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Makes sense. One other thing I just thought of is wondering if Lightroom can import stills directly from video files? I have no idea, but I remember that Photoshop had integrated some rudimentary video functionality some time ago so maybe Lightroom has some? It's not completely beyond comprehension that they might anticipate solo wedding shooters wanting to pull stills from video files. One thing to keep in mind is the creative impacts of inserting a stills step into your video workflow. On my last couple of trips I worked out a dailies workflow where I backed up the footage, pulled it into a timeline, applied some basic colour grading, and then reviewed it (it's a dailies workflow after all!) but also pulled stills as I went. The creative impact is that while looking for good stills I was focusing on clips that had a single good frame, which is often not creatively relevant for doing a video edit, and could definitely impact your mental inventory of your footage. If you're doing this before you've done the edit, or if the edit is predictable or formulaic enough, then it might not matter, but otherwise it might negatively impact the editing process. Resolve has an ever-increasing catalogue of AI features, but I doubt they'll be sophisticated enough to choose the nicest compositions and facial expressions etc, as making the happiest movie possible isn't really the focus of many film-makers.

The C100 would suffer from the same problem that all workhorse cameras suffer from - the best images from them are made by people who are so good at making images they don't post to social media and/or don't list their equipment if they do post. I wonder how many big budget productions have C100 shots mixed in with the C200/C300 main stuff but used the C100 as a higher-risk or mounted cam due to its size and relatively low cost if something happened to it. I've got the occasional beautiful image from my XC10 when the stars aligned and the location and lighting and composition were all working together, and that had a tiny sensor and 10x variable aperture zoom lens. The C100 almost matched it in pixel-peeing terms despite being 1080p and In similar situations the much larger sensor and ability to have nice lenses would be game over.

VLC has a feature (available via a hotkey) that saves a screen grab as a PNG. It's not a very good player though unfortunately, on Mac anyway. It can't play backwards, and the feature to advance a single frame works at first but seems to get bogged down, and after you've advanced even a few frames it seems incapable of going back to playing again. I know you said you were editing in Premier, but (IIRC) the free version of Resolve does timelines up to UHD and can grab screen grabs relatively easily. It would require a bit of setup where you pull the clips into a timeline, then the grabbing would be like butter, then the export of all the grabs takes a few steps, but the ease of finding the right frames might be worth the 30s to setup and export at the end? Both are options though.

I deliver in 4K too. Just upscale your 1080p project to 4K on export - no-one can tell the difference! Wow - 35-350mm.... now THAT is a lens! That's definitely a lot, and I can understand why you'd feel a bit entitled too, after paying so much. If you're likely to see some animals while you're travelling around seeing other sites then that's probably the best way, as the animals you do see will seem like good fortune rather than focusing on the animals you paid to see and didn't. Those other places seem really cool too. Africa seems like a strange continent in many ways. Of course, in lots of those ways it's quite like the remote places here in Australia, but although I've seen quite a number of them they still seem strange.

Equivalency of DOF is the elephant in the room for sure. In comparison, MFT lacks in the selection of gargantuan lenses with super-shallow DOF and FF lacks in small lenses without shallow DOF. If someone made a FF 28-280mm F7.0-11 lens then it should be the same size as my 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens, but of course the internet would go ballistic over it and run whatever manufacturer dared to create such an abomination out of town faster than you can say "grab your pitchforks - the devil has come for our children!". It depends on what you're doing of course, but for me personally when I switched from watching YT lens reviews to watching award winning movies and TV shows from the worlds leading professionals I had the Ah-ha moment when I realised very few shots had shallower DOF than could be achieved with relatively normal MFT lenses. Even when looking at the shots that would have required quite fast lenses on MFT, the aesthetic penalty for the DOF being deeper was very low. I then looked at what potential benefits would be traded-away for it.... lighter cameras that make me more likely to carry them around and use them and therefore get more shots to use in the edit... smaller equipment making me more pleasant to be around and having a nicer trip and causing the people around me to be happier and more relaxed and look nicer in frame... the smaller rig making the people around me less distracted and suspicious... the deeper DOF meaning there was less chance of having one person in focus but the others out of focus or it simply missing focus by focusing on the wrong thing... the much lower likelihood of having a difficult conversation with law enforcement or self-important security staff, etc. I concluded that getting slightly shallower DOF was a very small benefit competing against a significant number of advantages that would make far more impact to the end product and to my experience in using it. The extra cropping potential is one of the only benefits I can see for sensors above 2.5K. I put the cropping modes on my GH5 and GX85 into good use when I was shooting on primes and have been hugely impressed with them with my GH7 + 9mm F1.7 PanaLeica which I'll use for shooting in ultra-low-light. The R5 + EF-RF + 40mm F2.8 would be a great medium size setup. Perhaps the best second camera FF setup I could think of would be your R5 + 24-105mm F4. Like I mentioned above, the flexibility and speed of using a zoom when shooting in uncontrolled conditions just gives you more coverage - there's a reason doco and ENG shooters use zooms! Yeah, that's a real gem, I'm still seeing footage crop up on YT that really shows how much you can push things. I've also noticed it's very popular with the vlogging crowd and it seems to give really good results, similar to those who might use a small mirrorless, which is definitely saying something when you consider the size of it. Nah. Do a complete end-to-end analysis of what gives you the best results in the final edit or final photos, work out what equipment aligns best with those trade-offs, buy it, test it and learn the settings, then shift focus to actually shooting and don't look back. Beauty magazines make you feel ugly, and camera YT makes you regret your equipment. Best strategy is to ignore both. By far the most important skill in uncontrolled environments is being able to understand and predict the behaviour of your subjects. Not only does this matter for shooting people in public, but it matters doubly (triply?) for safari because the biggest struggle seems to be even finding the animals in the first place. A professional animal tracker would probably get better footage with an iPhone than an amateur with all the equipment in the world who spent a week and only saw a few animals the whole time. Perhaps a good exercise is to think about what the total cost will be of the trip, think about how much it would matter if you didn't see any animals at all, and then see how much it would cost to hire a guide or some other service that would help you locate things. There's a reason that people hire a model instead of just walking the streets hoping to find someone to shoot!

