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Somewhat embarrassingly, I originally bought the EF-MFT SB to replace my M42-MFT SB, but when I put my Takumar 50mm F1.4 on an M42-EF adapter and that onto the EF-MFT SB, the rear element of the Takumar interfered with the EF SB glass when I tried to focus more than a few meters away (nowhere near infinity focus). I probably could have determined that before I bought it if I'd searched enough, which is the embarrassing part. I'm not really sure how to tell which M42 and C/Y options would have this problem too.. is there a way to know? What Nikon lenses would be F1.4 or faster? and are there issues with the SB? The native MFT lenses from TTartisan / 7artisans are good options, but aren't as fast as the two Voigtlander F0.95 lenses I have, and are also bettered by a F1.4 lens on a SB. I did shoot with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 in Japan and it seemed pretty good, but at 100mm equivalent FOV it's on the long end for my hand-held stuff. The Zeiss ZE Planar 50/1.4 looks like a potential option, being cleaner than the Takumar+M42-SB combo. The Mikaton 50mm F0.95 would be a stop faster than the Zeiss, and would be cleaner than the Takumar too, but is more expensive. I should look at the Sigma F1.4 primes too, in case something there stands out, although they're competing with the Zeiss Planar, which I would imagine is tough competition? I already have a ton of options and combined with my very specific requirements I'm really pushing things to find any options I haven't thought of, but I didn't think it would be so difficult to find super-fast FF EF lenses!

Thanks for the feedback! The gate weave was applied at the timeline level, so is the same settings throughout. It's funny how it appears differently on different shots through, maybe because the coffee equipment is motionless the gate weave stands out more? The original gate weave within the FLC looked like periodic horizontal movement, which surprised me as I would have thought that the film moving vertically at high speed and then being abruptly stopped for each frame would have resulted in more vertical positioning error than horizontal. Sadly it doesn't have any controls other than Amount and Rate. I ended up completely rebuilding it using the Camera Shake OFX plugin that has lots of controls. Sadly it seems based on a SIN function with a bit of randomness built in, so I had to play with the rate slider so it would interact chaotically with the frame-rate to appear relatively random. It does have separate amounts of vertical and horizontal (and also rotation, which I didn't use). I asked AI about the different characteristics and during a decent discussion it suggested: I got it to update the numbers with a 16mm projection print and projector, which made them slightly larger, but later on in the discussions it also suggested that having a small gate weave on each frame and occasionally have a larger registration slip of 3-5px, which it said was what people remember about the look. I don't really know how to do that in Resolve, so didn't include it. It also suggested that a worn projector might include some horizontal wandering and that film emulation plugins might emulate that as well, which might be what the FLC was doing. I ended up adjusting the vertical and horizontal so they were stronger than V4 but not so much that I hated it. Another thing it mentioned was on larger screens the amount will appear much more than smaller ones, and I'm editing in semi-cinema conditions, with a FOV of someone sitting in the middle of a normal theatre. If you're looking on a smaller device it might appear less. When I went to see Goodfellas at a theatre that was projecting from original print distributions, they played a bunch of old ads and a bunch of previews (IIRC a lot of these were 16mm) as well as the main feature on 35mm. The gate weave was really inconsistent, with some items having lots and others having none and being noteworthy for how absolutely rock solid they looked. Anyway, what else separates it from looking like real film? I suspect we're not there yet, and probably not even close...

Gate Weave increased (and I rebuilt the gate weave engine using the Camera Shake OFX). I'm not sure I like the aesthetic, so might turn it down for my own projects. @Clark Nikolai @eatstoomuchjam @Framed_By_Dan would especially appreciate your assessments of how close this is and what might be any next steps. I feel like it's good enough for my (untrained) eye, but if there are any more specific things you can identify then I'd be keen to keep going and see how far we can go. I'm gradually disabling things in the FLC plugin and manually recreating them myself using other plugins or just manual methods.

