kye

Gary W bought the GX850 when this thread was going strong, and he's just posted his 2 month review with it. He mostly takes stills so that's the focus of his review. TDLR; he really likes it and finds that it has an X-factor that he can't explain that makes him really enjoy using it. It's not going to replace his GX85, but it makes a great compliment to it.

You'll have to overcome your modesty and post about it when it's released 🙂

Best of luck! The ATEM models do seem to be great, especially considering the historic price of such things (which every review painstakingly explains to you at the start) but they do seem to be very "industry". ie, the answer to every question is to build a TV station and hire an army of people to do everything manually in the same way it was done in the 1980s. This is similar to when I ask a question to any pro who works in the studio system and their answer is to shoot my home videos how a studio shoots a feature film. When I look at the ATEM device, I see a few buttons that do a single thing, and a few buttons that run some hard-coded macros. Why there aren't buttons to run the user-defined macros until you buy the $1000 Extreme model is silly - the Mini has buttons I won't need, let alone the 500 buttons on the Extreme. What you really need are a few buttons where you can store and then recall configurations, so you can have Config 1 with HDMI 1 (showing yourself), and Config 2 with custom PiP settings (showing your slides with you in PiP with custom location etc), etc, then you could swap back and forth without having to punch a bunch of buttons each time to re-create the settings while also looking professional in front of your audience. The saving grace is that in the default setup you can swap from HDMI 1 (you) to HDM1 2 (the presentation) without looking, and then when you have to look down at the ATEM to find the stupid PiP button at least they can't see you fumbling around because you aren't currently visible. It's typical BM though. Like with the Speed Editor - the middle and largest section of the controller is for multi-cam only and can't be configured to do anything else. Anyway, rant over. Using an iPad to run the slides seems like an elegant solution. I find that when you're presenting to a group, you need two main things: To see what you're sharing to the group To see the people in the group For my day job I do this using MS Teams (the platform chosen by corporate) and having a triple monitor setup where I have the meeting on one screen and I share another screen, so I can just drag any window I want onto that monitor and it's shared. I share a lot of different things like Word documents, Excel sheets, web content, as well as Powerpoint, etc. Oddly, Powerpoint tries to be "smart" with Teams, and when you're in Teams and hit the Present button in Powerpoint they try to be clever and talk to each other but just screw everything up. My wife is just getting setup and her business hasn't gone live yet, but she'll be using Powerpoint and Zoom with a USB webcam, which our early tests show is a similar situation with them trying to be clever but screwing it up. I suspect the eventual setup will be a real camera and a laptop running Powerpoint going into the ATEM, then that plugged via USB into a second laptop that is running Zoom and controlling the call. The goal is to be able to fit the whole setup in a suitcase for travel, including camera / tripod / switcher / lights / stands / diffusers / etc, so we can operate from anywhere. The laptops would fly carry-on of course.

Or even just the inclusion of their own RAW flavour perhaps, as that would have been much easier to copy straight across from the Z9?

I watched a bunch of ATEM Mini reviews yesterday and it looks like that would be a great setup to upgrade to once we're up and running. A few minor questions, if you happen to know: If you enable picture-in-picture and have it so that the setting persists between inputs, and then switch to input 1 (the source of the PiP) does it give you input 1 with a PiP of input 1? or does it disable the PiP for that angle? and if it does disable it, does it re-enable it when you swap to another angle? Does it delay the audio inputs to match the audio delay on the HDMI inputs? Did it get upgraded to have a multi-screen view on the HDMI out? or is it still limited to either Program or Preview? Is there any way to run macros from the hardware device? Having a custom PiP would be great but the PiP buttons erase any custom settings apparently. Unfortunately the best reviews were the ones done when it came out, and they are obviously only of the initial firmware.

I re-read this thread out of curiosity and I have to say that I think things have changed a little over the last 4 years - streamers seem to have gotten a bit more organised and are less likely to be fumbling around and having lots of dead time. I have also noticed that there are new approaches to streaming too. One I particularly enjoy is where the female streamers do a live review of the people that have been banned and then appealed, which is normally absolutely hilarious and also has no dead time, despite not requiring any preparation. Have people been doing a lot of live-streaming for clients etc? or themselves? My wife is just starting an online training business, so there will be lots of streaming in my future...

+1 for having a consistent methodology. It might not be exactly what each person will get in their own setup, but it allows direct comparison between brands. The parallel is DR, which has so many nuances in testing that you can't compare measurements that come from different sources, making the data almost completely useless unless it's part of a large database all from the same source and methodology.