Yes, AI is a real wildcard. I see that there are really three fundamentally different groups when it comes to generative content. The first is professionals who create material for the general public, or various niches of the public. This is where AI will have incredible impacts. The second is professionals who create for their clients directly. This is people like wedding photographers etc, where the client is the audience. This has been debated, but I think that there will still be a market here. If I did something and wanted a record of it, I would want the final images to be of me, not AI generated content that looks like the people I know might have looked during the thing that actually happened. The third is people creating for themselves, where there is no client or money changing hands. This is every amateur, every personal project from professionals, etc. The goal is to have a final result that this person created. Amateur photographers take photos and print and hang the best ones, not because they're the best photos ever taken, but because they were taken themselves. Personally, I'm in the last category and I am completely resigned to the fact that my videos will never be great, will never attract a significant audience, will never be regarded as important, etc, but that's not why I do it so in that sense AI is no threat to me at all. I do understand that people are all in different segments of the industry and have very different perspectives for very good reasons..

A phone is always a great second camera in a pinch.. but if there's budget, it's hard to look past the GX85 or LX10. They're comparatively small, especially if you fit the GX85 with one of the pancake zoom lenses. Jeez, it's lenses the whole way isn't it. A sensor size goes up, lens size goes up exponentially... Maybe you should rent an MFT system? I understand that lots of the wildlife is best seen at dawn? Things can be pretty still then, so that works in your favour. Not sure how things go at dusk as the sun shouldn't have been heating things directly for a while and temps could even out a bit. But if you're shooting big cats sitting lazily in trees during the middle of the day it'll be heat shimmer galore. Yeah, these old lenses can be a bit beat-up sometimes. The GH5 does a great job with stabilisation, but there's no getting around the fact that you're trying to hand-hold an 800mm FOV lens, or trying to use it on a crappy tripod where the only thing "fluid" about the head on it is the words in the product description!

Wonderful images... great stuff!

This is my most recent finished edit. I wrote the music for this too. I've shared it before, but some might not have seen it. Shot on the trip I did to Seoul last August where the wife and I got sick and spent most of our time in the hotel. OG BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2. Graded in Resolve with heavy use of the Film Look Creator tool. Music written in Logic Pro.

This looks incredible! Great images and colour, and I really like the music and edit too. It really is a different world down there isn't it...

That's a hell of a lens! I have a Tokina 400mm F5.6 permanently on my GH5 now to act as a telescope because I looked into buying one and it was cheaper and more fun to buy a super-telephoto lens! It's not super-sharp wide open but in daylight you can just stop down, plus anything that is quite far away suffers from heat haze anyway, so the sharpness of the air is the limiting factor. I've thought about going on safari for years but have never actually gone. My thinking eventually lead me to the idea of having two bodies, one with a very long lens on it, and the other one with a very shot zoom on it so you can get shots of when the monkeys start stealing food out of your van, or the elephants ram you. My impression from social media is that these things are practically guaranteed to happen. I have the PanaLeica 100-400mm on my "when I'm a millionaire" list as it seems it would be perfect for things like a safari where you never know how far away the subjects are going to be.