Soooooo...... no more EF manual focus lenses around I should know about?

As a 47mm F2.2 it's pretty close to a 50mm, so a pretty good FOV if that's the look you like. I've just bought the Panasonic 25mm F1.7, which is 50mm F3.4 on the GH7, and it's my first 50mm FOV lens, so I'm keen to start taking that out and about and "learning" that focal length. It probably seems odd to most that I've never shot with that focal length, but it's never really suited the situations I've been shooting in. Big and heavy isn't desirable, especially as I have some pretty killer combinations in that range already. I've got the Voigtlander 17.5mm and 42.5mm F0.95 lenses, which are 35mm and 85mm F1.9 equivalents, and with the Sirui 1.25x adapter they're as wide as 28mm and 68mm F1.5. Problem is those combinations are each 1300g / 4.6oz (2100g / 74oz with GH7) which is usable for hand-held shooting but my arms are pretty much done after a few hours. Of course, I'm also pretty much done with being on my feet for that long too so the setup isn't the limiting factor. These setups also have the advantages and coolness factor of being anamorphic too, so there's that! I'm slightly tempted by some other much stronger anamorphic adapters too, but in playing with the Sirui I've learned that they're very dependent on the taking lens, and some lenses work and other lenses that seem very similar are an absolute train wreck, so it's basically a blind purchase and these things aren't that cheap. My current preferred Night Cinema combo is the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and M42-MFT speed booster, and I bought the EF-MFT speed booster to try and get a slightly cleaner image, but unfortunately the 50/1.4 -> M42-EF adapter -> EF-MFT speed booster stack doesn't work as the back element of the Takumar interferes with the EF SB glass. I figured that the EF SB would open up a whole new world, as EF used to be the default standard for about half the worlds camera users, plus EF and PL were the de facto standards for cinema. My recollection was that there were tonnes of interesting and super-fast third party EF lenses, but now I go looking there doesn't seem to be so many to be found. If budget was no-option then there are a lot of cinema lenses that are very interesting, even anamorphic ones, but budget is a consideration so unfortunately things like the USD1400 Blazar Cato 85mm T2.8 2x anamorphic lens will have to just remain a dream! Apart from this being like me asking "can you recommend a lawnmower?" and you suggesting "just sell your house and move to a NYC apartment", I actually don't think it's true. I've done a lot of "what if" scenarios for what I'm trying to achieve, and while it might have worked for you specifically, when I look at the lenses for a given system I find every system to be very lacking. Sure, you can get fast lenses at 28/35/50/85, but there are all kinds of other gaps that MFT just doesn't have. This is gradually changing, as manufacturers gradually fill out the various lens lineups, but my impression of the current landscape is that most FF systems have the fast primes and holy trinity zooms (28/35/50/85 and 16-35/24-70/70-200) but very limited and patchy coverage of small and light lenses and in-between focal-lengths, etc. Adapting vintage SLR lenses gives access to character lenses, but only FF ones, not really S35 cinema ones (unless you go to crop mode which is throwing away resolution and now you're half-way to MFT!), and not the S16 ones. You sort of get the standard focal lengths in modern and in vintage, but that's it. MFT has all the small and light and in-between focal-lengths, but the weakness is in the fast primes and fast zooms. MFT used to have all the advantages of mirrorless essentially being able to adapt any SLR lens, but as time goes on, more and more of the interesting lenses are designed for mirrorless APSC/FF cameras and therefore not usable (or only available in MFT mount so you don't get a SB advantage) or are EF cinema lenses and are huge/heavy/expensive because they compromised on size and cost to ensure they're sharp sharp sharp sharp sharp enough for modern use. As an example, I have a tracking sheet of all the lenses I own (not every one available) and it's FF equivalent. This table includes: 15mm 18mm 26mm 28mm 30mm 31mm 34mm 35mm 40mm 50mm 53mm 56mm 59mm 64mm 70mm 71mm 75mm 78mm 80mm 82mm 83mm 85mm etc. I don't even think it's complete! Most of those are different characters too, being a mix of different manufacturers, vintages, and combinations of being native / with a SB / with an anamorphic adapter / with SB and anamorphic adapter, etc. So yeah, if you happen to want a fast standard focal length, or a fast trinity zoom (that's enormous), then FF is great, but the rest is pretty lacking. The other reason I'm not moving to FF is that most of what I shoot is on a native 10x zoom, which FF doesn't really have a good answer for. The other other reason is that the work for me to sell all my MFT equipment and re-buy in FF would make it so that I should just work those hours at my day job and increase my budget, so selling things isn't really cost effective. The other other other reason is that the GX85 has all sorts of configurations that FF can't match, so I wouldn't be selling that anyway.

