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My understanding was that Brandon literally helped make the genre with (what I like to call) "washing machine travel films" like Hong Kong Strong that are like you rolled and spun a camera through a city and then cut it with only match-cuts - they trigger my motion sickness pretty strongly and I literally can't watch them. However, people loved it and he got a bunch of TV appearances out of it: As previously said in the thread, he can make any camera from the last decade shine, and he has, and it's skill. All true. What no-one else has said though, is that videos like this are film shoots. They're not holidays, or someone filming while traveling (even slow travel).. These videos are researched, storyboarded, scheduled, and then shot on location with a cast (him and his GF, but often he recruits locals and will direct them like he's shooting a narrative) and crew (IIRC he's mentioned hiring people to fix, drive, translate, liaise, etc). This is no secret, and his free BTS content shows this openly. I think he sits in a fascinating space that I don't see a lot of professionals operating in. He shoots uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) situations, like markets and crowded public places, does so with talent and a shot list, but does so shooting relatively low-impact. People shooting a travel doc will be shooting with talent in markets and in the streets but will have huge shoulder-rigs and will build up a little crowd of people who are just staring at the shoot and have to be choralled to keep them out of frame. People shooting relatively incognito in a crowd are mostly doing it without talent or a plan or shot-list. Not a lot of people sit between those two scenarios, and even less will tell you how to go about doing it. I've paid a lot of attention to his BTS segments (which are excellent if you want to make videos like this) but as someone who travels for the enjoyment of it and shoots along the way, I can tell you that there is very little overlap between shooting while you travel and producing and shooting and editing a travel film. I put myself on the email list for when he launched his course, and when it was released it was pretty pricey. Probably good value as he obviously knows what he's doing, but too much for me considering the differences of our methods. Maybe it's an aesthetic thing, but his work looks dated to me now, including the Oppo piece. I understand why he still shoots these things like this, because he's appeared on quite a number of videos like this that are posted on the manufacturers channel, rather than his own channel, so it's obviously how he keeps the lights on.

I'm imagining that it will be lens-dependent too, as some lenses are built for sensors that are happy to detect light that hits the sensor at an angle, whereas others want the light to be coming from an angle more perpendicular to the sensor. My understanding was that this is why some lenses vignette heavily on some cameras but not others, whereas some other lenses work fine across a wide range of sensors.

