kye

Just remember... the first hit is free 🙂

If we're going to cherry-pick the best examples, then you're all wasting your time not going to the casino....

....and after the bailouts stop, gold.

It would be interesting to see how they measure. I've said all this before, but I think people gloss over things a lot of the time, so I'll share some links again. People are very critical of the Voigtlanders and consider them to be inferior because of how soft they are at apertures that other lenses don't offer. People then seem to extrapolate this to them being inferior to the alternate slower offerings, and in fact, this is false and it's just a lack of education on their behalf, because the Voigts are similar or better than the other MFT contenders at a similar aperture. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2018/03/finally-some-more-m43-mtf-testing-are-the-40s-fabulous/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2018/01/finally-some-m43-mtf-testing-25mm-prime-lens-comparison/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/05/wide-angle-micro-43-imatest-results/ Of course, people can always look at these and then react with "oh, ok, so they're sharper or almost as sharp in the centre as the competitors that 5 minutes ago I was saying kill them completely, but look at how the sharpness falls off at the edges". This is true. If you value edge-to-edge sharpness then that's great, don't buy these. Being fully manual and with easily de-clickable apertures, they're not really photo lenses either, they're really video lenses. So if we're going to start talking about video lenses then we need to change our entire frame-of-reference because sharpness is the holy grail in photography but not in cinematography. If you haven't already, go read up about the lenses that are lusted after and are the go-to Hollywood lenses. Then go find tests for them and see how they really perform. Once again, lensrentals is a spectacular resource here. The tests of the Zeiss CP.2s and Super Speeds, of Canon and others, reveals they're not that sharp, and they fall-off drastically in the corners. Have a scroll through and see how the graphs look: https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/06/just-the-cinema-mtf-charts-zeiss-cine-lenses/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/05/just-the-cinema-lens-mtf-charts-xeen-and-schneider/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/06/just-the-cinema-lens-mtf-charts-canon-and-sigma/ I think it's really just a sign of how things are on the internet, people judge at face value and don't actually look to see if their beliefs are true, even when there is data available. And perhaps the bigger challenge we have on camera forums, we idolise how Hollywood has done things for the last decade (shoots 1080p with soft lenses) and then immediately disregard that and start banging on about how everyone needs 6K at a minimum and that lenses should be judged by how sharp they are. When I joined the forums I was no different. I wanted 4K and sharp lenses because I'd just come from shooting stills and I'd recorded 1080p with my Canon DSLR and found it way too soft and didn't realise that the fuzzy mess was Canon-related not 1080p-related. My journey of learning video has benefitted the most from un-learning the falsehoods that were already there, rather than to learn new things in addition to what I knew.

Thanks. That's interesting that the LGG colour wheels are more of a 'look' tool rather than a 'correction' tool if that makes sense. I seem to have become allergic to the orange/teal grade and have no desire to use it on my projects, and I think of all the grades that do a tint-vs-luma style adjustment that the O/T grade is probably the most natural, so I think I'm even less likely to grade using any other colour combination. I'm still working out what looks I like, but I'm making steady progress. I discovered DCTL over the weekend and that's a fascinating thing. I suspect that with that ability I may end up developing a DCTL for any adjustments I want to do that Resolve doesn't have an easy out-of-the-box solution for and then probably just grade under my custom one of those.

I find that one of the worst words that a person can use, both for their own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of others around them, is the word "should". We should all just get along. We should all do X, Y, Z. I find it to be problematic for two main reasons: It is the opposite of acceptance. So you found that some people like Tony Northrup - are you going to relax and accept that? No, you'll hang onto the idea that the world should be different. Holding onto how things should be in the face of what is is equivalent to that saying about resentment and how holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. You can't possibly think that what you say here in this thread is somehow going to change, literally, anything about what you're talking about, right? It is pure hubris. So you find yourself at odds with someone else, a group of people, a way of thinking, the world, the laws of nature, whatever it is. Should is the idea that somehow you are more qualified, knowledgable, intelligent, caring, virtuous, or whatever, than they are and so somehow your ideas are more worthy of shaping the world than the ones you don't agree with. I'm not going to pass judgement on this, maybe you are right, I'm not going to fall into the same trap and take the line that I know better than you about how much should-ed-ness you would benefit from. However, a good thing to contemplate when you go to say should is to think about what you're really saying. I have found that when I've backed away from the judgements of should then the fight seems to lessen in my life. I no longer have the friction with people that I used to over certain issues, and even YT seems to calm down. It's not that I don't see clickbait-style titles or thumbnails any more, although they're much less, but what I find is that I'm not emotionally triggered about them - they're just the same as an ad on TV telling me to buy Joe's Paint Stripper. I don't care about Paint Stripper, I don't automatically think that Joes is somehow the better paint stripper, but I'm neither going to eliminate Joes as a company I would buy, nor fire-bomb their headquarters in protest of being told what to do.