Great post and lots of good points. Research on preferences is possible and there are actually some great resources out there talking about what aberrations are preferable, and are likely what ARRI have included in their colour processing. You have probably come upon these before, but for those who haven't, some of the resources I've come across are.. Color image reproduction of scenes with preferential color mapping and scene-dependent tone scaling https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/41/0a/e5/0a78ae57552549/EP1158779A2.pdf It's a patent obviously, so it's very dry and technical, but it contains interesting phrases such as: "a visual color reproduction of a scene having preferred color reproduction" "It is well known in the art, that the best reproductions of original scenes do not constitute a 1:1 mapping of scene colorimetry." "Pre-ferred color reproduction is defined as a reproduction in which the colors depart from equality of appearance to those of the original, either absolutely or relative to white, in order to give a more pleasing result to the viewer." There are other patents from earlier (1995 and 1996) from the same authors, so you can see them developing their knowledge. Visible skin color distribution plays a role in the perception of age, attractiveness, and health in female faces LINK to PDF It's a research paper, so technical again, but contains: "Here, we show that facial skin color distribution significantly influences the perception of age and attractiveness of female faces, independent of facial form and skin surface topography." "The results presented suggest that visible skin color distribution plays an important role in subjective evaluation of female facial beauty." These can seem very theoretical, but they have direct application in colour grading and development of looks etc. This video below shows how adjustments in hue compression and tone manipulation can make skin tones far more pleasing. FilmLight and the work of Daniele Siragusano are really the most advanced that I've seen (published publicly anyway) so are incredible references. Video (linked to timestamp): If you can't be bothered watching, essentially he takes the following image: then alters it to be very unflattering by adding green under the eyes and increasing magenta on her nose and cheeks: but then applying a film look, the rendering of colour almost completely removes these unflattering alterations: The film look reduces the magenta/green in that area of skin tones, which is why the rendering is flattering. This is the film rendering of the image, but without the unflattering alterations: Obviously the image is nicer without the alterations, even with the film look applied, but the alterations are far less unflattering with the film look applied rather than just with the normal 709 style grade. This is a very simple example (compression of the magenta/green axis in the skin-tone area of the colour cube) and there are others too, such as the compression of the hue outright, to reduce the variation between yellow and red in the skin tone area. For example the ARRI Alexa 65 promo video shows a range of people and skin tones, including this older gentleman: Obviously this whole image is desaturated, but look at the variation in tone - there's a lot less than in real life, but it's in a way that is flattering, and it seems completely natural in the context of the video, where the whole video is quite muted: but compare that to the amount of skin tone variation that people actually have when they age, the lips and areas around the nose and eyes etc are far more red and contain far more yellow-red variation than the above image shows: There are all sort of other things - that's just two. Going back to the Kodak patent and seeing what the "preferred colour reproduction" is doing, we see it's doing all kinds of crazy stuff: This is a plot in L*a*b space, so is essentially the colour wheel (luma is the axis not plotted). The symbols are where the transformation puts the colours and the line points to where the colour used to be. So it's taking the more saturated colours and making them more saturated, but not doing this with the less saturated colours, however you'll note there are some exceptions in there. This is happening in a 3D space though, and some adjustments will be happening dependent on the luma values involved. HOWEVER, and I just realised this, because the Alexa outputs don't do luma-specific manipulations to hues, any such luma specific adjustments must be in the ARRI709 LUT, not in the camera. There's tonnes of stuff in here, for example, the paper shows this diagram - Figure 14: and the description of what it shows is: "Fig. 14 shows how the hue reproduction could be modified for a system including variability, so that the optimum system color reproduction is obtained including all the sources of processing variability. In this case, the memory colors skin 60, sky 58 and foliage 56 are consistently and smoothly moved towards a hue line, while yellow hues 62 are shifted towards orange." It doesn't talk about skin specifically, but the a*b* space is this: So the skin is in this area of the plot: Which doesn't seem to involve any hue compressions or alterations at all. I'm not sure why they omitted those. Anyway, fun stuff, but a very deep rabbit hole indeed.

