fuzzynormal

I don’t do auto focusing, so can’t offer an opinion on that. As for color profiles I use “natural” as Oly offers it out of the box. Tried a few experiments with flattening the image, but didn’t seem worth the effort (for me) BTW, I prefer the Oly histogram over the GH5 waveform. I’m only ever protecting the highlights anyway, so the Oly histogram is quite useful. (Again, for me)

I film my dog and then never edit the footage.

Well, there's you go in regards to Olympus. Personally I'm still hoping they're gonna try to do a little Japanese corporate tap dancing and attempt to wiggle out of letting their camera division go...but that still doesn't excuse their numerous mistakes running the company.

FWIW, when I'm uploading a video with twice the resolution I tend to make the file twice the data rate. My anecdote is based on naked-eye results from when I started doing these sorts of uploads 4 years ago. I imagine things are constantly changing with platform codecs, for better and worse. All I can tell you is that uprez'ing/up'data'ing my film files made the vids look better when when watching 1080 on said platforms. Really made a difference back then on YouTube more than Vimeo.

Ding ding. Upscale your vids for online platform viewing. Take advantage of whatever IQ edge you can squeak out of their systems.

I was going to buy a used Gx7 for $100 more than I got my waranteed/refurbished EM10iii. Its a good value for $300, yes.

SD slot is fine. I don't care about that too much. Will say the Cam's mount screw is too close the battery gate. When I put on my Manafrotto mount plate it needs to be moved to open the door. Battery life is really good. 1hr+ shooting time. Ergos are decent. Not as good as my old Em5ii with bat grip, but not bad for such a small camera. I really like smaller cameras. Changing ISO when filming is technically possible but impractical. Auto WB shifts too easily. Would rather it was more subtle. BTW, same issues on my EM5ii --just an Oly thing. 4k IQ is great. Love it and the colors. I bought this camera for $300 refurbished. Good value.

Yup

Using my em10iii today on a paying gig.

No worries there. Its WYSIWYG.

I bounce on and off YT. Never followed anyone, probably never will. I know channels exist with lots of info relevant to whatever you may like, but paying close attention to any of them seems like a chore. Besides, it's a destination, on the popular side, mostly for those that are easily influenced. The ones pulling cash on the platform are not called "influencers" for nothing. Pop culture is never as interesting as it pretends to be. It's not designed to be that way. And exceptions tend to prove the rule.

Maybe the image is horizontally flipped. [you beat me to it]

I recommend you giving me $6K so I can but that lot.

FWIW, my understanding is that corporations are basically told by their legal team to never apologize about product lest they open themselves up to class action lawsuits. They might apologize for "feelings," but usually not about stuff like this.

As an outsider looking into this Canon fiasco I find it amusing how so many people are drawn into the drama that have no dog in the hunt. (like me -- perfectly content with shooting 4k my humble $300 camera M43 camera) I'll never spend 4K on a camera for video again, but I certainly used to. And if I was dropping that sort of expense I'd expect it to work as advertised. That said, I used to have to do some rather violent hardware hacks to get the HDV 0's and 1's out of my old XH-A1 at times...and I thought that camera was a bargain @$3.5K. It's always something with Canon, on that you can rely.

I've used it in a horror movie to put people on edge a little bit.

As an American I'm going to assume this metaphor means I should take off my mask and tongue kiss Sony smart phone?

You're not wrong. Good specs help sell cameras. People like me say they don't need it, but in a few years when all manufacturers offer it and it's decent across the board even on middle and low-end models, I'll end up with it --and when that happens I assume I'll find the same practical use for it as everyone else, for sure. Just not going out of my way to acquire it right now.

Yeah, that's my thing too. Give me a person manually hunting for focus if need be. It's actually a pleasant aesthetic, I think. I'm not knocking anyone that uses AF. My wife does, for example, (she's stills oriented) but I'm just not that into it for motion pictures...and when I see many cool hybrid cameras passionately dismissed because they lack high-end AF capabilities, I'm curious about that rationale. An affordable FF camera like this S5 --made affordable because it's without all the bells and whistles sounds pretty great to me.

BTW, yes, those of us that shoot 8-bit are limited in what we can do in post on a bad shot...so I've just accepted that as a challenge to try not to get unforgiving shots to begin with. It's baked in shooting discipline because you know you're not working with as much of a "fix-it-in-post" safety net. I got my start with imaging in my dad's old darkroom. I shot terribly thin B&W negatives for way too long, but as the literal costs started adding up for my bad shooting habits, (a 15 year old blue-collar kid old trying to buy chemicals and film was a huge financial burden) I learned to really consider light and exposure and figured out how to "thicken" my negative. Mostly just from the technical side of things, but developing that skill/craft led me into the artistic side.

My attempt at a quick image grade of your violinist is sloppy as hell, stylized, and heavy-handed, but it's how I would mess around with an "iffy" shot in Premiere on my own work. A few traveling mattes to control the brightness behind the subject that demands the eyes attention; take the attention off that as much as possible. Lift the exposure on the guy's face a bit, trying not to halo too bad -- which I couldn't avoid, actually. De-saturation of the blacks and highlights, WB to taste, film grain, an application of a FUJI ET film stock, blah blah blah. It's all personal preference. FWIW, I just did something similar on a project last week. Got an bit of footage where the subject is pretty much silhouette and needed to pull his exposure out. I pretty much knew going in to work on that image that it wasn't gonna look good. I just accepted that the best I could do to it was make it mediocre rather than crappy. Honestly, I wouldn't use that wide shot of the violinist if possible. Hopefully, you have also shot him with a compressed FOV and created a sequence of tighter shots to frame out and soften the background distractions. The first thing to do when on location would have been to recognize you're shooting a subject in silhouette and change angles so that bad lighting isn't happening. Good luck overall. It's always a lot of work...if you find you're doing too much in post, then reassess why that's happening. The best looking projects need the littlest touches in post-production.

As you implied, some of your issues are that you're hoping shots not well exposed can be successfully manipulated into a gratifying image. What the photons are doing in your frame to begin with seems to be the bigger problem than the grading. Your reference image of the town from above is a good example of that. Early evening light creates more drama than a midday overcast shot. Sometimes with certain footage, you're never going to get it where you want it to be. In that case you need new footage or just accept it wasn't shot well enough to begin with. As someone that does the latter all the time, I've learned to know when I get a good shot and when I'm trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

That's interesting as I'm a documentarian and, again, I rarely use AF. Maybe I'm an exception that proves the rule? As I said, I'm really in the dark as to why AF should be such an important spec to have, but if it is, it is.

I rarely use auto-focus. I am curious though, for those that seem to prioritize it as a needed spec before buying a camera body, why exactly? What are you doing so often that it's invaluable to you? This isn't snark, I just don't shoot in way where I feel I need it, so I'd like to know why it moves the needle for others. Is it vlogging? It's vlogging, isn't it?

Thats exactly the reason there's a display self in my editing office with numerous vintage cameras on it....