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I know it's besides the point, but nice work on correcting that - the colours in the end result aren't half bad!

Imagine what this would do to the next cheap camera challenge!!

Nice pic! I really like the 35mm FF equiv focal length. That said, I really think that any focal length is very personal and it depends on what you shoot, how you shoot it, and under which conditions you shoot. For example, I shoot holiday videos of my family, which is essentially environmental portraiture. In this sense, I want to see my family members interacting with the environment they are in. This could be people or the place itself. In this sense, I want a FOV that allows for two or three people in the frame. I also shoot fairly close as we're in public, so the lens has to be at the wider end, otherwise I couldn't get far enough back / people would walk in-between. Also, I have discovered that when doing portraiture, we tend to frame up the people in the shot in roughly the same size, and when we do this over different focal lengths the distortion of that focal length comes into play. Lenses longer than 'normal' create a distant feeling with a compressed background and lenses wider than normal create a 'you are in the scene' / up close and personal feeling. In my videos I want them to feel like you're there with us, rather than somewhere nearby watching us, so I like a lens wider than normal, but not too wide. Here are a couple of examples I've shared previously from a 35mm FOV lens: In terms of using this as your ONLY lens, I guess you could, but you'd either have to have the ability to create the set around the lens, or be the kind of film-maker who is looking for subjects that fit that lens and ignore great shots that don't work on it. I've worked out for me that my kit is equivalents of a 16mm, a 35mm and an 80mm. The feel of those lenses is exactly what I want - the 16mm gives those WOW shots, the 35mm gives those "you're here with us" environmental portraits, and the 80mm gives a feeling of looking at that thing over there, wether that thing is something in the distance, or if it's a stolen moment from a bit further away when no-one saw you watching. In this sense, the lenses give the same feeling as you get in person, so for me they match what I shoot (people I love in interesting situations), how I shoot it (while I'm there enjoying the experience with them - and also enjoying the film-making immensely too), and under the conditions that I shoot (in public, often in crowded or restrictive circumstances where you don't have freedom to get into the right spot for the right composition). In terms of what is right for everyone else, that's not for me to judge, but for anyone who hasn't already worked out what focal lengths they like, I would encourage them to think about the feeling they want to create and look for the lens that gives that feel while composing how they like to compose.

He's got 57 now. I mean.... I just happened to notice... and was there for no reason at all....

That video is hilarious!! I guess I was saying that what matters to me is originality. You're bang on that the most successful ones are often derivative dishwater, but so are most of the successful songs, so I guess they match in that regard! I like music videos because they are a way to get paid for short films, working for artists can offer permission to deviate from the normal rules and content of film-making, and there is room for considerably more experimentation than is perhaps offered in any other genre. Of course, there are exceptions where videos were creative and also successful. The video for Thriller by Michael Jackson was certainly both, at least for its time.

You may be overlooking the difference between a 4K sensor and a 4K output file. The 4K sensor has ~12 million photo sites but each is only one colour (R, G, or B). A 4K monitor has ~12 million pixels, but each pixel is made up of 3 lights, one Red, one Green and one Blue. In this way if you want a full 4K image you must have an 8K ~48MP sensor. Of course, modern cameras are smart with how they process the sensor data and do a pretty good job from a 6K sensor to output a 4K file, but if you want true 4K then a 4K camera doesn't cut it. For most of us it doesn't matter that much, and at standard viewing distances (ie, in the SMPTE and THX specifications) the difference between a 4K image and a 1080p image is barely perceptible, so we kind of talk about capture resolution and delivery resolution in the same context, but they're really not the same thing. I'm a big fan of blur and I used a ton of it in the recent $200 camera challenge. I also think that resolution and sharpness is one of the reasons people are so fond of the older 1080 BM cameras (amongst other factors).

I would say FF FTW, but who knows. What I am happy to commit to is FF FTH - Full Frame For-The-Hype!

