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Have you studied the ads of competing products? and the ads that are regularly screened in the target market? One thing we can't know is what the client is used to seeing or what their environment looks like. Also, they might have an instagram full of oversaturated HDR pics and we wouldn't know.

Managing client expectations is potentially harder than actually doing the work, at least that's what I've heard from the professional colourists. It's good practice to get clients to send examples of grades they like to give you a starting point to work from. Another strategy is to do a few rough grades straight away and have the client choose which one they like for you to refine, that way it's not that you got it 'wrong' it's just options. The ideal grade for my tastes is somewhere in between the two grades, but that's taste as well. I know professional photo retouchers are constantly battling the clients about how much thinner/poutier/etc to make the models, with the client wanting to push the images completely off the deep end, and it's not uncommon to go back and forth a dozen (or more) times with the client saying 'more more more' the whole way. Remember that you're an artist, and often the client is trying to sell things. They're very different jobs with very different mindsets.

A 6K downscale to 2.8K would be a pretty lovely looking image, especially if you use a good codec like BRAW or Prores HQ, but is it a downscale or is it a crop? Prores is only offered in DCI4K, UHD, and 1080. In terms of battery life, I wonder if the target audience for a 6K camera might be the more serious shooters amongst us, who are more likely to have a rig and external power anyway. I know the EF mount makes it appealing to those with lenses, but there's a reasonable price differential too, so you'd have to want it!

I'd suggest: Setup a short section on the timeline so you can export quickly to test IQ Disabling all grading then export Check timeline resolution (IIRC output resolution doesn't override timeline resolution, but could be wrong) Create new timeline, add test clip, export that Create new project, new timeline, add test clip, export that Not sure what to do after that point... Re-installing resolve is the likely common recommendation It's called a Freemium business model. They've (mostly) written the free version already by writing the paid version, so it costs little to give away. They create a big name for themselves and it works as marketing. People go onto the free version of Resolve rather than pay for FCPX or PP, learn it, get used to it, then when it's time to upgrade and spend money their habits and workflow is all optimised around Resolve, so they've essentially 'converted' a customer before the customer has decided to buy.

I've been thinking a lot about lenses recently, and my take is that the best lenses for the P6K will be the usual FF/S35 suspects, skewing to the more modern end of that range. ie, the Sigma 18-35, Canon F2.8 zooms (especially the 16-35), and fast/modern primes. Here's why: Anyone shooting 6K will be interested in resolution and detail, so will be interested in higher-resolution glass The P4K can get similar framing with similar lenses by adding the Metabones SB, and there's even a new one now, so the older one might drop in value Anyone wanting to adapt lots of older lenses will want the shorter flange-distance of the P4K MFT mount Anyone shooting older more 'vintage looking' glass won't care about 6K and the P4K would be enough for them

I'm going to claim some points with my prediction... I guessed a higher resolution pocket camera, and lo.. 6K it is! (part marks to me!) I guessed that resolve edits for you, and lo.. v16.1 beta includes "Boring detector with timeline indicators to detect edits which are running too long"! (more part marks to me!) I'm semi joking of course, and my "guess" was a completely ridiculous extrapolation of current trends designed to get a laugh, but wow, they actually moved decently in those directions. BM just keeps on giving

It's the BM Ultra Pocket Cinema 8K Pro Plus, and the new Resolve 17 which edits the video for you!!

How long did it take for you to find a 3d rendered picture of a can of spam??? ???

How wonderful! Great stuff.. My wife said "Aww, that was really cute, and touching".

I use proxies all the time. I create 720p Prores proxies from the 4K h264 or 6K h265 source footage, which allows me to fit the source media onto the SSD of my laptop and edit on my daily commute to work. The 720 Prores cuts like butter and doesn't kill the CPU and battery. I just wish Resolve had a nicer way to render them.

The first few generations of tech always look hideous - just wait, it will get better, then it will get great. This is me going on record.

It's probably worth mentioning that there are three magic ingredients here.. "wide aperture", "MFT", and "sharpness". Our problem is that if we're testing the adapter for how sharp it is, then we're in trouble with most/all of the fast MFT lenses, because they are absolutely not sharp when wide open! I have the 17.5mm f0.95 Voigtlander and the last two stops are quite soft, and compared to the difference that the adapter is likely to be making they are probably useless. What we need is for someone to test it with a lens that actually is razor sharp when wide open, and for that I think we have to adapt something else. Just look at the lens test that @BTM_Pix posted in the Lenses thread - how much sharper the master prime was than the Rokinon or Dog Schidt lenses when wide open, and then look at the size / cost comparison! I'd be surprised if any of us with our mere mortal lens collections would be able to tell any difference at all.

This is potentially the best IQ of the bunch IMHO. Great work!!

