kye

Yeah, 1080p 300fps 10bit would be great for a cinewhoop. I was being sarcastic - reacting to the headline that it'll do 5K30 and 4K60. That's the kind of headline that announces that a camera designed in 2017 has finally been released. Part of the advantage of smaller sensors is that they can do faster video modes than larger ones, but it looks like GoPro has fallen way behind in this regard, if 4K60 is where it's at.

On the contrary, I like it quite a lot. It drew me in and immediately had a fresh and honest aesthetic that made his life look somehow very appealing and yet very accessible. I'm not sure if you've ever tried creating a video like these, but this is in kind-of the same direction that I work towards, and I can tell you, anything that is effortless to watch is because the person making it put in all the effort! Maybe I'm wrong, and he's just a natural, where everything he does just happens to come together into a coherent narrative with candid shots that all work and support the edit in post. The internet is a big place and I guess statistically there are likely to be a few people out there who can just pick up a camera and it all just works for them. Who knows. It sounds like it might be worth a go. When I was shooting stills there was a pretty constant supply of stories from people who say that photography saved their life. Typically they were working through the loss of a loved one or some other kind of major tragedy and were approaching suicide and someone gave them a camera and they just went out and started taking photos and it ended up helping them get through that difficult time. I am no expert, but one thing that comes to mind is deliberately doing the opposite of what you would typically do for paid jobs and testings. I've had a lot of success creatively in many different creative fields (music, drawing, photography, and more) by deliberately taking something you always do and just doing the opposite to see what would happen. It kind of instantly makes something new and fresh, and you won't have any expectation that it will work (many times it really won't!) which means you will also take risks and will be more in the moment. Worst case is you spend some time and have a little fun. I'm not so sure. I think nowadays with pervasive social media it's tempting to always be trying to get something that's sharable, and even if not sharable, you're always comparing yourself with things you see online. Think about beauty 'standards' and how young women talk about how they look - they can be incredibly beautiful and yet think they are ugly or fat because they're comparing themselves to supermodels or to tennis stars that spend 8 hours a day in the gym, or to pop stars who have been photoshopped to death in every image that's publicly available. Think about the people that you know and how often someone thinks they have an undesirable feature like a big nose or frizzy hair or blotchy skin or whatever and when they look in the mirror that's all they see. I know people who have worked out some bizarre way to contort themselves for photos and they end up looking ridiculous but they do it because it slightly improves the one thing that they see when they look at themselves. I remember a saying "don't compare your insides with other peoples outsides", which is talking about how we are aware of our own inner vulnerabilities and mistakes but are only aware of the projected personas of other people so we naturally don't compare well in that context. I used to think about Christian the same way - another 'cinematic vlogger - epic b-roll - buy my LUT packs - thanks to todays sponsor' but the last few videos have been different and he's started to become authentic, which puts him in another league entirely. I think the pressure on these people is huge, and there's a formula for making things look good and do well on social media. In a sense it's copying the Peter McKinnon aesthetic, except that the aesthetic alone feels empty without a big personality and big content. I think all the big YouTubers have a quite deliberate aesthetic, Casey Neistat has spoken openly about his, but when you're copying instead of finding your own voice I think there's a place that you end up and that's the aesthetic where there's the tens of thousands of these people that you're talking about. They kind of all end up looking like a model in a lifestyle commercial rather than a real human being. He now has my attention, let's see if he can keep it up.

Makes sense, if you're finding flat spots in the value of things then sure. I don't think it's unnecessary for you to want some assurances from Panasonic, but I do think it's unrealistic. There's a reason that 'corporate speak' exists, just like there's a reason that there's 'politician speak'. Politicians are trained in PR and phrase things so that no small snippet or sentence fragment can be quoted out of context, because if that happens then there's a media storm and it's bad for them, because that's how politics work. It's a similar thing for corporates, there is a different set of rules, somewhere between the PR implications of perception and the sharks in the water of whatever political environment that anyone with power is inevitably swimming in. From the outside things often make no sense, but if you're aware of the complex dynamics involved internally then things make sense.

