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This page at Adobe says "You can still edit JPEG and TIFF images in Camera Raw, but you will be editing pixels that were already processed by the camera. Camera raw files always contain the original, unprocessed pixels from the camera." That's why I suggest it might be an option. IIRC TIFF can also be uncompressed and can contain high bit depths so it seems a good container to keep the benefits of RAW files but get the pixels into a container that works with ACR. It would still have to be de-bayered in Resolve of course, but I doubt that the aesthetic difference that the OP is seeing is some revolutionary approach to de-bayering. Of course, maybe it is and this approach may not work, but if it didn't then Resolve would be out, and it's a convenient tool considering the OP already has it.

(I would imagine that shooting in 240p would make sensor sizes very difficult to discern, so it makes me wonder if increased resolutions have the opposite effect. Once again, trying to gather peoples impressions and see if we can learn anything about what might be causing these impressions for people)

What I was asking was if higher resolutions made sensor size more 'noticeable'. ie, back in the day, we had S16, MFT, S35, and FF cameras that all shot a maximum of 1080p. At this time there would have been people shooting video on all of these and so there would have been a certain aesthetic impression of what sensor size contributed. Now, we have MFT, S35, FF, and MF cameras that are shooting 4K or above. I'm wondering if there is now more of an aesthetic difference between these sensor sizes. ie, "When we shot 1080p it wasn't that noticeable, but now with 4K I can tell a FF sensor from a mile-away!" or the opposite. The reason I ask is that you said that your impressions of MF/FF vs smaller was only about stills images. Stills are likely to be higher resolution than video, so I was wondering if it was the resolution bump from the stills that made format differences visible to you.

I bought a pair of manfrotto xume adapters to add a fixed ND and found them to be super convenient, so definitely a useful purchase for working quickly. One thing that comes to mind is I don't know how well they would work with a vND as if you try to rotate the filter it might slide on the magnetic interface rather than actually change the vND strength, same with any other filters that are adjustable like this. You don't seem to be using any but just thought it was worth a mention. The other thing is that you have to mount the magnetic rings onto the filters themselves (two of them if you want to be able to add/remove each filter independently) so be aware that it will make your filters thicker and that might cause challenges for whatever you're storing the filters in when they're not on the lens. The level of work to integrate two complete separate BIOS's would be staggering. Assuming that this move from them is indicative of a future direction where hybrid cameras aren't in a parallel universe from their cine cameras, it would make sense for them to start again and build a new one from the ground up. They might have been doing this in the background for years. Certainly, other corporates I've been in often have a little 'pie-in-the-sky' project for concept development, that then moves into feasibility and high-level scoping after a few years, then into a preliminary design phase, before having its tyres kicked by the bean-counters and potentially green-lit for development into an actual prototype etc. My impression on some of their previous limitations (eg, why Canon 1080p was really just soft 720p) was that it was related to legacy hardware, and even legacy hardware architecture. If they were sufficiently pushed into a corner by the market to do something about it then I'd suggest that developing a unified hardware architecture and a unified BIOS architecture would make sense. They could structure it to be configurable so that the BIOS could be configured for the presence/absence of various interfaces, processing chips, etc. It could also be configured to easily cripple-hammer too, so they could arbitrarily disable various functions in software on a particular model even if the hardware would support it. It could even enable paid upgrades to unlock features. Time will tell I guess.

@ChrisInColour @Andrew Reid of course - that makes sense. Bummer. Could you use another format from Resolve that Adobe could import? TIFF perhaps?

I'm not really familiar with the difference between motion tracking and capture (am now - I just looked it up!) but obviously I'm at the edge of my knowledge 🙂 One thing that stands out about the difference would be that the accuracy of motion tracking the camera/lens/focus ring would have to be spectacularly higher than for motion capture of an object in the frame. Unless the sensors for these things were placed very close to the camera, which would limit movement considerably. I guess we'll see though - @BTM_Pix usually delivers so I wouldn't be surprised to see a working prototype in a few days, and footage a few days after that!

Happy for them to have all the opinions in the world about aesthetics. It's questionable if you'd want a YT channel to have opinions about the usability of something like a cinema camera, when all they understand is making YT. Opinions are absolutely NOT welcome when it comes to the engineering. Sadly this puts them in the land of "alternative FACTS" which I like to just call "lies". Sadly, there's a lot of the middle one from camera YouTubers, and a smattering of the latter, mostly concentrated to a minority. Fair enough that you were talking about stills. Do you find that with the higher resolution cameras (BMPCC 6K, R5 8K, etc) that sensor size makes more of a difference than it did in 1080p? If so, it could be a resolution thing? I've subscribed to his channel for years, but don't watch many videos. IIRC It's the channel for a retail store and has relatively similar style to CVP - ie, based on specs and practicalities and designed to assist people in understanding equipment prior to purchase or rental. Yeah, like I said - lots of variables change and so there's no comparison that's even remotely straight-forwards.

