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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!

Looks decent. Finally a small camera that isn't arbitrarily locked to 100Mbps (or 200Mbps if you're lucky) IPB codecs. I always wondered if the small form-factor would influence how much processing they could fit into it, or even IF the size influenced the processing at all.

Like. Subscribe. True. I was referring to a fictional interchangeable lens version in the future, but for this one it seems like they've compensated for this in their menus as the focal lengths seem to all be in FF equivalents: I very much doubt anyone shooting with a zoom will be terribly fastidious about shooting with exactly 35mm (and not 40mm) but I could be wrong, and the ability to set that zoom switch to preset focal lengths will certainly encourage people to stick to exact settings. Absolutely. Although TBH unless you're shooting professionally (which this isn't the camera for) or doing something really specific (like shooting green-screens) then a downsampled and lesser codec is still in the realm of being passable for most purposes. Especially with software like Resolve bringing all kinds of processing within reach. I must admit that I find judging image quality from other peoples images to be almost impossible as you're likely just seeing average images of the most incredible scenes. I remember back in the early days of digital when almost all photos were completely rubbish but there was always one or two photos you shot that looked magical because the light was just right and the scene happened to make a great composition or the scene was rubbish and the colour profile was also rubbish but they happened to collide in a way that is creatively interesting. Unfortunately for me, that means when judging lenses I either have to replicate that focal length / aperture combination on my existing equipment or just buy the damned thing to understand what it's like to actually use!

Cool camera. I literally did an ISO test on my GX85 less than an hour ago and was calculating what ISO/lens combos I could get away with for shooting street at night. I love my GH7 but the size of the GX85 keeps quietly calling to me. I see it as a fun little camera for photography with some cool video capabilities. I also see it as an incredible sign we're likely to get a new small interchangeable-lens MFT camera, although maybe the form-factor would be a bit small for including IBIS, so we'll have to see if the size gets a bump. I also see if as a fantastic sign that I missed the announcement completely as the only video in my feed about it was from Micro Four Nerds, so that's an encouraging sign about the amount of professional camera YouTubers I subscribe to! I'd go even further than @BTM_Pix about the crop-factor and say it's potentially even better than a 'normal' crop factor. By the time you're playing MFT you're already doing lens math all the time, and my experiences with the GH5/7 and GX85 and OG BM cameras was that it encouraged curiosity in different lenses, different focal lengths, different looks (from different FOVs), and different creative directions from the different looks. For me the (imposed) variety was a source of creativity rather than a limitation. I've seen videos recently talking about new 40mm lenses and the people struggled to understand the lens, and also seemed to struggle with the entire concept of how small changes in FOV can have large changes in how you use them, whereas this is something I'm very familiar with and seems to be an advantage over people who only ever use "proper" cameras. The other thing that might be relevant is that the GH7 actually has some small crop-factors too. Obviously shooting 5.7K doesn't crop, but C4K, UHD, and 1080p have subtle variations in their crop factors, so maybe that 2.2x is coming from the sensor? Still, even if no future MFT camera materialises, this might end up with a spot in my lineup anyway. The GH7 sensor has incredibly improved low-light (compared to any camera of a similar size) so the F1.7-2.8 lens should be quite serviceable in low-light and would have a shallow enough DOF for some nice separation in many situations too. I'm keen to see some numbers about how large it is.

Yeah, unfortunately it didn't have captions so I couldn't use auto-translate, but I noticed some waveforms and the tests seemed controlled etc so pretty good effort. His enthusiasm was..... pretty darn high too!

I'd be very curious about what this one is (from his thumbnail): Unfortunately it's not in the video and some googling couldn't find it, so I suspect it's AI?

OP hasn't logged in for 18 months and the post is over 2 years old, but I'm actually going down this rabbit hole right now. I bought the Neewer one below but don't recommend it because it clamps onto the touchscreen of the phone (and if you watch the reflections you can see the screen bend around the clamp!), plus is seriously bulky. The idea you need a large one isn't necessarily true - I have a range of ND filters and I found that if I hold a 46mm one up to my iPhone 17 in just the right spot it covers all the cameras with no vignetting. Having said that, as some (or all?) phones don't have apertures, you'll need enough ND to shoot wide open. I tested my iPhone 17 Pro a few days ago and discovered it needed more than 5 stops of ND in direct sun conditions, and from about 2-3 stops onwards became unusable with IR pollution, so mine is going to need my 4-stop ND, my 1-5 stop vND, and an IR cut filter. I've just ordered the Tiffen MagSafe one (that only claims to work for the iPhone 16, not my 17) and plan to attempt to modify it to work with my phone case and see if I can get it to work, and if the 58mm filter size covers all the lenses without vignetting (especially if it doesn't align properly).

