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You will struggle to get anything that looks 'great', so I would suggest a three-pronged approach: Content. If ever there was a time to make the grade support the content rather than be a spectacle in itself, this is it. One trick that often works is to go carefully shot by shot and ensure that the viewers attention is on the right thing / person, and that is often done by raising the luma of the area so it stands out. Typically this is large and very soft oval power-windows the way that you'd simulate a vignette, and is often a combination of inside-outside effects where the subject is pulled up a bit and the outside is pulled down a bit. If you do it softly enough then it should be imperceptible, but will put the focus on where it needs to be, distracting from the grade entirely. As there's no chance of making a 'great' grade, make one that is the least offensive. Do this by working out the weakness of the footage and then compensating for that. For example, in low DR 8-bit footage, often the mid-tones are stretched apart, so you could try lowering the overall contrast and essentially pulling the bits closer together. This will raise the shadows, and maybe this will give a nice vintage look, but maybe not, and maybe you'd be better off actually pulling the levels down a bit and compressing the blacks (and whatever compression nasties are there). You'd have to play with the footage to see where the issues are. It's worth experimenting with reducing saturation, which makes all footage look higher end, but may not be the aesthetic you're looking for. Degrade the footage to hide its sins. I've shot lots of very low quality footage over the years, including SD, bad codec stuff, and have had a lot of mileage from upscaling it, blurring it and adding grain. Upscaling it gives you more pixels to work with, and your timeline should absolutely be higher resolution than the original footage. Blurring at very small radius' is designed to soften the jagged compression artefacts. Blurring at slightly larger radius' will smooth gradients, and much larger blurs (essentially adding diffusion in post) will smooth over the image the same way as diffusion filters do. I'd suggest the smallest blur be at 100%, and the larger ones be semi-transparent over the image. Adding grain will disguise the fact you've blurred the footage, and will give an analog feel, which is far more preferable than having an early-digital feel. For this step I'd encourage you to grade at a standard viewing distance rather than close-up / pixel-peeping as the effects are easy to over-do. If you're going to upload it, do a version specifically that takes into account the compression that will be applied, and you'll have to add lots more grain (for example) and probably experiment with multiple uploads to fine-tune it. Here's an example of my previous attempts at making the best of low quality footage. Final: Original: Best of luck - editing old footage can be fun and a trip down memory lane. Enjoy the process!

I disagree. I'm a dad who makes travel videos of my family while we're on holiday and shoots my kids sports games - I'm about as video as it gets! I've found that some aspects of what cinematographers do fits with how I shoot, and some really doesn't at all, like, AT ALL. However, I've never seen another YouTube reviewer who reviews "hybrid cameras" get it so wrong as they did on the XC10 review. I've since moved on from that camera, and I found that actually it didn't suit my needs at all, so I don't have rose-coloured glasses about it in the slightest. I know this because before I watched their review I had watched literally hundreds of camera reviews online from dozens and dozens of YouTubers (gotta have a hobby!), but when I watched their XC10 review a strange thing happened. They said some things that made me double-take. My reaction wasn't like "oh, that seems plausible but I don't care" and it wasn't "that doesn't apply to how I shoot" which is common in other reviews.. it was "they're describing exactly how I shoot, and they're reviewing the camera that I own, and they're saying that this feature won't work for me, and yet, I've used exactly that camera in that situation (or worse) and found it fine - WTF is going on with this review". It stood out as being so fundamentally wrong that at first I didn't know what to make of it. I re-watched it the next day to make sure I didn't mis-interpret them, or to look for signs that it got messed up in editing (which I would imagine can happen when you're churning out videos), but there were no signs of that. I began to think about it, trying to understand why they'd think such a strange thing, and then when I was reading an article about cinema cameras from a cinematography site I realised that they said what they said because they had a fundamental misunderstanding about cinematography and what shooting on a set is like. I realised they only understand film-making from the perspective of filming a YT video. Then I re-watched their review and everything fit, that they'd get most things right but the critical thing so wrong. Mostly YT and shooting a controlled production would be basically the same, but there are things about the equipment that differ, for example cine cameras not needing very good high-ISO performance because everything can be lit or catered for with crazy fast primes because the set revolves around the camera and not the other way around. If you only learned about making YT videos you would get most of what happens on set correct and only a few specific things wrong, but you would get them spectacularly diametrically wrong which they did. So I am actually very appreciative they made that video. I learned a lot from it. I learned that not everyone who makes videos knows about film-making (I was involved in film-making before I got into shooting video myself, so that wasn't something I anticipated). I learned that my shooting style was actually a mixture of how you'd shoot a narrative, how you'd shoot a doc, and how you'd shoot a guerrilla available light run-n-gun home video. .....and I learned that Chris and Jordan didn't know enough about film-making to be able to provide reliable advice to a guy who makes home videos. And no-one else involved in their entire corporate channel knew or cared! You know that you're in trouble when your cine camera review isn't informed enough for the home video dad! Anyone can say anything online, and popularity certainly doesn't indicate reliability of information, which is definitely the case here.

