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Everything posted by kye
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I'm not familiar with the GH5v2 but Panasonic was (at that time) updating cameras with all the user-feedback, and your description was certainly things that the community was wanting. I definitely agree that one of the main challenges is taking a clip that was shot in LOG and has 10-14 stops of DR in it, and somehow stuffing that into Rec709 which has just over 5 stops of DR. This obviously manifests in having to crush or severely compress various areas of the luminance range, but it also means that the source material can have colours that are dramatically more saturated than Rec709 can contain and you'll need to work out how to contain those too. Once you have enough DR to shoot the scenes you need to shoot, having more is actually a liability rather than a feature. I co-produced a 5-min short with my sister a long time ago, and we estimated that all up it had 10,000 person-hours in it. But enough of this blasphemous film-making talk - we should go back to talking about camera colour profiles like film-making doesn't exist!
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I highly recommend going to the source if you're interested in going deeper, here are a couple of interviews with Jill on Joker that I found to be fascinating and thought-provoking: ...and this interview with Jill on John Wick and other films where they even talk about specific shots etc: Lots of info out there if you search and go looking for it 🙂
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I'm just wondering why you were posting a random YT video. If I posted a new thread with every video I liked then the place would just look like my YT viewing history and not a forum where discussions can happen and people can share knowledge etc. I don't know what experiences you had in high school, but I've been an adult a long time and I've become fond of talking to people. I really don't know what you were trying to say? What point were you trying to make? Maybe if you actually typed something then there might be some communication....? There are all sorts of interesting things in that video, so the discussion could be a good one. Let's all leave high school behind and try and discuss things like adults 🙂
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Here's my recommendation for SOOC shooting - Sony AX100. As Dave says "Sony AX100 looks better than your camera". Just look at the nice contrast, saturation, and above all... skintones! and in mixed lighting no less! Good luck getting that with a "better" camera - they all have far too much DR to give you a punchy image from their 709 LUTs or profiles.
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Which is it? Minimal processing / grading? or SOOC? They're VERY VERY different! Just for arguments sake, let's definite "minimal processing/grading" of an image as being limited to: 5 minutes of adjustments applied to the whole project 30s of adjustments per clip only using basic operations that can be done in PP/FCPX/Resolve using the standard tools This definition, if you were to make a 5 minute edit, with an average shot length of 3 seconds, then that's less than an hour of colour grading for the whole project. The differences that that effort can make will completely overwhelm any minor differences that different cameras have. If you were to say that the best SOOC colour was 5/10 and the average was 3.5/10, then the graded images you can do in that time with those rules will easily be 9/10. You might think that an hour sounds like a long time, but it's nothing compared to how long it will take you to edit something anyway. Casey Neistat did his daily vlogs, which were usually between 5-10+ minutes each, and took 5-9 HOURS to edit. This might sound like a lot, but he was an experienced editor even before he did his 800+ daily vlogs, and he also mostly knew what the film was about etc, so he wasn't filming without a plan. I've heard other YT film-makers (where the result is a film and not a vlog or whatever) say that they spent 30 HOURS even just colour grading their 20 minute film! The other thing that you might not be considering is that shooting for great looking images SOOC will require you to either have boring flat and lifeless looking images, or you need to crank up the saturation and contrast in-camera (as someone mentioned earlier in the thread) but this requires you to shoot really really carefully to ensure that all images are shot with exactly the right exposure and the right light levels and contrast levels. One thing I find in colour grading is that different images require very different levels of contrast etc to look coherent together - you might have one shot with something bright or dark in the background and then the next doesn't have it - so in order to look coherent you need to adjust the contrast between the two images slightly. Black and shadow levels is another thing that you want to try and get relatively consistent between the shots in the edit. Shooting meticulously like this will take a lot more time during shooting than to just move a few sliders in post - you have to setup each shot, ideally to adjust the level of contrast and saturation between each setup to get a coherent look, watching your levels and histograms etc. This would add 30s or more to each shot before you hit record. If you're recording anything except a controlled environment where everyone is waiting for the camera to be ready then you'll miss all the good stuff. It's fun to talk about technical things, sure, but these things aren't independent of the rest of the process. Your question may as well begin with "Let's imagine we're in a parallel universe where instead of cameras being for making videos, they're really....."