I think cinematic 'language' is something that is always evolving and things people do will always fall into three camps: things we've established (eg 180 rule, J and L cuts, etc), things that don't work and will never become a standard part of cinematic language, and things that are unfamiliar but will eventually become part of the standard language. The issue is that 'standard cinematic language' isn't as standard as we'd like, and it will be different between languages, cultures, and sub-groups. For example the technique of deliberately over processing and downgrading the image and audio (making the audio so loud that it's clipped almost beyond recognition) is a completely standard thing that started in meme culture and has worked its way into almost all types of social media video. I can't tell you what it means, but I'm familiar enough with its use that I get the joke when people use it. This is the problem with art - they take what is normal, then create impressionism, cubism, surrealism, post-modernism, post-post-modernism, etc etc etc....

and proving that creativity knows no boundaries, I share with you all this. The most epic and philosophical song about radiators ever written.

and the EOSHD Nihilist quote of the day goes to.......... *drum roll* ???

@ghostwind Your approach sounds sensible. I appreciate the buy-once-buy-well approach, and it sounds like you probably have a good enough idea on what your requirements are and how you work to be able to determine what will work for you, both creatively and from a return-on-investment perspective, and considering that the image you deliver may even be secondary for some clients compared how how impressive your camera looks or the specs you can advertise (like shooting in 4K). I don't know what platforms you're creating for, but 4K would give you the ability to deliver 4K 16:9 and also >1080p 9:16 vertical video from the same shot. We've spoken on these forums about vertical video and I recall a lifestyle/branding/advertising film-maker suggesting that filming vertical video for social and also for portrait-mounted TVs was becoming more in-demand. The framing may be different for different aspect ratios, but I would imagine not having to have a 90-degree adapter to flip the camera would be a plus on set, as for each shot you could just reframe and do another take, and then be able to produce a vertical and horizontal version of the same video without much extra time on set. The only other piece of advice I have is to get your hands on a few options and see how you like them. Even if you assume that Canon knows how to make a decent cinema camera (which is pretty well established) there may be little personal elements that would work or not work for you specifically. Ergonomically, conceptually, and for your workflow too.

So.... how did it turn out? Talk about ending your post on a cliff-hanger!! These writers, always trying to make sure you'll read their next post!

All valid points, but it makes me wonder how much you want to spend for a "what if" scenario. An alternative to this is a C100 and if the client wants 4K then hire a C200 for that project. At the point that clients routinely ask for 4K then you can consider how long a purchase would take to pay for itself based on data rather than a general concern. "What if" is the enemy of photography because it leads you down a path where you buy so much equipment that you don't have time to learn how to use it and you take so many things with you that you can't actually go anywhere or shoot anything. True wisdom is knowing how much is enough.

also, someone else just posted this excellent example of exposure tests.....

If you're asking me how I do it personally, then I just let the camera do it. I've played with my exposures enough to know that I'm ok within a certain range and can get what I need. I think this is personal. Have a read of these: https://www.hurlbutacademy.com/film-education-arri-alexa-vs-canon-c500/ https://www.hurlbutacademy.com/film-education-arri-alexa-vs-canon-c500-part-2/ If you do the tests and absolutely love it at a certain exposure and hate it at anything else then expose it like that. If you do the tests and discover you don't care, then let something else guide you. We all see differently, we all have different preferences, you will notice things I won't and vice-versa. I think there is a progression of knowledge and technique: Level 1: Full-auto go go go Level 2: I'm now very aware that I don't know how to do this right, I need help! Level 3: I've read a bunch and am experimenting and I've worked out all the settings and all the numbers and all the ratios and all the things Level 4: I don't bother measuring, I just adjust it until it looks right The Level 4 people can adjust it until it looks right because they know two things: what to adjust, and what looks right. To get to this level you have to go through the previous steps first. No shortcuts. My comments above about Level 4 apply here too. Read everything you can get your hands on, do all kinds of tests, learn everything you can, then just expose it so it looks right. I'm reminded of how professional colourists talk about grading skin tones. Level 3 people ask questions about the skin-tone line in the Vectorscope and the Level 4 people just laugh and ask "How would you grade these?"

Try everything. My suggestion above is a lot of work but think about it this way, you have two options: Spend an afternoon or two doing my test, learn how your camera responds, learn things about image quality, and build a new skill Shoot ETTR because someone on the internet told you to, and maybe years later you learn that it wasn't the best way and you could have been making nicer footage all those years I mean, Internet forums always have better advice than what professional cinematographers do themselves, right?