My film friend said that the edges were too sharp for S16, and gave me some examples of things printed on 2383 that look SUPER soft to me. It makes me think that the look of film is really two looks: 1) the look of a neg scan (which is digital from then on) 2) the look of a negative printed to a print stock I wonder how much "film emulation" is actually emulating the first one. I also wonder what look I'm going for. It occurs to me that back in the day what we'd see on analog TV would be low-resolution film scans (having maybe 480 lines) but would have had semi-infinite horizontal resolution (bandwidth limited and all that I know) and would have had zero digital compression, so the grain would have been fully in-tact (and therefore loud and proud). I suspect the aesthetics I absorbed (and are unconsciously referencing) would have been from music videos, sports videos, etc in the era of MTV (80s and 90s). In this early time anyone with a low budget would be shooting on 16mm (or 8mm!) and often not the highest quality lenses or cleanest stocks etc. I'm guessing I probably watched thousands of hours of pure-analog uncompressed 16mm or 8mm footage scanned and broadcast in SD, and those would have been quite DIY / experimental / creative etc, rather than the much more produced and formulaic outputs that came later on. Thanks! Like I said above, not targeting and specific pipeline, but I did calibrate the contrast on the first set of images from the GX85 to the DR of 2383, which was 5-6 stops in the linear range. The goal is to get something that looks like it could have been shot on some unknown stock. Realistically, this is a proxy for the images just not looking digital, and apart from trying to emulate VHS or Betamax, there aren't any other analog looks to draw from. Plus, film did a ton of things that research says that are aesthetically pleasing, and I'm sure I also have some baked-in nostalgia or just acclimation to this look. Interesting you think of T-max, and think this is fine grain. The grain on this is based on the 16mm preset in FLC, but modified to be softer. More on this later. I looked around and found a few 8mm examples with high contrast, but most were much more faded-looking, even stuff that seems like it was shot recently. There's this video which has shots like this: or this one with shots like this: Thanks! It's definitely more about training my eye to learn what I like rather than any sense of accuracy, however film has so many things that are desirable that there's so much overlap I couldn't do either one to any degree without also making huge progress in the other! The technique I'm using is to add the grain first, then soften the image. This ensures that they have the same amount of softness and we're not dealing with these horrific combinations of sharp footage + soft grain, or the other way around. The people I spoke with suggested that this tends to look a bit soft and so they either sharpen afterwards, or add a touch more grain on top. These shots had a touch more grain on top. What I didn't do is match the grain to the image. I added 16mm-sized grain to a sharp image, then softened that. Maybe I should just add 65mm-sized grain so it matches the resolution of the image, and then adjust the amount and softening to match the stock. I definitely have more to test. You're also right about moving grain vs frame grabs. I'm reluctant to post video samples until I've worked out how much grain to force-feed into YT to get the right amount of it out again. Definitely all considerations for a full-historic-emulation. I'm not really chasing historical accuracy in the sense that you're talking about, although I might be chasing some specific something I saw once and loved, which is possible (or quite likely) considering I watched a ton of very creative and edgy films growing up, including a lot of early music videos and skateboarding videos, which are much more likely to have been hand-held and with the camera being used to express attitude rather than the restrained professionalism of documentary or narrative cinematographers. I'm still figuring this out, but I suspect that what I have in mind is a feeling that I'm chasing, or perhaps an attitude, and I'm trying to get closer to that on every level at once. The colour and tone, the texture, the movement (motion cadence?), the compositions and camera movement, the choice of subjects, then in the edit the pacing and rhythm, the structure of shot combinations and overall arc, as well as the music which I plan to write as well. It's the whole vertical stack from tech specs to final feeling and emotional aftertaste of the edit. I have always liked street photography, and for this project (which is sort of a subset of my Night Cinema project) it's really shooting high-attitude moving street images. The gold standard for this is Illkoncept, who shoots travel videos on digital but has also shot some videos on his 16mm Bolex: From what I understand the Bolex doesn't have that many lenses and the ones available are often very soft, so this 16mm footage is a lot softer than other examples. This is in contrast to a setup like this, where they have used Vision3 50D and shot on the Laowa Nanomorphs and scanned at 6.5K, so this is sort-of an example of an image pipeline where the negative itself is the limiting factor: The other thing I've heard is that over the decades they improved the film itself, and what I was lead to believe was that it doubled (or more) in sharpness, so late 8mm film matched early 16mm, late 16mm matched early 35mm, and late 35mm matched 65/70mm. Great discussion.. it's forcing me to think about all kinds of things I hadn't really considered, which is the whole point, plus the result I'm getting are improving with each iteration.

