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So, I've been watching that podcast and got to the part where Dave implies incredibly strongly that the S9 wasn't the camera that was planned to be announced. It's at the 1h30m mark of the video, but he's saying it as strongly as he can without breaking an NDA or outing a source (or both). My theory is that almost a week ago BM dropped the price of the BMCC 6K by 40% to $1575, and then seemingly Panasonic swaps the camera released during a press event where they had invited a bunch of film-makers to... Was Panasonic releasing a high-end video camera and didn't want to compete with the BMCC 6K at the same price point? Did BM get wind what Panasonic was releasing and drop their price to screw up their launch? I've seen documentaries about corporate espionage and that shit is real - companies spy on each other as much as you'd expect when there are millions of dollars at stake.

Here's a 2 hour podcast talking about it with Brandon Washington, Gerald, and Dave Altizer (who went on the S9 Japan trip). Chapters to give you a sense of the subjects covered: 5:20 Show Begins 17:30 Gerald Undone's Interview - Launch of S9 is Interesting 22:45How Does Gerald Stay Unbiased w Brands 29:54 How Gerald Decides What NOT to Review 32:50 Gerald's Thoughts on the S9 Launch 47:26 The Reason Behind Gerald's Studio Tours 56:13 Should You Receive Monetary Value for Reviews 1:04:22 Should You Review Gear if You're Not Using it on Set? 1:13:45 David Altizer's Interview - Perspective From Japan Trip 1:24:55 Does the Cost of the Product Influence Reviews? 1:30:38 The S9 Was Not the Camera That Was Planned 1:39:24 Michael Tobin on the Blackmagic 6K Now Also $1500

Actually, I think he's one of the most authentic YT reviewers in that way - he isn't a film-maker and doesn't pretend to be one. His reviews are technical and he doesn't pretend to know which little technical gotcha will be important to you and what won't be. This makes sense to me because film-making is different for everyone and tiny little things can be deal-breakers for a few but meaningless to most. The other authentic YT reviewers are the cinematographers. They are working pros who can speak to what is important, but also have a YT channel. This is important to me because cinematographers can have a tendency to know almost nothing about post-production, and/or their knowledge is based on having a workflow that has 27 people in it who all do this for a living. So when a cinematographer is also on YT it generally means they have experience with doing the whole thing themselves, so are able to speak to the whole end-to-end workflow and any quirks about things, which is what matters to lots of us. To complete the picture, the worst YT reviewers are the professional YouTubers. They pretend to be film-makers but only know about YT. They are mostly self-taught and not technical, so they think they're experts, but they're just pretending. If we took the fundamentals of image creation and tested them on it, most would fail, and some would get zero. Take the Resolution Demo from Yedlin - anyone who has actually watched it would either immediately stop hyping up anything 3K or above, or doesn't care about the fact that the image will, in the end, be put in front of an audience. They simply review cameras in terms of how good they are at filming yourself making camera reviews, nothing more, because they don't know anything else. A special mention goes to Chris and Jordan from DPReview fame, who actually made a short film each year with all the processes and techniques of the industry, and yet consistently made statements in reviews that showed they had zero understanding of the fundamentals. I'm wondering if this will spark a bit of a checkpoint in the community. First was the announcements about Insta360 asking people to hide sponsorships, and now this from Gerald, on the back of a highly visible PR event. Everyone says how much influence these "influencers" have, I guess we'll see. One thing I thought was fascinating was his idea of the three phases, and the idea that a reviewer can get big enough to start getting the invitations without having special access, so in theory they don't need it to keep growing. I suspect this video will make the rounds quietly within the YT community, and a lot of people will go "oh yeah... that makes sense". It's the kind of thing that once you've heard it you won't forget it. People will do what they want with that info of course, but I think it might cause a subtle shift.

