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Merry Christmas @Andrew Reid and everyone.. Just think how great it will be once we're all able to get out and actually start shooting again!

True. If they'd designed an interchangeable lens mount then it could still have been an M12 based system, but having the thread permanently mounted to the camera wouldn't have worked. Much better would have been to mount a few metal female mounting points around the sensor and have some kind of assembly that contained an M12 mount and lens that could be fastened to the board with the sensor on it. M12 is a reasonable mount because it's widely used in security / CCTV cameras, but the mounts are not designed to be re-used beyond initial assembly of the product.

The problem is that the flange distance of the GoPro lens setup, which IIRC is M12, is very small and the camera has a very narrow opening. This is a GoProp replacement lens - note that the entire lens is very narrow, essentially fitting inside the M12 mount (which has an internal thread). Most interesting lenses are much thicker, like this one, so can't be mounted without major surgery to the GoPro electronics: However, if GoPro had designed it a little differently then it would have been pretty easy to design it so that other lenses could have been used - the could even have sold them at horrifically inflated prices like every other product they sold.

A couple of years ago my wife and I did a trip to India with a charity and the trip consisted of a mixture of tourist stuff as well as visiting the beneficiaries of the charity in a bunch of rural villages. Due to a combination of factors I didn't film the people we visited in the villages, but I have a number of stills photos that were taken and am now editing the project and looking for advice on how to integrate these images as seamlessly as possible. The rest of the project consists of footage of travel legs of cities and rural India, as well as the tourist locations like Taj Mahal etc, so my concern is that the images will be a bit jarring, but visiting the villages was a personal highlight of the trip so if anything I want to emphasise those parts rather than de-emphasise them. The images I have are smartphone images and range from being single images (like a group photo), to having sequences of photos (how people will take 3 or 4 images of something happening), all the way to a few bursts of 20+ images of things like a guy operating a loom. I'm immediately reminded of the work of Ken Burns, and will definitely animate some movement in the images, but I don't typically narrate my videos and I have very limited audio from these locations, so the images may be required to stand on their own, which I'm concerned about. I can probably cheat a little and find some audio from elsewhere and use that as ambience, which I've done before on other projects to cover gaps in my filming (lol). I also took audio when the women sang so I have those too. I'm thinking that I should embrace it and deliberately give it a more mixed-media feel, considering that I can make stop-motion from the sequences / bursts, and I could even use stills instead of video in other moments where I did shoot video, or even go so far as pulling frames from video to use as stills, in order to kind of 'balance' the amount of stills vs video and make it a consistent style element. Has anyone edited a project where there were a lot of still images, stop-motion, or other non-video elements? I'm keen to hear ideas....

So, to paraphrase... In March, GoPro stocks were down to 3% of their 2014 peak But they've gone up from 3% to 10% of their peak The rise was unexpected In a conversation about a companies business model, where that business model hasn't really changed in the entire lifetime of the company, I would suggest that "down by 90% since 2014" is a more relevant figure than what they did in the last quarter, month, quarter-of-an-hour, etc... It's relatively easy to select any time portion you like to prove a point. For example, in the last few days they lost over 8% of their value. At that rate I guess they'll be bankrupt by the new year. Unless, of course, you think I'm taking the most current data out of context and I should zoom out a bit? 🙂

The question "what sensor most matches film?" is about as useful as "what film matches digital?". If you're interested in using digital sensors to emulate film, then learn to colour grade, like I said. What is possible far outreaches what people think is possible.

Historical context happens when you zoom out......