I like film and retro filmic looks, but shooting Super-16 (or even Super-8) is still an expensive PITA. After some testing of my equipment, I've realised that my GX85 has image quality equalling or surpassing a Super-16 film camera (with some categories surpassing a Super-35 film camera) so in my pursuit of a pocketable, portable, fun, simple, and fast setup that looks like film, this project is born. The criteria is to work out how to get great images from the tiny setup that are enough like film that most people would believe it if you said it was shot on film. My approach is simply to compare the two and find the biggest differences and then work on bringing them closer together, 80-20 rule and all that. The first point of comparison is already known, the crop factor is similar (2.2x vs 2.88x) so making sure I don't go too hard into shallow DOF then this should be comparable. Second consideration is camera movement, shake, and how they'll be used. S16 film cameras can be hand-held, but they've got some weight so are relatively steady in use. 8mm cameras were designed to be hand-held and are much lighter, so will move more. The GX85 is far smaller than either, but has IBIS (and OIS with some lenses) so that should make it feel larger, but I'll have to watch out for parallax, which will give away the cameras lack of heft. Third is the DR. Film has a huge DR and I wasn't sure how this would go - harsh clipping of highlights and blacks will be a dead giveaway. Without knowing anything about its rec709 profiles, I shot an exposure test where I took shots one stop apart. Film negatives have a lot of DR, but print film has far less, with stocks like Kodak 2383 only having about 5-6 stops in the linear range of their exposure (between about 10% luma and 90% luma, before the rolloffs kick in). Bringing in my test shots and matching the contrast within my standard colour pipeline (based around the Film Look Creator tool in Resolve) I realised the GX85 has enough DR to push its highlights well up into the highlight rolloff curve of the FLC, and same with the shadows, so this is fine too. DR, check! Fourth is resolution and texture. The images should be soft and noisy, but how much? After reviewing a number of sources, I realise that there are all kinds of factors, such as the speed of the negative, how it was exposed (0... or -1 and pushed in post, etc), but often the biggest factor in softness was the lenses used, and the biggest factor on the grain is the processing that the streaming service does when you upload it! In this sense, I have a lot of freedom in these aspects, but I'll have to do further tests on uploading to YT. I have seen videos that have really nice grain in 4K, so I know it can be done, but my previous tests showed the YT compression really changes things, so I'll have to do more tests. Then we're into testing with real images and just seeing what we see. My first test was some random shots in the garden, just to have a starting position. The feedback I got (including one friend who practically lives to talk about film!) was that it looked good but needed more saturation. My thoughts were that I exposed too high (I'd forgotten that the LCD is deceiving and the GX85 has a lot of shadow info) and as such the highlights in the first image were clipped in the file and still show in the graded image. After this test I happened to watch a YouTuber go through their grading process and they said they exposed by putting the image in the middle of the histogram, which made sense to me and I realised this is what I should do with the GX85. Second test was just a few images while out and about. It's the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens. I'd previously forgotten this lens is both a 31mm and also a 62mm (with the 2x zoom) and so is much more flexible than I was remembering, so I made sure to include some 2x shots to see how useful that was with this level of image degradation. I also decided to push the images to get more of the kind of look I'm chasing. The 2x seems completely fine too, having quality far more than this level of softening will show. I also re-graded them in B&W, pushing the contrast much further. I may even want to go harder on these. Much more work to do, but I'm really liking the process so far. In these days of digital perfection, the attraction of film is in the colours and the texture. If you want the colours and not the texture, wanting to keep a much more modern level of sharpness and noise, emulating some of the properties of film is so ubiquitous that I think it's just called "colour grading". The phrase "film emulation" then is for the texture of film and deliberately wanting the imperfections and aesthetics of it. You don't have to go hard like I have with Super-16 film + Super-16 lenses levels of softening, but if you did this is easily possible too and FLC has 35mm presets which soften, but do so far more subtly than this. I'll continue to iterate on the colours and textures, but moving into moving images is probably next, with all the testing of the YT processing and compression that comes with that. But seriously, imagine telling someone in the 80s that you could fit an interchangeable lens camera capable of shooting feature-film level images in your pocket... Feedback welcome.

Typing that reply certainly did make me warm even more to the LX100 and L10, but considering I have the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 already (and are therefore a FREE option!) it's pretty hard to beat for a number of reasons.. The size with the 14/2.5 is similar, and it doesn't get larger when you turn it on: As I edit in 1080p and am softening the image in-post rather than sharpening it, the 14/2.5 on the GX85 can be a 31mm and a 62mm (with the 2x zoom function) which are both absolutely awesome focal lengths for shooting how I like to shoot. I can easily bring other lenses if I am shooting something worth putting some effort into shooting (ie, it's not just an EDC opportunity). I've shot an absolute ton of tests on the GX85 so I know it inside and out. Like most of us here, I both crave the simplicity of having a fixed-lens setup that would do most of what I want, but I crave the choice and freedom of the options that an interchangeable lens mount provides!

