kye

Jeez, you spent that much? Both my cameras cost less than that. Combined! Without colour grading I'm screwed. However, this is part of getting the best image for the price. If you use a cheap camera and get a great result, who cares if it was the camera or the grading? We're all trying to get the best image for our budgets, even buying multi-thousand dollar camera bodies.

With a GH4 you should be taking in first place!

Try again... "In the past DaVinci Resolve systems were pre built and priced from $200,000 for a 1 GPU based system, to over $800,000 for a 16 GPU top of the line system. Even though this was in line with industry standard practice, it meant professional color correction was way too expensive for most people to afford." Source: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100413006446/en/Blackmagic-Design-Revolutionizes-Color-Correction! To the OP, Resolve is the best choice. Not only is the free version excellent, but over the last few years Resolve has gone from not even being in the picture to being a serious contender for FCPX and PP, with people starting to switch in real quantities. If you search google for Resolve you get ads for Adobe PP - this isn't a coincidence! I use Resolve for my complete end-to-end workflow and it's fully functional, and is the best colour engine you're going to come across (the competitor to Resolve is Baselight, but there's a reason you haven't heard of it...)

There is one thing that matters most in music videos... ideas. Screw everything else if the video isn't original. To that end, here's a great one: People say that there's no market for short films.... wrong. They just have music over the top.

GH5 for under $200? I'll take it!

I've just discovered how to make your normal camera look absolutely brilliant... Dump your footage from this challenge into a directory that also contains clips from your normal camera - then open a file from your normal camera by mistake. The 6K 10-bit H265 file from my GH5 looked absolutely spectacular!!

There's no need to rush. By doing the right things we make consistent progress, which is more than can be said by most

C, E, and I for me. About a third of them looked awful, and lots of the rest looked good in one location or in one way but bad in the other location or in other ways. Realistically the colour can be changed in post and colour differences between cameras can be equalised relatively easily if you're good with some basic controls. Good test! I'm keen to see the results

Excellent! I have two weeks to shoot like crazy and hope I can get lucky on enough shots to compensate for my camera! There's a 'rule' in photography that one image in a thousand is good and one in ten thousand is great, so that means I only need to....... oh crap.

Some really good info here. I watch a lot of YT and especially higher production channels, and at some point they all make a "how I succeeded at YT" video, and the story is always the same. Putting my business consultant hat on, I'd suggest you look at it like a sales pipeline: First step is to convert people that have no idea you exist into people that do know you exist. This is about having a video of yours appear somewhere on the screen. This depends on the mighty algorithm. Second step is to convert people who have seen you exist but haven't watched one of your videos into people that have watched one of your videos. This is about thumbnail and titles. This is where clickbait will help you. Third is to keep people watching your video for as long as possible. The first 'trick' is to hook the viewer in the first few seconds. Studies have been done about how kids can tell if something is authentic or not in something like 7 seconds, so basically you have to be interesting, and you can't fake it. The old trick of showing a clip from the peak of the third act and then "72 hours earlier" can work, but basically lead with the most awesome bit until peoples itchy clicks fingers move away from the "Next" button. This is where clickbait will hurt you - if you promise something in the title and then don't deliver then people will click away. This is why the Casey Neistat videos where he has big news (like the "I'm leaving NYC forever" video) the first thing he says is "Hi... It's not clickbait". The fourth is to get people to interact with your video. More engagement means you come out higher in the mighty algorithm. Likes and comments are great for your video and your channel. The fifth is to get people to watch more videos. This is where the end screen comes in with the "watch more of my videos" comes in, as well as people putting in links in the top-right when they mention things. The sixth is to get people to subscribe. Subscribers are more likely to see the next video you make. That's fancy words for things we already know..... Clickbait titles and thumbnails, keep people engaged, link to other videos, then the almighty "like, comment, subscribe" commandment. Then it's "post often". Then it's monetise. They also talk about balancing regular content with findable content. This is why people vlog and mix in product reviews. If their channel was only product reviews then they'd get hits but less subscribers, and if they only did normal vlog or whatever videos then not many people would find their content. So doing collaborations and reviews and other searchable content is how to find new viewers, and regularly making good content makes those people stick around. A good example is Sara Deitchy who famously got famous by making a parody of Casey Neistat. He did what everyone did, heard about the video, watched it, enjoyed it, but before sharing it he looked at the rest of her channel and saw that she'd made documentary-series and other real high-quality content and only then decided she was worth recommending. It's like threading the needle, you have to do everything right, however, I think that there's ample room on the platform. I was watching YT daily around 2005 and there were a group of YT peeps who got all the views and were all referencing each other, they're all gone, without exception. I suspect that most of the top ranking people from even 2010 or 2015 are probably mostly replaced as well. This is likely the algorithm changing over time, but it means that everyone famous now was new then, so opportunities exist. Oh, and everyone says you have to grind for years before your channel will take off, and even then, no guarantees.

