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Start at the end goal and work backwards, seeking evidence. For example, if the end goal is to get a job, call employers and ask to speak to their hiring manager and ask them if it's something they care about when hiring. If you want to learn to think differently, find who your lecturers would be and call them, asking them if their classes will teach you to think differently from the other classes on offer. You will quickly understand if they're full of shit or not. One way that is guaranteed to teach you to think differently is to find some film people you like (producers, directors, cinematographers, etc) who produce radically different work, call all of their offices begging for an internship where you work for free and get to shadow these people. Spend a few months with each, trying to figure out what they do and why and helping them. Not only will that give you access to people you know think differently to each other, but if you're any good you'll probably get offered jobs with people you gelled with. Be clear on your goals and work backwards.

No, but it's an understandable mistake!

@IronFilm raises an important and fundamental issue - that if you're stretching time in any way you will get out of sync. My method stayed in sync because it skipped past lots of content. There is an element of time-stretching effect to what you're talking about, and there are algorithms that do such things, however fundamentally it means that the time it takes to listen to the output is different to the time it took to capture the input. Have a think about how you're going to solve that and then we can talk about the details of implementing it

Here's a thought - every second you take the first 1/5th of a second and slow it down to 20% speed and watch that for the full second, then at the start of the next second you skip forward the other 80% of the second to get to the start of the next second and the cycle starts again. It would be semi-realtime, being that people would see and hear themselves in slow-motion with only a second delay. Considering you haven't specified what you're trying to accomplish, I'm not sure how this suits, but if you're looking at an art installation or something then that would work

Yes, Multicam would sure bump that ratio up.. and combined with @KnightsFans comments below about rolling through multiple takes you sure could keep a DIT (or three) busy on set! In terms of working forwards or working backwards, I've seen some conflicting approaches: One approach is to make a pass through all your source footage making selects and adding them to the timeline, then you duplicate the timeline and cull the duplicates and lesser shots, then rinse and repeat until you have a final edit. The advantage of that is that once you've eliminated a piece of footage you never have to watch it again, so it's efficient in that sense. The other approach is to review all your source footage and flag the truly great clips, then start with only the great clips on a timeline and then only pull in whatever else you need to make a final edit. This approach has the advantage that you're not watching and re-watching clips that haven't yet been culled. In narrative it's a little different as you've got an idea about what you're aiming for (a script) but in unplanned / uncontrolled documentary-style shots (like weddings, docos, events, etc) it's hard to know where you're aiming in terms of which shots will make the final edit. I've mostly tried the first approach, culling and gradually fine-tuning, and it works but it's pretty laborious. I suspect that the second approach works much better if you're able to efficiently remember what clips you have and are able to find them quickly. Some people are able to watch lots of footage and then remember it pretty well, but I guess that would depend on how much footage there was and the level of control - ie, it's probably easier to remember that there were three takes of that scene that worked rather than there were three reaction shots that might have made a great insert into a dramatic scene that you haven't even edited together yet. I once edited a video of a race where one camera was an in-camera shot looking forwards and seeing the dash and out the windscreen. It was a huge long file of multiple sections and the stuff in-between, and I was having trouble working out how to tell which bits were stages and which weren't. That is, until I noticed that during the stage the RPM gauge was fully maxing out and between times the car was basically idling.. problem solved! I would imagine that once you've worked out what to look for (like lots of crew on set) you could easily make selects. It would also make it easier as you only have to sync the footage once then you can cut it up easily.

I'm confused.. I would want a de-clicked aperture, but the nice rubber grips on the original photo series. I would imagine the follow-focus teeth would be pretty uncomfortable to use?

