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Vintage lenses are really for films/cinema, rather than commercial videography work. It's a different product for different audiences who have different preferences, thus the use of different equipment and techniques.

Are you referring to the retirement of the BM Micro Cinema Camera? That got mentioned here. Were there other models that got discontinued too?

I suspect that low budget productions haven't been using vintage glass for long due to not having access to such high-spec cameras for long. Back in the 8mm 16mm SD digital days there wasn't enough resolution or bitrate to be able to tell the subtle difference between various lenses and to counter the softer renderings having as sharp a lens as you could get was a good strategy. At that time large productions were using 35mm which could render lens differences. Then came the HD days, but once again, the codecs on affordable cameras were pretty low until the OG BMPCC came along and we got access to RAW 1080p and 4K compressed, but most were still obsessed by sharpness and hadn't snapped out of their infatuation yet and come to their senses. Now we have RAW 4K or more and compressed 6K or more almost in our pockets and some are starting to snap out of resolution mania and remember we're trying to evoke emotions, not showcase our equipment.

The investment is encouraging, although I have heard that the last thing a company does before shuttering is do a massive advertising blast as a final effort. Let's hope it's a larger strategy and not one from desperation, although renaming the company doesn't seem to make sense in a short-term context, so here's hoping!

Source: https://ymcinema.com/2022/01/16/oscars-2022-the-lenses/ I'd say that this bunch are a little more out of our price range than the normal lenses we discuss, but Panavision lenses aren't for sale, so they're out of literally everyone's price range 🙂

"I would like to talk about the topic of this video, but I just have to do something else first" <half the video later> "I would like to talk about the topic of this video, but I just have to do something else first" 30s of real content at the end of the video... I saw a video where Italian people had xmas trees up for something like a month beforehand, so throwing them out on Boxing Day doesn't mean "two days".

Have there been many new MFT sensors developed? I have no idea. It'll be interesting to see what the GH6 specs include, as obviously sensor tech will limit them. I agree about the need for a fast wide zoom for MFT. There aren't even any 16-35/4 equivalents, let alone 16-35/2.8 equivalents.

@BenEricson to demonstrate things a little more, here's a test I did some time ago. Started with an 8K RAW file from a RED Helium, put it on a 4K timeline and downscaled/upscaled it to various resolutions to see how visible it was on 4K YT. Even pixel peeing won't reveal any meaningful differences much above 2K. So, when there's so little difference between sub-4K Prores HQ and 8K RAW on a 4K YT video, basically all the sharpness differences you'll be seeing will be lenses or processing.

You can't judge resolution or sharpness of a camera by watching YT. So much stuff has been done to the data coming off the sensor before you watch it that it's like judging if a restaurant uses high-quality organic ingredients by drinking the sludge at the bottom of their dumpster rubbish bins in the alley behind the restaurant. Colour science is a different matter, but once again, so much of it isn't the camera. Have you ever seen Alexa footage SOOC, or graded ARRI footage shot by amateurs? It is almost indistinguishable from any other footage. I think one third of the look of ARRI happens on set, and another third happens in colour grading, and only the remaining third happens in-camera. At best, this is like trying to taste the quality of the ingredients after they've been cooked. Which is also a decent parallel because the average mum/dad cooking with the finest ingredients on the planet is still likely to end up with a mediocre result, at best.

Just a small point, but if I take this sentence literally, then you're saying that somehow when light enters one of the photosites on their sensor that it's also somehow activating the photosites around it, which I think violates the laws of physics. Every other source of softness exists outside of the sensor, being the optical performance of the on-sensor filters, in the subsequent processing of the signal after the sensor, including debayering etc. For proper evaluation of the sensor, you'd have to evaluate RAW stills, taken with super-high resolution glass, stopped down, in black&white, and under ideal test conditions. The limit on resolution is far more likely than people expect to be the optics or processing / compression rather than the sensor. Besides, 2K is pretty close to the threshold of what can be seen at normal viewing distances, and while that's debated, 8K is easily outside that discussion.

That graveyard video looks fantastic... if it didn't have the clumsy gimbal movement it would look like clips from a feature film!

Also nice looking footage, although many less shots of neutral skin tones etc due to the lighting and editing. Looks pretty nice though. I think there's a huge issue with the perception of cameras, which is that almost any camera can look great these days, but in order to see lots of great footage on the internet, competent people need to film it and post it on the internet. Canon know this and that's why they market to vloggers - the people who film and post footage online for a living. Film-makers, on the other hand, don't really care about cameras that much and can use whatever camera they like, and often rent ARRI gear. When they do want to own something more affordable, they film footage but it only appears anonymously on streaming platforms, so you can't tell what camera it was shot on. So this means that YT only features affordable cameras and noteworthy cameras, thus why there are so many more DSLR / MILC cameras featured on YT than cinema cameras and camcorders. If YT was representative then it should be: almost half shot-on-film full of ARRI RED ranger as well as DSMC2 and is there a single YT video (except movie trailers) shot on Panavision? Watching YT to see what camera gear is good is like watching Tiktok and thinking that humanity is only 15-year old girls and 20-something rappers who mime, dance and rap all day.

