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Pixel peeing here, but it looks quite compressed: Is that compression from the original file or the compression to upload the still? My understanding of wedding photography is that the occasional couple will drop real money to get a large print of the best image of the day to hang in their house - maybe 24"x36" or more. Does that still happen? If so, that's the worst-case they'd have to stand up to, probably being viewed from about the same distance away as its larger dimension. I do really like the idea of grabbing a still from a video, especially if you're a single shooter. I've played with printing out stills from video and my recollection was that bitrate mattered a lot more than resolution, at least for modest sized prints.

My recommendation is to invest a bit of time, and if you're making money then it's an investment, and put in a bit of work. Here's what I would suggest: Go through a few weddings and pull a selection of the type of shots you typically get onto a single timeline. ie, some day, some night, some close-ups of different skintones, some high-key, some low, some with super-saturated colours, etc Put an adjustment layer (or something you can colour grade in) over the top of all the clips Duplicate that timeline and grade it using every method you can imagine....... try every LUT you can get your hands on - even if they're obviously "wrong" (eg, try the ARRI 709 LUT, the Canon one, etc etc). FilmConvert (and it's competitors) typically have free trial versions you can use, in those try every film stock emulation. Etc etc. For each copy of the timeline you make: Apply the LUT / simulation Adjust the overall contrast to suit your footage (different LUTs and stocks will have different contrasts) Adjust any clips that need to be adjusted individually (some LUTs or stocks can do odd things on the occasional shot) (optional: add a caption to the grade with the basic info like what LUT or simulation, then export the first frame from each clip as a still) Once you've done that, sleep on it so you have fresh eyes. Bring in some grades you love - either previous ones you've done yourself or reference materials, and compare all the shots you graded and see what you see This is a lot of work, yes, maybe a couple of days if you try a few packages like FilmConvert and Dehancer and others. But you'll do it once, and then you can answer the question of what look/looks you like, save them as power grades (or presets or whatever) and apply them whenever you want. Plus, you'll have a library of looks that you can show to potential customers, you can review for inspiration, etc etc. I've done tests like this and found that the old saying is right - "do it right, do it once".

My impression of the OG Alexa is that the sensor is 10 years old, which will make it likely to be less efficient compared to todays sensor tech (as a decade of tech development has done wonders for things like this, regardless at how good ARRI are at making anything), and the camera also does a ton of processing to the image in-camera. This is likely to be relatively easy to implement the alrogythms on a newer more powerful and power-efficient chip, but it's still processing that isn't done in other cameras. If they were going to make a small mountable package with an ALEV sensor in it then it would have to be smaller than the ALEXA Mini, which is larger than the FX6, definitely, but isn't ridiculously larger... Considering the age of the tech, it might just not be possible to get it small enough, get reasonable battery life, and also keep it cool. Your comments about ARRI upgrading their S35 line first also makes sense. Sadly!

According to google, the takumar is 228g and the Nikon 1 is 383g. Its tough to use older non-plastic stuff, especially things like Takumars that were built super solidly and from high-quality materials.

I'll assume you're talking to me.. I haven't started yet either, as you say we're waiting for the rules. I do have a few ideas though. I'll give you a some hints.... 285g, 193g and 83g. One of them even includes a rig and external monitor.

Maybe you just setup the camera and it monitors the scene, shooting for the edit.....

I thought they'd stagnated a few models ago when the Karma was recalled. But their EIS seems to have prolonged their attraction a few models more. I'm not really sure where they would go now with the normal Hero line. "Here's another camera the same size and shape and basic features as the last one. Please drop another $500. Thanks...." Umm, no... That would be awesome, assuming it was small enough to use in the way we currently use hybrids. A box with Prores and even an original ALEV sensor would be a spectacular upgrade to basically anything currently available now. The sensor might be a bit power hungry though..

Who knows. The section of the market we're referring to is basically crash/vehicle/drone cameras and the smallest and cheaper ones contains: random offerings of BM from the early 2010s the first Zcam a lens manufacturer - Sigma FP a camera company founded so surfers could take selfies - GoPro And cameras with a slightly larger form factor and price tag also include: the more recent Zcam offerings and, more recently, RED The fact that these cameras are all so radically different, and yet have all been used in feature films for almost the same purpose, shows that the segment isn't well catered for at all. In perhaps the only context this would ever happen in, I think the possibilities in the space of tiny cinema-quality cameras are offerings from GoPro, BM, and ARRI. GoPro recently teased that they'll be making "specialised cameras" - whatever the absolute hell that means. ARRI might follow RED and make a tiny camera at the bottom of their range. BMs smallest current camera is now the P4K, which is, in almost any context, huge, so if they wanted anything smaller than that, then they'd be a good candidate. Of course, most BM folks like to rig up their cameras to either make them easier and more practical to use, to look "more pro bruh", or both, so how knows - maybe they won't bother with small.

