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I agree, everything has pros and cons. Just think about how every new camera release we all turn ourselves inside out because there's no perfect camera I think it also depends on what situations you shoot. Some people have control and the time to tweak things as they shoot, and there are real advantages to getting it right in-camera. Others are recording with varying levels of control or even influence on their situation, and just getting the shot might be the best they can hope for. For these people, moving light-sources or tweaking settings just isn't feasible, so adjusting things in post when the pressure is off gives them extra creative expression. My personal situation is that in shooting my family and travel videos I don't have time to fiddle around with various things. This is partly because we go where it's interesting and not where the light is good, partly because for me the holiday comes before the photography, and partly because I'm just not skilled enough to operate the camera and think about every variable all at once, which is why I rely on automatic settings for some things. I started this thread because I really like the look of the BPM filters and was using the Glow OFX plugin with Resolve (that does an ok job at this effect) and wanted to see how well I could replicate the real filters. I shared it partly because others might learn something useful, because it's nice to give back to the community, and because writing it up forces me to think clearly and critically about it so I learn more effectively by doing it. Education is one of those things where everyone wins Edit: I also really love that look during golden hour when the sun is out of frame but catches the BPM and gives a warm light-leak style rendering to part of the frame. That's also something you could model through tracking and placing the lens flare effect off screen, but light-leaks and flares is something I haven't added to my videos yet, so maybe that's something I'll explore in the future. I want to really push my videos but not to the point where the medium gets in the way of the content, if that makes sense

Yeah, it's great if you can keep compatibility between bodies but cover the range of nice features (slow-motion, recording limits, as you say) between them so you've got the right tools for the job. It's also nice if you can work out what combinations seem to work nicely together too. For example if you decided that for gimbal shots you always wanted a 50mm FOV and slow-motion then there's a chance that you could just leave that lens on the XT2. Perhaps you'd have your unmanned G7 with a wide lens, and perhaps the other one might be a longer length for tighter shots. Obviously these are just examples, but the less you have to be swapping lenses, putting cameras on and off gimbals, swapping filters and all that fiddling the better.

Reasons that adding the effect in post is better: It's free It works on all your cameras and lenses without adapters It works on all your past footage It works on all stock footage You can control the strength of it shot to shot You can control it within frame (you can have the nice skin smoothing effects on skin and not have it go nuts from a direct light-source also in frame) You can change the colour rendering like the Warm Pro Mist filters, or any other tint you care to make (even ones Tiffen doesn't offer) You can change the characteristics to emulate their other filters (Black Pro Mist is only one of the filters they offer - https://tiffen.com/diffusion/ ) You can even have hybrid effects like light sources glow green with a red outer ring around them, all adjustable to taste Real filters can have reflections under certain circumstances Reasons that adding the effect in post isn't better: It doesn't work properly if any channel is clipped It doesn't work with any light-source that isn't in the frame It isn't an exact match to the look Things that aren't good reasons for doing anything: That's how they do it in Hollywood

Looks good! How are you finding the camera?

wow.......

What bodies do you think you'll get?

Apparently there is going to be a new border that might need some coverage....

I think it's time for a GH6 rumours thread. There were a flurry of rumours in early 2015, including talk of 8K video and people were anticipating potential release dates. The New Camera made this handy-dandy diagram: They also made a couple of predictions about a couple of different possibilities on how it might happen: There's also lots more stuff in there too - http://thenewcamera.com/tag/panasonic-gh6/ We know that The GH5 got 5K video in a firmware update in late 2017, and with all the talk about 8K for the 2020 Olympics, the GH6 might be 8K. The GH5 5K mode also got H265 encoding, which due to its increased efficiency, is probably a requirement for decent 8K video. In May 2018 Personal View leaked this: https://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/19798/panasonic-gh6-first-rumors Then during the S1 announcements, a Panasonic rep made comments that indicated that video would continue to be lead by their GH line of cameras (I can't find the link) which helped to firm up the idea of a GH6 rather than abandoning MFT for FF, yet at least. What do you predict? What do you want? Do you care?