Yeah, great colours on this one - DoP and colourist knew what they were doing. Skintones were really nice despite the pushed colours (which often makes skin tones go nuclear), the image was super clean, and even the off-WB lighting didn't do bad things like clipping channels or rotating hues when getting brighter and dimmer etc. Even the film emulation style natural light car stuff still had good colours and skin tones that matched apart from being less saturated.

ie, if I took a FF camera and all the available lenses, put them in a shrink machine, set it to 50%, and hit go, would I get an MFT system with the same optical characteristics? ie, same FOV, save DoF, etc? I'm not talking about the electrical side of things as that's an entirely different ballgame, just the optics and sensor size. In physics there are some things that scale linearly, but there are other things really don't, for example volume. If you put something in a 50% scaling machine it would be one-eighth the volume, and weight (assuming identical materials). Lens size and weight are smaller with MFT but not proportionately, in any way I've been able to identify anyway.

oops..

and another...

It's illegal to talk about Panasonic and mention anything other than their poor AF. This is your first and only official warning.

or both!

How much time do you spend 'walking and talking' while holding the camera up with one arm? If it's, well, any time at all then I'd rule out the C70.. it's enormous! and is heavy......

I've bought the super-cheap eBay variable NDs and they're generally ok up until a certain point and beyond that they have the dreaded X in them. I'd imagine that yours would be usable. Even the name brand expensive ones have colour shifts, so just WB through it whenever you adjust it and you'll probably be fine!

I hold the camera in the palm of the hand that is focusing, and in a pinch could take my other hand off the camera completely, so I can get relatively stable results. A third point of contact can be very useful and I'd suggest that if you're trying to stick with MF. The other thing to do is just to practice, which is what I did at the start of teaching myself. There are so many people shooting in non-narrative situations and ranging from sit-down interviews + b-roll all the way to tailing highly-active people in real-life situations like first responders and everything in-between. To me the equation of AF vs MF is how critical every shot is and how much time you need and have to get it. Every situation in different. Of course, people think about AF completely wrong. Everyone is talking about phase detect vs contrast detect, but it's missing the point completely. Contrast detect and phase detect both work fine when the camera knows what to focus on and how to adjust itself in slight increments to not screw up a shot, but both of them fail when they focus on the wrong thing or the wrong person. Face detect and eye detect and animal eye detect and flower detect and all that stuff is actually where the cutting edge of AF is and that's because that is the weakest link with AF, but no-one seems to be talking about it. I find it odd TBH. In terms of people getting sharp lenses and then using lots of haze, I find there's a few approaches, but the pros either use neutral lenses in order to optically-degrade the image in post (eg, Mindhunter) or they use a combination of lots of subtle elements to build the look, with lighting, haze, lenses, composition, set design, etc. Noam Kroll talks about people only using one thing and therefore over-using it: https://noamkroll.com/is-too-much-diffusion-in-cinematography-the-new-too-much-shallow-depth-of-field/ The other things he lists (other than diffusion) were all hallmarks of amateurs trying to get 'cinematic' images without knowing how to do it properly, so I'd say it's a mark of lack of knowledge using just one thing.

It really depends on what style you're shooting. If you're shooting for a more cinematic image then you can manually focus vintage or third-party lenses and the diffusion characteristics will offset the overly-sharpened codecs. Considering there is no perfect camera, the first thing I'd sacrifice is AF because the alternative is lenses that have reliable focusing (ie, me), are cheaper, and create a nicer image. I understand this isn't the case for videographers, as that's another whole thing with different goals, methods, economics, target audience and aesthetic. So many people are out there saying they're trying to get more cinematic images, and then they turn around and want lenses to be as sharp as possible wide-open and want AF, which almost completely contradicts the previous statement, as almost every theatre-bound production I've read about deliberately uses softer-rending vintage lenses despite having the budget for basically whatever lenses they'd care to use.

Apologies if I mis-understood your intended meaning... I thought you were saying that there was no point directing the site to three of the four audiences I listed and were then saying it would be dull to only address it to the single remaining one! 300dpi on a print that was 6ft by 6ft would be 466MP (assuming I did that math correctly). 100dpi would be 51MP. Those are a little larger than the stills resolution from smartphone cameras, but not so far away as to be ridiculous, so it would make sense to have a site 'standard' and to evaluate them not based on the number of pixels but on actual resolution (ie, lines-per-inch). I'm thinking specifically of landscapes here, but architecture etc would also require the same technical evaluations. The more I understand about the language of cinema the more I realise that the trend of smartphone camera tech isn't going in that same direction. This makes sense from a product perspective as well, as in almost all cases the people making cinema don't really get any advantage from using a smartphone rather than a camera with some other form-factor.

Makes sense. We have the Komodo now for that purpose, and the BMMCC before that. It would be interesting to see if ARRI made something for that niche, although I won't be holding my breath...