I'm not convinced. I just picked a video of his at random and watched a few minutes and what I saw was pretty heavily sculpted. As someone who spends weeks / months of the year travelling and shooting my own adventures (and I'm talking thousands of clips per week) I can tell you that how he shoots is not how you shoot if your primary goal is to have fun. He knows what he's doing and the missed-focus and shaky camera work is just him fine-tuning an aesthetic different to what is traditionally sought after. I've seen wedding video that looked like this, and it's a style. It's the hipster I-don't-care style, but it's a style nonetheless. I would categorise C-Roll as shooting clips with no use, where it would be rare to use them in anything published for several years at least. If your aesthetic is to shoot random stuff then edit it and publish it, then it's no longer random, it's planned. I've seen burnout on the YouTubers that keep up a weekly / more often schedule, and you hear how they start with a love for film and just having fun, it gets success and they have an interest so they try new things, then they get good and they push themselves, and before you know it they lose the ability to live their life separately from how it will appear online, and the stress of that normally ends badly. Unfortunately you only get to hear those stories in the "We're separating" videos from famous online couples. I think Christian is suggesting exactly the opposite. To shoot the clips that won't be any good, and the fact they won't be any good I think is what makes them what they are. If something is good then as an artist the temptation is to switch into the "how do I look" mode, which is the thinking pattern that makes people miserable the more they use social media.

I've known people who bought cars that were 1-2 years old with low kms, drove them for a year or so, then sold them and bought another 1-2 years old. They were essentially buying once the car had lost its "brand new" value and then sold them a year later for basically the same price, because the value of the car was essentially a flat spot during that period, so it was a way of kind of 'leasing' a car for free. I say 'leasing' as they had to be super careful and not get any marks on them or anything, otherwise the value goes down. Do you employ a similar logic in your camera equipment? Technology goes down in value so quickly that I basically assume that if I'm going to own something for long enough to use it in any meaningful way then it's going to reduce in value to the point where it's not worth my time to sell it.

LOL. I saw something about this the other day, can't remember where. The purpose is to give your kids a well-rounded set of life experiences. We have a strange concept the the goal of doing anything is to get stupidly good at it. If that was the case then success at school is becoming a university professor with a doctorate, and everyone else in the world is a failure at school. Hardly! I went the Sony X3000 route because it has OIS, but that's getting pretty long in the tooth and is out of your budget it seems. The GoPro market only has a few players with theDJI Osmo Action being the other contender, which also appears out of your price range. In a sense, GoPro is kind of the default choice because it's what everyone else is using and so there's so much more support for it because everyone has one. GoPro has a system of generations (i.e., Hero 6) and tiers (i.e., Black, Silver, White) and often the Black of one generation becomes the Silver of the next generation and the White of the following generation, although sometimes they get new features or whatever. It's worth comparing models across this grid to see which has the best specs.

Back in the day we had stuff called "tracing paper", although it probably wouldn't have the heat tolerance of baking paper, for, well, obvious reasons!

YouTuber Christian Maté Grab recently posted this video, which I think is very interesting, is hugely authentic, and quite frankly, brave. He talks about shooting footage for yourself, for no pre-defined or pre-imagined purpose, just of things that happen in your normal life. This is what he's called "C-Roll". He talks about how he has recently struggled with quite debilitating mental health issues / depression and the roll that C-Roll played in helping him recover from that state. The idea isn't new to those of us old enough to remember film cameras (he's probably not) and to a certain extent he's just discovered home videos, but I think it's an interesting and important point for those of us who may have adapted to only thinking of shooting for commercial purposes or for likes and followers, especially as the world gets crazier with the hype of social media and the slow but inevitable upset of basically the entire film-making and professional video industry. Here's the video: Do you shoot personal footage?

Yes, there are small pockets of uniqueness right at the edges of what is possible that maybe can only be achieved with one camera system or other. I experience that when I am shooting 120p on my GH5 and I enable ETC mode on the 70-210mm + 2x TC to get a FF equivalent focal length of 2100mm, which isn't something many camera systems can do. Other things aren't so difficult. My GH5 and the Laowa 7.5mm F2 lens would have done a half-decent impression of the shots you captured above, minus the TS aspects of the shot of course.

Just poking fun.. people get so absolute and polarised. FF is either unusable or non-FF images are unsaleable! Brand X either has garbage CS or mandatory CS! We've lost the nuance of saying that everything has pros and cons. Even if someone offered me an Alexa 65, I still couldn't use it because it's too big and heavy for what I do and I'd be nervous about it getting stolen, so I have my GH5. Is my GH5 perfect? Hell no. So, the correct answer to every question is "it depends", except for questions about something being mandatory or usable, in which case, nothing is mandatory because everything has a work-around, and everything is usable, in some situation at least.