I would phrase it differently. I know a few people who do real research before making large purchases, and I think it's more like being able to read through the reviews to see the truth. In that sense, we practically cover everything in salt rather than just a small amount of seasoning... Basically, you want to know the strengths and weaknesses of the product. The approach seems to be: If a review is emotional, either good or bad, ignore them. They obviously either have an axe to grind, or are euphoric, in either case they're not solely focused on seeing the truth, so although they might believe what they say, they won't be seeing clearly. Look for known reference points. If someone has reviewed something you don't like positively, then that's a warning, or vice-versa. It might be an issue with their bias, or a lack of intelligence, lack of thoroughness, or simply a misalignment of what they value compared to what you value. Taste comes in here. I look for music reviewers who share common taste - if you don't like the taste of whiskey then it doesn't matter if it's the best whiskey in the world, you still won't like it. Look for meaningful criticisms. No product is perfect (you can't please all the people all the time), look for criticisms in a review, and only accept real ones, rather than token or BS ones. If a review is level-headed and detailed, maybe you can take the criticisms as true, otherwise, get more opinions. Look for patterns. If lots of reviewers, who all make it through the above criteria, say similar things about the products weaknesses then they're probably true. Smell out marketing. If you're looking for the benefits or strengths of something and you've seen a pattern of positive comments from level-headed people who also made criticisms, then look for specificity. If the pros of something are generic then it's more likely to be marketing talking-points, but if they're specific then that's more likely to be true. Also, look for how people say things, and if there are patterns in the phrasing, or if they seem natural. Even unconscious positive bias (be it to the brand, product, or just an agreeable personality) will be influenced by marketing, so a manufacturer can shape the way you think about something with their PR statements and framing, so that when you get the real product you 'see' it in those terms, regardless of how objective you actually want to be. It's a tricky thing. I think that's why people like Gerald Undone are so useful. He's level-headed, speaks in specific terms rather than marketing fluff, and mentions things that others don't. Does he have huge film-making pedigree? Probably not. But if he says that I can't film in 10-bit 4K at more than 30p then I am inclined to believe him. It's also why I unsubscribed to Chris and Jordan. After watching their savage review of the XC10, which was a flawed product to be sure, I realised something - they don't understand film-making. Sure, they mentioned the weaknesses of that camera, which I had verified with other sources and the specs, but they also ripped into aspects of the camera that weren't weaknesses at all. When I watched their review I was completely puzzled, because I was simultaneously watching videos on how people use cine cameras, which was saying the completely opposite to what they were saying and it was then that I realised that they might understand video, but not film-making. Reviewing a cine camera and criticising aspects that all cine cameras share is just silly. Unsub. Having said all that, the whole thing is fraught with peril as I have ended up on many occasions with products that were poorly reviewed and yet worked great for me for years of real use, and also with products that I did the research on and were terrible in ways that no-one mentioned at all. I think of a small part of my budget as R&D purely for writing off stuff that doesn't work out, or for buying things that seem ok but I can't be sure of. Sometimes things work out and other times they don't, but thinking about it like that makes me feel better about it. Certainty is an illusion after all.

According to wikipedia, that's 33 stops of DR. I realise that this spec probably doesn't directly relate to the DR the way that we would normally think of it, so we probably can't compare directly. How does that compare with other sensors? (assuming they measure the same thing?) Or does it directly compare? In which case, 33 stops of DR is A LOT more than an Alexa!!