I missed your point about it being in the S9 chassis, but that makes total sense and gives a lot of hope for a GX10, as if they can fit a FF IBIS sensor assembly in there they should be able to fit a MFT IBIS sensor assembly in there too. If they announced one of those I'd be very tempted to pre-order one. I'm super happy with the images from my GH7 but the size is cumbersome for a lot of things, and my GX85 still softly calls to me because of the form-factor. Once you add a large lens to it the difference becomes less significant of course, but there are lots of small lenses. This is the GX85 vs the GH7 (they haven't put the L10 in yet) but it shows my general point: Looking at the size this way really does show the genius of the LX100 and L10. This is the LX100 vs the GX85, but the GX85 has the 12-35mm F2.8 lens, which not only is MUCH larger than the LX100 (open and closed), but the lens is 1.5 stops SLOWER at the wide end than the one in the LX100 and L10!! In order to get an MFT camera to match / surpass the LX100 / L10 lens, you need to go to the 10-25mm F1.7 lens, which isn't a fair test as it's wider and constant F1.7, but the size difference is.... stunning. The more I think about it, the more I realise the F1.7-2.8 lens and GH7 sensor combo really an 80% combo, where with its speed and aperture and the GH7s ISO performance, for general travel / family / hobby / creator / vlogging / etc stuff you'll only really miss the odd situation here or there where you'd wish for something more. This is absolutely in contrast to the other little cameras I've looked at (the Sony ZV-1 comes to mind) where as soon as you go inside or after the sun sets the image turns to mush with the poor ISO performance, plus the DR of the GH7 sensor will seriously embarrass lots of the alternative options too. This is because most of them are just old, but that seems to be the state of the market for these smallest options. I'm not really sure what the current alternatives are for the L10, but happy to hear if someone wants to make a list...

Size is a funny thing as there are two different comparisons to be made - one is with it switched off (and lens retracted) and the other with it on and lens extended. I've noticed that people often only care about one of these and don't give a hoot about the other. The EDC crowd only care if it's pocketable (while off and lens retracted) so they can take it everywhere and others (like me) only really care about it when it's being used. From the perspective of what it's like when it's on and extended, especially if you use the sci-fi looking triangle door lens cap thing which will attract all kinds of "WTF is that thing?" attention: It never ceases to amaze me how different we all are from each other, even when literally talking about the same piece of equipment!

Perhaps the biggest mistake was inviting a bunch of influencers with tiny hands to come to Japan and make it look enormous by comparison. They could have just had someone the size of Shaq in the lobby holding one and posing and every video would have started with a very different tone! Sounds pretty normal to me, but my household has a rather eclectic purchase history, so I might be an outlier!

The battle of Resolution vs Common Sense was over long ago and us consumers were the losers.

Well, that intern got Panasonic 20 hours of clear air, but the intern from Canon that chose when to announce the R6V only managed to get about an hour before Sony released the A7R VI, so I guess everything is relative! Still, they're all for different audiences and at different price points etc. A $1500 P&S vs a $2500 FF camera vs a $4500 67MP beast. I doubt many people went "oh no, I preordered the L10 but the Sony has higher resolution - pre-order cancelled!"

@mercer Canon just released the R6V, which is somewhere between the R6III and C50. Another option to consider...

Yeah, some pretty nice looking images from that lens. Realistically, on a consumer camera without RAW or Prores, the codecs are potentially going to be the limiting factor more often than the lens. I'm easy to please though, as my aesthetic leans towards the analog and emotive rather than the person building a personal database of all image sharpening techniques ever created.

I'm optimistic about it, but there are no guarantees. Also, if it has an MFT mount it might be more expensive rather than cheaper, you never know.

I searched for "LX100" instead of "Landscape" and it seemed to work, with most shots meeting the criteria...

Well, they just launched the Canon R6V, so I hope Panasonic enjoyed their 20 hours of PR!