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Human vision is fundamentally different to the way that video works, so there is no frame-rate & shutter angle combination that makes sense. To expand on this, imagine you have a fan with only one fan blade, and imagine that it's spinning quite quickly. We would see the fan blade as a blur between (let's say) the 12-oclock position and the 6-oclock position. Then a tiny bit of time passes, and now we see the fan blade as a blur between 1-oclock and 7-oclock. etc. To put it into traditional video terms, the shutter angle is much much more than a 360 degree shutter. There have been attempts to actually simulate this. They filmed scenes with a very high frame rate and using a 360 shutter, and then you can combine many frames together, let's say that output frame #1 has capture frames 1-100, then output frame #2 has capture frames 11-110, etc. In this way, you can have a shutter angle that is larger than 360 degrees. You could also do things like have the motion blur be a fade rather than all parts of the motion blur be the same. I think this might be what we're running into when we talk about 24p vs 60p. Maybe 24p has the right motion-blur, but 60p has the right refresh rate, but can't have a shutter angle more than 360 degrees. I believe that computer games have worked out that the human eye can't detect anything more than a certain frame rate, ie, 120fps or 240fps or something, so in that instance there's no point rendering a game at faster than that. So what we need is a frame rate at that pace, but with motion blur around 1/50th of a second (corresponding to 24p 180 shutter) which with current technology isn't possible. Thus, the 24p 60p debate will never be resolved because the technology isn't the right kind of design. Actually, it's that 24p is a problem because people who do video use equipment designed for computer gaming, but don't know that that's what they're doing. Do you recall my earlier post where I said that film-making is deceptively simple and that people don't know what they don't know? This is one of the things I was talking about. There's no real effort required to get great 24p - just buy equipment designed for film-making and not for computer games. There are a huge number of external display adapters that are available for purchase, and they're very affordable too. BlackMagic sells a bunch of them here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products including the Decklink which is $145 for 1080p and $195 for the 4K version. I suspect these only work with Resolve, but there would be others that work with other NLEs. These will also give you support for 10-bit, HDR, and SDI if you have SDI monitoring equipment, and perhaps best of all is that they are a completely managed colour pipeline, so the operating system and display drivers and all the crap can't stuff up your colour calibration, giving you a completely calibrated display to work from. Most monitors will happily display a 1080 or 4K signal at 24p if that's what the hardware is giving them, so all you need is one of these interfaces and all the problems you're facing will go away. You could make the argument that this gives you a great 24p pipeline but it doesn't solve it for everyone viewing your videos, and that's true. For them, it will be a mixture of watching on computers designed for gaming, phones, and smart TVs. People watching on computers probably aren't going to have good 24p playback, but as has already been mentioned, will they even notice? I'm not sure about phones, but smart TVs may do this happily, considering they're designed for media consumption, not for gaming, but it might well be a patchy. I remember setting up my media boxes to be PAL and not NTSC (before I had a completely smart TV) so they were definitely broadcast focused rather than PC/gaming mentality. Also, you'd be surprised at how many people can spot the 50p "soap opera effect". I doubt that many would spot the difference between 24p and 30p, but you never know. If you ever sort out your equipment to give you proper 24p (or 25p) playback you could test your friends and family and see if they can tell. You might be surprised.

As promised... Shot on the mighty SJ4000 with replacement 8mm M12 lens. I brought the footage into Resolve and pounded it with a hammer until it no longer looked like a cheap modern camera, but reminded me of an expensive older camera. I might have been a little heavy-handed with the film-grain though, I thought YT would compress it slightly more, anyway, enjoy.