I bought an EF-MFT speed-booster, now I need some lenses! It's a VILTROX EF-M2II, and I tried my 50mm F1.8 and the AF was somewhere between functional and like it had a mind of its own. The focus ring on the lens has such a short travel that it's impossible to use as a MF lens (which it wasn't designed for so I understand). I'm looking for some interesting / fast / cheaper EF lenses that will be fine manually focusing. I'm especially interested in lenses F1.4 or faster but are still budget lenses. My thoughts immediately turn to the early days of cheap Chinese glass, but I can't seem to find any as any search is overrun with Canon AF lenses, or with new MF lenses that are for EF-M mount but are incorrectly labelled as EF (even Meike has a lens labelled as EF that is clearly a mirrorless lens!), and while EF was the only mount people never bothered to include that information and so things don't appear in searches. Laowa doesn't even let you browse their products by mount! Our new robot overlords suggested some options: The Samyang/Rokinon series: 35mm 50mm 85mm F1.4 Zhongyi Mitakon Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 (nice but it's over AUD1000!) Zeiss ZE series: 35mm f/2, 50mm 85mm f/1.4 MEIKE 50mm F1.2 Anything else I should be looking at? I really thought there were more third-party options around than just those.

If you like.. the thread I linked to included a link to a comparison of dyes and the digital sensors all had significantly weaker dyes in the bayer filters, probably to increase the sensitivity to light, but it means the spectrums of RGB overlapped a lot more than film, which hardly overlapped at all. This has all sorts of implications on digital vs film, and I have been pondering it since linking to that, but I'm not really sure what it really means in the context of ARRI colour science or even good colour science etc, which is why I didn't mention it. One thing worth mentioning is that when it comes to additive colour (like light) the response is a cone that gets wider (more saturated) at higher luma values, whereas subtractive colour (like dyes) the response is widest at the lowest levels of luma. This gives you two cones where the additive one (which is any monitor) can't fully replicate the most saturated parts of the subtractive response. However, now we have much higher dynamic range devices (HDR displays) they pretty much cover the dark-and-saturated part of the subtractive cone, and considering that modern cameras also have this kind of dynamic range they also capture it too, so that problem is mostly solved, with the only wrinkle being that you have to compress the whole gamut when grading your footage for SDR displays so it all fits, which is why film emulation plugins are so useful because they do a great job of this.

The "Australia Tax" is definitely real. It's getting less now thanks to how easy it is to buy direct online from overseas, but if you buy locally you pay a significant premium to the local importer who has exclusive rights to set pricing and sell those goods. I've known people who needed to buy something significant for their work, so rather than buying it locally, they took the family on a weeks holiday to Singapore (or the US) and bought the thing there and brought it back in their luggage... and even including all the costs of the family holiday etc it was still cheaper! I also remember someone from tech company needing to download a huge database from overseas and with internet speeds at the time they ended up flying there, burning it to a bunch of discs, then flying home again, and if you divided the total amount of data over the entire duration of the trip it was still dozens of times faster, and might even have been cost competitive on the data rates too.