Use of a single prime can have many advantages, this article from Noam Kroll is a good overview: https://noamkroll.com/many-iconic-directors-have-shot-their-feature-films-with-just-a-single-prime-lens-heres-why/ Of course, it has to fit with your situation as @zerocool22 illustrates. I derived my choice of the 35mm FOV from my situation, being that I wanted environmental portraits while being on holiday with people I know, so typically filming between 1-3m away from the person, and I'm often not allowed to move around such as in tour busses and boats. The FOV also creates a neutral point of view that is close enough to 'normal' that it doesn't create any obvious effect. I found a 50mm FOV to be too tight as it tends to isolate at that distance, and 28mm FOV isn't tight enough because when you get someone large enough in frame they become too distorted. The idea of a 2x zoom is interesting and I've recently discovered that with the 5K GH5 sensor I can shoot 1080p and get a 5K-2K downscale but also if I use the 2x digital zoom then I get a 2.5K-2K downscale so image quality is still preserved and noise reduced compared to the 2.5x 1:1 crop which is also a bit too much of a change to be so flexible. That turns my 35mm FOV lens into a 70mm FOV lens too. It's a useful option and for those that like 24mm focal length the 24-70 is a great choice. Interesting to hear about your scheduling limitation @Anaconda_ - do you find that you can plan and operate on a weekly cycle with this schedule? What are the productivity implications you've found?

One of the things that I think amateurs miss about professional film-making is that it's a production line. There are standards for how each operator does their bit so that when it's passed to the next operator they know what to do with it and don't have to re-invent the wheel each time. These standards have been developed over many decades in order to get the best results from an acceptable time commitment. I think that's something that is really missing from people who think of film-making as a single-operator. Not only because you're not in the mind-set of working with others and thinking of their needs, but also in the sense that we can do anything and 'get away with it' because we're passing the footage we shot to ourselves to edit and then to ourselves to sound mix and then to ourselves to colour grade and then ourselves to encode and deliver. As a single-operator if you do something a bit wrong and then get it into the edit you're now in a situation where you're having to work with what you have, and maybe you get frustrated and maybe you learn. In a team if you do something a bit wrong you will get a pretty severe talking to from the boss and you will learn from that experience and probably never do it again. Netflix sets dozens of rules with their cameras, it's not just TC. These reasons are there so that the chain of how team-based film-making works isn't completely screwed up because of camera choice. Anyone who isn't familiar with the rules should go read them, and if there's a rule that you don't understand the benefit of, then you should learn more about it, because these rules have been created by the people that do this successfully for a living for decades.

GoPros allow highly-skilled operators to make spectacular situations look great in the same way. Great cameras allow passable operators to make modest situations look very good in whatever way you want as an artist. I think GoPro missed an opportunity by not offering a model where the lenses could be interchanged, even if it was via a relatively delicate process that took some time and couldn't be done 'in the field'. I bought a Sony X3000 instead of a GoPro as it had OIS instead of EIS, which matters in low-light situations, and that will be replaced by the wide-angle camera in whatever smartphone I have at that point. GoPro filled a niche and didn't innovate. Not a recipe for the long-term.

Thanks, that's interesting. I'm not relishing the idea of having to buy it separately, but I guess it might be worth me doing some reading about custom view LUTs. Thanks, that's also worth knowing. If you can't easily switch it on and off then that would mean it would have to be suitable to be the only way you're viewing footage while recording. Normally a DP would have a technical view like false colour to ensure proper exposure, the DP and director (and others) would have a 'normal' view (perhaps with a look LUT), and the focus puller would have a separate view with peaking. If I applied a LUT in-camera then I'd be designing a LUT for all three applications simultaneously, which i'm not sure is possible to design well.

I recently re-watched a great video on the visual style of Alfonso Cuarón and collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, and in delving into this more deeply, was reminded how the pair imposed their own limitations when shooting Y Tu Mamá También and how limitations can help focus the creative process and also keep costs down and allow amplified creativity. Who else does this in their own work? We likely all have limitations imposed externally, considering we're not world famous with infinite time and money, but even for those who are operating with limitations, how many of you are either consciously shaping your process in order to fit within your limitations, or even imposing more when you don't need to, in order to simplify and increase creativity? I have found that the limitations that Cuarón/Lubezki impose fit well with my own. They shoot only wide angle lenses, exclusively hand-hold the camera, use natural light, and feature the characters relationships to each other and to their wider surroundings. Further, the camera movement is deliberate and has a 'character', they use long takes at the climaxes in order to further the sense of reality of the situations. I shoot my families travel and the occasional event, shooting hand-held with a 35mm prime (and only changing lenses when a specific shot is called for), shoot only in available light, feature the moments of my family and friends interacting with each other and the environment we're in, and because i'm behind the camera and have a relationship with my family my movement and framing will take on that character. It almost seems to me that there will be a range of famous directors, DoPs, cinematographers, and other visual artists that will align well enough with your own style and preferences that we can learn a lot from it. Who else is studying the visual styles and processes of others to learn?

