kye

I've found that normally the best display for someone to judge something on is the one they're used to the most. The best display in the world won't be a good reference if it's different to what you're used to. The argument that no-one is viewing things using a calibrated display is very common, but is ultimately a very strange idea. Chefs know that food tastes different to everyone, but they don't go around saying that there's no point making the food taste good to them because people eat their food with uncalibrated mouths. Musicians don't go around saying that there's no point practicing their instruments because people hear music through their own cultural reference and taste. I'l go first with a camera guess. Sony. The reason that I think it's a Sony is because 1) the first image look relatively good, and 2) the fact you're asking suggests to me that the camera isn't one that is expected to have good colour. No-one posts images from an Alexa and then is keen to hear what camera they shot it with.

Interesting survey, although hardly surprising results coming from a site with "economics" in the name. I've been doing an interesting survey for more than two decades where I ask senior management about talent and the overall state of the workforce. The result? Every leader that ever commented to me said they have very serious difficulty hiring people with leadership ability. A decent percentage volunteered that they've had to change their approach to organising, even restructuring, to work with the leadership pool they have. I've detected no change in this over the years. In business, everything eventually gets traced back to people, then to management, then to external forces, then to those people, and eventually to the human condition itself. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and the longer you look the more this becomes clear. And if you think that COVID is an exception, go read about the Spanish Flu.... it makes covid look like a head-cold in comparison.

I'd be curious to hear how many people commenting in this thread have calibrated displays and are viewing in controlled lighting conditions. When comparing images with no reference (except pure aesthetic reaction and visual memory) these things factor in hugely.

That sounds like it! Anyone who has recorded sports in 120p (or more) and then had to review the footage in post will know that slow-motion is no joke... for every second of 120p you watch at 24p, you get 4 seconds further behind!

I'm having deja-vu as I swear someone has asked this question before, and it made no sense then or now. What are you trying to achieve? and how is this not achieved by shooting 24p with a short shutter speed?

@EphraimP I definitely prefer A as it's warmer and colours have more clarity and fullness. B is cooler and so the neutral tones in the background and lack of saturation in the skin tones make it look more hollow and like the guy is in poor health. If it's meant to be in neutral lighting and the guy in good health then B looks like someone has used the wrong colour space transform. Having said that, you haven't said what the film is about, and "nice" doesn't work well for horror or action or many other genres, so the aesthetic should dictate the look...

OT, but I thought this was an interesting video on the supply chain issues: TL;DR: by optimising supply chains for the lowest costs you concentrate demand onto fewer and fewer suppliers and supply chains, which also happens when factories to make highly specialised items like semiconductors cost so much to setup, but unfortunately that means that that approach introduces many single-points-of-failure in the production of many goods. There are also issues with unbalanced supply chains causing shortages of things like shipping containers etc and any temporary situations (like lockdowns) will take potentially years to recover from.

It is a nice image, no doubt. I think it's the way it looks so natural even under unforgiving lighting, such as direct sun, that really makes these cameras stand out. FB has a lot of good groups with people posting finished projects and footage on a regular basis. It's a different crowd..

P2K and not Micro, but almost identical image....

Didn't Canon have an industrial modular camera that worked up to 4,000,000 ISO? I have vague memories that someone made one..

I have vague memories of the Prores being as flexible in post for WB as the RAW - is that right? Regardless, I shoot Prores HQ with 5600K WB. So unless you want to change the framerate, which isn't often, and you're using a manual lens, you don't have to access the menus at all. Just focus and aperture via the lens, and then ND for exposure.

....but seriously though, the earths population is going to peak and stabilise. The total output of the worlds land will eventually stabilise. It's likely that our energy usage will continue to grow, but assuming we're still around, that will shift to being sustainable and so that won't drive the economy nearly in the same way that population growth does. This means we're headed for the transition from growth-based economics to steady-state donut-based economics (no, I'm not kidding, it really is called that, see here for more info!). If you think that COVID has put some challenges in our path then go read about the Spanish Flu and realise that this thing is a head-cold in comparison to that horror movie**, and then think for a minute that the transition from growth to donut economies will be the first time this has ever happened in the history of humanity. ** by the way, there's a bunch of evidence that suggests that the Spanish Flu might have been the inspiration for the entire horror movie genre, as it happened shortly before cinema was really established, and if you read the reports about the symptoms they sound very similar to the average horror movie.