No no no... the OTHER French New Wave 😉

When are you uploading your vlog? 🙂

I'm sorry that you're not able to get what I'm saying, it's not through lack of trying.

I don't really know what the capability of Resolve is from the perspective of a professional editor. At one point I looked around for editors using Resolve and there basically weren't any, as its reputation was as a colour package and industry changes slowly. I suspect that there are more features available than you might think, but maybe now as many as you would want. If you haven't looked already, the manual is huge and very well written. Sven from ThatGuyEdits seemed to make a lot of very slight J cuts where he cut the audio right at the start of a word and then cut to the shot of the person speaking a few frames later, which I was surprised to see softened the cut so much that it seemed to go from being quite percussive to almost invisible, maybe the brain was mostly too busy with the start of an audio something to notice the visual changing. Very interesting effect though.

You asked why not have extremely high resolutions - the costs include things like memory and storage and processing. Everything has a cost, even opportunity cost. The cost of resolution which isn't needed for most images is the cool stuff we could have had instead.

I think it's very difficult to understand how different people with different points of view can interpret something so differently. In my corporate work I am often writing documents and then having them reviewed by various executives before they are eventually approved. I'm constantly amazed at how someone will mis-interpret something I've written, and when they explain why they interpreted it like that from their point-of-view, it becomes obvious that they would have mis-interpreted it like that once you understand their perspective. Humans are constantly evolving how we communicate depending on who is present. If we're talking to two people at a party and a third person joins the discussion, everyone changes how they communicate, even just slightly. This is why when your friends meet each other and you see them interacting, you might be surprised at how they act towards each other because they never showed that side of themselves to you. I think, to a certain extent, everything is contextual, and so everything runs the risk of being mis-interpreted by someone who has a different background to you. Tastes evolving over time is a good thing I think. When people get older and they don't evolve, I think that's a warning sign that they're not learning or changing or adapting. I subscribe to so many people on YT now, and I kind of treat my subscription feed as a partly-filtered feed, and add videos to my Watch Later list, which I then watch videos from. I unsubscribe from channels when they start to annoy me or I haven't watched one of their videos for a long time. I'm often going to the main page and going through the recommended page and adding those to my Watch Later list, and then subscribing to people who seem good. Some new ones last and some don't, depending on how much they annoy me or are good. I realise that there are channels that I've watched now for years and years. One channel, for example, I started watching when they had their shipping containers delivered to their block of land. They're now living in the mostly-built house and have two kids. There are lots of other channels that are like that too. One channel about restoring old tools now makes whole videos restoring a tool, using a range of tools in their shop, where I have seen them restore every one of the tools they now use. I say that I unsubscribes from people that annoy me because that's often what happens. I'm kind of watching people's normal lives, so as long as they don't annoy me with poor video editing or annoying personalities or being too fake and polished all the time etc, then they're real and I've gotten the enjoyment from it being real. That's completely different to a TV show that will be tremendously more exciting and fast-paced and well put together, but of course that's completely fake, so it has other merits. Other content on YT can be hilariously funny, but in a very niche way, or in a very limited style. One of my favourite YouTubers is a machinist called This Old Tony. He makes machining videos and no-one really knows what he looks like as his videos only show his hands, but his videos are spectacularly funny and brilliantly written / edited etc. My wife gets annoyed with me when I watch him while sitting next to her on the couch because on some videos I'm basically laughing for the whole 20+ minute video. Anyone that can regularly incorporate time travel jokes, paradoxes, insults, etc into their videos deserves all the subscribers they can get IMHO.

