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I hadn't originally considered that the mic capsule and maybe mic circuitry exist prior to any attenuation, so that might be the missing piece. I see a couple of different signal paths.. Setup #1: "microphone" (which is a microphone capsule, feeding into an internal amplifier circuit of some kind) v Zoom F6 (which is likely to be an adjustable resistor -> the rest of the circuitry) Setup #2: "microphone" (which is a microphone capsule, feeding into an internal amplifier circuit of some kind) v "mic preamp" (which is likely to be: an adjustable resistor -> fixed gain circuit -> adjustable resistor -> fixed gain circuit) v Zoom F6 (which is likely to be an adjustable resistor -> the rest of the circuitry) If we assume that we adjust all the controls so that the microphone capsule on the edge of clipping physically aligns with every fixed gain circuit on the edge of clipping electronically, and we call this 0db, and we assume that every gain circuit has a self-noise figure of -100dB. Then we assume that we put the microphone near something very loud, and let's imagine that it has 15dB of head room above the average level, and we record, then we'll get noise in the recording at 85dB below our loud sound, which is a SNR of 85dB. Now we take that setup and go inside to record something very quiet, which is 80dB below the loud thing. The loud thing was averaging -15dB, so that means this thing averages -95dB. Our self-noise is still at -100dB, but that means that we only have a SNR of 5dB. Its an extreme example, but so is having 5dB SNR, so I think it remains relevant even if the difference in volume is less. Did I mess up the math? If that's the case, then it won't matter if the F6 is clean down to -200dB, the noise from the active circuitry in the microphone (which we know is there because it requires phantom power) will already be mixed into the signal before it gets to the F6. Microphone capsules are a passive transducer that are used the exact opposite way to a loudspeaker (which incidentally is why you can use headphones as a microphone) and therefore have no noise floor or self-noise, so the only setup where the F6 is the only active device and you plug a passive microphone straight into the F6. Then your recording will only be limited by the clipping of the microphone capsule and the F6s internal components. The camera analogy isn't a good one because in a camera the sensor is the first electronic component, whereas in an audio setup the recorder is likely preceded by multiple other electronic circuits that have their own limitations independent to the recorder.

Maybe it was an artistic decision. When I was investigating using video as a way to grab still frames as photos I did a bunch of reading about different shutter angles, and there was a great explanation about how one of those war movies (Saving Private Ryan IIRC) used 90 degree and 45 degree angles to make the horror seem less stylised and kind of blurred over. They spoke about how in 180 degree angle explosions are just big blurs, whereas if you shorten the shutter time then you can see the bits of things (and people) flying and it makes it much more visceral. In a sense the cinematic look is a pleasant style, and they didn't want it to be pleasant, they wanted it to be graphic and awful. Maybe Peaky Blinders make similar choices, it would certainly fit with their subject matter and storylines! The one I noticed was S4E2 at the 48 minute mark, with the shot looking up at a balcony with a ceiling fan above that. Just looking at it now the shutter angle is very short indeed, but it's not a graphic moment in itself, so who knows.

I have no idea - the level of production design on the show is exceptional, unless they had an accident and broke their only ND, or a logistics error of some kind. Probably one of those 'X happened and we thought no-one would notice' kind of things.. Strange though!

Use whatever you have, shoot edit and publish, then do it again.. and again.. Almost every successful YouTuber has early videos that are awful (they may have deleted them but they were there) and every successful Hollywood film director has a box of awkward short films somewhere. You get better by making films, not talking about equipment on forums.

Well, holy sh*t, if the DR and self-noise of a mic preamp is sufficient for recording everything you've come across then I guess it might actually work. What mic do you use? I'm curious about the SNR. I thought the world was a much more dynamic place... you know, with orchestras being so loud they are a health and safety hazard and all that stuff. It makes me wonder why equipment that has a safety track only drops it by 20db - which as a person that doesn't adjust levels because I'm thinking about too many other things I routinely find isn't enough latitude and you clip both tracks. I figured that audio techs had to use attenuators at various points in the signal path to keep levels within range.

As someone who already owns a 0.95 lens for low light performance, this was hardly a surprise, but it's nice that there are at least two people on the planet that don't think fast apertures are only for bokeh whores..!

What about the microphone? I mean, if you set it up so you can record the NY city street then when you get inside then are you simply going to be getting a great recording of the noise floor of the mic preamps? You might be right about the Zoom being able to have that low a noise floor, which means the lawyers will be happy, but that's kind of like saying that you can jump off a building without any issues when technically that's true because it's the landing that's the problem - it might be true but it's practically impossible and could therefore be classed as misleading.