Just speaking for myself here, but if anything is going to push me over the edge into prepping, it's f0.95 in a Hollywood film.

I think the GH6 may not need an attention grabbing feature to stand out considering the price bump. People who were at the limits of the GH5 might find that the GH6 is worth the upgrade, considering how much money they might have in lenses and the total cost of changing systems. For example: 120p going from 1080p to 4K is a useful upgrade for those that use that mode, sports shooters for example 60p going from 4K 8-bit to 5.7K 10-bit is a meaningful change too, especially for those shooting log Even in an incremental upgrade there are likely to be other minor improvements. The Panasonic colour science has advanced quite a bit from the GH5, so even if the GH6 just 'catches up' to S1/S1H performance, that would be something. Addition of Dual-ISO would make a huge different to people who shoot in low light. I shoot with f0.95 lenses in available light and that works well, but it would be nice to be able to stop down to get a deeper DoF without the noise overwhelming the image. A new sensor opens up some very interesting possibilities, including faster read-out times, higher DR, dual-ISO, etc. A new processing engine is something that's also interesting considering the existing processing engine is actually enormously capable. I did some testing and confirmed that the GH5 does the following: 4K and 1080p are downsampled (which everyone already knows) 4K60 is downsampled, so is 1080p60 (and IIRC so is 1080pVFR) Also, the 1080p mode with 2X digital zoom is also downsampled from the middle 2.5K of the sensor, even in 60p! None of this pixel-binning, line skipping, BS that other cameras seem to think is normal. So, if the processing engine is being upgraded and gets new features, they won't be to enable it to do things you'd expect it to do anyway, it will be things that are in addition to normal functions you'd expect.

There's no such thing as technical perfection, only how well the technical choices support the content / context. It's like asking what size paint brush is the best - very different answers if you're going to paint detail on a miniature, the face on a portrait, or blast a flat colour on the side of a building. Any time someone rates a piece of equipment out of context they're substituting in their own context without mentioning it. Sadly, that context is often to brag about their equipment on the internet.

I totally agree that it's about the quality and not some arbitrary technical specification. It's a bit sad that most manufacturers make us choose between heavily-sharpened low-bitrate low colour sampling h264/5 and RAW without many options in-between. Imagine if cameras let you customise a profile to independently specify the codec, bitrate, bit depth, colour subsampling, Intra/ALL-I, resolution and frame-rate.... Then imagine if they gave you a rocker switch to smoothly zoom in-between a downsampled full-sensor readout and a 1:1 crop at your selected resolution, that would be pretty sweet. I ended up with a P2K (OG BMPCC) and M2K (BMMCC) for cine-camera tasks and mostly shoot Prores HQ, and a GH5 for run-n-gun handheld travel videos using the 200Mbps 10-bit ALL-I 1080p mode. That mode on the GH5 isn't my dream spec, but I'm prioritising ease of editing so am choosing between the ALL-I modes and I did a comparison between all the modes and when you put them onto a 4K timeline and upload to YT there isn't any visible differences that I could tell, perhaps because they're all downsampled from 5K in-camera. I'd get a P4K or P6K if the cameras weren't so large, considering I want to blend into the "just another tourist with a camera - nothing to worry about" category for the projects I shoot. I also seriously looked at the Sigma FP but couldn't get past the impossible choice between the enormous data rates of the RAW files and poor quality of the internal compressed files, whereas the P2K and Prores HQ really nails the size and codec I'm looking for.