Great looking setup! I'm curious how much you use the colour part of the colour wheels in comparison to the levels (rings) of the wheels? I have the Beatstep mod and it gives the levels for LGG as dials, which is awesome, and it occurs to me that I generally don't use the LGG colour controls that much, but I'm wondering if it's just that the convenience (or lack of it due to no 2d controllers) has prevented me from using them, or if it's something else. I'm rarely called to adjust the colour of various luma ranges differently to others, so using temp/tint seems to work for me. Of course, I'm still just getting used to the LGG levels and have only recently realised how good they are for grading footage - so much more powerful than I thought they'd be considering how simple they are.

I suspect that you might be right about that one. I suspect not dead, but probably not in the world leading features ages either. Fundamentally, focal length is determined by sensor size, and lens size is determined by focal length, so MFT will always have an advantage of being a physically smaller but still interchangeable lens mount where there are already lenses available. In that sense there might be continuing budget lines from Panasonic. They could keep on making cheaper cameras but with better features still using the tech that already exists and is gradually decreasing in price.

I just looked up the definition of clickbait, and wikipedia (at least) says that it's marketing that has some kind of deceptive element to it. That wasn't my original thought process, I was thinking of clickbait as simply that - bait for clicks. I guess to me the idea that it involves deception is kind of simplistic in a way, and perhaps the crux of what we're talking about. So let's say that clickbait is deceptive marketing, which I'm happy to do if that's the definition that is broadly used. The trick is then telling deceptive marketing from the marketing that delivers. ie, if someone posted a video and had the title "We broke up" and had a sad faced person on the thumbnail, and the crying emoji, is that clickbait? Well the answer is - you can't tell until you watch the video. Maybe it is, but maybe it's not. Without having watched the video, all you can see is that it's sensationalist marketing, but you can't tell if it's clickbait. What this means is that it is logically impossible to not watch clickbait videos. Even a video that has a picture of a chair on it and the title "How to build a chair" might be clickbait - maybe the video isn't about how to make a chair, or maybe it's about how to make a chair but the quality of instruction is too poor to actually be instructive. I could go one step further then, and say that by saying "I don't click on clickbait thumbnails or titles" means that clickbait cannot be defined as deceptive, because by definition you can't tell if the video will deliver or not, and so in that sense, the use of the word in that kind of sentence must apply only to the style of the thumbnail and title, rather than how accurately they describe the content of the video. Id' suggest that if you're normally let down by videos that have that kind of appearance then you're particularly susceptible to whatever it is that they're pushing. I click on videos all the time that make claims in the title that could easily be left unfulfilled, but typically aren't. Here are the last few videos I watched as of right now - none were clickbait, but all claimed some kind of content: "how I created my youtube channel" "Pulp Fiction cinematography breakdowns | Part 2" "Slip and slide WITH A LOOP!! (World Record)" "It's yacht vacation time" "DIY porch swing frame" "Vietnam: the economy of the next decade?" All of these were phrased in such a way that made me click on them, and all of them had the potential to fail to deliver. agreed 🙂 In either way 🙂 I agree that it holds up a mirror to culture and society - absolutely. That same sense is what I was referring to when I said it speaks about the individual - it holds a mirror up the the individual as well. I'll admit that camera and videography channels seem to be particularly bad for sensationalist and deceptive titles and thumbnails, but the YT drama genre is probably way worse - I would imagine that all the typical human dramas that soap operas are made of make pretty good sensationalist titles. Mind you, I've watched my fair share of other genre videos that had more exciting titles than the content actually delivered, and vice versa. If I could find it, I'd link to the video of the machinist channel This Old Tony where he talks about machining in his home hobby shop, but managed to make drink come out my nose because of the various time travel references, in-jokes about other machinist channels and you tubers, and various other jokes of an extremely nerdy nature. It had the kind of title that would put a librarian to sleep. Maybe by having a boring title and not preparing me for a nasal-passage-related-incident then that video was also clickbait?