The Z6 has a lot of fans on here - many believe that it has the best colours (or close to) of any of the modern bunch of cameras. My impression is that shadow detail and colour are partly matters of taste and the project (think about how green the skin tones in The Matrix were!) but obviously an ARRI does better than the first iPhone so there are some objective measures. In terms of highlight rolloff I think this is purely taste. If you capture a scene without clipping, with minimal noise, and in 10-bit (or more) then you should be able to create whatever highlight rolloff you like. The work that @Sage has done with the GHAlex LUTs is a good example of how closely you can emulate an Alexa with a GH5, and the highlight rolloff is a significant component of that look. I would suggest that many cameras can get the shots in the video I posted - or at least 99% of the way there. Many great looking videos have been shot with very modest equipment when put in the hands of someone with the requisite skill, and given the right lighting, production design, etc. Anyone can pick up an S1, Z6, or Alexa for that matter, and record awful looking footage. The difference between what the best and worst GH5 footage looks like is night and day, and the difference between what the S1, Z6 can do in comparison to an Alexa is much smaller than the aforementioned gap. Thanks! I suspect they're all walking on flat ground and the subject in the foreground is a little taller and the camera height combined with the wide angle lens is what makes the height difference more apparent.

Considering it's not your video I will not analyse too deeply or be too critical, but this is what I see: There is quite a bit of variation between shots, some are really good and some aren't as good Overall the colours are pretty good It wasn't shot with an ND (the fan shows no motion blur) so that gives it a slightly video look, but this is a minor point I think what lets down some of the shots in this film are lighting and composition - this is where the top end of cinematography really shines and in this video some shots are very nice and others have odd framing, distracting backgrounds, unflattering lighting angles, etc. Having said all that (much of which is nit-picking) it needs to be acknowledged that this video was obviously shot on the street, the models were shared amongst many photographers, there appeared to be no artificial lighting and I didn't see any lighting modifiers in there, and it's likely that the time available wasn't huge. In those circumstances it's a completely different challenge, and comparing a high-end cinematographers showreel to something shot run-n-gun in probably only an hour or two doesn't make sense. If you're interested in good examples of cinematography then I'd encourage you to stop looking at YouTubers and start looking at the pros. Make a list of the most gorgeous movies, TV shows, and advertisements you've ever seen, research who shot them, who graded them, and then go find their showreels and use those as a reference point for great images. Here's a good one: Then read as much BTS stuff as you can find. Using IMDB and shotonwhat.com will unearth huge amounts of information about how these images were created. Also, there is no substitute for hard work. Find a shot you like, take a whole day and try and replicate it. Work out what lighting was used, what lens, what angles, then pull it into post and try and replicate the grade. Find the sites that sell very expensive LUTs (not youtubers - people that actually work in the industry on movies/tv/advertising) and find their before/after images. These are useful because they often have a colour chart in them, so if you have a colour chart of your own then you can try and replicate that look and be able to apply some science to it. It's great to connect with other people, and this site has many skilled people that will answer questions etc, but there's no substitute for hard work. If reading about things or talking to people on the internet made us great at film-making we'd all be multi-award-winning geniuses! [Edit: also, videos comparing high-end lenses, like the ones that BTM_Pix posted just recently are great too, because they will be well lit and perfectly exposed/WB etc, and probably aren't graded either, so can serve as a great reference point]

It looks pretty good, but not great. I can offer more feedback than that if you're interested, but a lot of this stuff is quite subjective too, and with art there isn't a right or wrong way to do it. What were your goals with the piece? Are you happy with it? What kind of feedback are you interested in?

How's the latency @webrunner5 ?