It's a good thing that GoPros have smaller sensors and can implement the higher resolutions/framerates before the cameras with the larger sensors can. Oh, hang on...

This thread is a duplicate of the thread where... the one about... well.. actually, the thread where... ...anyone tries to have a conversation about MFT and the FF fanboys walk in.

Great stuff from Matteo Bertoli:

Of course. I just think it's strange when people get confused between buying tools to create a product and buying stocks as part of an investment portfolio.

Maybe yeah. I thought the purpose of film-making equipment was to shoot with it? Even if Panasonic goes under tomorrow, and MFT is declared dead by everyone I know, I'll still be able to go outside and shoot images with my "worthless" GH5 and "paperweight" MFT lenses.

Sure. Just buy something that was great and was super expensive and isn't trendy anymore because it's not 16K RAW internal. Lots of great camera out there going for a song because the gullible people have moved onto the next shiny thing.

I have a full thread about how shooting 1080p is often sufficient, assuming your camera is good enough. There is a good argument to be made for shooting 4K in order to get good enough quality out of your camera as some cameras 1080p isn't that great. But so far all of the 8K smartphone videos I've seen unfortunately don't really make the grade when compared with decent 1080p.

WOW. Those zoom shots are fantastic! How is the video on these marvellous devices? Have you been testing that too? Or is it still not good enough to be taken seriously yet?

It could be due to Panasonics shift to full-frame, or it could be a combination of other factors. By other factors, what I mean is: The GH4 was revolutionary, being one of the first affordable cameras to have 4K. The GH5 was revolutionary, in many ways but especially delivering 4K60 and 10-bit internal. If the GH6 is to uphold the reputation of the GH line then it would need to seriously step up and take on the competition, which leads me to... The competition being all over the place. The A7s3 release was delayed from the normal release schedule, and if rumours are true, was pulled from it launch event at the last minute because Sony weren't sure it would really hit the spot, leaving a huge fanfare for some lenses. The R5 came from no-where with 8K, after a strange release of the EOS R which seemed to be a big release but was underwhelming and quickly got a big discount. BM released the P6K, a "successor" to the P4K with a S35 sensor and an EF mount, which confused the heck out of everyone. BM then released the 12K UMP which was so left-field it was from a parallel dimension. So all in all, releases have been all over the place and unpredictable, because the market has been in the shadow of... The promise of 8K for the Olympics and now it's delayed because of.... COVID. No-one knows what impact COVID is going to have on the film-making market, especially the low-budget segment which MFT is more prevalent, so the best time to release a camera is pretty tricky thing to gauge. You'd have to be pretty courageous as an exec to pull the trigger on a huge production and release run during a pandemic, and especially one for an MFT camera because of the... Trend towards full-frame and even larger than FF with some "medium format" options in a few examples. This is a tremendously upsetting dynamic when S35 ruled the cinematography world for so long, and MFT only had a 1.4x crop compared to S35, whereas now it is considered a 2x crop at least. This makes MFT seem less palatable by an increasingly fanciful and fickle marketplace, where there is more and more focus on the flashy toys and less and less focus on steady workhorse cameras, and even the "quite market" of content creators is getting tempted by the allure of affordable RAW, which comes with all the... Legal trickiness of patents and licensing agreements and other big companies all playing chess with their lawyers at our expense. FF is but one element of a tornado of uncertainty.

Funny. I've also tested the telescoping version of that lens on the Micro. It's a little too long for my tastes, and definitely not fast enough, but having IS at the wide end is very useful considering that most wider primes don't have IS. The 14mm/2.5 is a great pairing for the Micro too, but lacks the IS. Of course, probably my favourite lens for the Micro at this point is probably the Laowa 7.5/2 as it has a horizontal FOV equivalent to a 22mm lens. Throw on a 2.66:1 crop and it's not a bad wide-aspect all-rounder. Of course, if I was going to use it for shooting real projects, I'd probably buy the Voigtlander 10.5/0.95, which would be equivalent to a FF 30mm f2.7.