Sounds familiar, except the part about 8mm footage being available. I think there's a VHS tape with me on it when I was about 10, but I lack a VCR, so it'll sit in a box for a while I'd imagine. I seem to remember the tape wasn't that interesting lol. I do wonder if the footage would be interesting to our future selves and descendants, but if I ask the question of myself, the answer is that yes, I'd be very interested in seeing clips of my grandparents or great-grandparents, even if they were shot on a potato. But if it's not the case and one day my storage goes belly-up I'll have had enough fun along the way for it to have all been worthwhile! It makes sense that higher framerates might be more revealing and therefore make CGI imperfections more visible. Certainly HD and FHD had that effect - I heard that productions had to spend more money on makeup because little imperfections that didn't used to be visible became a problem and they had to work slower. Lots of stuff in here. I understand about BRAW, but wasn't explicitly aware that you could get lower resolution BRAW from the whole sensor. I'd be interested to know if it's downsampling or simply line-skipping / pixel-binning. If it's downsampling then that's a cool thing. The comparisons between RAW / BRAW / Prores and h265 / AVCHD performance in post is really about IPB vs ALL-I. Another example of something that the GH5 does right but no-one else is doing because they can sell you their own RAW flavour and make you buy their external recorder or their NLE. Tech companies are assholes sometimes. I understand that extra resolution in post has advantages and the more sophisticated your workflows then the more resolution is useful to you. I've kind of gone the other way with my workflow development. I started out wanting the highest quality capture (which meant 4K with sharp lenses) and was aiming to do all the hard work in post. Now I've worked out what look / aesthetic I want, I am aiming to get it right in camera as much as I can. I have moved away from shooting to crop, post-stabilisation, and shooting log to colour later. I've worked out that I have much more in common with film-makers rather than videographers. My client is me and I can make technical decisions in order to please myself and fulfil my vision and objectives, instead of having clients to please who change their minds after the shoot and don't know much but demand the most impractical but least relevant things, like 4K delivery for social media, or zooming into things in post etc. If I was a videographer I'd probably be shooting in 6K RAW, putting that on my business cards, and recycling my hard drives on a regular basis. It's not a job I envy, that's for sure!!

Very interesting and I understand the logic completely. 'Slow glass' is an interesting concept for sure. How do you edit your videos? or do you edit at all? One thing I had to work through for myself was how to edit, in terms of the philosophy of editing. For example, the real-life experience of travel is of there being yelling and stress before leaving because the kids left their packing to the last minute and then can't find things and didn't put their devices on charge (they're teenagers so we let them make their own mistakes lol) and then boredom and awkward conversation in the uber going to the airport and then stress at the airport followed by boredom waiting for the flight and then..... I had to work out if I wanted to put that stuff in there or not. Putting it in would be more like Slow Glass but it's not the kind of travel video that anyone wants to watch, and filming it certainly isn't something that would help the situation while it's happening! I concluded that I would only shoot when it didn't hinder the activity itself, and would only put things in the edit that my wife would accept or that the kids would be ok with when they are in their mid-twenties. I also realised that the process of editing (and by extension when you even pick up a camera and hit record) is editing of some kind, which is the process of sorting things according to some criteria, and your chances of that criteria not being hugely biassed is very low, especially with people you know or love. I do have a secret long-term project of sorts in that I sometimes shoot random test footage in the house for things like low-light performance and stuff, and that often includes little shots of the family watching TV or whatever happens to be happening, and the 'project' is that I don't delete it unless I'm made to do so on the spot. I won't be pulling that footage out and editing it, but it will be there when I'm old and I suspect that the family will be able to look back and not care that they were in their pyjamas and hadn't combed their hair or whatever.

One of the things that 24p gives me is a certain surrealist aesthetic. What I mean is that 24p isn't quite real, it's more like an impression of reality rather than an accurate representation of reality itself. Things that make video more realistic like 60fps, rec709 accurate colours, HDR, super high resolution, 3D, etc seem to make it less 'cinematic'. Of course, this is an aesthetic choice - if you want to make videos that seem very real then those things are great. Games or POV videos should be more realistic, so those things are benefits in that case. I shoot travel and events of my family and friends, so my videos are like a vignette of memory, and in alignment with that the aesthetic I want is fuzzy and impressionistic like memory. I also like the idea of giving the same larger-than-life aesthetic that feature films have when viewed in the cinema. I find that 24p is one of the things that helps generate that aesthetic.