I understand your point, but I suspect we have a philosophical difference here. My end goal is to make art. Out of the many ways I could do this, I have chosen video as the medium, and for this purpose I own a camera. If I could stick a USB stick in the side of my head and render my memories to it then I wouldn't bother with any of the opto-electric-trinkets that we talk about here. So, when we talk about spending many thousands of dollars on equipment instead of $40 for a 10-year-old point and shoot on ebay, we are doing so because we think that expensive equipment gives us a nicer image. For me, and I suspect most others, nicer typically means that the end product looks far less crunched when compared to what we pointed the camera at than a cheaper camera would do. This is why our discussions talk about everything in the image pipeline. Walking through it, we talk about filters, lenses, the sensor stack, the sensor, the digital processing (colour science), the codec, editing, grading, delivery codecs, distribution, and final projection. We care about everything. I understand that not everyone wants to have perfectly realistic imaging, there is this concept of a 'cinematic' image and we talk about how certain distortions have a pleasing effect. Swirly bokeh lenses are an example of this - not everyone wants the modern look. However, when we're talking about what we want vs what we don't want, not everything is desirable. For example CA isn't something most people want. It's definitely not something I like the look of. There are other things we sometimes want to get rid of. ..and here we get to the crux of the problem - if there is a problem with something in the image pipeline then we have the choice of having everything else in the pipeline have high-quality and therefore ruthlessly reveal the issue, or we can deliberately lower the quality of something in order to effectively hide that issue. It's a question of how clearly do we want to see the best part of the image, knowing that we will also make it clear to see the worst part of the image too. For me, it's about spending the money on the worst part of the image pipeline. If someone said they had an Alexa and PL cine lenses but used a scratched $10 ND filter and were thinking of upgrading to an ARRI LF because they wanted to get better image quality we'd think they were crazy because they should replace the ND filter instead as that's clearly the worst part of their setup. For me, I think that lenses might be the worst part. I watch a lot of Netflix and on almost everything I watch I'm seeing bad image quality caused by lenses, not by filters, not the sensor stack, not the sensor, not the digital processing (colour science), not the codec, not editing, not grading, not delivery codecs, not distribution, not the final projection, the weakness is the lens. And when I look at moving from 4K to 6K I think about what lenses people are using and I think "4K isn't your bottleneck". Using a Helios... 4K obviously isn't your bottleneck. Using a Sigma 18-35, Panasonic 12-35 f2.8 or Canon 16-35... I still think that 4K isn't your bottleneck. Using a CP.2... Even then I think 4K isn't your bottleneck. I know it's a taste thing, but when I see lens issues I'm just thinking everyone is spending big dollars to make high-resolution copies of fuzzy 70's polaroids.

I'm planning on getting one of those when OSX drivers are released - the horsepower-per-dollar ratio is pretty good on that. Of course, I'm not sure if getting a better card will help me as my CPU might be the bottleneck. I'm currently talking with one of the BM support providers so am hoping for some wisdom (and performance gains!).

Kraig Adams does it regularly in his videos. His videos are travel films and often go from vlog style to cinematic style. The vlog style is 16:9, hand-held or gorillapod, normal speed, with location sound and is often funny. The cinematic style is 2.35, smooth / often gimbal and sometimes drone footage, often slow-motion (although he's moving away from that now), with music over the top and is beautiful. He has experimented with how to transition between the two and often animates the black bars coming in and going out. It's a very different style to the video @heart0less posted! This is a good example, and he talks about it in the BTS.

I use aperture-priority mode and auto-ISO in combination with zebras. It does the heavy lifting for me, and if I notice that something is pushing into zebras range (I can't recall if I set zebras to 100% or less) then I will manually lower exposure compensation in order to keep the highlights. My GH5 has decent DR and I prefer a less saturated look that shows more DR and doesn't crush the highlights/shadows. To do this I shoot HLG and try to capture the whole DR of the image without clipping and then adjust brightness in post to equalise exposures. As I shoot in 10-bit I can push the image around quite a bit in post and it's not in danger of breaking, so I have that latitude. This fits my "capture everything and make the look in post" approach. If you're trying to get it right in-camera then obviously this isn't how to approach it!