I couldn't agree more about size and form-factor, and how smaller setups are more fun and, in a way, more spontaneous than larger more serious setups. This is why, despite owning a BMMCC, I bought an OG BMPCC (the P2K!). Paired with the 7.5/2 (giving a 22mm FOV) or 14/2.5 (giving a 40mm FOV) and the obligatory IR cut + vND + diffusion filter stack, it's a fun setup that still fits into the "tourist with camera - nothing to see here - move along" category. Combined with the (much larger) 12-35/2.8 lens gives you great OIS and a 35-100mm FOV. Both combinations give a handheld setup that rivals the best cinema cameras that amateurs who haven't inherited could buy, even up until a handful of years ago. Just for fun, here's a video from the OG BMPCC: and even a full cine-sized rig is getting smaller and smaller these days if you want to rig it up "properly": (courtesy of Tommy Do on FB)

Not sure if it's useful, but this video talks about getting hard shadows with a Nanlight Forza 500, which I think is the same type of light you're talking about?

I would imagine that mirrors could be quite useful, depending on the geometry of your set of course. The sharpness of a shadow is related to the ratio of cookie-to-surface distance with light-to-cookie-distance, if that makes sense. ie, if you have a light and a wall, putting the cookie closer to the wall gives a sharper shadow, and putting the cookie touching the wall would give an infinitely sharp shadow. Use of a mirror could mean using a light with a narrow beam to go the entire width of the set, hit the mirror / cookie (in either order) and then go into the FOV. This would mean that you drastically increase the distance from the light to the cookie, even if the space isn't big enough to let you back up. It does mean that the cookie would have to be bigger though. Having said all that, it's pretty messy and wouldn't work if the there was haze and the path of the light went near the FOV. It's also worth exploring how sharp you want the shadow to be. Your example shots weren't all super sharp.

As a GH5 owner, I've watched Panasonic gradually improve the colour bit-by-bit with every new camera they've released, and they've really taken it to a nice place now I must say. The GH5 still gives spectacular images, but I must say that with the colour science improvements of the newer models that the grass is getting greener. If I didn't have to spend thousands and/or buy all new glass then I'd be tempted. Of course, considering I haven't shot anything in the last 18 months due to covid, it'd be hard to justify upgrading from a camera which is ageing rather than wearing out. I bought the Voigtlander 42.5mm f0.95 and Laowa 7.5mm F2 lenses in 2019 and haven't used them on a trip yet!

No surprises here, but I'd say it's the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera. A modular cinema camera under $1000 brand new, uncompressed Cinema DNG RAW at 60p, and a beautiful image. The image doesn't look like that second generation iPhone or camcorder that Canon love to imitate when clipped either.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMb6CR781Kc With Resolve it superscales to 4K beautifully too. You don't actually want 4K, you just got trained by the camera brands that 1080 is bad because they compress the absolute living crap out of their images - no-one is rejecting the Alexa 1080p because it's not 4K! With great quality RAW images you can push and pull them in post and they keep on giving and this is pretty darn close to that... Plus it's the easiest camera to grade that I have ever seen. Great images just appear when you drop a LUT or CST onto them, rather than struggling for hours to get good colours.

Auto-ISO would be a tricky thing if it had to transition between LUTs, or other ISO profile adjustments, but for a cine-camera it would be a safe bet that no-one would do that, and maybe these cameras don't offer auto-ISO at all (I very much doubt the Alexa would). Certainly, cinematographers pay a lot of attention to how a camera reacts when under or over exposed, and the relative differences are very subtle, so if they did make custom profiles that evened out the response it would be a meaningful thing that people pay attention to.

Interesting to see, and makes me wonder if the next step would be for camera manufacturers to implement a custom LUT for each ISO setting, which would get rid of the green in those high ISOs. I've dealt with footage that was underexposed and had colour that looked like that and let's just say it's not fun to try and fix in post. I think I was about half-way to getting a physical reaction from that footage just thinking about trying to fix it in post!

