kye

Hi Max, welcome to the forums! Things here can be harsh, but it's more that people are passionate about their perspectives rather than just being nasty, so I hope you can get past the initial impressions and stick around. You'll never question if people are being honest with you, and people do spend a lot of time agreeing and helping each other too, and nasty people are invited to leave, so it's not toxic like most other forums, IMHO. I've really enjoyed your videos and you're definitely one of the most thorough reviewers with tech performance and the like, so thanks for your work, it's been both entertaining and informative. In terms of how you did the camera tests, I agree with a straight-out-of-the-box test. It's useful to see what the manufacturer has suggested and what many people will use. I think the second most worthwhile test is to set exposure and WB with a grey-card. In a way the out-of-the-box test is for people that don't know or care, and the grey card is for people that do. The third (and most difficult) test is to try and tweak profiles to get a good result, and that's the one fraught with peril, because it's going to come down to taste unless you get objective about it, perhaps placing skintones at a given IRE, etc, but if done well it's probably a 40 minute video exploring all combinations across many scenarios with a comprehensive analysis and recommendations component. This audience would have preferred a grey-card style test, as perhaps the majority of people that post here are either professional film-makers of some kind and the rest of us are ultra-serious amateurs (like myself). This forum also has a bit of an issue with what the YT algorithm does to creatives - heavily pushing you guys into low-quality disposable first-to-publish click-bait industry-shill type content designed to help brands sell cameras to bros who need to be told they need a "FF sensor" "fast glass" for awesome "bokeh" great "colour science" awesome "codec" and "ND filters" and a gimbal and "buy my LUT the link is in the description" to make "cinematic" videos, and insert more meaningless buzzwords here. (and never mind that cinema was glorious for decades without any of these...). I realise that you have resisted these pressures more than many others, which is to your credit and why I'm still a subscriber. [Edit: I think your hardware performance videos are excellent and have been well received on here in the past, it's just that this video was a bit subjective and click-bait-ey so that's why it got the negative reaction. Talking about colour science is a difficult topic and one that this forum is pretty sensitive to because the vast majority of YTers don't know anything about colour science beyond buying a LUT and the results they produce are so terrible that the only conclusions that we can draw is that that particular person didn't bring out the best of that camera, and we have to wait for someone who knows what they're doing to show the potential of the equipment. So you hit a nerve basically...] Keep up the good work and I hope you stick around

I saw the first question and closed the window.. but that's fair enough, we have lots of cameras aimed at us. However this thing lands, I think the price won't be aimed at me!

Cool review.. subd. How's the FS5 setup treating you? In the Z90 video you talk about being able to quickly go from telephoto to wide for huddles and things like that, I'm curious what lens you'd use for that flexibility, unless you have your second camera with a wide on it, using it the way pro stills shooters run two bodies where one has the 24-70 and the other the 70-200.

I hit this when I decide to do a 2.35:1 project from 16:9 clips. IIRC there's also an option somewhere (maybe Project Settings?) where you can choose how clips scale if they don't match the timeline resolution. I think the default is to scale them to fit 100% within the timeline (so you get black bars on the sides) but there's an option to scale the clips so they fill the timeline resolution. When I do this (which isn't very often) I typically forget about that option, and just go through the timeline scaling clips (1.33 is the magic number for this situation) and also taking the time to move them vertically to control which bits get cropped.

Yeah, the DR on Canon isn't the greatest unfortunately.

Resolution likely isn't the same. RAW at a given bit-depth has a constant bitrate and one of the plus points on the 5D is the fast card slot, so it can do higher resolutions than the lesser models. Have you used ML?

I would also prefer to carry more batteries because that means that the weight of all the extra batteries is in your bag where it's much more comfortable over time than carrying it in your arms when holding the camera. Of course, in terms of a P4K fully rigged up vs an Ursa, the P4K option is nice to have because it offers flexibility between different shooting situations. You can't make an Ursa small like a P4K is without a big rig. If you were hiring a camera for a single shoot and needed it all rigged out then sure, just get an Ursa, but if you're buying it (like most people would be with a P4K I would imagine) then the flexibility is a useful thing.