Recompression will make an image worse in all kinds of ways, depending on what settings were in there and what was in the source. I'm not saying that the image in question was perfect to begin with, but just clarifying that the artefacts are a mixture of what the camera saw, what the artefacts the codec in-camera created, and what artefacts the still image compression put on top of all that I all my travels with equipment I learned that: I prefer Manual Focus over AF, because AF isn't there yet and with MF I have full creative control I don't mind the aesthetic of human focus pulling and don't need everything in focus at all times (I shoot only travel and home videos so I have full creative control) I really like being able to get subject-to-background separation via background blur, which if you're at a distance from subject requires a large aperture I also shoot exclusively in available light, and shoot a lot at night, and I have pretty good night vision so I also want a camera/lens combo that 'sees' in the dark as well or better than I do, which means a combination of high ISO and large apertures I really really like 10-bit files as grading them is just as good as 14-bit (IMHO, but I did comparisons between compressed 10-bit, and 10, 12, and 14 bit RAW) I'm not very good at mixing the focus direction (I've shot with the "wrong" MF direction lenses before and afterwards it screwed me up for a week or more each time) I'm not super-picky about consistency between shots and I can always compensate between lenses etc in post (at least to my personal standards, probably not to others) When I shoot sports I want very very very long lenses (I shoot a lot at 840mm FF equiv) I hate hate hate clipping and I like ~12+ stops of DR (as opposed to less) as I like creating a lower contrast output image that shows off the full range (reminiscent of how high DR cinema is graded) I'm pretty good at spotting the most expensive / highest quality cameras and codecs in blind tests, so my tastes run towards RAW and ARRI colour science I like 16mm, 35mm, 70-80mm, FF equivalent focal lengths (and a very long zoom for sports) To this end, I ended up with: GH5, as it has 6K 10-bit low-sharpening H265 mode, 4k60, and 1080p180, EVF, loads of buttons, MFT crop factor for the long focal lengths, I don't care about AF, and the colour science and 10-bit make it nice to work with for nice colours (although I still have huge amounts to learn about grading) 8mm F4 SLR Magic (to be upgraded to 7.5mm F2 Laowa lens when I sell my Sigma 18-35) 17.5mm F0.95 Voigtlander (the default lens on the camera) 40mm F1.8 Konica Hexanon (on a dumb non-SB adapter) 58mm F2 Helios (on a dumb non-SB adapter) 70-210mm F4 Canon FD zoom on a 2x Canon teleconverter on a dumb non-SB adapter Rode VMP+ (with the attenuator set for a safety track) I am missing a prime in the ~80-85mm range but haven't managed to find a budget friendly option yet, considering how little I would use it the budget isn't that much. For trips I would either take a three-lens set of 8mm, 17.5mm, and 58mm, or a four-lens set with more extension of 8mm, 17.5mm, 40mm, and 85mm. I have bought a bunch of other lenses and literally have a box of stuff to sell, and there's a 135mm f2.8 Minolta in there that I'd also consider taking on a trip for extra coverage, so I'm not sure about keeping that one or not. It's always a compromise between travelling light and being flexible... Had a look over this and it's interesting to look at the Dog Schidt, which (I believe) is a Helios 58mm F2 modified to flare a lot (depending on the options chosen in the customisation). It really shows how soft it is at F2 and how sharp it is at F4. The bokeh on that is quite pleasing and quite reminiscent of the higher cost options. @mercer was right about the bokeh on the Rokinon being really busy and distracting, I didn't expect that from it. It'd suggest that's because it's dirty (which IIRC is what the texture in the bokeh normally reveals) but it looks like internal reflections or something and not just random dust or fingerprints or whatever. Any ideas? It's quite off-putting to me. I looked at a bunch of the cheap vintage brands like Rikenon / Mamiya-Sekor / Chinon / Revuenon etc but eliminated them because of the hard-edged distracting / bubble bokeh and the fact I want my bokeh to shift attention to what is in focus rather than be a special effect that pulls attention from what is in focus to the background!

The last step in writing software is optimising it, so depending on which version you downloaded it might not have been optimised yet. Still, whatever works for you We're in the business of making art, not keeping up with the Jones' or learning the latest software.

I didn't detect the class system on there, but probably didn't read for long enough (plus I was interested in learning about lenses not the users) but that dynamic makes total sense and is probably an inevitable consequence of mixing expensive cameras with human nature. Pity though, elitism is a lose-lose situation. We may very well all get camcorders again. lol about the rabbit hole I fell down, but it's been a fun adventure and totally worth it as I have learned a bunch about myself. Had I known then what I know now I wouldn't have gone the XC10 route as its technical priorities don't align with my aesthetic priorities, and I'm not sure that a camcorder could really hit all the buttons for me, at least with current technology. Remember that frames you see here are re-compressed to JPG or whatever, so depending on the software used to extract the frame it might be super crunched

