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There's a solution to that - it's called Manual Focus. ....and if you upgrade to Manual Focus, then basically Panasonic cameras are best-in-class! Seriously though, probably the biggest challenge with the AF crowd is that they think that PDAF / DPAF are near perfect and that DFD is unworkable. The real situation is that neither are fit-for-purpose yet. AF will be great, once it reliably focuses on where the director wants it to be focusing, and does so with the right transition speed and doesn't pulse when it's there.

Having something that was continuous would be great, like the Sony one, and the JVC and FS5 ones. It's not that difficult a thing to implement technically, so it's cool that some manufacturers did it. The thing to watch is that when your digital zoom is more than a 1:1 crop you're actually upscaling in-camera, and the quality falls off a cliff at that point. I tried 2x, which is a 1.35x downsampled image, but the 4x is 1.5x upsample so it's taking about 1.3K and upscaling it to a 2K image, which does not look good! Really, the proof is in the resulting image, so just give it a go and see how your camera performs. Absolutely, you're zooming into the noise and the softness of your glass. Given that most lenses soften up when stopped down a bit from their widest aperture, you may find that a general rule-of-thumb might be to stop down a bit when using the zoom function. When you're keeping the digital zoom in the range where it's still downsampling then you do get the NR benefits of rescaling. We saw that the benefits of a 5.2K image downscale to 4K was a decent improvement on things like noise, and that's only a 1.35x downscale (on the GH5) so it doesn't take a huge amount to smooth out the noise, assuming that the noise is pixel-sized, rather than the Canon noise that spans multiple-pixels for some unknown reason.

I've recently "discovered" some of the benefits of using the in-camera digital zoom. These won't apply to everyone, but it's worth considering and I don't hear a anyone talking about it. Let me illustrate by taking my GH5 as an example, but the principle applies much wider, especially as cameras go towards 8K and beyond. The GH5 has a sensor that's 5184 pixels wide. When you're shooting 4K, the camera downsamples the 5.2K to 4K, giving a higher quality image due to the benefits of oversampling. The benefits of oversampling are well known, and many cameras have this. The GH5 also has an ETC mode, which essentially does a 1:1 crop into the middle of the sensor. This is a common feature across manufacturers. If you use the ETC function in 4K, you get an additional 1.3x crop, and if you use the function in 1080p then you get a 2.7x crop. Both of these modes are shooting a 1:1, so you get a tighter FOV, but the image is no longer oversampled, so the quality goes down. Enter the digital zoom. In 1080p mode, the GH5 allows a 2x and 4x digital zoom. The 2x digital zoom is less than the 2.7x 1:1 zoom from the ETC mode, so (assuming that the cameras image pipeline is designed well) the resulting 1080p image should be an image that is taken from the middle 2.6K pixels and downsampled to 1080p. In other words, the 2x digital zoom is a way to punch-into the sensor but still keep the quality of an oversampled image. This principle will occur any time that the digital crop is less than the crop of going to a 1:1 area on the sensor for whatever resolution you're shooting in. The Sony ClearImage Zoom comes to mind here, where (I think?) you can zoom in by a lesser amount than the 4K 1:1 crop (which is something like 1.5x?). Perhaps other manufacturers have similar functionality too. Of course, the lower the resolution you're shooting then the more likely this will be available on your camera. For those still shooting 1080p then this is worth looking at. For those shooting 4K, this will increasingly be useful as sensors creep up towards 8K and beyond. For me though, I've now abandoned the idea of having to buy an 85mm prime, because I can simply do a 2x digital zoom with my 42.5mm lens and get the same FOV and (basically) the same image quality, and if I happen to have my 7.5mm lens on and want to quickly grab a 15mm FOV shot then I know I won't be sacrificing quality to get one. Had I known that this feature delivered such good results I may have actually bought different lenses, so it's not a trivial thing, and it's worth giving a quick go if your camera supports it.

