Chrad

The Civil Dead is a really good film and I had no idea it cost that little.

...to make TikTok videos. This is still going to be true when everyone has an iPhone with fake rack focusing on it. You'll still need to spend time and money to stand out. You're still going to need a crew if you want a certain standard of lighting and sound, especially one worthy of Apple TV. The competitive advantage of having a budget is arguably going to be even more important for traditional filmmaking if smart phone camera advancements lead to a flood of people producing content with a higher apparent baseline of quality. At the end of the day I don't see this technological shift as being so seismic as to so dramatically alter the course of society as you envision. In general, but especially among the younger generations, people are consuming less film content. They watch more TikTok, short clips, Twitch streams. Video is everywhere but 'fIlm' in the traditional sense is becoming less central to the culture. If the incredible advancements in affordable video technology we've already seen have lead us to the centrality of TikTok, then to me that's a sign that people just aren't itching to make 'films'.

It should be ProRes Raw of course, but I suppose that waits til Red's patents expire in 2027.

It's going to be quite a meta take with some ironic commentary about our current obsession with nostalgia and reboots. I'm trepidatiously keen.

Mark my words: this won't happen. People aren't making TikToks instead of traditional film content because they were waiting for the right technology to roll around to decide it's worth doing. If the incredible democratization of filmmaking technology we've seen over the past couple of decades wasn't enough to get them involved already, they lacked the time, energy, or interest. The truth is we who are interested in traditional filmmaking are part of a shrinking demographic.

I can agree on that. And big FPN patterns.

I honestly think it just comes down to technology and conditioning. If filmmakers of the past had the ability to DNR the hell out of grainy filmstock, a subset of them would have done just that. They had no such luxury, so they sought out the finest grained stock they could access and/or embraced it as an aesthetic quality of the image. With digital, we developed the technology to scrub the image of noise before people the textures of digital filmmaking had stopped seeming alien, let alone started to be romanticized for its limitations and quirks. I don't really think it's true that noise destroys resolution, and grain only adds flavour. Large grained filmstock is considered to hold less resolution relative to finer grained stock. Outside of extreme examples of visible FPN in the image, I also don't think the pattern vs random aspect makes much difference to the viewer. In practice, digital noise is perceived as random. The appearance of noise varies from camera to camera, but I think it's the kind of imperfection that can prevent images from looking sterile and inhuman. I look at it as the surface of the medium becoming visible. The philosophy that denoising should always be applied to digitally sourced images seems like one that's opposed to to the inherent characteristics of digital, and ironically it's one that ends up creating images even further removed from the world of film. To me it's more interesting to be open to the new. Noise can be ugly, but it can also in the right hands have a soulful texture to it.

Matt Frazer from Panasonic said something interesting in the stream after the GH6 was announced. When dismissing rumours that they were exiting M43, he said it's their 'testbed for new features' which later filter up. In light of that and the recent rumours I think they'll introduce DPAF with GH6 and later it will come to L-mount bodies.

Right, but having a blanket approach of shot on digital = we have to denoise that, every time, suggests a lack of tolerance for even naturally occuring, finely controlled noise, and possibly a love for plastic textures.

Silly. Film is a lot grainier and we accept that as part of the aesthetic, so I don't know why we need to treat video differently and expect total cleanness to the point of sterility.

Why would Arri, a very traditionalist cinema company, lead the pack on autofocus? They just released a new set of manual primes and zooms.

I can't stand Potato Jet because it's shameless consumerist hype, but I don't mind Gerald Undone. I don't expect him to be an artist - what he does well is putting together videos with extensive detail and testing regarding tech specs. There is some value to that in evaluating these tools, and he does it better than most others on YouTube.

I just like that on first impression it lacks that immediately recognisable overly sharpened camcorderesque look that it's typically hard to get away from on the GH5/S.

First footage. Looks great to me. Detail, noise and dynamic range look very BMPCC4K like, as I'd hoped.

Something I find interesting is how many have commented on the distractingly shallow depth of field, but I haven't seen anyone comment on another characteristic of this F0.95 wide-open shooting...the softness, which was to me very noticeable in wide shots. Goes to show that we gear-nerds and pixel peepers get way too hung up on technical perfection. I suppose it's different if you're doing product shots or ads that are trying to project a clinically cutting-edge image, but the majority of the time, no one cares that much as long as the image registers. See also on Netflix the grain storm of the 4K scanned 16mm for the new Master of None show. It blows my mind when people call images with some small, gently buzzing noise in the shadows 'unusable'.