Smuggle in your own popcorn, and put your mobile phone on silent, but don't accept the defeat of cinema! RISE UP!

Good question and thanks for raising it. I've contemplated this option in the past and decided against it because at the time I decided that being able to see colour was more important for framing and composition for me. I shoot personal videos of my friends and family in uncontrolled situations so it's useful for me to see the colour so that I can include it in the shot or exclude it depending on what I want. Having said that though, with the freedom of colour grading, I can 'fix' any undesirable colours in post, so even if I don't see them during filming it's not a problem for the final footage. In a sense I'd like a setting that's half-way, where saturation is reduced to perhaps a third and the highlights are in a fully-saturated colour. It would be great to be able to apply a display LUT in-camera (GH5 doesn't have that feature) as I could design one that partly desaturates the image and also shows an image with increased contrast so that it exaggerates exposure and makes it easier to get the exposure of things like skintones correct. I'd also make it so that pure white was 100% red and pure black was 100% blue, so you could tell what you were clipping.

Q: When will digital catch up to film? A: When you learn to colour grade properly. With a few notable exceptions (you know who you are), the colour grading skill level of the average film-maker talking about this topic online is terrible. Worse still, is that people don't even know enough to know that they don't know how little they actually know. I have been studying colour grading for years at this point, and I will be the first to admit that I know so little about colour grading that I have barely scratched the surface. Here's another question - Do you want your footage to look like a Super-8 home video from the 60s? I suspect not. That's not what people are actually looking for. Most people who want digital to look like film actually don't. Sure, there are a few people on a few projects where they want to shoot digital and have the results look like it was shot on film in order to emulate old footage, but mostly the question is a proxy for wanting nice images. Mostly they want to get results like Hollywood does. Hollywood gets its high production value from spending money on production design. Production design is about location choice, set design, costume / hair / makeup, lighting design, blocking, haze, camera movement, and other things like that. If you point a film camera at a crappy looking scene then you will get a crappy looking scene. There's a reason that student films are mostly so cringe and so cheap-looking. They spent no money on production design because they had no money. Do you think that big budget films would spend so much money if it didn't contribute to the final images? I suggest this: Think about how much money you'd be willing to spend on a camera that created gorgeous images for you, and how much you'd spend on re-buying all your lenses, cages, monitors, and all the kit you would need to buy Think about how much time you would be willing to invest on doing all the research to work out what camera that was, how much time you would spend selling your existing equipment, how much time you would spend working out what to buy for the new setup, how much time you would spend learning how to use it, how much time you would spend learning to process the footage Take that money and spend half of it on training courses and take the other half and put it into shooting some test projects that you can learn from, so you can level-up your abilities Take that time you would have spent and do those courses and film those projects People love camera tests, but it's mostly a waste of time. Stop thinking about camera tests and start thinking about production value tests. Take a room in your house, get one or two actors, hire them if you have to (you have a budget for this remember) and get them to do a simple scene, perhaps only 3-6 lines of dialog per actor. It should be super-short because you're going to dissect it dozens of times, maybe hundreds. Now experiment with lighting design and haze. Play with set design and set dressing. Do blocking and camera movement tests. Do focal length tests (not lens tests). Now do costume design, hair and makeup tests. Take this progression into post and line them up and compare. See which elements of the above added the most production value. But you're not done yet - you've created a great looking scene but it is probably still dull. Now you have to play with the relationship between things like focal length / blocking / camera movement and the dramatic content of the scene. Most people know that we go closer to show important details, and when the drama is highest, but what about in those moments between those peaks? Film the whole scene from every angle, every angle you can even think of, essentially getting 100% coverage. Now your journey into editing begins. Start with continuity editing (if you don't know what that is then start by looking it up). You now have the ability to work with shot selection and you should be using it to emphasise the dramatic content of the scene. Create at least a dozen edits, trying to make each one as different as possible. You can play with shot length, everything from the whole scene as one wide shot to a cut every 1s. You can cut between close-ups for the whole scene, or go between wides and close-ups. Go from wide to mid to close and go straight from wide to close without the mid shots in between. What did you learn about the feel of these choices? What about choosing between the person talking and the person listening? What does an edit look like where you only see the person talking, or just the person looking? Which lines land better when you see the reaction-shot? Play with L and J cuts. Now we play with time. You have every angle, so you can add reverse-angles to extend moments (like reality TV does), you can do L and J cuts and play with cutting to the reaction shot from some other line. What about changing the sequence of the dialogue? Can you tell a different story with your existing footage? How many stories can you tell? Try and make a film with the least dialogue possible - how much of the dialogue can you remove? What about no dialogue at all - can you tell a story with just reaction shots? Can you make a silent film that still tells a story - showing people talking but without being able to hear them? Play with dialogue screens like the old silent films - now you can have the actors "say" whatever you like - what stories can you tell with your footage? Then sound design.... Then coaching of actors.... Now you've learned how to shoot a scene. What about combining two scenes? Think of how many combinations are now available - you can now combine scenes together where there are different locations, actors, times of day, seasons, scenarios, etc. Now three scenes. Now acts and story structure.... Great, now you're a good film-maker. You haven't gotten paid yet, so career development, navigating the industry, business decisions and commercial acumen. Do you know what films are saleable and which aren't? Have you worked out why Michael Bay is successful despite most film-makers being very critical of him and his film-making approach and style? There's a saying about continuity - "people only notice continuity errors if you film is crap". Does it matter? Sure, but it's not the main critical success factor. Camera choice is the same.