I love it when people criticise the Voigtlander lenses for being soft wide open. You know what every other MFT lens looks like at 0.95? This.

I think that what people think of YT says more about that person than it does about YT. Plenty of channels out there delivering great content and with no ad breaks either. Admittedly, most of the channels I watch have a Patreon, but typically those aren't promoted very hard. Judging the quality of content via the thumbnail is like judging the quality of the lighting in a film by the graphic art on the DVD case, back when we had them. Marketing is marketing and content is content. Just because someone is selling something doesn't mean what's being sold is rubbish. Every product that you ever loved was sold at one point with marketing. and when you say you don't like "clickbait" what you're really saying is you don't like "marketing".

Yeah, if you're using the SB then the speed difference is less. Of course, that makes the setup even heavier over a dumb adapter. I hand-hold and carry the camera around in one hand all day, even when i'm not using it, as a shot may present itself at any moment. For that reason the weight in my backpack is completely different to the weight on my wrist. A big travel day can break the 20,000 steps mark, and I think in Pompeii we went higher than that even. If you're on sticks or even a rig then weight is less of an issue. In terms of focusing, once you go fully manual, you don't go back. I vaguely remember something about a focus clutch that could be manual or disengaged for AF? Apparently it was great, but can't remember who manufactured them. Might be something to look into.

Yeah, people can be amazingly insensitive sometimes. We try to avoid things like that ^^^^ as much as possible. I'm pretty sure I stand out as a tourist pretty strongly. I hope that makes me seem harmless and have people forgive any unintended faux pas, but I do try to read the room and be as situationally aware as I can be. I'm definitely not one for filming random people. I've done a lot of street photography as practice before I got into video and a smile goes a long way in those situations. Perhaps the biggest thing i've learned is that what makes us human is universal, and to trust my instincts around when people are relaxed or not. Body language is definitely a shared expression if you know how to read it.

Wow - what images those would have been!! I shoot my holidays and so that means shooting on the move and always having a camera ready while you're doing something. I use a camera bag insert like this, in the bottom of a generic backpack: It gives me room to put things on top and also means it doesn't stand out like a camera bag often does. I also use the Peak Design Capture on the front of my backpack to keep a camera handy: As I have two cameras (GH5 and Sony X3000 action camera) i'm either in transit and the X3000 is mounted there when i'm not using it, or i'm at a location and using the GH5 and the X3000 is there and I can swap between them. If I have to do something with my hands while standing up then I can normally pocket the X3000 and put the GH5 there, meaning my hands are free to eat, carry things, help one of the kids with something, etc..

I had the Sigma 18-35 and I found it too heavy for how I work, so I ended up with separate Voitglander MFT primes, which were significantly lighter and also significantly faster. Of course, being primes they don't zoom...

Just looked for where I got that $200 and it was an amazon listing, but I've now found more and yeah, it's less than that!

If I quote a $ then I've auto-translated for our mono-currency friends in the good 'ol USA. A bit like how they get to use the internet without a country code. and don't get me started on the Australia tax. I've known people who wanted to buy an expensive piece of equipment (approaching the cost of a cheap car) and instead of buy it locally they take the family on a week long shopping holiday through Asia and then pick up the piece of equipment on their way back through Singapore, just paying for it via extra luggage fees....... and still come out ahead.

What is a "shoulder holster" ?