De-clicked aperture as I often have to grab quick shots and start recording before I've adjusted the aperture then focus then adjust aperture. With clicked apertures it shakes the camera around and ruins that part of the shot, whereas de-clicked just makes the exposure a little off (while the auto-SS in the camera follows the adjustment). I'm evaluating the idea of replacing the 40mm Hexanon with a Rokinon 85mm and simply zooming into the footage taken with my 17.5mm in post to bridge the gap. I just did a quick test then of taking a bunch of shots and cropping into some of them and not others and comparing the video quality (with sharpening added to the zoomed ones) and the results are a bit meh once you're scaling to more than about 150%, but I'll upload to YT and see if that crunches the differences. In terms of mount, not sure - I can can adapt basically anything, so it would be whatever was cheapest!

This is a 24K camera.... Not cheap though. https://petapixel.com/2014/10/30/41395-thats-much-24k-gold-nikon-df-will-cost/

Thanks! Follow-up question then - what if I shoot hand-held without a follow-focus (and will never shoot with a follow-focus) but want to have a de-clicked aperture? It seems like there isn't a combo that offers this.. unless they're like the Voigtlanders that can be set to de-click somehow? [Edit: or do real cinematographers just have an indent on their left-hand with focus gear teeth?]

Cool tips. If you feel like you can share more (without crossing your personal PR threshold!) then please feel free In terms of ratios, I can't remember where I saw the 400:1 ratio but this gives a few with a couple of stand-out numbers... I understand that knowing what the story is, having it planned, and knowing what you're going to shoot should give a lower shooting ratio than a doc (where none of that is planned) but obviously it's not the case for every film! I don't know what would have made Fury Road and Gone Girl have ratios like they did... it's nice to have options in post, but...

Does anyone know the difference between the Rokinon cine lenses and the Rokinon XEEN cine lenses, apart from the housing and of course the price? The cine lenses are fitted with follow focus gears, are marked in T-stops, etc, so I'm thinking that there must be some kind of optical difference?

Just had a look at the spec page and it only has an internal SSD up to 1Gb, but doesn't specify a limit of how large an external drive, so who knows. If there is a size limit that would be quite limiting, I agree.

VR.

I thought that this was part 2?

Let's get this party started! Not the best thing I've ever made, but in the spirit of quantity over quality (and of making things and publishing even if they're not perfect), here it is. This is lens #1 - I may make more than one film with each lens. I think I followed all the rules.... someone made so many of them!! ???

There are a couple of phrases that are interesting here... "what gets measured gets managed" which can be a good thing (eg, number of car accidents on a piece of road) but then there's "a good middle manager will meet their targets even if they have to destroy the organisation to do so" which... isn't. Metrics cut both ways.

YouTubers have been promoting the new Gnarbox 2.0 which looks kind of cool. IIRC it has ability to plug in an external USB drive for storage, as well as a USB port for an external card reader, and can do cool things like backup a card to the internal and external drive at the same time.

You're right that it would be great if a manufacturer combined all the best bits. In my mind the GH5 was pretty close to this, apart from the AF people really don't complain about it in any major way, and even then the AF isn't so bad. I'd suggest that you re-think how you look at Instagram influencers though: they create original art and publish it on a daily basis (or more frequently) they are interacting with their audience, essentially having a conversation about the art form or about the content / concepts it depicts many of them are deriving an income from their art, and some derive their entire livelihood from this Yes, many of them are just attractive millennials living off product placement, but the vast majority of professional artists are catering to the whims of big brands and the superficialities of the public, so if we simply dismiss them as brand shills then we're also condemning most product, fashion, and lifestyle photographers and videographers, modelling agencies, photo and video re-touching houses, and advertising agencies, which is a very large chunk of the entire industry!