I'm going to disagree with all the sentiments in this thread and recommend something different. Go rent an Alexa. For practical purposes, maybe an Alexa Mini. Talk to your local rental houses and see if there's a timeframe you can rent one and get a big discount, often rental houses are happy to give you a discount if you're renting it when the camera wouldn't be rented by anyone else so have a chat with them. Shoot with it a lot. Shoot as much as you can and in as many situations as you can. Just get one lens with it then take it out and shoot. Shoot in the various modes it has, shoot into the sun and away from it. Shoot indoors. Shoot high-key and shoot low key. Then take the camera back and grade the footage. I suspect you won't do this. It's expensive and a cinema camera like an Alexa is a PITA unless you have used one before. So I'll skip to the end with what I think you'll find. The footage won't look great. The footage will remind you of footage from lesser cameras. You will wonder what happened and if you're processing the footage correctly. I have never shot with an Alexa, but I am told by many pros that if you don't know what you're doing, Alexa footage will look just as much like a home video as from almost any other camera. Cinematic is a word that doesn't even really have any meaning in this context. It really just means 'of the cinema' and there's probably been enough films shot and shown in cinemas on iPhones that now an iPhone technically qualifies as being 'cinematic'. Yes, i'm being slightly tongue-in-cheek here, but the point remains that the word doesn't have any useful meaning here. Yes, images that are shown in the cinema typically look spectacular. Most of this is location choice, set design, hair, costume, makeup, lighting, haze, blocking, and the many other things that go into creating the light that goes through the lens and into the camera. That doesn't mean that the camera doesn't matter. We all have tastes, looks we like and looks we don't, it's just that the word 'cinematic' is about as useful as the word 'lovely' - we all know it when we see it but we don't all agree on when that is. By far the more useful is to work out what aspects of image quality you are looking for: Do you like the look of film? If so, which film stocks? What resolution? Some people suggest that 1080p is the most cinematic, whereas some argue that film was much higher resolution than 4K or even 8K. What about colour? The Alexa has spectacular colour, so does RED. But neither one will give you good colour easily, and neither will give you great colour - great colour requires great production design, great lighting, great camera colour science, and great colour grading. By the way - Canon also has great colour, so does Nikon, and other brands too. You don't hear photographers wishing their 5D or D800 had colour science like in the movies. What lenses do you like? Sharp? Softer? High-contrast? Low contrast? What about chromatic aberation? and what about the corners - do you like a bit of vignetting or softness or field curvature? Bokeh shape? dare I mention anamorphics? But there is an alternative - it doesn't require learning what you like and how to get it, it doesn't require the careful weighting of priorities, and it's a safer option. Buy an ARRI Alexa LF and full set of Zeiss Master Primes. That way you will know that you have the most cinematic camera money can buy, and no-one would argue based on their preferences. You still wouldn't get the images you're after because the cinematic look requires an enormous team and hundreds of thousands of dollars (think about it - why would people pay for these things if they could get those images without all these people?) but there will be no doubt that you have the most cinematic camera that money can buy. I'd suggest Panavision, but they're the best cameras that money can't buy.