Yah, the $200 one might be 20x the little USB keypad, but it's also only 20% of the price of the Resolve Keyboard, so yes, everything is relative. I've taken to using the layout: I O P J K L where I is Mark In, O is Mark Out, and P is Append to Timeline, and J K L. are backwards, stop and forwards. Then in the Cut panel I can pull up tape mode and it puts all the clips in a folder back-to-back (like tape, funnily enough!) and then just using these 6 to go through and do selects. I find that works just fine, and I get selects out of that onto a timeline. Considering I mostly shoot my own travel and events I am normally keeping things in sequential order, and only change the order if there's a problem and I need a cut-away or something to fix the coherence, that means that the selects are also an Assembly. The part that has me wondering is once I've got the Assembly it's what happens from there. I then go through and work out what the shots are that I want to essentially shortlist. I do this by dragging the good ones up onto a different track (often several different tracks for different classifications of shots) and this isn't something that I have used the keyboard for in the past, but would be cool. Then I cull all the shots that weren't shortlisted, apply music, and then I'm doing more fine-tuning of the edit in accordance with the music. As my selects are typically the entire duration of the "good bits" from the source clips, they're normally way too long and so I'm mostly taking clips that are 2-20s long and cutting them down to the 1-5s to fit into the timing of the edit. This is done with Command-Shift-[ and Command-Shift-] which do a ripple delete from the playhead either to the start of the clip ([) or the end of the clip (]). I'm likely using some other keys to navigate around too during this phase. I should do a mini editing session and actually film the keyboard so I can see what I'm doing during a real edit, rather than editing but trying to pay attention to the keys I use rather than the actual edit. Luckily, the garish LED lights are extra if you can find the stripped down versions! Depending on the keypad I might end up getting something that's got nicer ergos. I might also just end up remapping more keys on the normal keyboard using the Keyboard Shortcut editor in Resolve 🙂

@DFason Cool little video. I'm also curious to see your rig.

Just doing some searching for something else and came upon this - does the keypad look familiar? @BTM_Pix thanks, but wow are they more expensive! It seems like the shuttle wheel is the only hardware control that can't be easily replicated with a keyboard, but do people use this much? In Resolve the J-K-L combo is backwards-stop-forwards but if you hold down K and hit L then it goes forwards one frame and J goes back one frame, so it's easy to fine-tune the playhead frame-by-frame without moving your fingers at all. I'm curious to hear what other people are using...

That might actually be a bit easier to design - currently the GH5 has a higher resolution viewfinder than the screen, but maybe a larger screen could match the viewfinder and make the design a bit simpler. A higher resolution viewfinder / screen would make manually focussing so much better too. At the moment the focus peaking isn't that great.

Camcorders can be great in the right hands. Here's Mr Herzog for his latest film...

I've gone down a rabbit hole with hardware controllers, and while I am really appreciating my Beatstep Davinci Resolve Edition for colour grading, it's not the tool for video editing. The tool for video editing in Resolve is the Davinci Resolve Keyboard, but I can't justify the $1000 price tag, and one of the reviews I read said that it's only worth the money over a normal keyboard if you use the extra buttons that it has on the sides. Ultimately, the review said, you'll have more keyboard shortcuts than you will have keys on the keyboard, so the extra physical buttons are needed so that you're not constantly having to do Command - Shift - Something to get at your shortcuts. This lead me to the idea of just buying more keys and then programming them to say Command - Shift - Something when I press a key. That lead me to this article - https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-powerful-programmable-keypad-for-less-tha/ It talks about using one of these: along with this software to program it: http://www.hidmacros.eu/ This would mean that any function of any software that can have a keyboard shortcut attached to it can be assigned onto one of these and then you can have your own dedicated controller. Has anyone done this? These keypads are $10 from amazon and the software is free. I think it's worth doing just to try it out.

I've developed a few thoughts on this over the years. My grand unified theory of cameras is that highly skilled people can make almost any camera look glorious, unskilled people can't make any camera look good, and that for the rest of us in-between it's about how easy or hard it is to work with the equipment that matters. Watching one video can tell us a lot of things. It could show us the potential that the equipment has. It could show us what is possible in a difficult situation (for example, low light, high DR, etc). It could also give us a clue about how hard it is to work with if we know the skill level of those involved in making that specific video. However, one data point is one data point, and for a more general view of a camera we have to watch many videos, and even then there is a limit to what we can tell without actually using it ourselves. Reviews attempt to bridge this gap, but they are subjective and biased (consciously or unconsciously). I suspect it's the case that amateurs draw conclusions based on one video because they don't know any better, skilled people know not to draw conclusions from one video because it's folly, and geniuses draw conclusions from one video because they can.