I understand the attraction of codecs like BRAW, but going back to my original point - it's the bit-depth and DR that is the main attraction for them. The only reason you can WB in post is because of the extra bit-depth, and the extra DR is just that they haven't clipped the DR from the sensor, but both of those can easily be matched by other codecs, Prores 4444 and XQ for example, if implemented correctly. The downsides of any RAW/semi-RAW format are that you're either getting the full-sensor resolution or you're getting a cropped image. The full sensor resolution option requires more processing power in post to decode that resolution, then downscale/upscale it to whatever timeline resolution you're running, and only then can you process it at your timeline resolution. This gives you the benefits of oversampling, but it makes your computer do the work in post, every time you hit play. The other issue is getting a cropped image. This has three downsides: you don't retain the FOV of your lens, and you lose the oversampling, which causes both a loss of colour subsampling resolution (a 3840x2160 / 1920x1080 sensor readout is only what - 420 colour?) and the other thing you lose is the noise reduction effect of downsampling from many pixels. A proper implementation of Prores 4444 / XQ or even a 12-bit h265 ALL-I file with sufficient bitrate that was downsampled from the whole sensor would side-step all of these issues. It's why I shoot with the 200Mbps 10-bit 422 ALL-I 1080p mode on the GH5 - it gives me all the things I'm talking about except the 12-bit. The GH5 was released in 2017. Things have only gotten worse. I predict that in 3 years two-thirds the 4K devotees here will be tearing their hair out because the $4000 cameras will be offering 2500Mbps 8K and 80Mbps 4K and 20Mbps 1080 and everyone will be crying at how much it costs to have a computer that can edit 10-bit 8K h265 files. Then everyone will make the investment, and a couple of years after that..... h266. Any time you mix those two frame-rates you're going to have the 8/16 minute problem. 24/25p is a whole different thing. 23.976 vs 24p has a frame rate difference of 0.004 fps. 24 vs 25 has a 1 fps difference. I'll let you do the math 🙂 With drones it doesn't really matter anyway - no audio to sync to and I doubt you're doing much stuff where the timing is critical.

I've also found that most of the times Resolve went a bit funny (ie, something wasn't doing what I expected) then I just save and restart Resolve and re-open the project and it goes back to working fine. It may not fix your issue, but it's worth a try if you hit an issue while you're in an edit.

Not all cameras from then were 420.

I've thought a few times about what a GH6 would have to have to be better than the GH5 for me, and there's not many things TBH. Of course, I'm not the kind of person who these 24K - 300 FPS - internal RAW - 48fps burst - eyelash AF - 8kg - $12599 cameras seem to be aimed at. I have stuff invested in MFT too, but would happily re-buy a GH5 if mine broke and if I felt the need to change platforms then it would be far enough in the future that the FF camera I would buy with enough features for me wouldn't be that expensive and the lenses available are just getting more and more available and affordable. I had a burst of FOMO around FF just recently, thinking that if I even change to FF then the lenses that I'd want might be vintage primes and might all be too expensive at that point and I'd have missed out, but I kind of realised that there are enough good FF lenses available new that I could get a 'good enough' set, and partially compensate with filters. Still, if someone gave me one of these new A1 cameras then it would be great - I'd sell it and buy more interesting vintage lenses 🙂