This is true, but it is mostly offset by the increase in resolution. 1080p was ~2MP and I remember the data rates and processing requirements being huge at the time. Now we have 8K ~36MP and the data rates and processing requirements are huge for todays computers. It's tempting to say that we won't go past 8K and computers will keep up, but people have been saying this since 1080p and it's gone up 18X since then. The next shifts will be into VR, where you need to shoot in a huge amount more than your delivery resolution so I see no end in sight to the increases.

Check the other threads.... they're still alive and well.

Yeah, the ergonomics (and grip especially) on the XC10 was second to none.

Greater resolution comes at the expense of every other spec.

Announcements like this are just wonderful... All it took was a pair of press-releases and all of a sudden dozens of people with no training or experience instantly turn into patent attorneys and corporate lawyers specialising in mergers and acquisitions and market strategists etc, and not only that, they also instantly gained insider knowledge about market caps, sales figures, product strategies, etc, and just when you'd think that it couldn't get any better they also become R&D experts in both hardware and software design! With a shift so radical in capability, even the hardened skeptic must believe there is a higher power involved.

Not always, but sadly it's hard to do. The challenge is that for synergies to emerge the management from the more powerful company needs to have the humility to recognise that they don't know all the answers and that there are better ways of doing things. Unfortunately, "not invented here" is a very common mindset and different is eradicated rather than celebrated.

It's definitely cute, but I think it's probably not good. I couldn't find any reviews or sample images, so I suspect it might even be a low-res sensor that just upscales to 44M in software. It's probably the same sensor and firmware as those first generation 40+MP smartphones. If retro is in, then a bit of blur is part of the style, not a failure of lens design or MTF curves!

I've stopped trying to understand the younger generations in terms of tastes etc.. The other day we went out to a nearby community event and my daughter (20) came, and was rocking one of these: I couldn't find anything online about it other than online stores and Reddit comments telling people "you're in the wrong place - you have a digital camera".

Thinking about this more after posting, and after going down a small and enjoyable rabbit hole of watching video of rock bands play live, I think the majority of the effort is getting good angles and then putting in the work in the edit. I think the camera work during recording is good when you've got lots of good roaming cameras, but you don't need them. If you were doing stills and just setup a bunch of static cameras and hit record, then took stills during the concert, then took all the static footage and edited it together, applying creative filters, cutting as much as the style of music permitted (cutting frenetically for a smooth jazz performance wouldn't work, for example..), and cropping with motion in post (push-in zooms, push-out, pans, and even cropping in on someone and following them like it was shot that way live), could all be combined into a decent end result, despite there being no active cameras during the concert. But, adding my usual disclaimer, time is money and that stuff all takes time, so if the budget doesn't permit it then that might be out of reach financially even if it's possible artistically and logistically. I keep thinking that it might be fun to edit music videos, but then I remember that would involve clients and deadlines, and then it doesn't sound like fun anymore!

Man, that would be something! This Nikon/RED thing came from left-field, but a Canon/Arriflex announcement would leave me not knowing what to think! In terms of what this means for the mirrorless market, I think it's potentially a good thing - I'll be waiting to see what Nikon does with this in the next few years. It's well respected in post-production for being a good codec to edit and colour grade (efficient with computer resources etc). The people who know how to colour grade don't really care much about the image from the high-end cameras because they're all flexible enough in post to get what you want from them, but the codec performance is a real thing.

Nice work! The shooting style was sort of loose and a bit who-gives-a-f*ck which actually suited the song and the way they were singing it. Coverage is always an issue, which is why I value speed of shooting for my home videos, because it means I end up with more to work with in the edit. If you're filming rock-n-roll and the dirtier style of music then you could lean in to the grittier style and have angles that are gritty too. For example, an older camera with a super-wide looking up at the singer, or even a few action cameras plopped around the place would give you lots of options and lots of backups to cut to. The quality will probably be bad, but you can make them B&W, blur a little, add tonnes of grain, and now they're super-8 angles and things are fresh. Just find something to mount them to, strap a USB power bank onto each one to give them infinite battery life, put in a large but cheap SD card (which is fine because of the low data rates), and then just set and forget. Cameras from companies like the SJ-Cam are easily affordable and these days shoot 4K etc. I'm reminded of Painkiller from Judas Priest: It is quite obviously dirty and distorted on purpose, even having slow-shutter, radically stretched / warped shots (as short cut-aways), etc. Even the heavy contrast and radically clipped highlights/shadows lean into the aesthetic. This is a much heavier song, but there are things that could be learned. If you want to up your game then it might be worthwhile sitting down and analysing a few great videos like this one, even just watching them at 25% speed on YT reveals a bunch of useful stuff, like lots of inserts where it doesn't matter if the music is sync'd or not (like the singer staring at the camera) which are useful because you can use them anywhere in the edit as long as the movement lines up on the beat, etc. You can also lean into the effects, like rotating hues, strong filters like Instagram etc. Also, a 360 camera mounted high and off to the side could also be great - not only would it give a high-angle of the band but can also give great angles of the crowd and show that the band is super-popular (assuming it's a real gig). I understand all this is subject to the time and budget constraints you have, and margins can be super-tight for this stuff, but just some ideas..