So when he said that apart from selecting line/mic you will never have to set levels that will work in the real world in all cases? I can record on the tarmac of an aircraft carrier while planes are landing with a boom mic with the same settings as the interview with the captain in controlled conditions with the same mic?

Traditional, in the sense that these people claim that you don't ever need to adjust levels again, which if you take their claims seriously, means every other system where you did need to adjust levels to get a good result I guess my entire point in this thread is that either in 24 or 16-bit digital, or analog before that, either cassette tape or 2-inch machine, levels were important, and they claim they're not for this new machine, but it doesn't seem to be true. It's kind of like selling a car and saying you don't need to wear seatbelts anymore, when in reality there is a small percentage of the time in very specific situations when not doing so will end badly, which is the same here. I hate it when marketing people simplify and hype something to the point of out-right lies, and this is that.

I don't know... compared to the P4K, every other camera has a completely bone-head-stupid-ridiculous-waste-of-time-pure-BS-almost-zero-practically-no-data-at-all bitrate

It depends on what you value, as different people prioritise things very differently to each other. It might be that when you look at what Sony provide and compare that to what you value there is a strong match. That strong match will likely not be the same for the next person who shoots different films in different situations with a different style, edits and grades them in different software on different hardware, likes a different final look, and all the time is using their eyes that see framing, DR, colour, resolution, sharpness, and contrast differently to the way your eyes do.

....or more than half

They've pushed a lot of things from CPU to GPU so that may have an impact in comparison to previous versions.

My XC10 was great in every way except I needed faster lenses for shallow DoF and low-light performance. Ergonomics are spectacular.

I think you captured it brilliantly with your interloper statement, and I completely understand. I've gone the same gear route as you - my workhorse rig is GH5, Rode VMP+, 8mm / 17.5mm / 40mm lenses, and a wrist strap. My second setup is a GoPro Hero 3, waterproof case, and a floaty handle that I use for wet locations. I also have a Gorillapod 5K and a Manfrotto Pocket with me but neither gets much use. I'm great at the point-camera-at-other-people-doing-things shots, and getting good at travelling shots as b-roll between scenes, but not so good with establishing shots, time lapses, or basically the shots where I'm doing something other than filming, such as shots where I'm in them. I need to learn how to expand my repertoire. In terms of video quality, I'm still exploring the potential of my GH5, but it's way better than I am, and my limitation is my skill level. I'm a little bit disappointed with the Hero 3, but considering that it's many generations old, that's probably to be expected. My equipment is not the limiting factor any more. Nice grab. I wonder how much of it is the set design, lighting, and grading, as opposed to the camera. No doubt that the 1DC makes lovely images, but I'd be surprised if there aren't more modern options that could get close enough so no-one could pick them apart.

Well said. Advancements in technical aspects like resolution and DR etc can contribute to a higher production quality, but if they come at the expense of something else that is more valuable, like talent comfort, shot design and camera moves, ability to improvise, etc then it works out to be a net loss. In a sense the big high-end cameras aren't that well suited to weddings and other situations where the camera needs to follow the action, rather than the action following the camera. This is why when I'm making holiday videos of my family I want a flexible setup that can get the shot the first time, because I don't want to ruin the holiday by making my family act in a video rather than have a holiday. Also, the magic is very difficult to repeat, especially for non-actors. They say that your wedding day goes by so fast, if the photographer and videographer were to slow that down to "I thought the day would last forever because it seemed like the posing for photos and video would never end" I don't think that would be success!

I haven't used v16 yet, but I did have a thought that the playhead behaviour you describe might be related to the mode? In the old Edit page IIRC the playhead behaved differently depending on if you were in different modes, like the Select mode, Trim mode, Insert mode, etc, so maybe there's an equivalent to that? I know that different people think in different ways and although I didn't understand all the different modes or why you would want them, I was definitely impressed by how many there were. I'm really looking forward to this part too, as this is also a bottleneck for me and although I got good at various hotkeys for making an assembly it wasn't completely optimised, and definitely wasn't fun! Good to hear it's working for you and has made a decent improvement.