There was a hack to do it that I came across. From memory you save the project file (very important!), then select all clips on the timeline, edit-cut, now the timeline is empty you can change the frame rate, then paste everything back again. I remember trying it and it working, so if the above doesn't work then let me know and I'll see if I wrote it down anywhere.

Great to hear you're upping your colour grading game, and getting better results! I watched that video a long time ago and found it quite useful at the time. The workflow you describe above is a pretty standard workflow in colour grading circles. In terms of how I believe it's normally discussed: Skintone exposure is typically set on location through a combination of camera and lighting / lighting modifiers Somehow the image gets converted to a 709 space (This can be via a great many methods, depending on your preferred workflow, but a conversion or PFE LUT is fairly common) The adjustments that get made to the whole image are referred to as primary adjustments, or "primaries" The adjustments that get made to parts of the image (for example via power windows or a key) are secondary adjustments, or "secondaries" Colour grading can seem like a bit of a dark art, and in many ways it is, but it's definitely a case of the 80/20 rule where you can put in a little effort and get a big reward in return. Here are a few videos that I've found useful that cover the basics but go a little further than Avery does in the above video... enjoy! Great video from Wandering DP (excuse the clickbait title - it was done as a joke!): I can't speak highly enough of Wandering DP - his channel is full of cinematography breakdown videos where he talks about lighting and composition and are tremendously useful if you shoot your own content. Ironically, the above video by him talking about colour grading is better than most YT colour grading videos, despite the fact he isn't a colourist, doesn't claim to be one, and this is the only video on his channel that talks about it! I have gone through a kind of mental 180 degree shift in how I think about shooting and colour grading over the last 6 months or so, and I think that his videos have played a significant part in that transformation. My understanding about how to go about shooting and grading is now far simpler, clearer, and I'm getting radically better results, and I'm not sure how I didn't understand this years ago or how there is any other way to think about it at all! And to take things up a notch, here's a video from Waqas, who is a professional colourist and obviously enormously talented. This video shows his approach, how he might make a commercial grade, and how he might make a cinematic grade. I can also recommend his videos too, as although he has a standard approach that he likes to use (as all colourists tend to have), most of his videos have little details and tips that you can pick up new stuff from, even if you've watched his other videos already. You'll also notice if you look at his channel that he recently did long interviews with the DP and the Cinematographer of Joker. The common theme between these two YT channels is that both of them are industry professionals, not internet professionals, so their frame of reference is how things are done on set, rather than the typical YT / Vlog / buy-my-LUT / links-in-the-description folks that are all over YT pretending to know what they're doing. Good luck!

I suspect that it's the grade, or some part of the image pipeline. Apparently the first one was shot on a Red Epic, which according to wikipedia: "In 2010, Red released the Red Epic which was used to shoot The Amazing Spider-Man, The Hobbit, Prometheus, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and The Great Gatsby as well as many other feature films." I'm assuming that it was the earlier Epic, instead of later ones, but even then, I didn't think that those other films looked particularly thin. I'd imagine that shooting with a Red you'd either shoot in RAW or Prores, so it would have been at least 10-bit. For me, it was quite a difference between the two in terms of image thickness. In terms of the creative effect, the subject matter of the first one is very digital/cold whereas the second one is more analog and human, so 'thin' and 'brittle' is a relevant and appropriate creative choice for the subject matter.

