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Resolve. Sorry, should have mentioned that. Check out the link to the other thread with the description of the adjustments

Balancing with natural light is fine but if the natural light changes then it can really trip you up, like on a day where the sun goes in and out of clouds. This may or may not be a concern (some places have blue skies 300+ days a year, so... ) For this situation I'd suggest renting a sound blanket (or whatever works) so that you can block out the natural light if it's being troublesome. This would mean you need a powerful artificial light, especially if you're bouncing it instead of using it directly, which is good advice. It would suck to start the shoot and not have a powerful enough light. If it leads to more work then you'll have some kind of commitment to buy something and you'll have more experience knowing what was required, both in terms of power as well as other factors, so you can choose a light that will work well for you and how you like to operate.

My take is that many of the things that camera nerds on forums obsess over are surprisingly unnoticeable. I used to get caught up in things like resolution and bit depth and colour science, and after seeing a few real tests (or even better - real world tests) I got a shock and learned that some things really make very little difference. That's why I question things I'm lead to believe and actually go and do tests to find out. I do far more tests than I talk about on here, gradually unlearning the BS that the internet is full of. Of course, much of what is talked about does matter and the vast majority matters sometimes and not other times. That deeper knowledge takes years to learn on the internet, or mere hours if you pick up a camera and go do a test and see what the end result looks like. “What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.” ― Mark Twain

Write up:

@BjornT was kind enough to share a grade he did using Filmconvert and Lumetri. Here's his final grade: and my manual grade: These are the adjustments: First node is WB Second Node is this Luma Curve: Third node is Hue vs Hue: Fourth is a YUV channel mixer with a key to only apply it to blue: This is the main 'look' of the grade, and remember that although the snip above says RGB, that the node is in YUV colour space. If you're looking for cool looks then a channel mixer in YUV mode is where it's at! Fifth node bumps up the Luminance and Saturation of the yellows (in the trees) via Hue vs Sat and Hue vs Lum curves. Sixth is a key on the skin colours that shifts the yellows slightly towards pink (with a Hue vs Hue curve) and also raises the brightness a little (with a Hue vs Lum curve). This was an interesting exercise and I primarily did it by having the two shots on top of each other with a Difference blending mode, and looking at the resulting image with the Waveform view, and also having the two shots next to each other on the timeline. I'd go back and forth between the two shots and look at what the main issue was, then go into the Difference mode view and play with the controls trying to make the waveform go as low as possible (low waveform = smaller difference between the images). I tried a number of things in curves where you'd end up with a curve that would look like a rollercoaster and that would tell you that something was going on with what you were adjusting, but that this type of curve wasn't the answer, so I went down a few of those rabbit-holes and trashed the node and tried something differently. Anyway, that might be useful for someone.

Interesting. Here's my manual attempt to replicate the grade. Original: My manual grade: Grade from @BjornT with Filmconvert etc: Some of the colours aren't quite right, but it's broadly there. I'll do a write-up in the Grading thread about what the adjustments are.

I can't think of any situation where going through all the pain of an upgrade would be worth it for half a stop of DR!! DR matters to me, but I do wonder what would be a significant enough bump to make me think about it.. This is an easy statement to make, but from a technical perspective that's a pretty big ask! I know what you mean, and I agree, but very high bit-depth RAW 24MP stills is a pretty high standard - not to mention the bitrates that go with that ???

The test shots in this lens review are P4K BRAW 3:1 if anyone is curious...

Speaking of Meike lenses..... Think of it like buying a grey card and a LUT that balances out all your footage, including matching cameras, forever (when combined with the auto-adjust function in Resolve, not sure if other NLEs have a similar function). Using that (and the NLE auto feature) to get a neutral image that you can then put a grade on top of (be it a fully manual grade, LUT, or preset) would be a pretty good colour workflow if you weren't into grading.. $189 wouldn't even get you a professional colourist for a few hours on a single short film, so that's the territory you're in.