It's a drone lens so the ergonomics are abysmal, but it works, the images aren't bad, and it's significantly cheaper than the Laowa!

Setup a test scene with some shadows/highlights, some bright colours (a test chart is great but not needed), and some skin tones. Film it with your camera at varying exposures, I'd suggest "properly" exposed and +1, +2, +3, -1, -2, and -3 stops. Then in post process the footage so that it's all the same brightness and then look at the images, notice what it does to colour, skin tones, and highlights/shadows. This is what professional cinematographers do to "learn" a new camera or film-stock. They often talk about how a particular camera is a -1 stop camera because they've done the tests and that gives the nicest skin tones or colour or whatever. I'd also suggest that you play with the colour profile to test things like lowering the contrast (most normal profiles have too much contrast for my tastes) and for each change you make you should repeat the above test. You will eventually find that you prefer a profile with a certain contrast, a certain saturation, and a certain exposure level. It's a lot of work, but if it wasn't required then every home video that dad made with a camcorder would be breathtakingly beautiful, and that is obviously not the case.

My opinion is that it would have been great for them to make the mount removable so that people could have the option. Even if it took an hour and specialist tools to do, it would have allowed a level of customisation for those that were interested in it while also not even being noticed by those that would only use the EF mount. Think about how Sigma offers the mount change service on many of its lenses, this might be a similar thing. Maybe a separate version of the P6K will be released, but this makes changing between them a sell/buy exercise instead of a minor change you can do at home. If the P4K/P6K was the right type of camera for me then I would have been willing to sacrifice a bit of resolution when shooting an MFT lens. I use a GH5 as I don't want RAW but I do want IBIS as it suits my shooting style and aesthetic. My lens collection has four major lenses: 8mm MFT, 17.5mm MFT, 40mm FF, and 70-210mm zoom FF. I'm not sure how large the image circles on my MFT lenses are, but I'd be interested in being able to test how large it is and maybe my 8mm lens can actually get a bit wider too, who knows. I see the P4K/P6K cameras as being somewhere in-between a point-and-shoot (where you can't customise anything or plug anything into it) and a cine camera where it is completely modular and you have to attach a dozen different things just to get it to write an image to a storage device. In this sense I think there is room in the market for it to offer some degree of flexibility, and a removable mount with different crop factors would be a win-win where people who want it can use it and people who don't need it wouldn't even know it was there.

Wikipedia is all you should need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion Basically, if I make a scene with three points, the first one is perfectly in focus, the second is a one inch behind the focal plane and is a bit blurry and the third is two inches behind the focal plane. Then I project that image onto two sensors, one is low resolution and the other is high resolution. On the low resolution sensor the point source hits one pixel (one photo site) and the second one is a bit blurry but the photo sites on this sensor are so large that it still only hits one photo site. The third point is so out of focus that it hits more than one photo site. On this sensor the first two points are in focus and the third is out of focus, therefore the DoF is between 2 and 4 inches. On the high resolution sensor the point source hits one pixel (one photo site) and the second one is a bit blurry and because the photo sites on this sensor are so small that it hits multiple photo sites. The third point also hits more than one photo site. On this sensor the first points is in focus and the second and third are out of focus, therefore the DoF is between under 2 inches. This is because the definition of what is in focus and what is out of focus is related to the resolution of the sensor / film-stock. This is what Circle of Confusion is referencing. Also from wikipedia: In digital photography, what is acceptably sharp would be based on the resolution (which is why people pixel-peep by zooming into 100%) and the visual acuity of a digital sensor is its resolution.

Let's cut to the chase with an example. If I set up a lens and adjust focus so that the blur on some writing is just enough to make it unreadable, then it doesn't matter which crop factor or how much resolution I digitise the projection from that lens at, the text will remain unreadable. If I then adjust the lens so that text is just readable, then it will be readable regardless of crop factor and resolution (except if the resolution is too low to resolve the detail in the text). Does that make sense?