I disagree about them being camera related. The whole idea of a vND is that they act as a colour-neutral filter to simply let through a proportion of light. Any NEUTRAL density filter will attenuate all frequencies of light in equal proportion. We know they're not perfect and this results in colour shifts, however, all cameras 'see' in the same basic RGB colours. There can be very slight differences between which frequencies of light different manufacturers sensors are sensitive to, however these will be very very small differences and if a filter is so crazily built that it's very different for one camera than another then you'd want to avoid it at basically all costs as its colour response would be spectacularly non-neutral. Here's the plot comparing a range of digital cameras - not much difference: Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342113086_Introducing_the_Dark_Sky_Unit_for_multi-spectral_measurement_of_the_night_sky_quality_with_commercial_digital_cameras

Any chance of sharing the test, and original files? I'd be VERY keen to play with them and see how they compare!

For those people there are only two kinds of delays: ones that take less than the 0.2s that their ADHD will tolerate, and larger ones that mandate Instagram usage. My experience of living with ADHD teenagers is that normal life provides 100+ moments when social media can be utilised, therefore the delay in mode switching is basically invisible! Thinking more about their choice to make it a Dual-Boot OS reveals something very interesting. By going dual-boot they're essentially showing that it's easier to take an existing Cinema BIOS and port it to the R5C hardware than to integrate new features into the stills BIOS. This implies that: the hardware in the R5C must be relatively similar to a cinema camera, otherwise it would have been too difficult to port and they would have gone the other way (like they normally do) the divide between the stills and cinema divisions must be far less now, as the development would have required someone from the cinema department work with the stills department to develop the hardware and get the software to work Obviously it's not clear what the politics are, but it means a cultural change within the company to either let it happen (if you're the cinema department) or to order it to happen (if you're in charge and can make people do things they don't want to do).

The big drive for resolution in Hollywood comes from the VFX teams, who require the resolution for getting clean keys but also for tracking purposes. I've heard VFX guys talk about sub-pixel accuracy being required for good trackers as by the time you use that information to composite in 3D elements, which could be quite far into the background, the errors can add up. Obviously each technical discipline wants to do its job as well as it can, and people do over-engineer things to get margins of safety, but I got the impression that sub-pixel level accuracy was in the realm of what was required for things to look natural. The human visual system and spatial capability is highly refined and not to be underestimated, but of course this will be context-dependent. If you were doing a background replacement on a hand-held shot of a closeup that involved mountains that were relatively in-focus then a tiny amount of rotation will cause a large offset in the background and it would be quite visible. Altering the background of a shot that has moderately shallow DoF and only involves the camera moving on a slider would be a far less critical task.

I've watched a number of tests comparing vNDs over the years and agree - the quality is limited regardless of budget. Also, cost isn't a predictor of performance either, with some mid-priced options out-performing higher priced options, often quite considerably.