Very impressive results.. nice work! Any chance of sharing an ungraded still with us? I'm curious to see what the plugin is doing

I shoot in difficult situations and demand a lot from a camera in terms of DR and ability to recover things and push it around in post. My strategy is to buy the camera that covers my needs and shootings style best and just make do. Every camera will always be a compromise in some way, so you just have to choose which things you compromise.

@leslie @noone are you guys talking about colour charts to use to calibrate the video out of your cameras, or monitor calibration to get colour accuracy of your monitors, or both? Not sure if this helps, but the advice I'm hearing from the professional colourists is to calibrate your monitors, and then to just process the footage to look good ("if it looks good it is good" as they say). However, these guys are colourists, so they're pretty good at making the image look however they want, so have less need of a colour chart to do the work for them. If I was looking to buy a colour checker to auto-correct my footage then I'd consider buying the one that Resolve uses to auto-magic the shots in the colour tab, but that's probably the one that's much more expensive!

If the lenses can focus a little past infinity at their hard-stop then there's a bit of room for something in the mount, so maybe a small amount of something grippy like a very thin rubber gasket? ie, cut from a very thin rubber sheet perhaps?

I think I do the same as @leslie and that fixes it. One of mine has a pretty stiff focus ring so that makes it a bit more treacherous but even then I haven't had issues. Maybe your adapter isn't quite so grabby when done up?

Lens #2.. something more akin to my normal style of film-making.

Well, don't let me stop you..... In other news, my second film is now uploading.

I noticed some lenses suggested that the manufacturer used a m42 mount but a different flange distance, and that these wouldn't be a straight conversion with a normal adapter, and I thought I'd bought one of these but one arrived and it's fine, so maybe it's one that hasn't arrived yet. How far away can you focus? Maybe it's workable?

I'll take free... thanks!

He did another video blind-testing is you could tell which camera was which and I worked out about half-way to look at the sharpening as that's what gave it away, but yeah, a couple of the shots weren't too bad. Then again, I'm shooting a GH5 with a F0.95 lens because of the low-light I regularly shoot in, and I'm upgrading my 8mm F4 to a 7.5mm F2 for better low-light for the same reason, so I'm hardly going to be an average user in that department. Gotta get those wide-angle blue hour shots... Or after the sun has completely gone....

No, I was focusing on the longer focal lengths when I bought them. IIRC I have a 35, 50, and something longer. I also kept everything m42 for simplicity. Well, all the Pentax and Russian lenses anyway.

In this video in particular he recorded with a number of different apps, and I'm wondering if it was an app with a low bitrate or bad post-processing that is to blame. There's one shot in particular (of his partner walking the dog along a trail - I think it was shot with the wide) that is absolutely terrible, but the wide shot of the waterfall wasn't nearly so bad, so I'd take the worst shots with a grain of salt. Of course, the best shots were also not that great, especially in low-light so there's that. In many ways this is the perfect architecture - super wide, medium, and tele options. The iPhone 11 just doesn't deliver that architecture that well with poor ISO performance and heavy-handed post-processing. Having something that had the same three FOV cameras, but had OIS instead of EIS, and the ability to record in some kind of low-processed 10-bit codec would be a completely different proposition. The recipe is good, they just need to upgrade the ingredients.

I can get behind that.. I have several in my "to sell when I can be bothered" pile ???

Let me get this straight... you shot a film for a film competition and didn't follow ANY of the rules? I'd keep your eyes on this thread come judging time!! ???

at least follow all the rest of the rules!!!!

Is the iPhone 11 Pro the perfect minimalist travel vlog camera? Spoiler: no. Double spoiler, some of the footage out of it looks terrible. I have a friend who lugs his 50D around the world even though he's a minimalist and hates carrying it around and all the hassle of memory cards and editing, but he's tried using his phone and however convenient it was, the only photos he likes came from the Canon. So it doesn't matter how much you like the shooting experience - if you don't like the output, what's the point?