I don't think I agree. The traditional story arc is that there is some kind of stability which is broken by the inciting incident, and then the main characters spend the rest of the movie trying to recreate a new stability but they have to struggle and change to find it, which is where you mention embracing personal change. This kind of personal change does happen frequently in these movies - the love interest either doesn't think they're worthy or are too proud but there will eventually be some kind of kiss (or dancing), people will have their ideas challenged and will reframe them and become wiser through the process, etc. Where I think that we struggle with these things is that: They're not the focus of the movie - the focus of the movie is the fight with the external threat (as you say) so in a sense the movies are much more black and white than more human-centric films and in these films the characters spend comparatively much less time embracing personal change than they do fiercely rejecting it with a weapon of some kind, and They're cliche - we've seen these stories before and they're worn out and done to death. My teenage daughter can tell you the entire plot of an average Hollywood film after the first 5 minutes and get 80% of the plot points correct. Same with an entire TV series. She's not psychic - it's that Hollywood is unoriginal.

Well, I suppose that by the time you rig up many of these cameras with a full cine setup they're quite large, so maybe someone releasing a fridge into the cinema camera market might not be too out of place, but they'd be completely stupid to imply a hand-held run-n-gun in their promotional materials!!

Just set the preview window to 100% and make sure the timeline resolution matches the source clip resolution and that should eliminate any preview window scaling issues. It's worth checking this with known bad clips, and it's also worth checking the footage in another viewer. For example, VLC can take snapshots of single frames and you can zoom into those to really see what's going on.

If you can get your hands on one, I will allow it!

I was thoroughly enjoying Rise Of The Silver Surfer right up until the silver surfer spoke for the first time. I was thinking how cool it would be to have a plucky gang of heroes get so completely out-classed that their foe doesn't even acknowledge they exist. Having a complete action film occur and still be wondering WTF the bad guy was would be absolutely brilliant. Please, someone make that film.

If they got it open then maybe you should give it a go.. what's the worst that can happen? The only real specialist tool you need is a lens wrench, but you can make one by filing down the tips on an old pair of needle-nose pliers into a pair of flat blades. If you do, just take lots of photos (or a video) as you go so you keep track of which bits go where. It also helps to place the parts in a logical sequence (eg, left to right) when you remove them, so that working the opposite way (right-to-left) will be the right sequence to re-assemble it again. 135mm lenses are typically quite simple optically so shouldn't be prohibitively difficult to service. Look online for a service manual beforehand as that would be the best strategy, but I'd say give it a go anyway. I had good results working with a solution of tap-water and dish soap for cleaning, then distilled water for rinsing and a lens rocket blower to push the drops off the glass before they dry. A box of q-tips and those solutions worked well for me.

You might be right about single-person shoots. There's only so many hands (and neurons) available to get the job done as a solo-operator and no-one will give you a pass if the end result isn't quite right because it was only you. I'm an overly-enthusiastic amateur who shoots my families travels and the odd video for a friend. In this sense my shooting is guerrilla run-n-gun zero-impact kind of shooting where I document what happens, as it happens, where it happens, without making people do things differently or repeat anything. To this end, I shoot hand-held with a GH5, Rode VMP+, and a very minimal kit of MF primes, Sony X3000 action camera, and my iPhone (as required). I manually focus as I spent so much time being frustrated with poor AF and I also learned that I preferred the aesthetic of that more than AF, even very good AF like the Canon DPAF. Obviously I benefit from IBIS (as I'm hand-held, hate the super-8 home video micro-jitter aesthetic, and most places I go don't allow tripods), the higher DR and bit-depth of the GH5 (as I shoot in available-light and go where the action is), and the dual-gain setting on the Rode (as shoot in uncontrolled conditions and don't have a spare hand or spare mental CPU cycles to adjust audio gain). Having said all that I've produced a number of short films and I know my way around a set, so I'm familiar with the whole cycle from funding applications, grants, scripting, storyboarding, coverage, lighting, call-lists, extras, ADR, through to editing, grading, mixing, mastering, delivery, festival submissions, and promotion, etc. I also used to write my own music and ran a small recording studio for a decade or so, and have built a dozen or so hifi systems from the ground up (with wood, screws, wire, soldering iron, valves, transistors, resistors, capacitors, digital chips, transformers, etc), so I'm rather overqualified for the "dad with a handicam" role that I play most of the time