What differences are you seeing? I'm not arguing that there aren't any, because there are, but they're a lot less than the price differential would suggest.

Technically exposure has nothing to do with profiles, but in real-life you can't look at footage that has a profile but no exposure decision, because every piece of footage you look at is a product of all the decisions that the camera makes. If I designed a camera with the best colour science but it under-exposed everything by 5 stops, you'd call BS on my claims that it was the best colour science on the fact that the images coming out of it were rubbish, and you'd be right. In a sense, saying 'look at the colour science in this camera' is kind of like saying 'look at how this camera does one thing and please ignore everything else' which is silly if something else that it does is rubbish. What we should be saying is 'look at the quality of the images coming out of this camera' which is the basis of my comments. and on that basis, neither is acceptable as a reliable final outcome.

I disagree. The Sony got the exposure of the skin tones right on a couple of shots, and the Fuji didn't nail any of them, and I think the Sony got the WB right on one or two of the shots, and I think the Fuji got the WB right on maybe one shot, but overall both were unacceptable. The entire idea of shooting with those profiles (and not HLG or LOG) is that they don't need grading. If a colourist created a reel with any of the shots from either camera, that would show they aren't competent.

I think you're missing the point here. The 700D is a beginner DSLR because of two things - price and features. The difference in features 700D+MLraw and 5D+MLraw is much less with ML, so there is actually a huge interest in the cheaper cameras. In a sense, this is how many people see ML RAW options: Cheaper APS-C cameras (model numbers in the hundreds) - medium bitrate card slots, CDAF, cheapest, APS-C Nicer APS-C cameras (model numbers in the tens) - medium bitrate card slots, PDAF, medium priced, APS-C Premium FF cameras (model numbers in the single digits) - high bitrate card slots, PDAF, expensive, FF ML basically over-rules all the other tweaky differences that Canon imposes. The 700D is actually one of the most supported cameras because one of the primary developers for ML has a 700D themselves.

In almost every shot I thought that the best version was somewhere in-between the too-purple Sony and the too-green Fuji, and I also didn't like the skin being blown out / washed out on the Fuji. In practical terms, if I was grading log footage and I got to either result I would think "well, I screwed that up!". However, I'd imagine that either one would be gradable to get that right balance somewhere in-between with a few simple adjustments, so in a sense, my conclusion would be that either one is fine. I'm sure there are differences in terms of which colour science you might prefer, but with shots that have the WB and Exposure so far off there's no way to tell which might have the edge. Once again, this isn't a comparison of the cameras, this is a demonstration of the skill (or lack thereof) of the person performing the test. It would be interesting if he'd used a grey-card to manually control things, but alas....

My dad, now retired, got into scanning his old prints and slides. He had the $1k slide scanner, but was lusting after the $5k slide scanner that occasionally popped up on eBay, because the difference was that on the $5k one you could adjust the plane of focus to get the sharpest results. The problem with the $1k scanner is that it was calibrated to focus on the surface of the thickness of the slide, but with a very shallow DoF (like these scanners have) if you can adjust it then you can find the plane within the slide thickness that the focus is best and then scan that. Kind of like having a tilt-shift MF lens instead of a fixed everything lens. He tried putting shims in but that moved the plane of focus so it was above the slide thickness, so was the wrong direction. Also, small errors that occurred in the position of the slide when it was being exposed meant that the focal plane might be skewed diagonally throughout the thickness of the slide, so the full tilt-pan adjustability is desirable. Of course, paying someone else to scan for you is unlikely to meant them doing 20 scans to adjust the focus geometry for optimal results.