After a little while reading comments and watching videos and reading the specs, I have come to think of this camera a little differently than it seems others are. I think it's about size. If you want a better camera and don't care about size then just buy an S5iiX, or a BMCC 6K, or Alexa or whatever. Camerasize.com doesn't have the S9 yet, so I did a mockup myself, basically it's the same size as the GX85: In those terms, it's a GX85 sized camera body but FF, PDAF, Dual native ISO, 10-bit LOG, Open Gate, claimed 14+ stops of DR, cutting edge colour profiles, etc, without losing the IBIS etc. If it was an MFT camera then people would be falling all over themselves about it, but it's FF and so somehow has to be an Alexa LF to not get roasted.. doesn't make sense to me. Of course, it's not perfect because nothing is, but at this size and price the competition really isn't perfect either. Also, the F8 prime doesn't really bother me that much, and it's a much closer comparison to the 14mm F2.5 lens than you might think. The 14mm F2.5 has the DOF of a 28mm F5 lens, which is only just over a stop deeper, and if you combine the dual ISO of the S9 with the F8 lens then that gives it a 2.5 stop boost giving equivalent light gathering of a F3.5 lens (if I did the math right?). The iPhone 15 main camera has a crop factor of 5, so the main lens is equivalent to a 26mm F7.2 lens, and older models had smaller sensors so would be equivalent to slower lenses. Entire media empires have been built on content shot on phones, so I don't see this as a major issue. Then again, I bought the Olympus 15mm F8 body cap lens for MFT, so what would I know! My review of that lens is that it's great, but F8 is too slow for anything indoors or after sunset. With the Dual ISO that limitation disappears. The challenge for FF was lens size (and especially the L-mount), so here's a lens that's small and pocketable and great for street photography. Is it overpriced? Should it be AF? Probably.. but it exists, and "F8 and be there" is a saying that came from the best photographers who ever lived and has stood the test of time. All that said, I'm not buying one because the lenses are all still enormous except the new pancake. Hopefully this is a new body that Panasonic can re-use for the MFT line 🙂

Is there an archive of the video somewhere? Not sure where, but maybe it exists...

I'm not really following the project, but this got posted to a FB group I'm in and the footage looks pretty good... nothing incredible, because it's a standard sensor of course, but really workable: From the video description: STARVIS 2 sensor (IMX585) from Sony shot in a variety of frames rates ( 24, 30, 48, 60 ) in both 12-bit lossless compressed and 16-bit uncompressed CinemaDNG RAW at 4K resolution directly to CFExpress Type B media shot handheld with an image-stabilized Canon 17-55mm lens and a Metabones speedbooster Edited and color graded in DaVinci Resolve 19 Beta (4K timeline, exported in 8K)

Gerald just put out an incredible video talking about YT camera reviews, reviewers, manufacturers, and how the whole thing works. He talked about brands specifically and how they have treated him, including Panasonic punishing him for a YT title, Canon, Fuji, Sony, etc. The good, the bad, and absolutely the ugly. He also gave a pretty comprehensive and level-headed-sounding overview of how it works. If all you want to do is complain about everything (which is most people online sadly) then you can skip the nuanced parts of his video and just get to the gossip about each brand (that's what it is after all...) but the whole thing seems well thought-out.

Yeah, unfortunately it's the collective "we" and those of us who think there might be an optimum resolution and sharpness are hopelessly outnumbered by the MOAR! MOAR!! MOARRR!!!! people who are completely divorced from reality and can never get enough.

SHHHHH... I think Cam is listening....

Actually.....

Optics are different than the specs. One thing that isn't widely discussed is the optical formulas of lenses and what impacts they have on size and image quality. In general, the higher the optical performance the higher the quality..... For example, here's the Zeiss Otus 1.4/55 vs. Zeiss Planar 1.4/50mm The more everyone online keeps talking about megapixels and sharpness the larger all our lenses get. It's pretty simple really - we're getting what we asked for.

Or maybe they want to place another order with the factory but there is too much stock out there to make it an easy decision, so it could be part inventory management, part PR, and part market testing. I'm just guessing of course, but I have noticed that retail tends to prioritise moving units over profit. I've heard people before say that they'd prefer to be moving units even if it was without any profit margin at all rather than make profit but have very low throughput. I don't pretend to understand why..

Ah, right... I'd forgotten about the frame interpolation. Doing it your way bakes in the 3:2 pattern, but at least it won't look like someone accidentally slipped the audience something in their drinks!

