fuzzynormal

As you say, It's the common media issue of: public awareness=problem. Just because you suddenly begin to notice something doesn't mean it's suddenly more likely or important. That's just how the human brain works. Ever learn a new big word in your vocabulary? Thought yourself, "that new word sure is neat," and then began to hear it and used often seemingly at random? That's not the big word asserting itself into the world, that's you paying attention to it. Anyway, if everyone had a gopro on their dash here in CA, you'd see just as much ridiculous nonsense on the roads, if not more. Americans are allowed to drive without much financial or legal effort and that evidences itself on the streets with bad drivers. Go check out what the motorcyclist deal with. Some of them have been wearing helmet cams for a few years now... The YouTube vids have followed. (And now that I've put motorcycle-helmet-cams in your brain, you'll start to notice THAT a lot more too.)

I wouldn't expect lenses to change much because, as you say, physics. However, a sensors ability to read the photons landing on it, that's just going to get better and better. High ISO with great color, no grain, @8k, and above? I could see that happening. In the meantime, let's hope Olympus does indeed decide to throw the motion picture user market a bone with some informed choices on that firmware.

Okay, but so are most of the responses to this thread. I'll defend myself by saying that the OP asked why some cameras are more "film" like than others, and stable lensing is a traditional aspect of cinema industry shooting...so...

I don't know. The stutters to my eye look too random for that.

Don't use ML for a round of tests. Go back to the OEM firmware. Shoot 24p and then 60p or 60i. Watch what happens during playback of those files directly from the CF card. BTW, your shutter speed on the camera is irrelevant to the issue. Overloading the data rate with a firmware hack can cause dropped frames. I did this on occasion with my old GH1. A good SD card could handle the higher data rate, but using slower cards would create issues.

Hi. I'm gazing at my navel and see a bunch of lint in there. What should I do? Buy a Nikon or wait for the Panny 4K to get released?

Well, for what it's worth, when I shoot one of my next documentaries it'll be with an Oly OM-D and I'll rely heavily on the 5-axis stabilization. In fact, I've decided to use that camera pretty much because of the stabilization feature. I will be, as you say, at the "mercy" of the stabilization. However, I'd frame it as a "reward" not a "mercy." I'm perfectly confident, under the conditions I'll be in, that I'll achieve superior cinematic footage with that gear than I would with most all else.

There's a bit of the argument in this example that parallels the whole LOTR's frame rate controversy. Insomuch that as you fail to stick to the traditional technical tropes of film look, you're going to be making stuff that messes with expectations. With LOTR, it was a different frame rate that upsets that expectation, with this 3D movie it's really bad lighting compounded with bad grading/colorization. With the 3D flick, I might even be generous and guess that maybe the director wanted the campiness of a video look as it fit the goofy narrative? Cheap-looking on purpose, perhaps? Who knows. Did the director ever clarify? Maybe he just got lucky with great cinematographers on earlier films and screwed on this one?

Interesting take on what a "video" look is, I think. Maybe the context of the content is altering your conceptions? Doc style footage does skew to a similar "video" camera use aesthetic.

A response to "why do some cameras create more of a film look" is simply: Perhaps those cameras are in the hands of people that know how to effectively use them. It's not just the camera that creates the craft. The gear is easy to get now a days. What are you going to do with it is now the bigger question.

For what it's worth, a 24mm 2.8 on a M43 sensor comes extremely close to matching a cinematographer's sweet spot settings. 35mm film shooting is a smaller imaging area than a full frame sensor, so this does't match up perfectly, but M43 basically has a 2x FF factor. So, 24mm becomes 48mm and 2.8 becomes 5.6. And that's where you want to be a good bit of the time. Maybe slightly longer lens for talky scenes, but otherwise it's a good place to play for a ton of conventional shooting.

That's not a pan. It's a bad slider shot and the unbalanced friction of the slider is physically staggering the camera; making the whole camera body actually shake.

Mmmmmm, that's some juicy vertigo. And I used to think I was ballsy climbing my local grain silo.

I do a lot of documentary stuff wherein I don't control room lighting. Manual exposure, no exceptions there. I almost always expose for my subject, a few exceptions here. I "eyeball" the exposure on the LCD. If it looks good I roll with it, lots of exceptions here. Of course, you have to understand what "looks good" and why, but that's the shortest/simplest answer I can give. Wisdom eventually will help dial you in to get shots that aren't over or underexposed.

In my experience, 3-axis gimbals work fine enough straight away once it's all balanced and dialed in. You can get better with 'em as you go, but they're easily useable even for a neophyte.

Yup, no doubt. But at the same time it certainly doesn't look "video." I'm not saying it's what you should do without a knowledgable consideration, it's just a quick recipe for hitting those flavors that describe "cinema" (in the context of what it used to be before digital)

I do think it's stunning to get such a great picture out of such a small camera, but you're going to get some weird mud by going -5 on the parameters. I know I do.

Of course, we can all talk highfalutin' about how to get superior cinematography with DSLR's/Mirrorless, but here's the cliff notes/shortcut to a "film" look that is pretty cheap and easy. Cheap being an operative word here: Slap some sort of old manual 50mm lens on a Rebel/Lumix/Alpha/Nikon, open the iris all the way, record@24fps, run your shutter @50 or below, adjust exposure with ND and/or ISO --you'd be able to create a "film" look by doing that I'd wager. All would have slightly different IQ, but then so does film stock. Regardless, it's not going to look like video camcorder footage. Well, let's not forget that then you have to do something informed with all such stuff. Knowing why this would work is arguably just as important as doing it, however.

I still assert that if you have the right skills and people, you can go into a camera store, leave after spending $500, and have good enough imaging gear to shoot a film that has the potential look indistinguishable from most of the films that have ever existed. The imaging devices are now that good. It's all the other stuff that matters more. And there' so much other stuff. If you want to be a filmmaker, an answer isn't "buy this or that camera." It's "study." You can't buy your way into a career by purchasing gear. (you kind of could a generation ago) You have to develop skills and then have a viable, unique, and interesting outlook with those skills.

This is true. I've done it for this exact look. It's definitely one of those "too much of a good thing" kind of aesthetics; which is interesting if that's what you're going for. Bottom line (this is an exaggeration but with some truth in it) if you're an amateur and unaware of the "recipe" to create cinema, it's probably going to look like video. You could shoot and then project film camera footage in such a way to make it look like video, for instance.

Exactly this. And this. Basically, in certain minds, any attention is validation.

Third post's a charm, right? Curious: are you the guy that makes those vampire movies? As for the 4K. I got no issues with a blogger that enjoys tech getting excited about new tech. The fact that he fosters that excitement is okay by me.

Amen to that. For a short film narrative, :60 spot, or maybe a music video I'd consider a shoot in RAW because the workflow for those projects are suited for a pedantic approach. I'm certainly not tenacious enough to use RAW for my long-form documentaries though, and that's where I do most of my stuff. Folks need to realize that for every job there are different solutions. Gets kind of nuts when people argue about the "best" camera. "Best" camera? In what context, you know?

Well of course 4K can look better, there's more resolution. I'm just saying 1080, properly and dramatically shot, looks great as it is. My local camera shop has a pretty scuffed but otherwise perfectly functional used 5DII for sale at $730, so I exaggerated a bit on that one. Anyway, my main point is the tools are cheaply there to create and create wonderfully on par to a pro level. It's not to deny that better gear exists.