Good points. I did a bunch of testing on the overall image quality of various codecs and bitrates in a separate thread some time ago, and here's the results I got from 1080p: and graphed: Prores and h264 from Resolve are in the key but not in the graph because its quality is poor and below the graphing area. Resolve is known for not having great encoders unfortunately. The rest of the thread is here: Results were similar for UHD, so not worth repeating. I do wonder about the perceptual / aesthetic aspects of the errors that each generates. My perception is that Prores always looks so much better than h26x codecs, and I wonder if that's the nature of the error. For example if you take an image and blur it then you will generate a rather significant error from the source image but it would probably be very benign aesthetically, whereas if you took vertical stripes 10px wide and increased their brightness to get the same overall total error across the image it would be almost unwatchable, and a similar thing happens comparing random noise with fixed-pattern noise, so the nature of the error is of significant aesthetic concern. Of course, it could be that Prores tends to look nicer due to its higher bitrates, or tendency to have less sharpening added prior to compression, or 422 instead of 420, etc. I also agree that 100Mbps is sufficient most of the time, but the problem is that when you buy a camera costing multiple thousands of dollars you are likely to hit the situation where it's not sufficient at some point during your ownership of that camera, and for every person that buys it and doesn't hit that situation (for example always shooting in controlled conditions) there will be another person who buys it for use in outdoor adventure and films trees in the wind, rain, snow falling, all while hand-held, and basically experiences those problems on a weekly basis. It's like putting the tyres from a corolla on a Ferrari and not being able to change them - it's a huge bottleneck for the output of the camera.

I own the BMMCC which is tiny but becomes larger than a 1DX when you put a monitor on it, so I bought the BMPCC OG just because of the overall size. The GH5 is great in that regard because of the EVF, which adds little size but makes it usable in almost any conditions, unlike the BMPCC. The 5K mode on the GH5 is also dramatically less sharpened, so it's kind of a "raw-like full sensor readout" mode. THIS. Can you imagine if it leapfrogged the pack and ended up with Alexa-like DR? Now that would be a headline grabber and put MFT back on the map for sure.

I agree with your outline of why similar colours are grouped together, but I wonder if it's a function of bitrate. What I mean is that maybe the encoder would like to leave the colours separated, but due to bitrate limitations it has to sacrifice where it can do the least damage, and due to the 8-bit + Log combination these places are the least-worst and doing it any other way would simply have been worse again. One of the things I find fascinating about modern cameras is the atrocious bitrates they employ. 1080p Prores HQ was ~180Mbps, but the "standard" for 4K was only 100Mbps - even on multi-thousand-dollar flagship cameras like the A7S2. 100Mbps for 4K is laughable but seemed to be unquestioned. The bitrate for Prores is constant per pixel, so the 4K bitrate is 4x the 1080p bitrate at about 700Mbps. The H26x series are designed for broadcast not acquisition so unfortunately don't really get better in quality with bitrates the high, but they certainly do a nice job if you push them to give the highest quality they can muster.

@Parker Nice honest channel launch - subscribed! A request if I may... or two... 🙂 1) Please talk about the most advanced topics you are comfortable talking about. I say this because everyone else seems to start with the basics and never gets past them. This will be a lot of work in the writing stage for each video, but will also help you as talking about something forces you to really understand it. 2) Please talk about how to create a story from the footage that you get. What I mean is, when shooting weddings and the little one-day profiles, you find the story in the edit instead of planning it beforehand. Obviously I know that these things have a bit of predictability to them, but there's definitely an art to finding the story in the edit. I watched the video with isolating headphones and found it fine. Maybe you should balance your voice with the music on headphones and then turn the music down by 3dB more or something as a bit of a safety margin for less pristine listening conditions. It would make the mixing phase pretty straight-foward to have a rule like that. Or better yet, get a traditional musician-style microphone stand and arrange it so the bar is horizontal, put a colour checker where your head will be, focus on It, hit record, then go sit down and just push the horizontal bar out of the way (it will just pivot out of shot) and not only will you be in focus, but you'll also have a colour checker at the start of every shot. You could also mount a small whiteboard to use as a slate for future shot identification, and you can put the mic stand to the side out of shot so no having to put a tripod on the chair where you'll be sitting. Also, on the next shot you can just swing it back into place again without having to move the whole stand. Alternatively, you could hang something from the boom mic, which should be almost directly over your head and just out of shot. Awesome! Content is king, so as long as you make the videos edited nice enough to not be unwatchable, then just film it and get it out there. I watch far more content of people doing things (building houses, machining, travelling, renovating, etc) than I watch professionally edited stuff, simply because it's mostly more interesting. It's pretty hard to be a good enough writer that you can match the authenticity of someone who just opens their mouth and speaks in response to life, it's pretty hard to be a good enough actor that you can match the authenticity of someone who is actually living in their characters shoes and is genuinely seeing things happen and reacting for the first time, and it's pretty darn hard to write a story that is as surprising but logical and plausible as reality itself. This is what film-makers find hard to understand about vlogging or content creators. Their film-making mostly sucks, but the acting and story is equal to that of the pinnacle that Hollywood has to offer.