Yeah. When we're all living in the future dominated by AI and robotics we'll look at the big brands of the time and look back to how there was no direct pathway to success. Some might have come from consumer drone companies, some might have come from high-end military contractors, some might have come from some other field but had a bunch of cash and bought up a truckload of R&D firms and their patents, etc. Times of great change are times of great opportunity for those who put in the work and have a lot of luck.

Yeah, it's not too bad. In terms of what is a toy, if a 15 year-old kid who saved up money from a part-time job they worked after school to buy this, they'd be confident they've gotten the best pocket camera that money can buy. When the cinematographer who still prefers to shoot IMAX large format film for their features, but is resigned to the fact that they are sometimes forced by practicality to use an ARRI Alexa LF, looks at a P4K (or even an UMP) they may very well consider them to be toy cameras. It's all a matter of perspective.

Sooooo......... not an 8K camera then.

I think that it's important to understand why you want to get into film in the first place. If you're looking to use film for the aesthetic of modern film (great colour, DR, infinite bit-depth lol, etc) then you'll probably want a fully automatic camera that is easy to use and you can easily execute your vision by controlling it like a semi-modern camera. If you want the aesthetic of vintage film because there's a surprise and (I think) magic in the imperfect aesthetic then you may not care so much about being able to execute your vision, but in a sense it's more a case of pointing it in the right direction and seeing what aesthetics come out, rather than what you specifically tried to put in. Both will (to a greater or lesser extent) give you the experience of using a film camera without burst modes or the ability to see the image until it's processed. For me the attraction was in the process being slowed down, but also in the kind of random magic that came out, even from the Tintype app I used. One thing I didn't mention about that app was that it stored the original image with removable changes on top, so you could revert it back to the straight image that the camera took, and I tell you, reverting to the original image removes 100% of the magic of those images. The beauty is in the horrific distortion. I would go out with the family to the beach and take maybe 20 shots (ie, went nuts!) and half of them would be keepers. The distortions in that app are almost a nostalgic art production-line. Almost anything looks great. Anyway, I'll stop now.

I agree about the feeling of it feeling special. I used a few different apps, the first shot was from an app called "Tintype by Hipstamatic" and I can't recall the other app I shot the second photo with, but googling will find some cool apps. In a way the app doesn't matter much as long as it does those delays and limitations. I really recommend Tintype though, a great all-around experience, and as you can see it can deliver really lo-fi results!

Edit: I played around with an app for iPhone that simulated the experience of film. It gave a square format, introduced a random amount of shutter delay, and wouldn't let you take photos faster than a few seconds apart. It then applied various filters to degrade the image (which had random factors built-in) and would save the photo but not show it to you. Even with this "far from analogue" setup the experience of shooting photos was remarkably different, in a good way. It made you slow down, there was anticipation about what you'd get (eg, if the tin-type stains would frame the person or obscure their face!) and the photos had some X-factor to them that made the whole thing worthwhile.

Finally it's time for the roles to be reversed and for me to tell someone else that their setup is tiny and they're worrying about nothing!! ??? Think about what a typical video setup looks like: and now think about the size of a MF stills camera..... I hand-hold a GH5, Rode VMP+, and all-metal MF primes for hours while on holiday - anything short of a film camera requiring bellows is reasonably carry-able!

Even that depends.. If you're shooting a long-form without access to huge HDD space then 1080p acquisition might be the best way to go, with some of the smart upscaling algorithms to get it to 4K delivery. Slow-motion is normally forced at 1080p on affordable cameras, but even if it wasn't the file sizes might be prohibitive for some. Then in terms of delivery, YouTube compresses the absolute life out of video so you're better off "delivering" in 4K even if you didn't shoot in 4K. However, if you're delivering straight to the client then a higher quality 1080p might be preferable to a lower quality 4K, for macro-blocking in shadows or other compression artefacts. Shooting 4K for 1080 delivery has many benefits, but it's not a one-size-fits-all option.

I've heard it's going to be absolutely GREAT!!

I didn't vote because you didn't put an option for "it depends".

Cool!! Stop thinking about cameras, and start thinking about making awesome films.