We all know the camera and imaging industry is being disrupted heavily, first with the move to digital that sunk Kodak, then with smartphones slowly eating the whole industry from the bottom up, and now right at the start of generative AI. In situations like this market consolidation is an enormous game of 9-dimensional chess, so this move will be the result of more analysis than a person could read in a week, even if we had post-graduate qualifications in corporate law, economics, and accounting. It's not like Nikon was sitting on a huge pile of cash to begin with - in this phase of a market disruption where the manufacturers are literally fighting to stay alive if this wasn't a great match for the two companies across many/most factors then it will be a mistake that might cost them everything.

I'm reminded of the pattern in automobile manufacturers where the fancy sportscar brand that isn't profitable is purchased by the mass-market manufacturer that is profitable, and then in exchange for the sports brand being propped up the high-powered engineers get sent on excursions to the parent company to talk about how to tune the suspension and tweak the engine for a new hot-hatch variant. But, in this case, I'm really not sure who is profitable and who isn't... Simultaneously I'm optimistic about the RED tech trickling down to Nikon, but also pessimistic about that because now Nikon has a cine line their first job will be to protect it with a cripple hammer.

WOW indeed! Let the speculation commence!! Payday for Jarred.....

Gerald just dropped a video talking about how he has discovered that camera overheating tests are almost completely unreliable. TLDR; he tested the same camera in the same environment with the same settings, and got results ranging between 55 minutes and 8.5 hours. Here's the video, which talks about it in much much greater detail: I think this pretty much means that camera overheating is an un-testable risk for any camera without a fan. This is because: The tester probably didn't tell you what ambient temp they tested at The tester definitely didn't tell you what airflow and ventilation was present The tester probably didn't test all the modes you will use The manufacturer might update firmware after the testing and completely invalidate the data The test won't have been in the situation you're recording in and, lastly, in case you're still with me... The test is probably a random number generator anyway I think that overheating is now officially the camera boogyman. Sceptical of overheating in general? I've personally missed moments when my iPhone overheated........and that's a camera that no-one has identified as having a thermal management problem.

Possibly, but you know Sony - only the latest releases are updated and the rest are dead to them!

Yeah, I think I'm just a bit frustrated overall TBH. I'm also fighting with Resolve over half-a-dozen small issues, to the point where I'm genuinely considering writing my own colour grading plugin where I can get what I want. I'm also rapidly becoming frustrated with the colourist forums too, as recently I randomly heard a snippet in a podcast that was a simple and beautiful answer to a question I asked several years ago and got zero helpful replies to, but that everyone involved in colour for the last 30 years would have done hundreds of times on the average project, so now I'm wondering what the quality of the rest of the info on there is. I also watched something a number of months ago that was right at the cutting edge of colour science tools which was what I was thinking about but no-one is talking about. I know it's a sign that I'm progressing beyond a certain level of knowledge/skill, but I just find it frustrating to be seemingly going against the current in yet another area of this stuff. What does this all have to do with MFT cameras? (apart from being frustration in general..). Well, the better I can capture things in camera the less work I have to do in post.

Yeah, but remember, our situations have almost nothing in common. You're shooting dreamy images for someone else to pay you money and doing so in a situation where you're expected to be taking up space and using as impressive a camera setup as possible. I am shooting environmental images for myself in situations where I'm discouraged from taking up space and where having the smallest possible setup is to my advantage. As far as my understanding goes, if I was doing what you do then I'd also have the same thoughts as you. I imagine that if you were doing what I do then you'd also understand why I have the priorities that I do. It's easy to look in at a situation from a distance and see enough of it to have a good overview, but to be far enough from the details that the subtleties aren't apparent. The FF user telling the MFT user who wants small cameras that FF is just as good as MFT is like the cinematographer telling the wedding shooter that an FX9 is just as good for shooting wedding videos as a mirrorless, and completely missing that the price, size, weight, workflow, and a dozen small details make the proposition impractical at best. The comparison probably isn't bulletproof and you could probably find weaknesses in it, but I've had enough issues in the field with the size of my XC10 and GH5 that I can pretty confidently say that the considerations involved are real, even if they aren't obvious to outsiders. I mean, the other recent thread from @John Matthews was about cameras substantially smaller than the GX85!