I kind of include that in your personal decision-making process, but it's true that you can't decide on features individually, you pick the camera that has the best offering for your particular situation, which obviously includes your budget as well. One of the things that I really see as fundamentally ridiculous in modern cameras is the absolutely atrocious codecs for the lower resolutions. Many cameras have 100Mbps 4K but 25Mbps 1080p. The logic is ridiculous.... let's make a camera that can process 260Mpps (Million pixels per second - 4K at 30p), can compress 260Mpps, and can write 100Mbps to the card, then we'll take the 1080p video mode and write to the card at one-quarter of the cameras capacity! It's not like they're protecting their cine line by crippling the 1080p mode. I think poor 1080p codecs are one of the main reasons that 1080 has such a bad reputation online, people compare their 4K mode with their 1080p mode and think that's a fair comparison. Of course, in your case you could shoot 1080p in Prores HQ, which I understand is downsampled from the whole sensor. You might be a huge fan of RAW, which I understand the benefits of for some applications, and this leads me to another annoyance, and that is why they haven't implemented higher bit-depths. Prores 4444 or Prores XQ have 12-bit and higher bitrates than HQ, so might be a sensible half-step between HQ and RAW, and it allows all the benefits of a downsampled image. If you're putting 24p onto a 23.976 (or vice-versa) then it will cause a skipped / jumped frame every 16 minutes, but because it's a rounding situation, the first frame would happen around the 8 minute mark. However, every time you cut from one clip to another you're effectively resetting the clock, so you'd have to have a clip longer than 8 minutes on the not-matching timeline, or you'd have one frame error per 16 minutes (with the first error around the 8 minute mark) if your master was being broadcast on the wrong framerate. I don't think that's a real problem in practice.

I'm planning on shooting some stuff soon. I may even make the project B&W - here's that last still with a straight B&W conversion (and none of the other grading I would also do to it): The modding process was super-easy, so if anyone is curious then I'd recommend trying it. The only thing to watch is that you get a genuine SJ4000 as there are heaps of fakes on Ebay. I previously bought the cheapest one I could find, for the cheap camera challenge, and it was definitely a fake and the 640x480 video it captured was truly truly awful. There are a few easily google-able sites about how to spot a fake from the genuine one so it's not that hard.

Luckily it's an opt-in situation... 🙂 Indeed! GH6 for the win!! Seriously, a GH6 is the only camera that I would contemplate upgrading my GH5 for. Film-making is like any other technical field, there are people who are interested in what the equipment can do, and others who are interested in using it for bragging rights. You forgot the 1080p specs. Ah, don't bother. The GH5 has been killing it for many years now and releases since mostly can't touch it, and this camera is only US$6500 so......

I agree with the sentiment about shooting what you're happy with. I'd also add the caveat of forming your own opinions by doing real testing in controlled conditions and making sure you're getting the tech right. I used to read lots of stuff, and was that "confused mess" that you mentioned, and the way I got out of it was to actually test things myself and see what the effect actually was. All technical choices result in an aesthetic of some kind, and film is a creative pursuit, so it's creating a finished product with the intended aesthetic. If there was no aesthetic component then scripts would be technical manuals or lists of facts about a situation, and there would be no need to show anything other than diagrams on the screen, everything else is about the aesthetic. So when I see someone criticising a technical choice I just see someone who doesn't understand something. We criticise what we don't understand. I think film/video is especially prone to that because there is such a depth of knowledge required and it's deceptively simple, so people don't know that they don't know things. As an example, shooting 1080p and upscaling to 4K has much merit and I do it. I shoot 1080p because I have a GH5 which shoots 1080p in 200Mbps 10-bit 422 ALL-I in both 24p and 60p. I like the 'look' of 1080p and I can edit / colour those files on my laptop without having to transcode, so it doesn't cost me rendering time or money to buy a new computer. I upscale to 4K because YouTube compression is less-worse at 4K than at 1080p. You might think that it's a case of shooting in a 'worse' codec than YT, but it's not, I'm shooting 200Mbps and 4K YT is something like 10Mbps. I've done A/B tests and you can tell which is the 4K master and which is the 2K master upscaled to 4K for YT, but you have to pixel peep and you have to know where to look. For my purposes shooting 1080p gives me almost as many benefits as shooting 4K with a very significant advantage in post-production. That will be a different equation for other people, and I don't criticise everyone for shooting 4K, everyone has to make their own judgements. These judgements also include non-camera stuff and even non-filmmaking things.

