kye

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!

Only film things out the window... boom - solved!

Yes, I was thinking of that and knew I'd seen it somewhere but couldn't remember where, so punched a few terms into google image search and found the above one instead

I think people associate vlogging with mobile filming (like with a gorillapod) but I would say that the vast majority of "people who upload videos of them talking to a camera" are in home studios with the camera on a tripod. In this genre jump cuts are the most common edit type, and having the extra resolution will allow them to create different zoom-levels and cut between them to hide jump-cuts. If you need to publish in 4K (which is a topic that we can debate another day) then having 8K to crop into can really help. In practice you can do mild scaling of 4K without visible artefacts, however if you're doing something where you want to crop in severely to create several virtual cameras, then 8K can be a real help. For example if you have a cooking show you can have a wide angle lens, and turn that into a wide, a medium of you, and various close-ups of what you're doing on the bench. Anyone presenting anything like this would benefit. If you had a 16mm lens you could have a 16mm wide, a 35mm mid of you, and up to a 70mm FOV for details and still be in 1080, 100mm if you're willing to rescale a bit. Yes, 8K will be a pain to edit, but if you're using one 8K camera and one lens instead of 4 cameras, 4 lenses (or more), and all the associated media management, syncing, colour matching, etc, 8k could still be ahead for a lot of people. It's a different mindset - in the new world we 'over capture' and frame in post, just like a 360 camera. @BTM_Pix has already mentioned this. In the old world we based our capture format on the publishing format, but this was a technology limitation that we have now been freed from. Yes, it has attractive and nostalgic aesthetic aspects to it, but that doesn't mean that those limitations work well for everyone or all types of film-making. Saying that no-one needs an 8K camera because no-one needs to publish in 8K is like saying the only point of buying an 8K camera is to publish 8K, which is also like saying the only point in buying a Ferrari is to drive at 300kph.

I bought my Resolve license (the dongle version) when Resolve 12.5 was the latest and it's still good. I've heard others say they bought at v8 and their dongle still works. BM haven't promised that licenses will get free upgrades forever, but they've been delivering exactly that for many years now and there's no signs they'll change that strategy. Welcome to the Resolve club!

I love this topic! The way that audio circuits work are actually very simple, and the audio industry has taken some principles, applied them in slightly different ways and made new words for them ("gain control", "fader", "input levels adjustment", "microphone/line level switch", etc are all electrically the same function) and so they take a new product, re-arrange the gain structure, and now they get to make spectacularly stunning statements that sound groundbreaking but are actually almost irrelevant. One of the main jobs of a professional audio engineer is to select audio equipment, connect the devices together in the right way, and adjust the settings on each of them so that the levels all the way through the signal path are high enough that noise doesn't creep in, and low enough so that nothing clips. Depending on how many devices you use, the signal path can have half a dozen or so different controls and another dozen amplifier circuits designed by the manufacturer. In this device it looks like Zoom took two of them, adjusted the gain on one of them, made the second one more accurate, changed the names and are calling it a revolution.

Well, he gets 10 points for shock value. But so does every Apple iPhone marketing campaign.. I think comparing it to a RAW photo is an excellent comparison. Imagine I showed you that you can shoot a raw image really dark and then I can bring up the levels in post and it looks fine, well, that's one thing. Imagine then that I said you never need to adjust exposure - that would mean that if you used it in the way that a normal photographer used it then you'd be fine, but that's not what I said, I said never.. which wouldn't actually work in some situations. 32-bit recording is probably really great, and the noise of the preamps in it is probably very low, but I suspect there are limits and although it's just not very likely that someone will hit them, that's still a very big difference to them not actually being there, which is what he implied. The legal disclaimer for that claim would be very long and have much fine print to go along with it.