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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:

It's beginning to sound like some of you are getting triggered by this whole thing. If the various investments and work-arounds of shooting 4K are worth the additional investment for your particular situation or emotional attachments then go for it. The history of mankind is more of a cosmic wonder than I thought.. just think of it, all the people that can't live without 4K would have died all through history up until only a few short years ago! This is beginning to get tedious. Please do yourself a favour and do a little experiment.. shoot a 1080p BRAW clip and then shoot a 4K BRAW clip, put each of them on a native resolution timeline and then load each of them up with effects until your computer can't keep up. Compare how many effects the 1080p timeline got to with the number that the 4K timeline got to. I look forward to the results of your test and the proof that the 4K timeline, and processing 4x the number of pixels, takes the same processing power as the 1080p timeline, with its quarter the number of pixels. This thread is about 4K vs 1080p, not the very specific situation and particular camera selections that you happened to make. Cool. If you render a 1080p master file then upscale it to 4K and upload that to YouTube then we can compare the numbers and see if your 6K timeline is that much better than having downscaled to a 1080p timeline and then upscaled the result to 4K YT. I look forward to comparing them.

When I first started working in the tall buildings in the city, I was really taken back and concerned when hearing the next rumour about how big company X was about to downsize by 600 people, and big company Y was going to outsource it's blah department. This was in the wake of the GFC, and bonuses were only a month or two salary at best! After three years I realised there are always rumours and that disaster is always looming. It takes more than whispers to cut through the noise for me. Covid is putting pressure on the whole world, there will be blood in the water, but it's not there yet.

You're confusing the processing power required for decoding the image from the original codec with the processing power required for doing effects once it's been decoded. RAW, and BRAW especially is a radically easier codec to work with over AVCHD. I'm guessing you don't put enough effects onto your files to really slow things down. Try putting your BRAW on a 12K timeline and apply a bunch of OFX plugins and see how far BRAW gets you then 🙂 I'm not arguing that 4K is no use, I'm just saying that it has hidden costs. It's a bit of a stretch to say that mentioning media size and encoding time covers things like the concerns of noise management from extra fans. It sounds like your 4K workflow doesn't have any hidden costs because you've already paid for them. Think about what the cheapest system that could do what you do with 1080p BRAW would look like - probably a 2012 laptop - which is close to being free at this point, so in that sense the entire cost of your whole editing setup is the "hidden" cost you have already paid. It's like trying to tell someone that there are extra costs involved in driving 400Km/h and the person saying to you "I don't know what you're talking about, I just get in my Bugatti and do it, so it totally costs the same!"

Most of the time I just go into Resolve and look to see what stuff is called or whatever, but I don't have the free version so can't reference it 🙂

I've seen that before... years ago actually. When it was written 🙂 Seriously though, I looked through that and multiple nodes wasn't mentioned, so I wasn't sure. I find BlackMagic aren't the greatest about keeping the documentation up to date and easily findable.

You're so gracious!

Which bit isn't correct? I've never been able to get a clear idea about which restrictions there are on the free version. If the free version has multiple nodes, then that's pretty awesome, and makes it a lot more useful.