This topic contains two very distinct and completely separate topics that people are mashing together - one is filming in 24p and the other is getting smooth playback of 24p through the whole image pipeline. One is an aesthetic choice and the other is a technical configuration issue. Most computers aren't setup for a 24fps refresh rate, and so when you play back a video it will be doing its own horrible things to it. That's on top of all the other horrible things that amateurs do to the frame rates already. It's very easy to see what is going on with your playback - set your smartphone to its super-slow-motion mode and then play a video and film your screen with your phone. Import the footage from your phone and then count the frames that each frame of video is displayed on your computer. There's a reason that Resolve is designed to work with BMs hardware interface cards - it means that Resolve can run your reference monitor at the right settings without the OS getting in the way and doing horrible things to the colour, bit-depth and frame rate. Until anyone has confirmed with a high-speed camera that their display is actually showing 24p (or any other frame rate) with an equal amount of time per frame then they can't speak with any credibility about the aesthetics of that frame-rate.

Following on from the Shane Hurlbut lens comparison, I'm interested in hearing about which lenses have desirable rendering properties, like a 3D quality, or a more flattering rendering of faces, etc. Some stills from the test I linked above: It seems that somehow the older optical properties of the Cooke give more depth to the image. I've also encountered this in my own tests with the Takumars, which seemed very flat in comparison to other equivalent lenses at identical apertures. Another strange example is this comparison of two 35mm lenses at the same distance and aperture: The K35 looks like it has more wide-angle distortion, almost like it is a wider lens that's closer to the subject, but that isn't the case. Of the more affordable lenses around, what are the ones that stand out? and why?

Yeah, I just watched the second part (the two hour one) and Chris said that he's trying to work a couple of years ahead of what he's shooting, so doesn't want to talk about what he's looking into because as soon as he talks about a particular vintage lens then the prices go through the roof, so he doesn't want to disclose that until he's already bought the lenses he needs to build his own set. I feel like some of these vintage lenses are already too expensive to own, and that time is running out for other series.

While watching the latest @Tito Ferradans anamorphic video, he references a great conversation about lenses and especially vintage vs modern glass. The video is 1-hour and they present screen grabs from lens tests as well as talk about lots of interesting stuff, especially K35s. @Andrew Reid - there was even some stuff mentioned in here about them that Media Division didn't include in their excellent video on the FD vs K35 lenses. There's also a part 2 that is 2-hours that I am yet to watch: In the first part above they make reference to a comparison that Shane Hurlbut made between the modern and optically excellent Leica Summilux-C and the vintage and less perfect Cooke S4, including some side-by-sides that really show a difference in how 3D the lenses are. Spoiler, the Cooke is the more 3-dimensional of the two. Going back to Jay Holben and Christopher Probst, apparently they're working on The Cine Lens Manual which is a book and has been in development for many years now and is up to 1000 pages. Apparently it's taking so long because of the extensive testing of various lenses that they have done in researching the book, so it seems like it might be an encyclopaedia when it's finally done. I'll be keeping and eye out for it, although with the work they've put in it'll probably cost more than what I'd be willing to invest! The other thing that they mentioned in the test is the previous tests done by Sharegrid. Their site is here: https://www.sharegrid.com/learn and it features a quad player feature where you can load up four lenses and play their studio test from the four of them simultaneously, which is fantastic for comparing lenses, or even the modern vs more vintage lenses. It's just a pity there aren't more affordable lenses in there!