I'm not really connected to older folks who behave badly on social media, but I do remember that my grandma, who was a sweet old lady well into her 70/80s at this point, would occasionally decide to add to the fun and enjoyment of a family gathering by telling an amazingly racist joke. Sometimes in the middle of a busy cafe in the middle of Sunday brunch that we were having for someones birthday or something. She'd finish the joke, there would be stunned silence, and someone would change the subject and we'd all move on, with her being at a loss as to why no-one laughed. I realise that's different to what we're mostly talking about here, which is being knowingly awful to people online, but I remember in one particularly cringeworthy event she told a racist joke about one nationality and the table next to us was full of people from that same nationality, and I remember hoping they hadn't overheard. I guess there's cluelessness, and then maliciousness. People online probably have a mixture of both, sadly. My theory is that this prolonged underhanded behaviour relies on it triggering an emotional response in the recipient for it to work. In situations where that doesn't occur, the recipient basically ignores the behaviour until such a time as it becomes preferable to deal with it, in which case the response is calm and firm. In such cases I think that it tends to work because the underhanded people realise that it's not working. It sounds like that might be the case for you as well. Certainly the YouTubers and public personalities I've heard talk about it say they had to work through a time when it affected them, but came out the other side stronger and with strategies for managing it. I'm not saying that the bad behaviour is excusable, but I think it's a factor of life and the best strategy is to somehow become ok with it, however it is that you can achieve that. I'd imagine that the more famous / rich / respected you get the more people will come after you and the harder they'll do so, which just means that if you're growing your career or profile that it's a constant challenge and potentially requires more and more effort or energy to go into that. Perhaps the culmination of that curve is that presidents require security to prevent being assassinated, billionaires and celebrities require bodyguards, security systems, and live in gated communities (at least in most countries in the world) etc.

Editing might be, perhaps, one of the only things in film-making where you can't buy results. Writing might be another one. With editing, if you have equipment good enough to edit, then the only difference between a blah edit and a spectacular edit is the skill of the editor. In terms of classic movies, while editing on film was obviously not as easy as an NLE, they had most of the tools at their disposal. Even if you're just limited to making a simple cut, most edits would not be diminished by this restriction. The ability to dissolve, either fading to black or white or cross dissolving, gives more expressive freedom, but it's not a hugely common technique. ie, it's used very very rarely compared to the straight cut. The addition of the NLE feature to gradually crop a shot can allow the fine-tuning of match-cuts, which I notice in older film films are sometimes not quite aligned and so it diminishes the effect. However, the match cut is even rarer still, making the availability to match framing almost, but not quite, irrelevant. When I was choosing which NLE to go with, FCPX, PP, or Resolve, I realised I needed very powerful colour grading functionality, including stabilisation, but only very basic editing functionality. I find this to be true now, even more than then. I haven't used anything except a straight cut or the odd dissolve in any serious way in any of the dozens of videos I've edited. Resolves ability to do fancy things is going up and up, and my desire to use anything fancy at all is going down and down and down.