Makes sense. Getting a 2.8 that is sharp from f2.8 up would probably have been more expensive. Of course, if you're cropping into the image circle then you're really only interested in the performance of the lens in the middle of its image circle. Unfortunately that's data that places like lens rentals publish, and not for that many lenses, as it's obviously very laborious to gather. I ended up with the Voigtlander 42.5mm f0.95 prime. Not sharp wide open, but almost as sharp as the competition when stopped down to their widest apertures, and can be used wide-open in a pinch. Subjectively a bit of sharpening goes a long way to matching things, especially if you're degrading the image in post as well with halation or other softening effects.

lol, the only place I didn't look was in the thread title! 😂😂😂 There's a pretty well established principle that lenses sharpen up when you stop them down the first couple of stops. As mentioned before this has exceptions, but those exceptions seem to be just that, exceptions. DXOMark has a lot of interesting lenses and you can look at the graph of sharpness (perceptual megapixels) vs aperture to see how much it sharpens up when stopped down. Typically they look like this: Where wide open they aren't as good as when closed down a couple of stops. So in that sense, the target aperture really matters, as the best way to get a sharp image at f2 might be to buy an f1.2 lens. The exception is normally much slower lenses that have the same kind of optical performance as the above, only don't open the aperture as much.

Absolutely. I have f0.95 primes, so you're preaching to the choir here! Actually, they didn't. Or at least, when I just re-read this thread five times looking for it, I couldn't find it! True. The issue I took, and thus my slightly sarcastic reply, was that this is viewed far too simplistically by people. Take two hypothetical lenses, one is f1.4 and the other is f2.8. Let's say that the f1.4 one isn't so sharp wide open, but the f2.8 lens is. The traditional, one-dimensional, thinking is that if you want sharp images then the 2.8 lens is the one to go for because "the f1.4 is soft wide-open but the f2.8 lens isn't", end of story, and mostly, end of how deep the persons knowledge is about the subject. The problem with this thinking is that the f1.4 lens might be sharper at f2.8 than the f2.8 lens is, but the sharp-wide-open one-dimensional thinkers don't go that far.

Why, f4 lenses are sharp wide open, that was your criteria. People often make the mistake of judging lenses wide open, but the problem is that not all lenses have the same largest aperture. Sometimes the best way to get a lens that's sharp at a particular aperture is to get a lens with a wider aperture than your desired one.

This seems to be the download page from Cinematography.net: https://cinematography.net/raw-and-exr-camera-rushes.html I haven't downloaded anything from there yet, but will check it out. I'm also unsure of the licensing, so if you explore these then make sure you're clear on that before proceeding.

I have consistently failed to make my own footage as good as I was hoping for, so have decided to try my hand at grading the best footage available, the sample shots from the manufacturers themselves. I've done this in the past but got sidetracked, but am now back on it. I figure that until I can make ARRI or RED footage look good, there's no point criticising my own footage - maybe the footage is fine and it's my grading skills that are solely to blame. My previous attempts, however short, made me realise a few things: flat ungraded footage from any camera looks dull there was a lot more noise in the RED and ARRI footage than I was expecting - ie, A LOT more Overall, the biggest surprise was how average the footage looked. Since then I've learned a bunch and hopefully will have more success. Anyone want to join me? Arri footage is here: https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/camera-sample-footage RED footage is here: https://www.red.com/sample-r3d-files Komodo footage from Seth Dunlap is here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cfxdizrgt3aa4ml/AADPxF6XZIs2_uB7Xt_piHUya?dl=0 BM UMP 12K footage is here (underneath the "Generation 5 colour science" heading): https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursaminipro BM Pocket camera footage is here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicpocketcinemacamera/gallery Sony Venice frames here: http://www.xdcam-user.com/tag/footage/ but I couldn't find any official footage for download I've downloaded footage from https://raw.film before too, so that might be worth checking out. As a reality check, I'm also pulling in the ML footage I've shot back when I was playing with it on my Canon 700D, and also the test shots I've been shooting with the BM Micro Cinema Camera. I suspect that the footage I shoot is much better than I think, and that I'm much worse at colour grading than I think. If anyone is interested in joining me that would be fun, and if there are other places to download well shot sample footage that would also be very interesting.