You're right, but I think there is something to be said for content too, which the OP indirectly acknowledges. I believe that charisma, beauty, video production skills, and content are all valuable and can be traded off against each other. There are people that have charisma alone and are successful, there are those with video production skills alone (cinematic B-roll!!!), and content too. If you don't believe me about content, then start a channel that gives out the winning lottery numbers but isn't nicely edited or with charisma and you'll still rocket to the top. You could encode them and make the videos private and people would hack your account to get the opportunity to try and decode them and you'd still win. In a realistic sense, it pays to have all three. YouTube is good because it fosters experimentation and immediate feedback - it is the Petri dish of video production...... and like Petri dishes, they contain traces of huge evolution and adaptation, but are mostly filled with smelly rotting awfulness.

I use dual level recording all the time because I never know when I will occasionally need it. That's not to say it's useful all the time. I am skeptical of their "you never need to change levels again" claim, which is why I explained about DR and SNR. The extra bit depth is useful even if you're recording within normal parameters. I think there are three situations: you manage gain structure and levels and are fine with current bit-depths you don't manage gain structure and record outside of the current DR for 16-bit audio but still function within the DR of your microphone and other equipment you don't manage gain and record DR ranges outside the limits of your worst piece of equipment in the signal path This unit only helps people in situation #2, and is a net loss for people in situation #1 (as @IronFilm explained). They claim it helps all three, which is quite obviously false. I'm all for advancing the tech, but don't have your PR department lie about it to sell more units to people who don't have enough understanding to know you've stretched the truth past breaking point.

I use dual channel recording all the time. The problem isn't that the F6 isn't great, it's that by comparison, everything else is shit. The F6 could have 4000 bit recording, but if you have a bad signal source then your 4000 bits won't help, because the limitation will be elsewhere in the signal path. Unfortunately, in comparison to the F6, everything is a bad signal source.

I think you have to patch the input to the track so that when you hit record it knows which input you want to record from. It sounds like you might have already done that, but if so then I'm not sure. This might help?

Good summary. I'm a bit skeptical about the usefulness of it. Not to say that it won't be more useful than a normal device, but my question is how much more useful. I think that noise may play a big part in limiting how much extra dynamic range there is. The idea is that in traditional system you want to keep the levels in the sweet spot where they are below the clipping point, but above the point where the noise starts to become audible. An audio engineer will adjust their equipment so that the signal is in that sweet spot through every piece of equipment in the signal path. The problem comes if we don't adjust the levels when we go from one situation to another. Here is how different situations can be from one-another: So, if you set the gain for a noisy street scene where the levels were in the 80-90dB range and then didn't adjust it when you shot the two people talking quietly in bed scene, the bedroom scene would be 60db quieter than what an engineer would set it to. We set the street scene so that the peaks are at -20dB, and we're good to record 70dB of dynamic range because the normal system is fine to about -90dB. We probably don't need the full 70dB, so there's some wiggle room in there. But now were in the bedroom scene and the peaks are at -80dB (because 60dB quieter than our -20dB peaks is -80dB) and with a normal system this means we have less than 20dB of dynamic range there, assuming that at -100dB is where the noise floor is. A normal 16-bit system would be awful quality here, but let's put that aside, because we're now talking about the F6. The Zoom F6 may very well be able to go down to (let's say) -200dB. This is my estimate, but if 16 bits can do -96, 24 bits can do -144, 32 bits should be around -200dB. The problem we're going to have is noise. I'm not sure that the F6 will have input circuitry that has a noise floor of -200dB (that is very very very low noise levels), but let's assume that it does. The problem is that your microphone probably doesn't. Anything that needs phantom power requires it precisely to run its own internal amplifier circuitry, and every microphone on the planet is built for the -96dB levels of 16-bit. For example the Sennheiser 416 has a signal-to-noise ratio of 81dB. If you used this mic then your lovely F6 would be making a very high quality recording of your actors mixed with a very high recording of the microphone noise, and both your actors and the microphone noise would be at the same volume level! Win!! I don't know if the 416 is that good a microphone, but even if we had a mic with SNR of 100, or 120dB, that's still only putting your noise floor of the bedroom scene 20dB or 40dB lower than your actors, and that's not a great end result. If I've done some maths wrong in here please sing out, but I believe the logic stands. And if anyone thinks that my example is extreme, just imagine a shot of two people walking in the doors of their NY apartment, up the stairs, into their apartment, getting undressed and then into bed. Not only might you have level problems in one scene, you might have it IN ONE SHOT!

True, but the videos have a shelf-life because BM pumps out new versions all the time and you'd have to re-make all your videos!

Don't worry, once gimbal technology has matured and all gimbals look the same and there's no point upgrading they'll release the first auto-balancing ones and everyone will have to upgrade all over again!