Your points are all true, but what I'm getting at is that the balance is off. If I got a family car and made it sportier it would be good and appeal to a wider audience. If I made it faster still it would appeal to a narrower audience and most people would want other improvements rather than speed, for example perhaps safety or comfort. Making it faster and faster and faster leave behind most people because they'll never need the speed but would really prefer to pay for extra safety and comfort and a better stereo instead of paying for speed they won't use. Cameras are like that now. The only people where 8K is actually better than 6K in any meaningful way (when actually looking at the end result) is people doing VFX of some kind (crazy stabilisation, severe cropping, VFX) but they're specialists. So 8K is really a feature for specialists that is implemented in every camera. So we all have to pay for this feature that we won't really benefit from. But it's worse because all the energy being put into that feature is investment that could have been put into the other things that would have been of more use to a wider audience. Take the OG BMPCC for example. It was 1080p RAW internal, but had terrible battery life. You'd think that in a decade they'd have a camera that would take care of the battery life, because that was one of the cameras leading issues. Not so, the R5C can record 8K RAW, but not on battery. They've under-improved one feature and over-improved another. It's like Canon announcing "Last year we announced our 25K flagship camera which required external power to record, and that wasn't the ideal camera for everyone, so we're proud to announce that our new camera is 50K and still requires external power to record!" and people are sitting back and thinking "WTF - you worked on the wrong thing!". Similarly, think about the reaction when Panasonic keep releasing camera after camera with more and more resolution, larger sensors, but the AF is still the Achilles heel of the whole thing - "WTF - you worked on the wrong thing!". That's what I'm doing now. I'm sitting here looking at my OG BMPCC, my BMMCC, my GH5, my GX85, and thinking that all those cameras had weaknesses that would be great if they were fixed, but the current crop of cameras has been improved in ways I didn't want (and very few people actually benefit from) and most of the current cameras still have the same issues as before. They're working on the wrong things, diverting money from the right things. Hahaha. I love the old "I found one example in the entire history of mankind - therefore your argument has no merit at all so go home and let the rest of us forget you ever existed" logic 🙂 There's an interesting error of logic that people seem to be making around colour science. I keep saying that I wanted better colour science, and people keep saying that now 10-bit and RAW is more affordable so there I have it, but this is missing the point. Colour grading RAW is very difficult and manufacturers are much better at doing it than we are (otherwise, why are people so enamoured with Canon colour, if anyone can do it?) so actually, the lower the cost of the camera, the better I want the colour science because the worse the owner will be at colour grading and the less money they can devote to it. I think you're hitting the nail on the head here, The Aesthetic is about getting the right look. It's a "right amount" mindset rather than a "more is always better" mindset. If you concentrate on the right amount, then you're interested in getting the right amount of resolution from the sensor, the right amount of resolution and sharpness from the lens, the right amount of distortions, etc. The challenge is that, for everyone except specialist VFX applications, the right amount of camera resolution has already been gained and now they're just piling on more and more, but we haven't gotten the right amount of other things, like functionality or reliability. The R5 was a classic.. it can record way more pixels than you need, for way less time that you needed. It doesn't average out! The trip to film and back is a perfect example of an artistic treatment rather than a 'fidelity' treatment. Essentially it degraded the process in every way possible, when viewed from a technical perspective. Lower sharpness, lower resolution, altered colours, and cost both time and money. Worse technically, but better aesthetically. If I make two versions of a camera, one with a lower resolution sensor and one with a higher resolution sensor, the higher resolution sensor one will: drain the battery faster, or require a larger heavier more expensive battery (camera has to process more pixels) fill the memory card faster, or require a larger more expensive card have worse low-light and noise performance have worse colour (think about how colour goes to shit in low light) cost more to manufacture require a faster computer to edit, or require time to render proxies To a certain extent these costs are hidden, because technology is getting cheaper, so the cost of getting a memory card that can record an hour of footage doesn't go up from year to year. However, if I already own a large enough SD card for a given resolution, and they don't increase the resolution of the camera, the cost of an SD card for that camera drops to zero because what I own now is fine and I don't have to buy anything. This is a point that most people don't realise. I've seen it. Great film, really really enjoyed it. For anyone in this thread using this as an example of higher resolutions being useful, absolutely. Anyone shooting a VFX film with a budget more than $100,000,000 - please understand that I'm not talking to you! 🙂 LUT support in camera would be great. Guess why they don't include it in lots of cameras? It takes processing power. ............processing power that would be spare if the camera wasn't processing so many pixels!! This desire for "authenticity" through the smartphone look has been around for years but is interesting that it has permeated this far. I remember reading about it years ago when I wasn't even into video yet. IIRC people don't trust the more polished, longer focal length, shallower DoF image because they became so associated with big corporates (the only ones who could afford that look) making highly polished videos that lied about crimes against humanity and the oppression of the poor and working classes etc (you know - business as usual). Yet, the vloggers still seem to want shallow DoF, and go to extraordinary lengths to get it, so who knows if that aesthetic will somehow gradually be redeemed due to the huge volume of honest authentic people vlogging with a shallow DoF out there. Conversely, I wonder if we're in for a spate of heavily misleading content with the smartphone look somehow tarnishing the 'authenticity' that this look currently enjoys. If you get enough people spouting anti-social crap through it then that would do it, but of course that would require the people watching to realise that the content is anti-social, rather than radical free speech. Seems we're losing the ability to tell fact from lunatic in the current climate! Still, it's a genuine thing since the authenticity came from the content of that 'look' being more honest than the previous 'look'.