I agree. Of course, a 2-year old is practically the same as extreme sports for an AF system! Especially if it's indoors under artificial lighting where ISO performance comes into play. I just hope we're not contributing that much to that marketing purposes. After all, "we need AF because the internet is full of people saying that the market wants AF" would be a pretty logical outcome of "I commented on the forums that the market wants AF because that's all that seems to be talked about". Personally, I think the less we talk about how we "need 4K" or "need AF" or Whatever-T-F the manufacturers are pedalling this month, the better. I'd rather not be part of the problem, and I suspect that a bunch of people hanging out and saying things because they think that's what everyone else wants is a pretty good way to play right into the GAS issues. After all, what role do forums like this play? New people want a "big camera" to get "blurry backgrounds" and forums like this teach them it's called "bokeh" and that they need 4K and FF and AF etc, so then they go and buy that Sony FF camera and there you go - the market has spoken, unfortunately it said what we told it to say by talking about how all these things are "needed", which mostly just isn't true.

You make fair points, but then ask why the discussion is so binary - just look at the statement you make above. What is fascinating is that you use the word reliable - no camera has a reliable AF system. None. There are literally no cameras available on earth that you could use to 100% get the AF right. The GH5 isn't 100%, but neither is the Sony A7S3, or the Canon R5 either. I've seen multiple shots in recent vlogs where the camera focuses on the background, or on the foreground, or just stops, and these are shots that are making it into the final edit. Think of how many out of focus shots the GH5 created and how few ended up in the edits of YouTubers, then apply that to the PDAF/DPAF cameras and so even they are screwing up on a semi-regular basis. The GH5 was a roaring success without good AF, and lots of people buy it, even now, despite the millions (billions?) of comments online about how the AF is not reliable. Would the GH6 be a better selling camera if it had PDAF? Absolutely. Will PDAF give it "a good and reliablish AF system"? Hell no. Does it "need" a "reliable" AF system? No, because such a thing doesn't exist.

The challenge is that the camera must know who to focus on and when. This is essentially an impossible thing, especially for narrative. Imagine a shot with a composition like this, but where only one character is in focus at a time: The background character starts in focus... BG: You've screwed everything up....... I can never trust you again pause FG: I'm sorry When should the AF change focus from the BG character to the FG character? The answer is, it depends on the director. It could change during the pause in 1, before 2, after 2, in reaction to 3, or not at all. If the answer is anything before 3 starts speaking then how the hell could a camera know that this was the moment to transition focus???? This is the fundamental challenge of AF. Anyone who doesn't understand this doesn't understand how to use focus as a creative tool in a film. Lots of people don't need to know this of course, but I find that even in making videos of my family this stuff becomes relevant, which is hardly the pinnacle of the art form.

I just substitute the phrase "robot that doesn't know the foreground from the background" whenever I read AF. It makes phrases like "The GH6 won't be successful until it has the DPAF from Canon or PDAF from Sony" sound ridiculous, but also more accurate: "The GH6 won't be successful until it has the Dual Pixel robot that doesn't know the foreground from the background from Canon or Phase Detect robot that doesn't know the foreground from the background from Sony" I think most people here that talk about AF are either wedding shooters thinking that their films will be better if they can get shallow DOF on their circling-the-couple-gimbal-shot (they won't be) or tech nerds that don't shoot at all. I came on this board thinking that Canon colour science was the best, 4K was required to get a good image, and that AF was a critical feature. Now I know that most of the manufacturers have great colour science, but that magic is created on-set and in post not in the cameras internal LUTs (even if it's an ARRI), I shoot manual focus, I shoot 1080p, and I think possibly the largest weakness in current cameras for image quality is dynamic range. How did I progress on that journey? I shot stuff and looked at it and worked out how to make it look better. I learned about what actually makes a nice image vs just reading the marketing BS that manufacturers spew at us constantly. Guess why? Older cameras can potentially make nicer images than newer ones - no wonder that's not on the marketing talking points!