I am torn between the minimalist attraction of having one camera, one lens, one mic and getting to know it inside and out and just shooting it to death, and the alternative which is to have more flexibility and the complexity that comes with it. For me the difference is if you are in control of the situation or not. If you are then you pick the lens you want and say "stand here" and it all happens, but the less control you have the more flexibility you need in your kit. Otherwise wildlife photographers would just use their favourite 50mm lens and tell the birds / leopards / elephants where to sit, where to land, etc That's very interesting. I read a bunch of stuff in there and came up with the idea there were the accurate / neutral lenses that were called "modern" because lenses have gradually been getting more neutral over time, and those that were inaccurate / coloured / flavoured / etc but that the imperfections were aesthetically pleasing and were called "vintage" because older lenses were more likely to be like that. To me it seemed to be kind of useful shorthand and seemed to be relatively consistent, but maybe I missed some of the nuances of how the phrases were used. They spoke about having two sets, one modern and one vintage, but because the modern ones are expensive (CP.2, Zeiss, etc) either they normally owned the vintage ones for personal projects or low budget doc work and hired the modern ones when the project required it, or they were the ones owning and hiring out the modern ones, and were contemplating if there was enough of a market to buy a vintage set for a different aesthetic and maybe justify the price by also hiring it out. Regardless, I've bought lenses all over the spectrum and just deal with it in post lol In all the tests I did I found that all lenses got to be quite sharp when stopped down a couple of stops, and interestingly the affordable lenses that were sharp wide open were the same as their competitors but just didn't open that far. For example an f1.4 lens would sharpen up by f2.8, and similar lenses that were sharp wide open only opened to f2.8, so unless you spent squillions of dollars you just buy the f1.4 one and use it at f2.8 and keep the extra two stops in case of emergency Thanks - that is truly spectacular! It will spoil me for life of course, but you know, no pain no gain. What is especially good about it is that it compares mythically expensive lenses with a common lens that links it to many other lesser lens tests, so you can compare a cine lens to a budget one by seeing how each compares to the Rokinon. Very useful! And yeah, like @mercer was implying - screw carrying around one of those behemoths!!!

Yeah, that's why I said "modern looking" and "vintage looking" They sure knew how to make a great lens, even back in the day.. It's interesting reading the lens threads on reduser and the language they use when talking about CP.2 or CZ or Takumar or Russian lenses. In a sense they're even more sensitive than we are here and I imagine it might be because they're shooting in RAW (and possibly in a higher average resolution and with higher average DR than us too) so the character of a lens in terms of sharpness and micro-contrast would be more apparent. If we take @mercer shooting RAW but only in 1080, or we take many others here shooting 4K h264 with cameras that don't allow disabling of sharpening then we require a lens with more softness in order to get the same aesthetic because the lens either has to be softer across larger pixels (1080) or first has to overcome the sharpening (h264). Lenses are part of an image pipeline and need to be matched to the other elements at play to get the desired final image. I still haven't worked out if I like the 4k h264 or 5k h265 mode in my GH5 yet, and I'm also yet to use some of the lenses I've settled on in the field on a real project (for example, the Konica Hexanon 40mm/1.8 which is rumoured to be one of the sharpest lenses ever made, although who knows if that's true) so footage of that is still basically theoretical. I am still learning to grade, and also still trying to figure out what I like in a final image (although I seem to pick the highest bitrate / most expensive cameras in blind tests so there is that) so in a sense my entire image pipeline is still in flux. I go back and forth around wanting a lens that is neutral and gets out of the way because it's sharp and has excellent performance in the corners and wide open vs a lens that lends focus by being softer and duller in the corners and has flattering of micro-contrast by being softer overall, especially when wide-open. In this perspective I'm kind of lucky because I bought what I bought and don't really have the budget to justify going in a different direction with my choices! I've ended up with a variety of lenses and so in a sense I've just given myself problems in post to match them, but in a way that's also a good thing because playing on a harder level of difficulty is what sharpens the mind and the senses

Thanks for sharing - it's always interesting to be able to hear about how something was made and also be able to see the finished product. In the US/UK I think that happens a lot but here in Australia it's less common, but thankfully Last Change U is available here so that's really cool

I'm not over there... I'm over here! The reveal will be epic. I'm looking forward to it But only after I win lol.

Although it's too late to reply without knowing the lenses, I did look at them blind and my observations were: B and D were obviously more modern looking glass (the contrast on the whiskey screen left was telling) A and E were obviously more vintage looking with sharpness falling off towards the edges of the frame C was interesting because it wasn't modern, but still had quite strong contrast on the colour chart with bright whites I'm not surprised that @mercer liked the softer rendering of A and E, and TBH I'm not sure what I would prefer. If I had to choose (blind) then I'd have picked B or D because I can always soften them in post if I wanted to. I have two samples of the Helios and even on MFT where the corners are cropped, they're both still Jekyll/Hyde performers being sharp in the centre and soft on edges, and then sharp as hell when stopped down sufficiently. Cool test - thanks I was going to say that in reflecting about all the vintage lenses I bought, I think the Takumars are the best IQ for the money if you're into a softer rendering lens. I shot my "this is not an official entry" film I posted in the $200 film challenge with the 55/1.8 on a SB on my GF3 and I really liked the rendering and the flares. The problem for me is they focus the wrong way for my muscle memory. If I was on FF I think I'd be tossing up between a set of Samyangs and a set of Takumars. The Samyangs suit my "get a neutral image in camera then process it heavily in post" philosophy and the Takumars suit my observation that "you can't simulate everything in post" !! If you want to buy a job-lot from some sucker who bought a bunch of vintage lenses and is too lazy to sell the ones he doesn't want then just let me know. Asking for a friend.