Apple price, a big housing, lots of ventilators ('no one in his right mind allows one fan to cool such a system! What if it brakes?') and no Thunderbolt. On paper. And no OSX. And very probably no 16 pips 4k ...   EDIT: The critics assume that the multiclip runs in 1/32 resolution, which would prove nothing, since many existing systems could perform that*. Sounds reasonable. So let's not be carried away (I tell myself).   *EDIT2: Could they really? Isn't this rather about data rates than about resolution?

No longer. Since #10 the resolution is unlimited for lite (I think, read their spec sheet for confirmation). Limitation: No noise removal, no 3D. New in 10: Can make speed ramps. Important for music videos. Spares you one roundtrip. Workflow: You make the edit decision in FCP X, but delete the clip again leaving a gap as placeholder. You connect the clip @100% with the gap clip and then export the project to Resolve, where you rebuild the ramp (not yet in the tutorial, found out myself). EDIT: This sounds unnecessarily complicated. You could ask, why don't you just re-import the baked-in time-clip before exporting to Resolve? Because I try to establish a workflow for raw, proxy of course, in advance, for when my Pocket arrives.

I second that.   In the meantime, I recommend Alexis van Hurkmans Ripple Training on Resolve. With your affinity to color grading, you will learn it in a week or so. You will see how very limited FCP X is when it comes to serious grading, especially with Resolves aid of organizing nodes (instead of just stacking corrections), tracking vignettes and much finer controls. And then, if you suffer because you see a preview of, let me guess, three to six fps, you will know that working in realtime is no inappropriate luxury. 

That's why I feel so uncertain about what to do.

I can't give advice, since I am in a similar situation as you (amateur, but with some cinematic taste and education, quite ambitious, neither poor nor wealthy). So I just share my thoughts.   First of all, as I see it, the platform only matters if you are willing to give up FCP X.    Adobe has it's own virtues, but having access to both softwares (my best friend uses Premiere CC on a PC) and having used a classic NLE (FCP 'legacy') for more than ten years, I am convinced that FCP X makes so many things such a lot easier in every respect. And that nobody so far can explain to me the advantages of the traditional MOi (Yeah, I know, if a production is dependant on in-house workflows, slowly developed over years).   On the other hand, for serious work with dedicated software like Adobe, nobody can explain the advantages of OSX on a Mac. Not as long as you are not willing to pay substancially more for nicer design - but in many cases lower performance. The performance-argument only doesn't count if you put efficiency into the calculation. Which again means FCP X.   Resolve, as I have learnt, needs RAM as well as GPU. So since your GPU is too limited to really unleash the beast and you don't want to change the platform, your options (like mine, I have a MacPro early 2009 with only Nvidia GT 120, which means 512 MB) are:   > Buy a used classic MacPro - 'cheese grater' - for round about 1200-1500 € (as you know, old Macs sell better than old PCs) > Insert a second 2GB graphic card, better yet a 4GB graphic (like the GTX 680 Kepler, ~600 €, all 'certified' Nvidia cards are ridiculously expensive), use the smaller one for GUI only. > Stuff at least 16 GB of RAM into it.    This will be way over 2000 € in any case.   If you spent that much, you'll expect FCP 10.1 to take advantage of the second graphic card too. PC users stare at render benchmarks and compare CPU horsepower, which is less important for FCP X, which likes memory and GPU the most and, wisely configured, has finished rendering before you finished editing (somewhat exaggerated, I know). But we don't know yet if it will.   The new MacPro will. I think that even the basic modell (3000 bucks) will be the absolute overkill for anything, as long as you don't change to 4k production. Of course it would be naive fallacy to think you get a working system with that. You have to take into account all the Thunderbolt periphery that's also needed. To me it looks as if such a device with external raids was on the mind of the FCP X engineers from the start. What is the first thing you are prompted to do? Assign harddrives. Other software let's you first navigate to drives and folders, here you are asked to manage them.   That's where I stand with my considerations.

  Platos line. There is opinion, and there is knowledge. Fighting over opinion is completely futile. As if discussing the 'true' meaning of the shadows on the wall (cave analogy). 

You are right, and it's *scrubbing*, not *scratching*, I think Adobe calls it 'hover scrub' (well, it's not exactly the same and somewhat limited yet). I like Adobe for many reasons, and I think everybody has a reason to stay loyal to his choice. Like to my reliable GH2  :wub:       On the long run. Meanwhile, all owners of AVCHD junk must not feel inferior, that was the point I was trying to make.