Apparently they can't even educate their own sales reps about their own products, so their ability to sell a camera that doesn't have the latest specs may be less than required. Emily said one thing in the video that was amusing, she said she had to hand it to Sony, as they have managed to brainwash their customers into thinking that larger sensors are better and that smaller formats aren't useful for anything. This is true, there is all kinds of misinformation out there that people are just constantly repeating to each other. The total amount of money spent on marketing must be absolutely unfathomable, but the thing is that companies will gladly pay for it because sadly, it works.

My understanding is that WB is Linear gain, so it makes perfect sense for it to be before debayering. The logic is sound - WB is a mathematical adjustment to the sensor read-out and needs to take place before any creative operations, which for ARRI includes the debayering operation itself. Photographers click the button and expect the file on the card to contain the RAW un-altered readout from the sensor, which they think is somehow pure and have all these rules about what you're meant to do that they all just parrot to each other without anyone actually testing them and actually learning anything. ARRI is light-years beyond this, doing all kinds of processing. As someone who learned photography and then learned video, my impression was that going from photography -> videography was harder and took far more work to understand than learning photography from scratch. I randomly found a thread many years ago where someone posted the five most expensive photos ever sold without revealing where they were from, and the reaction was complete derision, with people saying things like "out of focus" "not sharp" "wrong WB" etc. When the OP revealed these were sold for millions of dollars each the reaction was various combinations of "we are right and people don't know what a good photograph is".

Emily talks about the L10 and MFT small cameras: The main point I took from this made complete sense to me. New cameras need to have new specs, new specs means current sensors and they need more power (both for the sensor and also processing much more data), and therefore there is more heat and larger batteries are required, therefore the chassis just needs to be larger. I note that camerasize.com now has the L10 in their database, so that means we can get comparisons! It is larger than the LX100, but not by a crazy amount... Emily did note that it's not pocketable, but also that after carrying it around Japan for 10 days she didn't feel that it was heavy or bulky at any point, so I guess there's a distinction there between pocketable and it feeling large / cumbersome / etc. It's also interesting to compare to the S9: Obviously the S9 needs a lens (unless you're an abstract filmmaker!) but the purpose of the comparison is that the S9 is a FF MILC camera with IBIS and the body is slightly narrower(!) than the L10, and the same height. So, I see no reason there couldn't be a GX100 in the S9 body as it would be the same except with a smaller sensor. Obviously the depth is different, but that is lens dependent, and anyway, if it's not pocketable then it's down to how large it is when it's in use, and at this point it seems the L10 grows more than Pinocchio running for President: I'm sort-of hoping for a GX100 as it would be extremely tempting, and also hoping it won't happen, as it would save me from being extremely tempted, and draw my attention away from my GX85 that (apart from it gradually turning into a film camera) I am remembering how much fun it is to use!