I'm not questioning if there is a look, I'm trying to work out what technical aspect might be causing it. Anything you can understand you can work with, and potentially accentuate or minimise for creative effect. One of the main challenges with trying to compare sensor sizes is that you can't change single variables - every change effects so many variables simultaneously that it's almost impossible to do any kind of aesthetic tests. What I mean is that you can get two cameras with different sensor sizes and two lenses and set them up to have an identical FOV and POV. If you organise your test well you can also perfectly match one or two other variables at the same time, but you'll have probably 5+ other variables all different. I think that's why there are a lot of very well done technical comparisons that only focus on one or two variables (for example Steve Yedlins excellent comparison of Lens Blur on different formats) but only very subjective comparisons of the overall 'look' between formats. I've read a lot of these accounts of subjective comparisons and tried to discern what technical aspects might be behind them, and I'm yet to actually find anything in-particular that is fundamentally different, but there are still many factors I haven't ruled out, and I've definitely learned a lot of stuff along the way. One thing that I thought was especially interesting was the effect that background defocus had on 3D 'pop'. In my lens tests I have consistently found that even a small difference in background defocus (ie, shallower DoF) had a large impact on depth. One test I did involved comparing lenses all at the same aperture and looking with one eye through a roll of cardboard so that I couldn't see the edges of the image, and comparing how much depth I perceived from the image. The interesting thing was that there was a surprisingly strong perceived difference in my test between a 55mm lens and a 58mm lens at the same aperture. Obviously the 58mm lens had slightly shallower DoF, but it was so slight that I had to actually measure the bokeh balls in the background to confirm it was different, but subjectively it made a much bigger difference than you'd imagine. My current thoughts on it is that it's likely to be a combination of a range of factors that accumulate to form the aesthetic impression. Of course, I still have much more to learn about it so this isn't a conclusion but rather more of a working theory. I do find that it's actually been a very good question to ponder, as it has lead me down quite a number of paths of enquiry that have taught me a lot about the technical aspects of a digital imaging system as well as the aesthetic implications of various technical aspects of such. Like all things, the value is in the questioning... Interesting about the Panasonic vs Sony EOSHD Pro Colour sales, but not entirely surprising. Sony used to have terrible colour! My impression of Panasonic colour is that it was ok with the GH5 but has gotten nicer with subsequent releases. If the GH6 has Panasonic S1H level colours then that would be a huge draw-card for me in upgrading I think. There's a rumour that something will happen in their live-stream this week, so I guess we'll see about that 🙂 I quite like Kai but with a few caveats. Firstly, he doesn't make the mistake of stepping out of his expertise (or doesn't do it like others anyway). He doesn't pretend to know the tech, doesn't try and explain it, and doesn't pretend that his testing is anything other than waving a camera around in a relatively hap-hazard way. I've delved into the world of professional DPs and seen their camera tests (which are very difficult to find BTW as they're normally on Vimeo with cryptic titles) which typically only test one variable at a time and aren't meant in any way to be a review, just exploration of the tech. There is also a world of semi-professional DPs who do commercial work but also do YT and non-DP revenue streams (like Tom Antos, Matteo Bertoli, Humcrush Productions, etc) but even these guys often have elements of their testing processes that aren't controlled for. Of course they're not normally claiming that a test is pristine and not claiming to know the tech or try and explain it, but sometimes I'll watch a test and think "I wish they'd manually WB the cameras beforehand rather than just set the colour temperature" or similar things like that. This leaves the poor YouTubers with basically no hope. They don't actually shoot things professionally like the "hybrid" DPs so they can't talk about the concerns or working methods of real sets, and they also don't have the discipline that sets often involve like a DP requesting a particular T-stop and lighting ratio and doing things by the numbers. They also don't have the technical discipline to review things because they are in the business of producing, hosting, filming, editing, and selling advertising on a show, rather than in the tech itself. Some of these people understand that and keep within the lines, and others just don't, and make fools out of themselves in the process. Of course, the sad thing is how many people don't know enough to know the difference, which is why these people can have lots of followers and yet fumble most of their content. What are your thoughts on the OG BMPCC and BMMCC in this regard? I thought they were well known for their magic / mojo. If so, they are an interesting example because they're doing it despite their sensor size rather than because of it. They do raise an interesting element though, which @Andrew Reid touched on earlier when talking about how much of the lens image circle falls onto the sensor. Despite the BMPCC / BMMCC having smaller sensors they are often used with c-mount lenses that were designed for this sensor size, or potentially even smaller, and thus they are looking at almost all of the image circle from many lenses they are used with. I must admit that I find them less magical when used with glass designed for larger sensors like MFT or FF.

I'm guessing that if you have the studio version of Resolve you could do it? I'd imagine that the files from the R5/R3 will be readable in Resolve and it can definitely export CinemaDNG files. You'll need the paid (Studio) version though as the free version has a resolution cap on it (4K perhaps?) and I'd assume you're dealing with larger resolutions from those cameras.

Why am I now having visions of a BMPCC6KPro with a 15mm F8.0 Body Cap Lens 🙂 🙂 The other combination, well, I'll leave some mystery to that one until I do it.

I tried the 3x bitrate on my 700D and found it did very little to improve the standard compressed file, as both were low resolution (700D had ~1.7K) and were still over sharpened. YMMV of course and the EOS-M is a different camera too. This is a great feature as 2.8K is a sweet spot in resolution I think. It's hard to make a true 1920 sensor look sharp because it's not 1920 4:4:4 so the debayering adds a blur, but 2.5-2.8K adds just the right amount of oversampling without having 6K or 8K ridiculous-o-vision and the file sizes to match.

OMFG! Famous for good reason!! I've been trying to work out what might cause different sensor sizes to have a different look and one aspect that I haven't ruled out was to do with the percentage of the sensor that was able to absorb light (ie, not the area between the pixels). This plays into how the threshold between in-focus and out-of-focus would be rendered - the "roll-off". Now that manufacturers have managed to make the gaps between the pixels smaller, have you noticed if this changes the look of the format? An upgrade at last! In the case of the GH5 (which I own and appreciate) it should be noted that it has quite average colour science. Compared to the superior colour science of the OG BMPCC or BMMCC the GH5 pales, and so do the images, to me at least, despite these having smaller sensors than the GH5. The problem with assessing the aesthetics of such things its very difficult to create a direct comparison where everything else is equal. A slight difference in brightness or contrast or saturation or WB or DoF can overrule some of these more subtle aspects like what we're talking about here. I would suggest that almost all camera reviewers understand less than half of what is going on inside the camera. Most less than a third and probably the majority approaching 10%. Chris and Jordan are particularly bad because it's obvious that along with the tech, they also don't understand how people significantly different to them use cameras either, which are probably responsible for the majority of images created.