I won't be. I use manual lenses and although my ability to manually focus doesn't track subjects with the same accuracy, I have never ever ever mistakenly focused on the background instead of the subject. I also film in the real world where my subject is surrounded by other faces and objects that there's no way the camera could distinguish between. Little pocket cameras have the ability to set VIPs and actually take photos of the people you want it to focus on and they will detect faces and then analyse them for the VIPs, and be sure to focus on the VIPs instead of the other random people of less importance. I don't have that option on any interchangeable lens camera I own, so there's no way that the camera can tell who I know and who I don't. Then there's situations like this - how well do you think face-detect is going to work here? Sure, PDAF with face-detection is great for vloggers against a plain background, and it's great if you're shooting a wedding on a gimbal as a one-person operator, but for more complicated stuff it's still a very long way from solving the AF issue. Besides, why settle for second best? My P2K, M2K, and GH5 have the same focusing system as an Alexa 🙂

Interesting test, but that shot at 0:11s really falls apart... not sure if it's the compression or what, but the right-hand edge of the figures practically fades in over a few frames as they walk in front of the background. Maybe have a look at the A7Sii videos people did in ultra low light and see how they got the results they got. IIRC they also used faster lenses.

It looked like the foam cover on it was on the large side, which would cushion it if it moved around a bit, so that's worth paying attention to as well. ADR is an option, but it can be pretty fiddly to do and if you haven't done it before it's not as easy as it might seem, especially for some talent.

What was it about the camera / footage that you didn't like?

The XC10 - the bane of my introduction to colour grading. I could never get the footage to look good, and now I finally realise why. Long story short, it's a cinema camera with a slow zoom lens, so you have to use it fully-manual, and I didn't. What that means is that if you put a scene in front of it that is within a few stops of correct exposure then it will look fine, but if not then it will either drown the image in ISO noise, or will hit its fastest shutter-speed (which being a cine camera isn't that fast) and will then stop down the lens, which was slow to begin with, and introduce diffraction. These are why most of the images I have from it look like poor quality JPG images, and sharpening them just makes them look awful, not sharper. OK, I'll move past that and let's move on to what it looks like from the few shots I have that look good..... This is a test shot from when I first got the camera, it's SOOC so I suspect it's a 709 profile: and here's the analysis: Seems reasonable. What about C-Log? This is SOOC: As usual, the CST created a neon abstract painting out of the skin tones, but with saturation at 60%, we get something reasonable: and the analysis: All good too. Soft skin, but close-up and with direct sunlight, gives some green. <long sections complaining about the camera deleted lol>

I've gone through and reviewed the shots I pulled from my back catalog and got some interesting results. Let's start with the GH5 in UHD 24p, on a 1080p timeline. (In order to sharpen you have to have something to work with, so I'll be talking about how good the codec is, you'll see why later on...) Take a shot like this, SOOC: Apply a CST and maybe some level adjustments if it needs it, and we get: and this is what the analysis looks like: This looks very similar to what we saw from the streamed reference images. The stubble but softened light gives a bit of green but not a strong amount. We can apply some sharpening and get this: and a 100% crop of the 1080p timeline: But that's in relatively good lighting conditions, how about under tricky situations? This is an image of dark skin tones, on a boat with no lighting on a river perhaps 50-70m from shore where the floodlights are lighting up the festivities. It was taken with the Voigtlander 17.5mm wide open (these lenses are known for being soft wide open) and the GH5 in auto-ISO mode, so who knows what the ISO was... This was my first trip with the GH5 and the Voigtlander and I had no idea what I was doing, and if memory serves, I think I was exposing to protect the highlights in the background!! Image SOOC: The standard CST does this, which is radically underexposed: But if we apply a ridiculous exposure adjustment we get this, which doesn't look good but will serve our purposes to look at sharpening: and this is the analysis: Note the green areas on the face are not just random noise - there is detail there. I reviewed successive frames and it is indeed detail. This is a 100% crop without any sharpening, just so you can see what detail is there: and with the sharpening I applied before, we get: It's worth pointing out at this point that these are from the 150Mbps Long-GOP UHD mode, not the 400Mbps ALL-I one. The GH5 earns its reputation once again. Now, let's change gear and talk about the XC10. Remember I said that we'd be talking about codecs for a reason? Well......