I don't have any information about what happened in this instance, but a very common behavioural pattern is where "bad faith actors" pursue a continued campaign of behaviour that gradually builds up pressure on someone and then that person explodes. The tricky part is that the campaign that pushed that person to explode will likely be a combination of: things done in public that are only very slightly over the line of acceptable behaviour and aren't "worthy" of making a serious complaint about because each on in isolation looks harmless things done in private that are definitely over the line but for various reasons are either inappropriate to share or where sharing them would come at a significant cost Perhaps a third factor in play here is directing (or not discouraging) other people from attacking the person as well. Kind of like being bullied by someones entire friendship group rather than that person on their own. So these things gradually build up over time, and the cumulative effects get under the skin of the target, and then they explode, and from the outside it looks completely inappropriate, like a huge over-reaction, and as it is a very emotional moment will probably not be expressed rationally or calmly. This explosion is the goal of the people doing the targeting and provides the perfect excuse for them to hold up their hands and say both "wow - where did that come from - I had nothing to do with that" and also "see - that person is crazy - you don't know how they've been treating me in private - this explains those times you saw me being mean to them". I've seen lots of people seriously damage their careers because of workplace bullying that plays out like this. It's very common. I get the impression that anyone with any public following has to learn to deal with this. YouTubers routinely talk about how they got big and then the hate started and that it took them a while to learn how to deal with it.

Thanks - excellent links and I'll definitely review them. I'm familiar with Walter Murch and have his book but didn't spot that playlist, which looks excellent. I've watched a number of his talks, but they seem to be around the same time and have the same content. Yes, definitely a great channel, and his series when editing the feature where he showed actual editing was great. It's hugely useful to watch someone actually doing the work, so you can see the effects and see what they're seeing, rather than just talking about stuff. The challenge I have is that my work isn't narrative, but travel, and Sven is very focused on that, which is very useful to others. I totally agree - it's very intangible. Both Walter Murch and Sven (ThisGuyEdits) describe the process as being very visceral - literally based on the feeling of your gut (viscera). Another thing I do is grab screenshots while I'm watching things on Netflix / Prime / etc as references for colour grading. I'm always trying to find a moment when the actor stops moving so I don't have motion blur in the frame. The reason I bring this up is that almost without fail, they cut just before that happens. I mean, I regularly stop the video on the first frame of the next shot, and can do that reliably even when I haven't seen the footage before. I don't really know what that means in editing terms, or even acting terms. Walter Murch mentioned a technique where he would be working on a cut and would skip back 5-10s, watch the sequence, and hit pause when he thought the cut should be - doing it by feel. He would take note of the frame number, then skip back and do it again. He would repeat this process until he was hitting the same exact frame reliably, and then he'd know that this frame was the right frame to make the cut. IIRC he said something like until he's able to hit the same frame reliably he hasn't understood the timing of the material yet, so the process is really an exploration and learning experience, with the reliability indicating that the learning has completed. The titular premise of Walters book "In The Blink of an Eye" is that we blink when we've finished a thought, and so you typically want to cut when the thought is finished, which is just before the blink. It could be that people tend to move while thought is occurring, and then pause when one thought ends and the next begins. This is probably linked to speech in some way, but I'm not sure how. Anyway, pulling apart the material like this is a great way to really study it in detail.

Where?

Good to know, and makes sense that they were super hot. The drying process probably only really kicks in once they're near boiling point, so it probably holds them there for a while as the moisture evaporates from the silica. Beyond that, seems like a good approach and should be relatively easy considering it's just a product and you're just following their instructions.

Such a good song and video clip. The time backwards and forwards reminds me of this:

Well, I'd say more like 5/10, but yeah. Even then, it pays to understand your needs. For some, AF-S might suffice, where you're filming yourself, using the remote, doing short clips, and not moving much. Film-making really is a pursuit of perfection (of the aesthetic, not the technical) while being surrounded by compromises in every way at literally every turn. So many things are inter-related and make decisions hard due to the complexities and far-reaching consequences. When I was buying my GH5 for run-n-gun travel, I was also considering an A73. On the surface the difference was AF capability, where obviously the Sony was great and the GH5 very not great, but the deeper ramifications revealed themselves the more I thought about it. I would have paired the A73 with the 16-35/4 and used the crop and zoom functions to extend it a little, giving me a one-lens AF solution with great low-light, but would have been limited to 8-bit codecs. The GH5 would require primes to get the DoF and low-light I was chasing, but had the 10-bit ALL-I codec options. In the end, it boils down to a completely different style of shooting - manual focus primes and lots of flexibility in post vs AF zoom with less. Almost a videographer vs cinematographer style choice. Yet, both were leading, well-liked, mirrorless cameras at the time, and were compared often on quite superficial terms, without really considering what it would do to the workflow of the user.

+1 If you take your time and buy well you can even make money on some things. It depends on where the product is in it's lifetime though, a 1-year old camera will go down in value over the next year, but a 40-year-old lens might stay the same or even go up.