I've used it on my 700D and yeah, it's not winning any UI awards that's for sure. Then again, I hear that the Sony menus give people nightmares so who knows. But when it comes to the image, it's like I said, different people wanting different things. All the professional colourists are taking the high-end Alexa footage and doing NR, softening / blurring, adding grain, and sometimes adding halation and diffusion - even on top of the vintage primes many movies were shot on. Then on the forums everyone is like "Dune looked AMAZING, I wish my films looked like that... anyway, who wants a 16K camera with no noise at ISO 100,000 and sharper Sigma Art lenses?" Yeah. People are even converting 24p movie clips to 4K 60p using AI and uploading those to YT. I suppose that's in-keeping with our current phase of revisionist history 😂😂😂

I suspect it differs by what you're trying to achieve. To me, the images have an effortless organic and analog quality to them, very much like the early Alexa models, without doing much grading - it's how the image is to begin with. You can get into that ballpark with the modern mirrorless cameras, but it takes a lot of work in post, and I'm not sure you'd get there completely. When I look at the test images from CineD and Slashcam all these modern cameras all look pretty similar, and even the ones that don't match the rest seem to be different in ways that are relatively easy to overcome in post. However, I've graded images from quite a few of these modern cameras and they all start out looking modern but regardless of what I tried (and I'm a better colourist than most folks around here) I couldn't get them to have any of that early organic magic that the OG BMPCC, Digital Bolex, 5D+ML, and the high-end 2K-3K cinema cameras all had. Maybe if you have FilmConvert or Dehancer and you really know what you're doing you can get them there, but I don't think people want that anymore. The look of high-end 2K workflows and of S35mm just isn't desirable to people anymore. I've said this before, but whenever I go to the cinema I get a massive confirmation that almost all the online camera discussions are about video and not cinema. Certainly almost all the images I see from 'camera people' look like they were shot with the worlds best interchangeable lens high-bitrate video camera, and look almost nothing like cinema. Even when people don't want something that looks super-digital, they apply a heavy film-look that makes things vintage. There was a high-end look that existed between 1985 and 2019, but I seem to be one of the last few outside the industry who want this look.

The image from the 5D3 and ML is simply incredible. @mercer swears by it and the images speak for themselves, there is an organic magic to them that is seldom seen regardless of price or form-factor. Apparently it's pretty stable too, no crashes etc. The 5D camera body is excellent but is ageing, and the sensor isn't the best in terms of modern specs, but prices are also very reasonable due to these things. EF glass is also plentiful, cheap, and optically excellent. The lack of stabilisation and the lower DR really suggest that it's a good camera for controlled conditions where DR and lighting ratios are within a manageable range. If you shoot controlled scenes then the 5D with ML certainly would be a good choice for having one camera.

Looks pretty good.... The poor-shooters Alexa 65?

Do you think that any cinematographer in their right-mind would use a 5D with a hacked firmware on a shoot that's $100,000 a day? Hollywood gets nervous if the camera is anything except an Alexa. If they get nervous about using RED, then you're dreaming that they'd even contemplate using a hacked firmware for anything. You talk as if you're familiar with the industry, but.....

Sure, but I recommend trying to be correct where you can. Early in my journey I read a lot on forums and I "learned" all sorts of things that simply weren't true, and it cost me a lot of money. Sure, casual readers of this forum aren't likely to be in the market for an Alexa, but if you're wrong about this then it makes me wonder what else you're saying that isn't correct either. Forums are not a group of people having a discussion amongst ourselves, they are more like a panel discussion where there are many more people that read the threads than who actually post in them. The technicalities of cameras and video are overwhelming enough without sprinkling in random statements that are factually incorrect.

It's also a strange comment to make if you've seen the PR videos of larger format cinema cameras where cinematographer after cinematographer gush about how the larger sensor will make all their dreams come true, and using all the words that forum fanboys use, and making all the mistakes that forum fanboys make around crop factor and DOF and FOV. I used to think that the pros automatically knew more about this stuff, but then I saw behind the curtain and realised that everyone is susceptible to sensor size envy. Since the Alexa LF and mini LF were released, the price of FF vintage primes has gone through the roof, to the point that a decade ago people were practically giving away sets of F1.4 primes and now the average cinematographer struggles to even put together a functional set of the F2.8 versions.

Interesting idea. How would you do it? I would have thought that every device would do it the same way, but maybe not..?

What a tragedy that would be.... Speaking of Iron Maiden, a recent discovery is watching reaction videos where people react to awesome music, and it's quite heartening to see that talent is still recognised and appreciated: Of course, it's also hilarious to see people implode when you give them some rather more full-on stuff too: and of course.. I first heard Slayer when I was 16 and by 17 it was basically easy listening, so I can't imagine what it would be like to hear it for the first time. For once the shocked-face in the thumbnails are appropriate!

Well, I do hate it when maidens aren't authentic!

Alexa LF and 65 are both FF or larger, you know, just in case you care about if what you're saying is actually true...