Yeah, there are differences for sure. Some situations show larger differences than others. One theme is that the Panny versions are much more saturated in skin tones than the Alexa. Coming from the kings of colour science, this has got to be deliberate, so even ARRI aren't trying to match the Alexa. I think that instead of asking "are they identical", the better question would be "does this impart some magic". I mean, everyone agrees that ARRI has the magic but their cameras don't even match each other between sensors, so it makes no sense to have a higher bar for the Panny version than we'd apply for ARRI themselves. My impression was that the ARRILogC profile and the ARRI709 LUT is the most like the Alexa, with the V-Log -> CST -> ARRI709 LUT not being as good. This makes sense as whatever colour / gamma secrets ARRI applies in-camera can be put into that profile as it's customised to the Panny sensors and also safely locked inside the camera away from prying eyes (unlike anything they put in their LUT). However, the Alexa also responds differently in the spatial dimension, with the far-red response including a more spatially distributed response from skin tones. We also know that Alexas process the image spatially in-camera due to their texture options and processing. Who knows what is going on with texture in there. IMHO the texture of Alexa images is right up there in importance as their colour response. None of this includes temporal aspects either. While I struggle to think of what processing might be occurring in-camera between frames, there might be some (we can't tell), and that's beyond the possibility that the hardware itself has some sort of secret properties that contribute to the image. FDTimes did an entire episode on the Alexa 35, with interviews of over a dozen people and 100+ pages: https://www.fdtimes.com/pdfs/free/115FDTimes-June2022-2.04-150.pdf Here is the image pipeline in the Alexa 35 (page 59): To give some idea about how stunningly out of our depth basically everyone on the internet is who talks about this stuff, starting on page 116, Dr. Tamara Seybold talks about Textures.. "For example, the debayering already needed to obtain the full color image doesn’t only generate RGB values but also influences the perceived sharpness and grain rendering. And many more steps influence the clarity and grain that are important aspects of the texture of an image. So we, in the image science team, pushed hard to obtain the best results by really optimizing each and every step in the image processing pipeline, not only for the best color rendition but also for the best texture, as we call it. We did that in a holistic way, optimizing steps in the beginning of the pipeline together with later steps so that the overall result would be best. At some point, this came down to having more than 30 parameters that we had to optimize together—a huge amount. We specifically had to build a small “texture grading machine” to be able to optimize all these parameters together." (emphasis added) I don't know about anyone else here, but I would struggle to even list 30 parameters, let alone identify all the parameters, isolate the 30 that matter, then find the sweet-spot (or sweet spots) in a 30-dimensional space. This is regarding the Alexa 35, but I remember reading in there somewhere that the innovation of the Textures feature is that you can choose different profiles on the new camera, whereas on the old ones you only had the one, and that on the previous models they had chosen a texture configuration that was their best attempt at a one-size-fits-all. So the inference was that the previous cameras were also doing this kind of processing. By implementing their colour science inside the camera, they could be doing all sorts of stuff. They could have things that analyse the image and then apply different treatments depending on the scene the camera was capturing. They certainly have a team capable enough and a camera with enough processing power to have a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand, LUTs or algorithms inside it and be changing these things based on context or WB setting or sensor temperature or whatever the hell else they found was useful. The sheer depth of knowledge that has gone into their image science is incredible. In 2009, Glenn Kennel joined ARRI as their CTO, which was a new position at that time, and in 2010 he was promoted to President and CEO. Glenn had previously worked for Kodak from 1980, and worked on various things that involved the gradual digitisation of the pipeline, including things like telecines and film scanners etc. My understanding is that his contributions at ARRI were pivotal for the development of the Alexa, which was the first digital camera to gain wide acceptance within the industry and did so due its film-like response. A bit of searching revealed some interesting discussions we already had during lockdowns..

I'd imagine it'll be somewhere between exorbitant, ridiculous, and "this is just an action camera - WTF".

Yeah, nice images! What I have learned in all my research is that there are tiny little sweet-spots in every aspect of the image. People lust after OLPF filters with just the right amount of softening, people marvel at skin tones with just the right amount of compression and hue manipulation, or lenses with just the right amount of distortion. Each of these imperfections / distortions / non-linearities has a certain feeling and aesthetic and comes with a range of associations. Combinations of these will have synergies, or won't, or will clash by pulling in different directions. When we moved from cameras that shot in the publishing resolution and recorded colour in the publishing colour space and gamma to cameras that had higher resolutions and log colour spaces etc, we went from looking at the image that professional imaging scientists tuned into a final commercial product to taking an image that was designed to be manipulated and then applying our own (likely far less skilful) texture, colour, contrast, etc. It's taken me a good decade to start reliably getting images I like, and even then, I'm using a film emulation plugin that is doing most of the heavy lifting.