Maybe it's just marketing. The FF enthusiasts / myopians will look at this and have their confirmation bias renewed and will be left with the impression that Panasonic understands them, sees FF as being the superior sensor size ordained directly by God, and that Panasonic is the brand to get. The MFT enthusiasts will look at this, be encouraged by the frame-rates and remember the track record of the GH line, and hold their opinions for when we see the IQ. Then the GH6 can be released and the MFT enthusiasts will see that the IQ is excellent. The FF myopians won't even look at "toy camera" reviews and will be none the wiser. ....and everyone gets what they want and Panasonic lived happily ever after. *roll credits*

Is this just fantasy? Lockdown in pandemic No escape from reality...

The fundamental challenge you have is the one that we all have - there's no perfect camera. The second, very unfortunate, challenge you have is that the 'simple' task of having a small, light-weight camera that can keep up with your kid and how you live your life. What this translates to, and why I put 'simple' in quotes, is that you want a camera that can: be small and pocketable, likely implying a smaller sensor have autofocus that can keep up with a small child (otherwise known as 'world-class' - watch some AF tests if you're unsure of this) can do that AF in the lighting that you find yourself in, which after the sun goes down, will be extreme low light has the kind of IQ that you deem acceptable Basically, the above is a very difficult set of requirements, unlikely to be met by anything, so you'll have to choose which things you are willing to compromise on. Parents getting a camera for pics of their kids running around think it seems like a reasonable request, but in reality it's kind of like saying you want continuous eye-AF at f1.4 in pitch-black. Cameras are getting way better than they used to be, but we're not there yet.

See if you can borrow one (or buy it with a return option) and do a bit of a stress test. I say this because I have a friend who is into stills and has an old DSLR that he hates lugging around, but he's repeatedly tried going on trips with only the latest iPhone and has kept going back to the DSLR. His reason.... none of the iPhone photos are good enough for him to print and put on the wall. The moral of the story is that the best of the convenient options may still not be good enough, and you might be better off trading some of the convenience in order to get something that will work for you. In the end we only remember the footage, not the camera gear, so as long as the equipment is as minimal as it can be for the required results, and as long as it's minimal enough that you actually take it and use it, then that's the way to go. You haven't talked about what focal lengths you're interested in using, and how you actually shoot. A MILC and pancake prime isn't a bad option and I've done that as a (barely) pocketable option in the past to great results.

Very impressive. Almost didn't watch it as the thumbnail doesn't do it any kind of justice whatsoever!

As a stop-gap measure, could you use a filter on front of the lens. Companies like Tiffen offer various models. Obviously something on the filter stack would be easier, but in a pinch...