Not off the top of my head, but I think some have spoken about it indirectly before, and an occasional one or two might mention $ figures. My understanding is that for the pros the revenue from ads is so little in comparison to sponsored content that it might as well not even be there. IIRC Levi Allen doesn't even have ads turned on because he feels they will hurt his channel more than they'd help his income. I agree with some of @Video Hummus comments - kids create lots of watch time and their habits would surprise you, watching things you wouldn't expect. There are quite a few YT people making videos about how to make a living from YT, and also articles and other info online about analysis of watching habits etc. I think the info is out there if you're willing to do a little digging.

Ads don't generate much income, even for the professional YTs, which is why they do sponsored videos themselves, essentially running ads within their "show". The goal is to attract many viewers and retain many viewers. IIRC the algorithm doesn't like it if people only watch a bit of your video then click away to the next one. This is why controversy, spectacle and drama are so prevalent on the platform, creating a steady stream of engaging videos is really fricking hard!

I thought Andrew said we could use existing cameras as long as we could prove that we could have bought it for under the budget limit... If you come last then this truly will be an interesting challenge!

Absolutely - well said. It's a tool that can be used for directing attention. The eye is pulled to things in focus, so it's another compositional tool in our arsenals. It's actually not - https://petapixel.com/2012/11/17/the-camera-versus-the-human-eye/ We just have some pretty advanced visual memory and it pieces together the bits we see in focus to build a mental model of our surroundings. Which is awesome because our eyes are actually deeply flawed instruments, but our brain hides that fact from us... http://www.cycleback.com/eyephysiology.html and the fact that it isn't makes it very interesting to all kind of people for all kinds of things... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698998003174 https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-49-3-273

I didn't say large DoF was worse, I just said it has an aesthetic. No negativity from me about deep DoF, just that if you show footage that has a fixed wide angle and deep DoF look then it has a certain aesthetic. I don't know why pointing out that something has a 'look' is automatically interpreted as being a bad thing. I wouldn't mind if all my cameras had the 'Alexa look'! Let's review shall we... here's my original post - please review it carefully for any hate: Ok, now you haven't found any, maybe we can start again.....?

I've got one of my cameras and have ordered the second one. I'm pretty sure one of them will come last, but ce la vie!

I was browsing ebay last night and found an old camcorder and was flicking thought the photos trying to see if it had a FullHD sticker on it and then I got to the side where you put the tape in! Then I laughed and tried to remember if I still owned any miniDV tapes. Then I wondered if the bitrate and codec on miniDV would be better than cheap cameras recording to SD cards..

I run Resolve.

iPhone X has focal lengths of 4.25mm and 6mm (source) which for the 4.25mm lens at f1.8 gives a DoF of 12.3cm at a distance of 20cm. A 26mm lens (which is what the equivalent FF focal length is) that was f1.8 gives a DoF of 0.28cm at a distance of 20cm. That's why you can't get any background blur with a tiny sensor unless the subject is very close. They love to say it's a 26mm equivalent f1.8 lens, but when you take the crop factor into account it's the equivalent of a 26mm f11 lens. They love to convert the focal length to FF equivalent but conveniently "forget" to convert the aperture. So their 4.25mm f1.8 lens is fast from an exposure point of view, but not from a DoF point of view, which is why I commented - every shot has infinite DoF and it impacts the aesthetic.

Yes, taking into account sensor size. If you don't take into account sensor size then it's a crazy fast ultra-ultra-ultra wide.

Great stuff. I think it was obvious from a visual perspective that it was shot on a phone, but after 10 seconds it wouldn't matter any more and it would all be down to the acting and story. I maintain that phones are very useful for what they do, which is essentially a camera with a slow / wide prime lens. Time spent not film-making because of equipment limitations is time wasted. I think discussions about equipment are fine as long as you're already shooting with what you have.

You're probably right. I compared a RAW still to a 1080 frame and saw a massive difference, but it will depend on bitrates. Maybe for $200 you get good quality 1080 and rubbish 4K. I guess we'll see!

I was contemplating not entering because I was pretty sure I'd be last.. Maybe the 'cheapest camera you can find' is a better approach? I do like the sound of that

Yeah, @quivering_member.. we made Australia great again some time ago before it got trendy. ???