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If you stare at them for hours and hours then you start to notice differences and they start to look normal. That's how all the YT "cinematic" content now looks nothing like cinema. I just watched Kill Bill 1 again, and yeah, it might as well be a different universe... When the people who can create any image they like with virtually unlimited budget create images like these - contrasty and punchy and not sharp in the slightest, then the people who are pixel peeing the 6K cameras aren't even playing the same game.
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Interesting comparisons and definitely a step up in quality. When used zoomed-out like this the image is quite good I think - it's very "action camera" but has nice clean colours etc. The DR wasn't bad either I didn't think. Maybe they'll be able to apply whatever improvements they've made to the X4 to the 1" model and it will be better again! It was interesting looking at the stats for the Insta360 Pro 2, which uses "6 x MicroSD cards + 1 x Full SD card" so rather than have an expensive media setup they just went for lots in parallel. The "Bitrate per lens: Up to 120Mbps" so is practically around the 600-700Mbps (there would be some overlap between lenses so not all bitrate would go straight to the final image). Maybe a "Pro" model could be a compromise and have dual media slots, with 200-300Mbps being written to each card. That would be a good compromise. The fact that the image would be across multiple files shouldn't be too difficult to manage considering that these files need specific support to process the image anyway. You might be right about a renewed push to 360 VR and 3D 180 VR, and I have a vague recollection of camera models that could fold one camera around, so it could be a 360 VR or a 3D 180 VR camera depending on how you configured the lenses. Having two card slots with one per camera makes sense in that way too. The fact that the ONE RS was modular also indicates they might be open to such a thing.
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Yes @Emanuel, but look at how you're talking about them... these words from you explain it well: they actually shine for what they are I usually divide between usable and unusable only for internal consumption aka no professional use at all these toys must be seen as complementary tools They don't replace anything etc. But let's look at these comments more deeply. Theme 1: They're toys If they had a serious codec then would they still be toys? I mean, in good light a small sensor camera is more than capable of creating professional images - lots of ENG cameras had VERY small sensors! Even if they released a PRO version with a CFExpress or SD UHS-III slot and could record 8K at 1,000Mbps... what would be left that would make it a toy and not a professional tool? Theme 2: They are just to add to the existing tools Let's imagine you're recording out in the real world and don't know where to point the camera because you don't know what will happen - what is the alternative to one of these? Option 1: Insta360 Pro 2 You can't realistically ask someone to carry a 1.5kg / 3.3lbs camera on a stick while they're actually doing things. So that's out. Option 2: Ask the person to carry a "normal" camera You can't realistically ask someone to be a cinematographer and aim a camera at what they're doing while they're actually doing something - plus you can't record the world and also their reaction to it at the same time. So that's out. Option 3: Use multiple camera-operators to walk in-front of the person This completely ruins any spontaneity of someone actually doing something out in the world, your fly-on-the-wall reality content just turned into a film set. So that's out. What else????? There aren't any other options to record content in the way that you can when you get someone to carry a 360 camera in one hand or strap it to their backpack or to their bike/scooter/etc and then just tell them to ignore it. By getting someone to hold the camera on a stick about eye level and a few feet in front of them, we can capture the situation the person is in, and also the person reacting to that situation, simultaneously. It's the perfect way to have a "fly-on-the-wall" perspective, only it's floating in-between the subject and the world, all in the form of a sausage on a stick which few people pay much attention to. If we had an invisible camera that could fly it wouldn't do a much better job than these things do. I genuinely believe these things are just a better codec away from being the main camera to record in some situations. They are an entirely new product category, and yet they're turned into toys because of a stupid design decision that limits any decent use in order to make them more usable for morons.
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Can you provide an example of each?
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I actually prefer HLG to a standard LOG profile. The reason is that HLG has rec709 levels of saturation and the main part of the image (everything below about 50%) and so when turning the image back into a 709 image from HLG you're not stretching out tiny differences in a flat LOG profile. The disadvantage of HLG in this sense would be the clipping of colours, but HLG retains the full DR of the camera so it will only clip on very very saturated colours and those will mostly be clipped due to being too hot (e.g. tail-lights) which would be clipped either way.
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Don't get me wrong, I WANT these things to be good. If they could make a 360 camera that was high-quality enough then it would be useful for filming in very busy situations and you could crop out the interesting moments in post. The issue is that even if they had 27K resolution, the fact they only have 200Mbps means that any crop that isn't an extreme wide angle just isn't good enough. I mean, 12Mbps of h265 is similar to 24Mbps of h264, but seriously... imagine that someone released a camera in 2024 that was 24Mbps! ....and if you want a camera angle tighter than that? You're practically pixel-peeping. I'm not even asking for much - V90 SD cards are common these days and they can write at 720Mbps. Having an EXTREME PRO mode in the camera that has a maxed out bitrate wouldn't be that hard - these things are premium products.
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The first thing I checked? ....and the last thing I checked. I've posted practically the same thing on every one of these releases, but the principle remains. If you crop in to the image, like 99.99% of shots will be, then the resolution doesn't matter, the bitrate does. 8K at 200Mbps cropped to a 90 degree FOV (about a 24mm lens) is 2K at around 12Mbps.
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You asked "what brands are you usually happy with color wise?" Good colour in an image is basically skin-tones - get them right and the image is good and get them wrong and nothing else matters. The way to get good skin tones is to film someone with the best skin tones you can find, use makeup to improve the skin-tones in your images, and to colour grade the skin-tones in post. Great skin-tones (and great coloured images) aren't created by cameras - they're created on-set and in post. Trying to choose the right camera to get good colour is like trying to choose the right paint and paint brushes that will make your paintings into masterpieces. You're looking in the wrong place.
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Vistek just dropped a pretty comprehensive video about how to test lenses, but it includes a bunch of really interesting stuff, ranging from what the various aberrations are, how to test for them, how to see them in the test images, and a range of other factors. He drew heavily from the incredible book The Cine Lens Manual: The Definitive Filmmaker's Guide to Cinema Lenses which is basically the new reference for lenses and has a whopping 836 pages and seems to have come down in price to only $175 or so (it was a lot more previously!)
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Cam likes the PYXIS...
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I agree on the focus on the influencer kids. In terms of if Nikon should let RED die, that's a tough call. They could retain the R&D benefits of the RED team (which is likely to have a very very different internal culture to the rest of Nikon and would be best kept separated) but without the RED guys talking directly to folks in Hollywood their ability to do R&D would be drastically reduced. RED definitely are a minor player, but they're not without any contacts.
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Getting great skin-tones was also a huge focus of film development. Here's a pretty strong example I saw recently (linked to timestamp): In case anyone is allergic to clicking and watching things, if you take this image: and then apply green under her eyes and magenta on her nose it essentially ruins her skin-tones: but guess what - if we apply a film look then those variations in her skin tones that looked awful are mostly eliminated: This is because the film look compresses the green/magenta axis in the image.. before: after: This is a pretty simple colour grading trick. Any half-decent colourist can do this without thinking about it too much, and most LUTs already have this kind of thing built in. Notice that this was all done in post, and didn't rely on the camera at all?
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I agree that this is a huge market and definitely where Nikon should focus their attention, and an N-line of cameras would be a good way to do that, especially if it took advantage of the tech that RED has. This doesn't really have much to do with RED making products for Hollywood though - that's a different brand making different products for a different market. Mass-market car companies do this all the time. They use their tonnes of cash to buy an unprofitable sports-car company and get their techs to work on making hot hatchback versions of their cars, and perhaps a new premium line of sports cars under the mass-market brand, but they also help the sports-car brand to improve quality control and keep on making new models. They don't just close down the sports-car brand. Virtually all sports-car brands are owned by another manufacturer that makes family cars.
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This is true. However, people are also trying to share their experience with you. For example, if you said that you were hammering in nails with your camera and it was really damaging the camera and you asked how to make the camera tougher, people would reply telling you to buy a hammer. Is this answering the question? No. Are people trying to help you? Absolutely. You have asked a series of questions over the last month or so about technical aspects of cameras that don't have any relevance to real-world shooting except in very very specific scenarios, and when people reply you haven't given any information suggesting that you actually face these scenarios in your own work, you just seem to want to discuss things like these real-world considerations don't actually exist. For example - do you know what the best ways are to get great skin tones? Shoot someone with great skin tones Shoot someone with good skin tones and good makeup Shoot someone with not terrible skin tones and really good makeup Shoot someone with great makeup Shoot someone with good skin tones and ok makeup and do digital retouching in post Shoot someone with not terrible skin tones and good makeup and do good digital retouching in post Shoot someone with ok makeup and do really great digital retouching in post Notice that the camera didn't factor into that equation? I'm sure that you understand that make-up is a pretty big deal on a movie set, but you might not be aware of how much work goes into skin tones and retouching in post. They say that getting the skin tones right is about half of all colour grading effort. Here's a video showing the state-of-the-art tools that are dedicated to this - these tools wouldn't exist if there wasn't demand for it...... this is the tools in Baselight which is the main Resolve competitor.
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It does, although as an owner of the current Micro panel I won't be rushing out to buy it. TBH, the panels have a bit of a controversy around them because BM seems to stop short of making them fully-featured. The feedback I hear from colourists is that the Mini is the best one because it has the buttons for controlling OFX plugins etc that the Micro doesn't, but users of both the Mini and Advanced panels frequently say that there are little things that aren't on the panels and BM refuses to make them customisable, so users have to keep a keyboard or mouse or tablet handy on the desk for just one or two frequent operations. In this sense, BM are like Apple - you do things their way and it's take-it-or-leave-it. To a certain degree the lack of customisation on the panels reflects the lack of more advanced features being built into Resolve, which means that people have to put together custom workflows with nodes in strange configurations etc, which of course aren't easily usable from the panels because the panels aren't customisable - even the Advanced panel at ~$28,000. I see quite a number of grading suite setups with a tablet as the main item directly in front of the user, then a panel behind that. Personally, I've tried to colour directly from the panel but the limitations in terms of what Resolve comes with has lead me away from it and to even develop my own custom tools.
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Are you referring to a specific situation where you shot in 709 and then in LOG but couldn't match the 709 profile when grading the LOG image? I have done quite extensive side-by-side testing and colour matching of my GH5, GX85 and iPhone 12, and I was quite surprised when trying to match the GH5 to the GX85 because I put a CST on the GH5 and the image was almost identical in terms of the colours etc. The GH5 has significantly more DR, and the GX85 isn't even showing all of its DR in its 709 profile, so that was a difference of course, but even matching between two vastly different cameras was very easy. In terms of how different they were from each other, in grading a normal project where I have shots taken outside in uncontrolled conditions the shot-to-shot variance of shots from the same camera was more than the difference between the GH5 LOG and the GX85 709 image.
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That's what I'm talking about too. My post compared the speed of CFExpress over USB with the speeds of 10G Ethernet.
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You seem to care about matching cameras....
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If you're cutting between two cameras that were used to shoot the same scene but from different angles then you'd be surprised at how different they can be without the viewer noticing. This is because: The lighting will be different from the different camera angles The contents of the frame will be different, either subtly or significantly The viewer might (and hold onto your hat here....) be watching the film and not comparing skintones Besides, I said to learn colour grading. If you can't edit two cameras together with skin-tones that are similar enough not to bother viewers, then you haven't learned it enough yet.