@BTM_Pix @gt3rs thanks for the suggestions. I now understand WTF is going on. I swear that half the handrails I use are larger than 2 inches in diameter, and I was beginning to think that everyone had gone crazy making tiny undersized clamps. I looked up the standards for handrail design, and found https://www.stepform.com.au/as1675-2018/handrail-guardrail-detail.html which outlines AUSTRALIAN STANDARD AS1657 HANDRAIL / GUARDRAIL: So, handrails will be 1.18-2.56 inches in diameter.....BUT, now I get it. The US, UK and EU standards all place an upper limit on handrail diameter of 2 inches / 50mm. FFS. So now I am wondering what I do. Buy one of the many handy and affordable things that will work in almost every other place in the world except where I live which will be a crapshoot if it happens to fit or not, or go the custom rigging that's heavier, much more expensive, but will definitely fit any handrail I come across? And if I get it wrong then I'm basically screwed as there's nothing I can do. *sigh* More research reveals that https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_id=10924&p_table=STANDARDS says "For wood railings: Wood components shall be minimum 1500 lb-ft/in(2) fiber (stress grade) construction grade lumber; the posts shall be at least 2-inch by 4-inch (5 cm x 10 cm) lumber spaced not more than 8 feet (2.4 m) apart on centers; the top rail shall be at least 2-inch by 4-inch (5 cm x 10 cm) lumber, the intermediate rail shall be at least 1-inch by 6-inch (2.5 cm x 15 cm) lumber. All lumber dimensions are nominal sizes as provided by the American Softwood Lumber Standards, dated January 1970." This picture clearly shows a guardrail that is oval in shape and waaaay larger than 2" in diameter:

Yeah, I watched a few videos today and learned a couple of things, but people editing real projects seems to be pretty uncommon, let alone pros who actually know what they're doing and do it day in and day out. I guess for me there's two parts... One is how they've laid it out, both in terms of which functions they mapped to buttons and also in the overall layout itself. The other is how people actually use it. For example, I think there's likely to be a few different schools of thought around workflows and because of that the layout is likely to be designed to cater to each of them, rather than be optimised for just one of those, so the layout alone may not actually be quite so useful. I will persevere though.

Well, I think that the D-Mount project might be dead, at least for me. Some time ago I ordered a genuine SJ4000 action camera, as they're structured very differently internally and are much more supportive of lens changes. Here it is, front plate and front panel removed (which is very easy to do) and lens removed (just twist with a strong pair of pliers to break the glue and it unscrews easily)... and here it is with the mighty Cine Nikkor just sitting on top: You can probably already see what the problem is - it interferes massively with the battery slot. What you can't see from those pictures is that when the lens is mounted at this distance from the sensor and is set to focus to infinity it can barely focus beyond the hand that is holding the lens. The infinity focus is so bad that focusing close-up on the lens is basically the same. The Nikkor would need to be mounted a significant distance further into the camera, making its intersection with the battery a problem. However, I also bought two other M12 lenses when I bought the camera... Here is the 8mm one, which gives a FOV somewhere around the 40-80mm range (I haven't really tried to estimate it better than that) which is perfectly serviceable and does the job of not being a crazy fisheye lens like the stock one. Here it is mounted in the camera: The other idea of the lens replacement was that it would be less sharp and slightly "vintage" with it's 2MP CCTV "pedigree". So, how does the footage look? Well, it's one of those good/news bad news things. Good news is the lens is great and flares like a monster: The good news / bad news part is that the new lens doesn't appear to have an IR filter on it, and I didn't swap the one from the other lens over yet, so it's an IR camera!! I've always wanted to try IR photography so that's pretty cool. Also, my original plan was to make everything B&W anyway, so that doesn't really matter much, and actually gives more light to work with, which is great for these tiny sensors. This pot is bright red, just like the leaves of that plant are bright green: The bad news is that the compression is pretty crunchy: Of course, I've worked with worse, so that's fine. But, going back to the Cine Nikkor, unless I want to somehow move the battery connectors, which are soldered onto the circuitboard IIRC, then the lens isn't going to be mounted to this camera any time soon. I'm also wondering if the codec is good enough to really warrant putting a nicer lens on it. I also bought a 16mm CCTV lens, but that can't even mount because it has to be so far AWAY from the sensor that it doesn't even touch the M12 mount, I'm free-lensing it at a decent distance in front of the camera. Also, the FOV from the 13mm Cine Nikkor would be prohibitively long, unless shooting with a tripod or a rig that's at least 20 times the size of the camera. One of the benefits of this setup is that it's so small I can film with it without any other rigging. I shot a project the other day with just my phone in 240fps mode, and am having fun editing that (my wife picked a ridiculous song for the edit which really elevates the project lol) and I'm wondering if using my phone is the ultimate camera for street and casual videography. Everyone takes photos these days and if I pull a face while I'm shooting maybe people will just assume I'm taking a selfie and not react in that "I've just been photographed!!!!" kind of way that some people do. So, SJ4000 and 8mm 2MP CCTV lens.. is it a cinematic beast? Probably not, but is it an interesting thing? Sure... It's probably the Super-8 version of an action camera.