Nice looking model for your test shots @BTM_Pix.. almost as good as when it wears a c-mount lens 🙂

They do seem very similar. It would be great to see MTF charts on the Meike lenses though, to confirm. The Meike lenses certainly have excellent performance, but they're very slow. T2.2 is probably around F2, which in DoF is equivalent to F4 in FF terms, which isn't that fast in terms of background separation. If you're just interested in the exposure value, then T2.2 might be fine. The way I see the Meike / Veydra lenses is as a set of cine lenses that has traded getting a little bit more sharpness for being one or two stops slower than the other contenders. It's easy to see the Veydras as very sharp because of the myopic tradition of only talking about how sharp lenses are when wide open, but it's not that hard for other lenses to get almost that kind of result when stopped down from their widest apertures. Sometimes the improvement when stopping down is absolutely radical: I suggest you compare the graphs from the Veydras (as a proxy for the Meike) with the graphs of the other MFT lenses that are around: https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2018/01/finally-some-m43-mtf-testing-25mm-prime-lens-comparison/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2018/03/finally-some-more-m43-mtf-testing-are-the-40s-fabulous/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/05/wide-angle-micro-43-imatest-results/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/05/standard-range-micro-43-imatest-results/ Not suggesting that the Meike aren't a good option, but just make sure you're aware of how they compare to their competitors before you hit the Purchase button!

There's a saying in business that "a rising tide lifts all boats" - it means that when times are good everyone does well, and the implication is that it's only when the going gets tough that you see who was running a solid company and who was only profitable because the going was easy. The death of compact cameras due to smartphones and now with covid, the tide is lowering and will continue to lower for some time, as the economic impacts of covid will not go away quickly. Unfortunately, business is not only about customer satisfaction, it's about money. History tells us that companies who work on hype and market protectionism and take advantage of market distortions can be successful, and often are. The camera industry is gradually being disrupted and I'm not sure that product quality will be the defining factor about who survives and who doesn't. It should also be mentioned that many cameras already out there are "good enough" to provide a steady stream of content in difficult market conditions. In that sense, content creators can choose to pay their bills instead of buy new equipment, so from that perspective the manufacturers are kind of last in line, so to speak. Unless you break your equipment, you can just choose not to upgrade.

Are they the same formula? In the previous video (comparing the Meike with the Veydra) he notes that the Meike has scarified the close focus distance to eliminate focus breathing, which would lead me to believe that there is at least some difference in the design, possibly only element spacing, but maybe more. Here's the part I'm talking about: Nevertheless, I think it's reasonable to suggest that the Meike performance is excellent. The comparison to the Zeiss CP2s is interesting, because it really depends on what you're looking for. My experience is that there are five schools of thought when choosing lenses: Choosing lenses that offer resolution but have flattering (ie, lower) levels of micro-contrast as this is flattering on skin texture. This is a significant force in high-end cinematography with the classic lenses being very popular in rental houses. Choosing lenses that are very sharp and very neutral in order to be combined with optical filters like diffusion filters or nets to get a flattering level of micro-contrast in-camera but also have it be adjustable, where with lenses it is much less-so. This is also popular in larger budget productions. Choosing lenses that are very sharp and very neutral to get the cleanest image out of the camera in order to process it in post with diffusion and other image tuning effects in post. I've heard of this in rare instances where someone knows the power of their preferred colourist and is willing to invest in more time and cost in post because of the fine-tuning possibilities. Choosing lenses that are very sharp and very neutral to get the cleanest image out of the camera because the aesthetic is suitable for the project. This is sometimes the case in larger budget productions, but is more the norm in lower budget productions like documentaries where the emphasis is on the content and the capturing is meant to have a more neutral tone. Choosing lenses that are very sharp and very neutral to get the cleanest image out of the camera because that's what stills photographers obsess over and the rationale of the person hasn't progressed beyond the idea that film-making is just taking many photographs very quickly. I find this to be the dominant mindset on internet forums. Of course, it's more complicated than just resolution and micro-contrast, but those seem to be the two dominant factors that drive most of the decision-making. I also noted in the big comparison that I did that some of the more revered lenses had higher resolution than average when wide-open and lower resolution when stopped down than the average lens, making them more consistent over their aperture range than the average lens, which is much softer wide open and much sharper when stopped down.

How big a diffusor are you looking for? There's a type of parabolic reflector where you put the light-source in the middle facing away from the subject (and directly into the reflector) and that should make the light source the size of the reflector. Like this kind of style: They fold up like umbrellas and so are pretty portable. I'd imagine they come in a range of sizes: Unless you're looking for something smaller? The idea could easily be applied to whatever size you like if you're after an on-camera solution like @BTM_Pix suggested: