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Totally agree. Although, considering that your comment about film stock is very relevant here and that's now the sensor and CS which means it's the camera too, I'd say it's Lighting, Lenses, and Camera (in that order!). Of course, the full list is more like: Story, Acting, Sound, Lighting, Cinematography, Lenses, and then Camera (in that order!)

Naturally, I choose the cheapest single-focus lens that matches with my 16:9 camera... oh wait!

Thanks to @noone for posting that link to lensrentals - that article completely changed the way I think about DoF and lenses. I hadn't previously made the link that field curvature is actually a map of DoF, so that's hugely useful. It also has a number of very significant consequences, and may help to join together DoF, field curvature, the FF look, how an image transitions between in-focus areas and out-of-focus areas, and 3D pop. I'm contemplating and will return with my thoughts once I've re-adjusted my head and worked out what this means.

@Julien416 I agree. Let's agree to disagree ??? It's probably a fine point, but your original post said "all the people" and "everyone". I was just trying to bring some balance into the equation. You might be right that the vast majority of people shooting anamorphic want a less clinical look, but from my cine lens thread I also quoted some people talking about the Master Anamorphics: It might just be a pet annoyance of mine, but so often people talk in absolutes now, and I think it just divides people, creates friction, encourages polarised thinking, and discourages critical thinking. I find politics to be very prevalent with this issue - if "everyone" (or even "all" the smart people) share your opinion then there's no reason to talk about issues, exchange views, and heaven forbid(!) actually learn something new. Anyway, rant over. PS, if you want to shoot anamorphic on a budget then maybe buy the lens and dirty it up in post! Or buy a vintage spherical and crop it. Or whatever. This lens doesn't somehow make all the other lenses disappear. in fact, it makes them cheaper

and here's one from the Pixel 4. skill > tech

I disagree. It might be that the defects are a common reason that people shoot anamorphic, but it's not everyone. Here's a video that includes the Zeiss / ARRI Master Anamorphic and it renders an image almost as technically perfect wide open at T1.9 as other cine lenses at T4. I suspect that shooting anamorphic because you want the flaws is a low budget thing (and because at low budget you can't get sharp well-behaved optics so there's no choice). It's like saying that people only shoot FF to have shallow DoF. Or MFT because they want a small camera. You might make the point that Hollywood cinematographers often like vintage glass because of the softness and rendering, which is true, but there's also a large segment of Hollywood that have the attitude of capturing things in the highest quality possible (meaning highest resolution and most neutral rendering) so that they can push the image around in post later on. It's not a POV you hear a lot, but lots of big movies are shot with this principle.

@heart0less that's very interesting because out of all the mega-dollar cine lens tests I've seen so far I don't recall there being a single Panavision lens amongst them. Of course, maybe one or two escaped my attention, but not enough to make me remember them. In the above: Panavision = 29 ARRI = 12 Cooke = 7 Angenieux = 4 the rest only got 1... Maybe we should buy Panavision lenses and it will make us automatically famous.... on second thoughts, I can't find a singe cine Panavision lens for sale. I guess it's beyond those things where the price says "if you have to ask it's too much" and all the way to "if you don't know where to ask then it's too much"!!!

Well, that's definitely a credit to Sony as I haven't spotted a single clip with colour issues. My understanding of Sony colours is that they are the most accurate but that people don't find them pleasing, and that their log profiles can be hard to grade. But having said that I haven't worked with Sony footage (apart from my new X3000 action cam) so none of that is from personal experience. Sounds like the OP should just use the default settings......

Interesting. That's different to the A7Sii where IIRC he had customised one of the profiles. Do you know if he's doing a lot of colouring in post? I'm not familiar with the look SOOC.

Not sure if it's the easiest, but I can recommend Davinci Resolve as an all-in-one NLE. There's a free version that you'll be able to use for basically everything you will need. It's one of the premier colour grading packages used in Hollywood, so the restrictions on the free version aren't aimed at the enthusiasts. FCPX has lots of devotees and PP also does although apparently it isn't that stable and people are starting to leave it to get better reliability.

+1 for getting white balance right in camera. Sony is known to be harder to get good colour from but that just means that you have to be more particular with WB and processing in post. Kraig Adams on YouTube is known for getting great results in camera and is currently using the A7iii. He made a few videos about it that might include his colour profile and settings.

Did those specs say that readouts were at 12-bit (and higher)? Or is that all sensors and the manufacturer just chooses 8-bit regardless?

@leslie did you put an anamorphic lens on your gopro? Or just replicating the aspect ratio? In terms of getting stability I'd suggest doing it right and only having to do it once. If you can look at how rails systems work and learn how they've solved the various design issues while keeping flexibility then fabricate something that applies those principles then I think that would probably be worth the effort.

It's interesting that the 50mm 1.8 is perhaps the most common lens design, and if we take an image circle designed to cover a FF sensor and applied a 1.33x horizontal crunch then that would line up pretty well with an APS-C crop, therefore making a lens that shares (at least some of) its optics with the cheapest and most common lens design ever made. I suspect that's pretty much the recipe for how they made this lens - get a 50mm 1.8 design and apply some optics that give the 1.33x and there you go. This makes Sirui the anamorphic equivalent of Yongnuo, which seems like a great thing for anamorphic shooters everywhere

@mojo43 watched the video - cool stuff! It's definitely a striking result, and you explained it pretty well. Some thoughts if I may.. Yes, please make more videos showing your grades One thing I've noticed from other grading videos is that they start off by talking about the colour, but every time they touch a control they then explain what the control is and how to use it (literally things like which way to drag the mouse to change the value) and I find that really infuriating, so don't fall into the trap of over-explaining the tools (which you didn't) How to use Resolve is covered by many many people, but what isn't covered is the art side of it, both from a perspective of talking about what you're seeing (eg, how to choose a good amount of contrast and what you're looking for) as well as from a perspective of why you want that much contrast and how that relates to the content of your film (eg, how colours link with the emotions of the characters, etc) If you can talk about the art and not how to use each tool then you'll find yourself without that much competition, and the videos will be useful to people who already know how to drive the tools. I'm looking forward to the next one!

I'll watch when I get home, but you're right about not so much on YT. I started a thread about Resolve and colour grading just to collect resources so that we can share them - it's here:

Just found this guy - looks like he knows what he's talking about....

I just conducted a very thorough analysis (I measured the height and width of the thumbnail image above with the screen capture thingy) and it was 3.334 so yes, somewhat wider than normal! The Atlas Orion Anamorphic T2 32mm they used is a 2X, and if you film 16:9 that's 3.55:1 and 16:10 it's 3.2:1 so maybe they did 16:9 with the lens and then cropped the edges a little?

Ah crap. Of all the times to make a typo! Yes, I meant that maybe the Cooke had a lower F-number despite it's T-number being higher than the Xeen. I think that we have a major problem in society because people are discouraged from saying they don't know things. What this means is that they make observations about the world that are useful, but instead of just saying "I see this, but I don't know what causes it" and letting other people take that as interesting information, they say "I see this, and it's because XYZ" which then makes people who know that XYZ isn't how things actually work throw out the observations along with the faulty explanation (and in today's society there's also a growing trend of completely disqualifying anything that a person has ever said just because they got one statement wrong, ever, which is really sad because everyone is wrong about things on a fairly regular basis). From that perspective, I take it that cinematographers who get paid to do high-end work might know a thing or two about the various aesthetic properties of lenses and images in general, and I think there is lots we can learn from them in this regard. However, I'm not going to take everything that any cinematographer says as true without any analysis, or any critical thinking, as that doesn't get us very far except "buy this product because I bought it", which doesn't make us better film-makers even if we could afford the stuff they're talking about. And if you think trying to convey aesthetic impressions of things in words is difficult (which it is) then try getting into high-end hi-fi. The number of times that I've been describing something I'm hearing and someone else on the internet tells me that I'm not hearing it, or that it's not possible, or whatever, is ridiculous, and if I had a dollar every time then I could afford to buy them a system good enough to prove them wrong

and now that you say that, it's obvious! oops ???

Yeah, there's something to be said for ignoring these relatively small differences... as in, a side-by-side difference that is obvious might not be obvious if in two separate shots with a shot of b-roll between them, and probably isn't noticeable when used in different productions. Certainly, if one is ten times the price of the other then you have to question the value you're getting from something, although the rental cost wouldn't be a 10X factor once you take into account the insurance overheads etc. You can absolutely make incremental improvements to get from where you are to nirvana, but the cost involved is pretty darn high! The Dog Schidt lens in the main lens test in my OP is a modified version of the Helios 58/2 which can be had for $100 or less on ebay. It's not as good as the $10,000+ lenses in the test, but it's not 100 times worse either. The laws of diminishing returns really kick in once you have a camera with interchangeable lenses and you get a few relatively fast primes in your kit.