I also love the look of lenses wider than 28mm. I think that the fact that 24/28 is the standard wide end of a zoom and therefore kind of the default focal length for landscapes etc put me off it. The fact that every smartphone video until two year ago was also that FOV sure didn't help. I settled on 15/35/85 FF equivalent FOVs as how I shoot. I love the 35 for environmental portraits (which is most of the work I do) and the 85 for close-ups or detail shots or far-away things and the 15 for landscapes and buildings and anything that's big and you want a WOW reaction from. When I bought my Laowa 7.5mm f2 (which is equivalent to a 15mm F4 on FF) I was tossing up between that one and the 10.5mm f0.95, but I wasn't sure that the 21mm equivalent FOV would be wide enough, and you can always crop in post but you can't zoom out in post so I didn't get it. Having done a few trips with the 7.5mm (and the 8mm SLR Magic I had before that) I've realised that I don't think I ever need quite the full width of the 15/16 FOV they give, but I'm not sure how much narrower I can go before I'd start missing the width. 18mm might be a good point to look at. I've done shots where I filled the 15mm FOV with the object, not leaving any dead space on the sides of the frame, and found that I had to get closer and the wide-angle-distortion was too much, so I'd have been better off standing further back and having a longer focal length. This is an example where the lens is too wide, unless you're deliberately going for a ridiculous look which I was.... but for this shot it was fine:

It's worth mentioning that with the right geometry you don't even need to tighten the clamp at all. This hook, which is designed to sit on top of a door, works because all the force is applied to one side of the door, and because the force from gravity is down, which keeps the hook securely on top of the door: Obviously the clamps we're talking about can easily rotate if kept loose, but I'm just saying that they don't need to be super tight because they're not fighting gravity, they're working with it.

Ok, now I am going to call you guys crazy.. Balconies are designed so that drunk people partying will be stopped by the fence/railing when they trip or get shoved towards the railing. People who fall from balconies do so because they fall over the railing, not that the railing fails! I'll take the structural integrity of something designed to hold up 100kg+ falling people over the structural integrity of an aluminium tripod with a rating of 10lb/5kg 🙂 Obviously it's important not to over-tighten the clamps, and also to ensure that the teeth or clamping surfaces aren't sharp in any way, which can easily be done by just putting a towel or t-shirt inside the clamp, but the setup only needs to hold up a GHx and lens combo, so that's not a problem. I can also arrange to put a tether around it to catch the setup if the clamp fails, but the orientation I would set it up in would put the centre of mass on the balcony side of the railing so it would tip into the balcony rather than over it anyway.

That makes total sense, and I guess that the lack of them out in the wild (they're radically backordered) will exacerbate current second-hand prices too. I can't justify the purchase now, so waiting until more people have taken delivery of theirs, and inevitably a bunch of people working out that it's not for them, will mean there are more around and the price might go down a bit. The way people were talking was that the editor was almost the same price as the license, so the (faulty) conclusion would be that you can get these things for almost nothing!! Alas. I think longer-term I would likely end up selling it anyway. For me, the more important aspect would be learning what techniques it's designed around and then implementing them in some other way. The only non-keyboard thing that the editor seems to have is the jog wheel, which I already have with my Beatstep Resolve conversion.

So, if I bought the Speed Editor and then sold the Resolve license to recoup some of the cost, how much is the difference? Has anyone looked at this? My rationale is that I want the Speed Editor but don't want to pay for it!