I have played around with various ways to structure a grade, with most of my real projects (not tests like I post here) having 3+ cameras. I tried using Groups, I tried using the Timeline feature, but I found them all to be kind of cumbersome in various ways. Here are two approaches for you consideration. Approach One - Shared Nodes Setup a node graph on the first clip that looks like this: A few normal nodes for this clip Three Shared Nodes for this camera Five Shared Nodes for the whole project The idea is that the normal nodes at the start are to adjust things that are likely changing from clip to clip, like WB tweaks, exposure tweaks, and maybe NR or sharpening (some of my lenses are softer at wider apertures so benefit from a little sharpening to even out the odd fully-wide-open shot). The camera specific Shared Nodes are for every clip from that camera and are typically structured to have the second node do the Rec709 conversion (be it via curves or LGG wheels or CST or contrast/sat/pivot or whatever) and the first one be pre-adjustments and the third be post-adjustments. The global Shared Nodes are to apply a 'look' to the project. Depending on how you like to work you could setup more than five to begin with. It's easy to add more at the start and not use them than have to add them later. You can also choose to add a "scene" set of nodes between the camera ones and the global ones, if you want to have different looks for different scenes. Approach Two - Simplicity Itself Review the footage and find your hero shot (or shots, if you've got multiple scenes), which will act as a reference. It could be a good idea to have this as a wide shot because it will include lots of different luma and chroma values. Grade the hero shot. Take a still as a reference, and make sure you're showing the gallery on the screen so it's visible. Grade each shot, manually, to match the hero shot. It should match closely enough to not look 'different'. Apply a look over the whole timeline, either using a Shared Node, use the Timeline window, Put on an Adjustment Layer, whatever you want. Go into the Lightbox view and look for any clips that don't 'fit' and go and fix them. Done. The second approach works really well if you have a control surface. On well shot footage you can get away with doing very simple adjustments to most shots, and only have to do fancy things to solve problems, like desaturating distracting elements in the background or whatever. Cool workflow, thanks for sharing. There's some things in there I hadn't heard of before, like the colour memories feature. Will have to look into that a bit more. Resolve is so deep....

Depending on how you define "cinema camera package" I would suggest that the BMMCC would likely be the leading contender. I've had significant trouble rigging mine up, considering that all the things you have for rigging and accessories are ridiculously large in comparison.

I think it's about intent. Christian starts his video saying "Most of the people I got to know in the last two years, let it be photographers videographers film-makers whatever, tend to only go out and shoot if they got something in mind to achieve, maybe it's a vlog, maybe it's a client project, maybe it's just a travel film". Trout and Coffee starts his most recent video saying "Hudson and I hadn't been on an adventure together for a year, by now it was the very end of August, I had been spending a lot of time staring at my computer in my office and could tell I needed to break off, spend some time away and do what I love most - make a simple film". So, the whole premise of that video was to make a film, ie, no shot in that was C-Roll. Sure, it's not scripted, but every time he hit record during that trip would have been in the context of "I'm making a film about an adventure with my dog" - ie, he had something in mind to achieve, like Christian said. The shot in the one you posted where he was talking with his dad about fly fishing might not have been scripted, and he might not have even shot it with a specific context in mind, but this is where we get to the tricky parts of YouTube and how it becomes all-pervasive. This is the hidden side that people typically only talk about when they're having some kind of meltdown. This is something that lots of people have spoken about - "and you start losing focus on like, what am I doing - am I doing this because I love her or am I doing this for the video? That's toxic for any relationship" (from the below video about 2:30 IIRC.). Most people put on a facade when they go out in public, or when a camera is pointed at them (which is basically the same except the public are invited into your life via the camera). When you're filming your life it's hard not to start living your life like people are always watching. There are great articles on surveillance and how privacy is kind of related to being able to relax in some way. In a sense, C-Roll might be different to A or B-roll due to the expectation of what will be done with the footage, because that's what matters in the relaxation and the creativity. I make home videos, but no vlogs. I make a video of when my family has a holiday, or goes out somewhere, maybe for a party or something. If I'm doing the dad-with-camcorder thing at some occasion where we all got ready, got dressed, and went out to do something special, then that's not C-Roll. What is C-Roll is the shot I got of my daughter (who loves drama and acting) that starts with me testing mixed lighting in the kitchen/dining room and the kids had been home from school for about 20 minutes, and my son comes through to raid the fridge and my daughter is telling my wife about some thing that happened at school and I kind of cheekily kept rolling and she saw the camera and then started making faces and then came over to the camera, took a breath, held for a beat, then dropped into character and then proceeded to give a highly bumbling and misguided tour of our house from the perspective of the character she was in that didn't understand 21st century western living. That shot is the one that was shot for no purpose, wasn't aligned with any project, was definitely not shot for publication, and I will probably drag out for her 21st birthday 🙂

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!