Ouch!! My GH7 (with battery, card, 14-140mm, and vND) is just over 1.1kg. The 12-100mm is just a hair under 300g heavier, so the GH7 + 12-100mm combo would actually be a hair above 1.4kg by the time it's fully functional, and my setup doesn't even include any audio equipment, so that's also something to take into consideration. I walked around Pompeii carrying the GH5 + Voigtlander 17.5mm + Rode Videomic Pro (1.4kg) in my hand for several hours, raising it up when I saw something I wanted to shoot. My wrist was sore for several days afterwards, just from having the weight on it for that long. It might be something you'd get used to, but having to train so you have the strength and stamina to carry a camera around seems a bit much to me! I agree. The high-ISO performance is actually quite impressive too. For low-light I have the 9mm F1.7 with CrZ and if I want longer range than that I have the 12-35mm F2.8. Probably the only other lens I would get for super-low-light shooting is the PanaLeica 15mm F1.7 because it's small and fast and being a Leica lens should be nice and sharp wide-open so the CrZ mode should be quite usable with it.

This seems like a simple question, but the more I think about it, the less simple it gets. Let's start out with the seemingly obvious answer - it looks like Super-16 because the sensor is literally a S16 sized sensor. End of thread, thanks for coming, byeeeee! Here are some thoughts suggesting it looks more like S35, or at least more than S16. Some are good arguments, some aren't, but summed up I think they're hard to dismiss. It appears sharper than S16, a lot sharper. Without getting overly technical, S35 has around 4K resolution, but the level of contrast on the fine details is quite low, and it's well known that by the time you print and distribute a 35mm film it really only looks like about 2K once it's projected in cinemas. This is perhaps the biggest argument for me - the P2K just looks like cinema did in the 90s. I know this isn't comparing a 35mm neg scan with the P2K files, but virtually all the memories of 35mm film that most people would have are from movies shot and distributed on film, not from viewing modern film scans. Lenses are much sharper now too, adding to it. S16 lenses were often very vintage! We have speed boosters, much faster lenses, and much wider lenses now. One of the looks of S16 was longer focal lengths and deep DOF, but if we were to use the P2K like we would use any other camera, it would be with speed boosters and faster lenses which would have much shallower DOF. The wider lenses we have now would be much sharper and faster too. So the lens FOV, lens DOF, and sharpness combinations would all be much more like S35 was, and perhaps even exceed it. How it's used would be much more modern. The framing, movement, lighting, locations and subjects also play a role in 'placing' a medium. This has probably changed less than the above arguments, and the things that any of us might shoot are more likely to still resemble things that I would associate with S16 (like FNW and TV and low-budget projects). I'm curious to hear thoughts from others. I've been reviewing my equipment and got to the P2K and thought "oh, it's a pocketable S16 camera" but my brain immediately added "that looks like 90s movies" and then I realised that these two things don't align!

Yes, it's the AF that makes me think of manual lenses on the GF3. For stills it's a fully featured camera, but for video it's auto-everything* and so having an AF lens on it is a pain because the CDAF will hunt occasionally. (* actually I recorded some clips with it last night and discovered it keeps the current WB setting - how odd that's the only thing it will let you lock down!) If you don't already own the Olympus body cap lens then perhaps the "7Artisans 18mm f/6.3 Mark II" might be a better choice as it's cheaper and faster than the Olympus.

Indeed! Actually, the killer combo for the GF3, if we think of it like a tiny vintage film camera, is when it's paired with the Olympus 15mm F8 body cap lens. It is truly tiny.... In a sense it's an incredibly synergistic pairing, because it gives a 30mm FOV, which is wide enough to make any micro-jitters pretty minimal (especially if you add gate weave in post) and it's sharp, so the softness is just limited by the GF3, and it's deep DOF which fits with the 8mm look. Without an ND you're also using the shutter to expose, which I understand is also how 8mm cameras worked? However, perhaps the killer aspect of it is the way you would use it. You'd never use this as your main setup, so this would be a carry-everywhere low-stakes camera for having fun with. It would be what you pull out when being silly with friends, or filming random things that aren't so formal. In a way, that's how people might have used an 8mm camera back in the day, because they weren't inundated with video and didn't have the media savvy we all have now, so they would have just pointed their home movie cameras at whatever was happening. It's even got a lever that closes it for use in pockets, but it also works as a manual focus adjustment and close focus is something like 30cm / 12 inches which might even get a little bit of background blur (I can't recall) so it's quite versatile. The challenge is that the F8 aperture means it's basically no good after sunset or indoors, so that's the weakness. Apart from that, this is perhaps the most likely setup I would use this with. There's an F5.6 version from a different manufacturer that is tempting, but re-buying it for only one extra stop is a bit hard to swallow. Anyway, here's a video I shot with this combo quite some time ago.... I can't remember how I graded that, but I think I used a film emulation plugin that added a lot of softening in post, so don't take that as the limits of its resolving power. It also shows a lot of rolling shutter, so maybe the strategy would be to have it on a strap around your neck and pull that tight when shooting to stabilise the camera a little. There is something about the extreme lack of technical performance that makes my brain think "well, this isn't going to win awards for literally anything, so ignore all the rules and just shoot and have fun!"