I didn't realise there were PDFs - that might be worth a look. I've commented before elsewhere that it's tricky once you know half a program because you probably won't get the overall structure / rationale of it from continuing to learn bit-by-bit but that watching videos that are mostly filled with things you already know is almost unbearably tedious. PDFs however, might be useful as you can scroll and go at your own pace. As an aside, I didn't realise until recently how useful the speed controls are in YouTube - watching something you're broadly familiar with in 1.5x or 2x speed can be refreshing as you can still follow it but it skips along nicely and doesn't seem to drag. It's definitely worth drawing attention to the training. Lots more people are moving to Resolve it seems, and the free offering is very capable. I definitely agree about architecture, which is not easy to learn if you're teaching yourself bit-by-bit. In terms of learning how to colour, you're right that they won't teach you that, and many colourist resources also won't. I started a thread some time ago to try and collect useful things, it's here: In the same way that learning bit-by-bit won't teach you the architecture of a thing, lots of good colourist content also doesn't teach you the overall mindset and approach for colour grading. If you're interested in a training course that I did recently that was absolutely spectacular, I can heartily recommend the masterclass by Walter Volpatto who works at Company3. The class was streamed some time ago but you can buy the download. I re-watched it recently and was blown away by how deep Walters knowledge was, and how he went another level up again from most colourist content by talking about workflow and how to manage large projects. He took great pleasure in occasionally roasting the colourists on YT, making serious criticisms of even the advice given by the top YT colourists who are obviously working pros, let alone the "buy my LUT" crowd who couldn't even spell LUT 2 days before they launched their own line.

I've watched some of their videos in the past and found them very good. They're quite slow, considering they cover everything and don't assume prior knowledge, but are very thorough. What is especially valuable, and you almost can't get anywhere else, is that they give you hints of how they designed Resolve to work and the architecture of it all. If you have the time and patience then watching the videos might be good value. Not sure what value certification would give you unless you're a pro looking for work though, and you're likely to have to re-certify every new version.

I've gradually worked my way "up" from cameras that applied too much sharpening to less and less. Typically they applied too much and so I got a bit familiar with blurring the image to soften it to get it to a good look. Now I own cameras that shoot in 1080p RAW and look completely silly without sharpening, and I realise I know very little about how to do that. Interestingly, there aren't many tutorials around going through how to do it, even the basics aren't covered well. Unlike topics such as how to apply a LUT, but I digress. So, this thread is about me learning to apply sharpening, sharing what I find, and maybe getting some hints from others. I've been taking screen captures from TV shows and movies as references for a long time (always a good thing to have when colour grading) and I thought I'd start by analysing these images first, then seeing what levels of sharpening come with the various cameras I have. I've compiled a bunch of source footage from my projects over the years as references. So, here's how it works.. I put a bunch of images onto a 1080p timeline, and then by some Resolve trickery, we can highlight areas of strong edges in red, medium strength edges in blue, and weak edges in green. Happy to describe the node tree if anyone is curious, but it turns images like this: Into outputs like this: I've looked at a range of images from Peaky Blinders, Chefs Table, S.W.A.T. and Unabom and they all appear to have similar levels of sharpening. For images where there is very harsh lighting and/or strong detail on faces (such as facial hair) the face texture just dips into the blue, but is green. For images that are softly lit and are of female leads who are meant to appear with smoother skin those areas of skin don't get any green highlighting, such as this: or this: but other than those things, people tend to get green highlights on the lighter areas of skin and not in the shadow areas, and blue on specular highlights: Now to analyse my images. I'm looking at footage shot on XC10 in 4K, GH5 in 1080 120p, 4k60, 4k25, and 5k25, iPhone 4k60 and 4k25, Sony X3000 4k25, and BMMCC/BMPCC 1080p RAW or Prores HQ. More to come.

I used to be into hifi and buying exotic valves and one of the stores that sold old valves started selling jewellery as well. Lots of hifi guys aren't the type to really understand women so maybe wouldn't know where to start and (maybe out of guilt / obligation) would just shop there as it was easy and they were already signed up etc. I have no idea how much they sold, but they still have a section of the site dedicated to it and their selection seems to have expanded! Maybe combine things? "There's a shortage of food, therefore prices have gone right up, that's why your car is missing AND I've brought less food home lately and the cupboards are bare. Oh, and BTW, people are getting desperate out there, so better to not go outside and see for yourself...."