Good post. I wrote a DCPX plugin that reduces the bit-depth of images and found that you can really reduce the bit depth significantly before it becomes visible on real world images. I think 6 bits was fine for many test images of skin tones, for example. Probably the biggest enemy of the 8-bit codec is the gradients that occur when filming flat-coloured surfaces like any interior wall. Not only is the light going to be unevenly applied to the wall, and not only is the lens going to vignette by a little bit, but the closer these are to perfect, the wider the posterisation banding is going to be. Still, you have to try pretty hard to get visible banding from 8-bit if the image is exposed well and isn't in a crazy-flat log profile.

Watched the video, haven't watched the film, thought that the video was funny and made me glad I didn't watch the movie. It reminded me of this video: Of course, I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, but he does have a point about movie making and editing and story...

I suspect you are a devotee of the "higher resolution sharper images" school of thought. This is also called "the video look". I did tests that mathematically analysed various codecs and the h264 / h265 codecs were mathematically more accurate than Prores at similar bitrates (which makes sense considering that maths is how the designers of compression algorithms test those algorithms and Prores is based on an older compression algorithm) however, humans are not computers. My suspicion is that the preference for prores over h264 etc is in the errors. For starters, Prores is ALL-I so renders motion very well, which is not something that is taken into consideration by the mathematics used to test algorithms. Yes, h264 etc can do ALL-I although most implementations do not enable it. Secondly, to my eye at least, Prores tends to give a softer look to an image than h264, which appears spiky and sharp/brittle in comparison. Anyone familiar with film will know that it isn't sharp at all. Anyone shooting RAW will be familiar with this. Prores has a very similar sharpness to RAW images, and requires sharpening in post to tune the image if you want a more modern feeling image. H264 and H265 feel very different to Prores. Yes, camera manufacturers tend to sharpen the image before applying H264/5 compression so that will add to this effect as well, but when you're comparing Prores to h264 you're comparing the whole image pipeline and this is what tends to happen. Unless you're a fan of the "video look" then these images likely have too much sharpening applied, and I find that my skills in softening an image with blurs are more developed than my skills in sharpening images purely because of how much sharpening is typically applied. All of the above would be similar for Motion JPG implementations as well, and the cameras with that as a codec also have a very good reputation. Finally, I suggest this - after reading this post look around you and notice your surroundings. Do they look 'sharp'? Look at your hands and the texture of your skin, look at the fabrics of your clothes, look at the device you're reading this on. Do they look 'sharp'? No. Reality isn't sharp. It's detailed, sure, but in an understated way, it just IS, without all the details yelling at you to notice them. Unlike h264/h265.

We were definitely spoiled, and the price going up is more reflective of the optical quality of some of those lenses. Covid and buying boredom / nostalgia will have driven the whole market up somewhat and it might correct in the next few years, but I don't think it will go down that much. There is a diminishing supply with lenses ageing and breaking, and there is a rising demand, both due to technology driving up visual media in terms of both video and stills photography, and a rising middle class in countries like China and India that has added billions of people to those who have discretionary income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class#Recent_global_growth