I think if you applied it in the Timeline node tree then it should work? It's worth testing, although applying presets to the Timeline graph may or may not work, I've had trouble doing that in the past. If it doesn't work, you can append it to a single clip, copy it, apply it to the timeline graph, remove it from the clip, take the screenshots you want, then just delete it. The alternative (if it works - I haven't tried it) is to highlight multiple clips and then append the node to all of them. This should work for extracting stills, but removing it might have to be done manually, which is a PITA. The other other way, which is a different approach, is to setup your grade with a shared node as the last node, and apply the adjustment in it, but setting the strength of the effect to zero using the Key Output in the Key tab. Then when you want to enable it just up the Key Output, take the shots, then set it back to zero. If you have an existing project then you'd have to copy/paste that node onto every clip. I'm not sure if there's a bulk way to do that, but once you did it you could do anything you liked with it. If you were going to do that then I would suggest copying half-a-dozen shared nodes so that if you need them then they're already setup.

Thoughts on how thin / thick these two trailers are?

You're have a good point, but I don't think this is what matters. What does matter is the difference between what a camera is capable of and what most people get out of it. If someone is getting half of the potential of a P4K then giving them an Alexa isn't going to give much of an advantage, because the same limitations that prevented them from getting even close to the potential of the P4K will also prevent them from getting the most out of the Alexa. There's a saying about continuity - "if people notice continuity problems then your film is crap". I think colour is kind of the same in many ways. As much as I love it, a great film with BM colour, GH5 colour, or even Sony colour, is still a great film. There have been many reports of people that don't know what they're doing using an Alexa, and the results are reported to look like a home video.

I think the hidden 'hack' for good IQ is to go back to 1080p. The GH5 has great 1080p modes, but even if the camera you have doesn't, if you shoot in the typical 4K modes then put them on a 1080p timeline then they're significantly better due to downsampling. I look at all the latest camera releases and don't really see much that I would want over what I have, from a 1080p perspective. Sure, if you're doing commercial gigs where people are paying for the spec, or recording stock footage or whatever, then sure, go for it. But any time you see a great image come up on your phone, you're not looking at something that's great because of the resolution, it will be the composition, lighting, colour, etc. That's where I'm spending my time and energy now.

Sounds like you're talking about situations where everyone is paid and everything is at or above standards, and of course, at that point it's well worth spending money on equipment as it pays for itself in lost time. Having a dozen people or more plus equipment on set is expensive. In terms of the whole of film-making though, lots of people are making content where they are time rich but cash poor, which is more where I was talking about. I think it's easy to forget how broad a range of film-making there is going on - everything from YouTubers with a phone and (maybe) and LED light and a lav, people making features by working part-time and maxing out a couple of credit cards, folks doing weddings or corporates, people on low budget but industry rate sets, through to productions where there are people above the line and the daily rental on the trucks alone would make the credit-card film-maker cry. I try to keep my comments generic and in the context of everyone. Plus, these forums seem to be more frequented by people at the lower end of the scale than at the higher end.

I'm actually not so sure about DR anymore. I compared the HLG mode vs Cine-D (709 equivalent) modes on my GH5 and the HLG has a couple of stops more DR (IIRC) than the Cine-D, but in real-life the differences weren't that much, even in extreme situations. The only time I missed some DR in my comparison shots was when the sun was in the shot, but even then it wasn't much. I used to shoot and think about DR in terms of making sure nothing was clipped, and then grading it to control everything. Now I realise that I don't care about things with that much DR. If I'm shooting inside and the outside is blown out then I can choose which thing I expose on, and if I care about the relationship between both then typically I can get a silhouette, and times when a face is important on the person inside (maybe they're looking out) then their face will be much better exposed and I can get the outside and their face. I'm not saying there are no situations where extra DR matters, but I'm saying that with, say, the 9-10 stops of DR that most cameras have now in 709 modes, that's enough for most situations. Also, the situations where 12 stops isn't enough, you might find that the 15 stops of high-end cameras is also not enough. Things with high DR that are common like fire, welding, the sun, any night scene where there is no ambient artificial light (eg, moonlight with torches, or moonlight with headlights) etc will be more than 15 stops of DR, so there's no point lusting after an Alexa in those situations either. In terms of lighting, I think maybe you're underestimating how much skill is involved in getting the highest quality shots that top-end shows and movies have. Give someone who is clueless an unlimited lighting budget (and an Alexa and great cine glass) and you'll still get something that looks awful. Lighting budgets only make a difference after you have someone with the skill to know what to do with them.