Certainly the IBIS distinguishes the GH5 from its competition more today than it used to, but before the GH5S, A73, P6K, P4K, Z6, etc, lots of people were buying it and using it on tripods exclusively. If Panasonic can make another “solid reliable work-horse” camera that had modes that other cameras only dreamt of in the GH6 then i’m not sure how important improving the IBIS will be. Of course, how you create a workhorse with new features is a bit of a tricky one.. (8K? 6K60? 4K240? 1080p960? or 12-bit h.265 in a variety of aspect ratios and bitrates perhaps?). Certainly I want higher bit-depths, higher DR and dual-ISO for shooting in difficult available-light conditions, but the file sizes of RAW make my blood pressure rise beyond acceptable levels, plus the lack of stabilisation for vintage manual primes is a deal-breaker anyway. Smaller sensor isn’t a trade-off when you compare it to 10x8 style film cameras, it just seems to be sub-optimal because the shallow DoF and wide angle lenses people want aren’t quite so available. I look at the S1H and apart from the ridiculous cost and the fact I’d have to re-buy all my lenses, I just look at how large and heavy it is and rule it out immediately based purely on that. Everything is relative. FF is a trade-off that isn’t worth it for me because it’s too large.

I've also seen mixed reviews. I think it works great in some situations and not in others. It would probably work very well for non-IBIS cameras like the GH5S and P4K/P6K. In terms of working with the GH5, the IBIS becomes a problem. The motion recorder will record what motion there is, but it won't know what residual motion there is left after the IBIS has done it's thing. You could potentially try and record that too, but that adds another level of complexity to things. I think it could be made to work, at least to the point of it being better than EIS, but it would require R&D, the willpower from Panasonic (or other brands), and they'd have to see a clear return-on-investment. It's definitely true that the GH5 owes part of its excellent reputation to the IBIS, but I'm not sure how much of a factor that is (as the GH5 is also an excellent camera in many other ways) and beyond the IBIS and the EIS I'm not sure how many people would be in the "shut up and take my money" camp if Panasonic improved things on top of the existing performance.

The footage looked pretty poor in shadows (watching in 4K on a 32 inch monitor) but that's pretty normal for YouTube compression in my experience. It's also common practice to add grain in post in order to stop the YT compression from making horrific banding too. I've seen videos where people de-noised the shadows in their video and the banding was so extreme that it looked more like a psychedelic fractal-trip video than poor video quality. I heartily recommend taking some test clips with increasing levels of grain applied and upload that to YT then watch it and see what it looks like once the YT compression has absolutely crushed it. I suggest trying 3-5 clips in varying lighting / contrast conditions and having a couple of seconds each, then having about 10 repeats of this sequence of images with gradually increasing levels of grain applied. I'd suggest a processing pipeline of NR followed by added grain, either from a plugin or just noise, it won't matter much for this test. And don't make the mistake of not adding enough grain, go from zero grain (so you can see what that looks like) to about three-times as much grain as you think is even sensible. It might be good to put some text in the video with your settings so that you have a future reference. I did this test, with the Resolve grain plugin at defaults except the strength pushed up to somethings ridiculous, and just ramped up the opacity of the effect. The full effect was still far too much, but the sweet spot was about three-quarters of the way up, and the first two thirds was basically identical because the YT compression absolutely killed it. It's a pity that the P6K video wasn't uploaded to YT in 6K. Screw that... I can't believe people go to so much trouble with 2X anamorphic just to get the aspect ratio they could get by just cropping!! ???

There certainly seems to be a new focus on anamorphic in the cinematic YT echochamber of late. Personally I'm not that enamoured with the look. The flares are cool as a special effect, but I think they'd get old quickly, and even after re-watching all three seasons of The Expanse recently, which is sci-fi at its finest and also included more than its fair share of people in spacesuits exploring the unknown whilst their headlamps create absolutely spectacular (circular) lens flares, even then part of me was thinking how cool it looked and the other part of me was wondering WTH it had to do with space adventuring. I'm more inclined to think that the oval bokeh and flares are more of a sentimental association with cinema rather than cool in an absolute sense. Of course, the wider aspect ratio does look epic to me, and I think that's because you're forced to compose with people fitting into the frame vertically and therefore you're getting more panoramic effect, taking a small step towards immersion. I was thinking last night that 2.35 is 1.32 times wider than 16x9, so I suspect (pending verification of the maths) that my 7.5mm wide cropped to 2.35:1 is actually the FF equivalent of a 20mm anamorphic setup, and cropped to 2.66:1 it's also the equivalent of a 22mm anamorphic setup. They're approaching the classic 21/24/28mm FOV that Hollywood loves so much, right? @heart0less your spreadsheet seems to be calculating FOV as an angle, but doesn't convert that back into equivalent focal length, is that right? That doesn't align with my brain, which thinks about FOV in FF equivalent lens terms.