Yeah, I guess you could just start using it and see if it bothers you, and like you say - there are various tools to fix it even if it shows up on a few shots where the ground doesn't obscure it. The C300 having a similar problem helps to give more confidence that your unit wasn't treated especially badly, but also gives less confidence in it happening again, or in the Canon design department! I've had a number of things repair themselves over the years. The power mirrors in an old car I bought just started working out of the blue, and on the same car I bought it from a different state and was taking it to be inspected so it could be registered and I realised I'd forgotten to fix the horn, which didn't work. The guy was running through a checklist and said "horn" and I remembered I never fixed it. I decided to press it, pretend to be surprised, then promise to fix it later, hoping they'd be lenient.. so I pressed it and it worked - scared the crap out of me! I've had electronics do similar things too. I was visiting a friend in the Windows 98 plug-n-play days and he had a new card in his computer that wouldn't work in Windows so we were chatting and just for amusement I tried over and over to install it, using the same process (open device manager, delete the entries with errors, restart, repeat) and I had gotten to the point where I remembered each mouse click in the process and then out of the blue it just installed correctly and worked fine. When something doesn't work now I just treat it as the first offer in a negotiation and switch it off and let it chill for a while and come back to me when it's ready to raise it's offer 😄

Ah, I didn't realise it was behind a layer of glass... I'm assuming the ND moves in and out of position, so maybe it got it on there when it was out of position? I'm assuming that whole volume isn't completely sealed. It still begs the question of how the dust got into there, and how much dust it's been exposed to in its life... the probability the camera has only ever gotten one bit of dust in it, and that dust happened to get to that spot is pretty slim by my estimation! Can you call CPS to get an estimate for how much it would cost? Maybe that would help inform if it's a return or if you'll keep it and send it off for the service.

Thanks! Partly I feel like I've moved past shooting the obvious stuff and started focusing on what I'm looking for, but also there's a bias in what frames I choose to post online too as wider more normal shots often look really cool when moving but as soon as you look at just one frame as a still image all the movement is gone and the depth collapses and the frame just looks like a chaotic mess. This happens even if you've been looking at it in motion and so your brain already has a 3D mental model of what it's looking at - you hit stop and it just collapses. This shot is a moderate example and looks like a very busy but confusing still image (taken right next to the Shibuya train station): When watching the video clip the train stands out most because it's moving quickly, the pedestrians on the bottom right are moving a lot and the ones in the distance and to the left are moving less but still moving, and the side of the rail bridge and buildings in the rear are completely still. Seeing these things your brain instantly builds a sense of depth, which combined with the rear of the signs then means you recognise the cars as being several lanes of traffic despite it being almost completely stationary, and so in only a fraction of a second the frame becomes about six clearly-defined areas, rather than the almost indiscernible chaos that the still frame is. The process of pulling nice looking frame grabs from my footage is a fascinating exercise in how different still images are from moving images. They really are a completely different thing, and I shoot for motion and chaos and layers, so in a way I'm posting my least interesting shots. I agree. I follow someone on YT shooting with the same Takumar 50mm F1.4 on FF and they shot a video of using it wide open in daylight and it just didn't look right. There are strong anatomical reasons for this as in lower light our pupils dilate giving our eyes a shallower DOF, we can often get flares etc from strong light sources (which will be on our periphery because we're probably not looking at them directly), and in very low light we even start relying on the rods in our eyes (which are far less detailed) instead of the cones which we usually use. I have a trip later on in the year where I will probably only be shooting during the day and won't have many/any chances to go off shooting at night, so I'm forcing myself to get excited about daytime images again, and in thinking about equipment I'm not sure that shooting with larger apertures / fast lenses makes visual sense so I might not even take any, instead just using my usual 14-140mm zoom lens.

Nice. Good idea about giving it a solid clean out with rocket blower etc. Mine tends to leak air quite a bit from the one-way valve, but if you put a thumb over it then it turbo boosts the air to give a much more solid blast. It'd be good to know if there's dust all through it, and if you end up dislodging a bunch, at least you can include that in any cleaning service you arrange. I have also found that fan brushes for painting are really nice for dislodging the dust that is just attached enough to not move from air alone, but they tend to be gentle enough that they're not picking up dust and then pressing it onto the surface as you move it around. I don't know how far I'd go if something was on my sensor - I'm mostly blowing dust off my lenses or off the outside of the gear after a trip. Speaking of brushes, the makeup section in most shops will often have very soft brushes with a short handle that fit really well into the case/container you're keeping your lenses. In terms of how it got there, I've noticed a minority of people seem to be perfectly happy taking their time and doing other things while the camera has no lens or body-cap attached. Personally when I'm changing lenses I do it in a sheltered area, taking the rear lens cap off the next lens, then swapping the lenses as quickly as possible (while still being calm and controlled) and then putting the cap onto the previous lens. If I'm at home and feeling fastidious I blow the rear element of the next lens (and rear lens cap) before fitting it, then blow the rear of the previous one before putting the rear cap on, in an effort to not let dust hitchhike its way into the camera.