Ah yes, I had forgotten you'd shared info early on the first page. I guess I got distracted by the subsequent posts where it seemed nothing had been established except an increasing urgency!

@stefanocps I've never used a modern GoPro, or a modern point-and-shoot either. My experience with threads like this is that either someone who has personal experience sees the thread and joins and gives useful advice, or they don't and they go no-where. People like me and @webrunner5 keep the thread alive by replying, giving you general advice to google and checking your logic, thus making it more likely someone with specific experience will see it and reply. Lots of threads on forums get zero replies and sink like a stone, especially on larger forums where something scrolls off the front page in a matter of hours. Considering no-one else has replied, I'd say you're on your own!

I went down the ML RAW path for a bit with my 700D. The files were fine but it was unreliable and a bit finicky in some ways. The 700D build was (at the time, not sure now) one of the most developed, but the RAW was still experimental at that time and I was using the 10-bit compressed variant, so multiple experimental features within an experimental build. @mercer says that the 5D build is rock solid and he never has any issues with his, which I think he shoots with on a weekly basis (or more). YouTuber Zeek has a channel which features a heap of EOS-M ML RAW material, so if you're looking for advice then his channel probably contains the stable builds and various tips for it.

I already shoot on my lightest gear, and the person who normally uses a cinema camera would end up being the winner anyway! Now, if it was a thread dedicated to selling equipment we don't actually use, then that might be a different story 🙂

The people in the comments section always know more than the people in the video, even if they don't lol. I was just going to post a reply saying "where has this been all my life??" but I realise I watched one recently that was hilarious.... they try sparkling water! In a rare moment where every star in existence aligned, I sent that to my daughter while we were out at breakfast with a few of her friends and she played it for the whole table on her phone and everyone watched and for 5 whole minutes no-ones ADHD interrupted. I wouldn't have believed it was possible if I didn't actually witness it!

I've re-read the last few pages of this thread and I'm pretty sure there's almost no actual communication happening, just people replying to something that they think the other person said (but often wasn't said and probably wasn't intended), forgetting what was said in previous posts, taking individual statements out of context, etc. I've also realised that this is the case with every thread about a new Canon camera, although it doesn't seem to be the case with cameras from almost any other brand. Something to reflect on. @Django @Emanuel @Video Hummus While I'm in a reflective mood I'll also say that I think that film-making is too complex a topic to discuss effectively, online at least, due to the sheer amount of interrelationships that happen (almost everything in film-making relates to almost everything else in some non-trivial way), and also due to the depth of technical knowledge required to understand what is going on. I've read entire exchanges on things like "can I downres 8-bit to get a 10-bit image" where every post contained a factual error. Concision is a real factor here too. Anyway, I hope that everyone is putting more effort into what they do with their equipment than they spend talking about it.

It's definitely the YT compression, but you just need to prepare for it before uploading. I've done a few tests before with various combinations of NR and adding noise etc and just uploaded the video in Private mode so you can see what the compression does to it. Uploading in 8K doesn't really change the lower resolutions - watch a 4K video in 360p and you'll see what I mean 🙂

ML RAW from a 5D3 has magic that I haven't seen from a Canon compressed file yet, but it's great for you that you're not seeing it because you can be happy with what they give you. Some others can see it and those comments are in this thread if you wanted to go back and see, so I was talking with them about it when you jumped in and questioned the discussion. The purpose of these threads is to discuss these cameras strengths and weaknesses right? That's what this is. It's great that you can't see what we're talking about. My advice is keep it that way - life would definitely be easier if I didn't! There isn't any worshipping going on, simply that there is a camera with a high standard of image and it makes sense to compare using this as a benchmark. If someone was a sprinter and said that they're great but they're no Usain Bolt then no-one would claim worshipping was going on. If a restaurant served a great meal you might say it was spectacular and certain elements reminded you of El Bulli no-one would claim worshipping was going on. Having cameras that are getting more and more expensive, have huge specifications and even greater expectations, and saying "they're great but over the last decade we haven't gotten closer to an Alexa" isn't Alexa worshipping either, it's just having a benchmark. It's not even like it's an irrelevant or inaccessible benchmark - most of the productions on Netflix or other streaming services are shot with ARRI gear and the Alexa range is probably the camera I see the most footage from and I enjoy seeing the most.