I think it might be time for a GH6 thread

At the time I was contemplating going for a Mid-Side configuration so I could record the isolation of a shotgun mic and the ambience of a stereo pair at the same time, so I would have needed two mics to both be powered, so it made sense from that perspective. The VMP is kind of a compromise in that sense, although having a safety track has saved by butt more than once. Actually, I've been meaning to ask you - is there an in-line attenuator that you'd recommend that only attenuates one channel? I've found that the safety track attenuation from the VMP+ isn't sufficient sometimes and I'd like it to be quieter. IIRC the VMP+ safety channel is 20dB down, so maybe something like 40dB down? I'd rather have a quiet and slightly noisier safety track than one that has clipped, so I'm willing to trade-off quality for safety on my safety track if that makes sense. If there isn't one you'd recommend then I'll have to just make one, but the DIY connectors etc tend to be bulky so a professionally made one would be nicer Either if there's a standard safety track attenuator that attenuates the already attenuated signal from the VMP+, or one that has a huge attenuation on it and I turn the VMP+ to both channels just being normal levels.

It sounds like you want to just stay with Fuji

I went to see the Nitro Funny Cars once. When they let rip it was so much louder than anything else it was like it wasn't even sound anymore but had become something different. It feels like the fabric of spacetime having the shit shaken out of it and the waves just go through you like you are a sheet of tissue paper on the surface of a lake and someone threw in a stone right next to you!

I find the logic in this thread to be very strange. People seem to think that a company should be able to make a new product without first having to design that product. How would that ever have made any sense?

Ebay is full of them.

There's a concept that I particularly like called Satisficing. The general idea is that you work out what the minimum criteria are, and then you work out how to meet that criteria in the most efficient way. Applied to equipment, it might be that you need certain resolutions, apertures, lens range, battery life, reliability, etc. You then work out what options there are and buy the cheapest / simplest / easiest one and then ignore any options that were better than the one you chose. We kind of talk a lot on here about how we love high quality images and therefore if we could all afford it we'd have an Alexa. Apart from the times when we often have criteria that rule it out (like, most of us can't afford one!) if we worked out we just needed 1080p RAW we might instead end up with a BM camera instead. Personally, I had a Canon 700D and I was dissatisfied with the sharpness (this was before I knew anything about anything) and so I decided to go 4K. I got the XC10 but ended up being dissatisfied with the images that came out of it because the lens had a very small aperture and I wanted to get more depth - the images from it just looked flat. Then I got my GH5 and some nice lenses and I love the look of it. I watch high budget films shot on Alexas / REDs / film / etc and I see the BM RAW from the P4K but the grass isn't greener for me. When I look at the footage I just want to love the images I get, and with this setup I do. There's some part of me that looked at my previous setups and said "no" and now it says "yes" and I don't feel the need to upgrade. It took a GH5 and a few nice lenses to get over that line for me (as well as me having to work out what it was that was important to me) and now I'm satisficed. I think that's a good way to think about it, and it can work for the creative elements too. There will always be a better lens, a higher DR camera, a cleaner more directional mic, a cleaner preamp, a higher bit-depth, a higher bit-rate, etc, but once you're satisficed then those things stop mattering. If you're feeling the urge to buy then work out what it is that your current equipment doesn't do for you (that you actually miss in real life, not in tests or spec sheets) and then work out what is the cheapest easiest simplest way to fix that, and stop as soon as you get there. My theory is that some of us like older lenses because they're less sharp, and when we were growing up the cinema was also less sharp, so the old lenses are triggering that nostalgia. I shoot my GH5 with the least sharpening (and soon to start using 5K open gate mode), lower bitrates, and also with softer lenses and I love the images because they kind of feel timeless to me. They feel 'right'. If I look at a 4K YT video shot with an RX100 it looks too sharp. If I look at footage from my 700D it looks too sharp and compressed, if I turn down the in-camera sharpening then it looks blurry. Therefore, there must be a middle ground somewhere in there. That middle ground is kind of my reference, and the look my setup gives me hits that middle ground and so I don't get distracted by how sharp / blurry / compressed the footage looks, and due to the DR and 10-bit it has a kind of film-look to it that also triggers nostalgia for me. To me it looks timeless. Who knows what the nostalgia will look like in 30 years time when the people in their teens now are watching over-sharpened 4K YT videos and Transformers 6 will be in their 40s and wanting to create a nostalgic look. Maybe they'll take their 12-bit RAW 8K VR goggle 360 footage and over-sharpen, then blur, and then over-sharpen again to get that digital pushed-to-breaking-point look that they fell in love to, had their first dates watching, etc.

For anyone else reading this who is looking for an external preamp and wants more features than the headphone amps as previously mentioned (I wanted a -20dB safety track), my advice would be that if you only want a single shotgun mic to just get a Rode VMP instead of mucking around with those external mic-preamps. I bought the Beachtek Dxa-Micro-Pro to use with my XC10 and Rode Video Micro and to keep the setup small and flexible. I didn't want to be buying disposable 9V batteries for it all the time (both for cost as well as environmental reasons) so I did the research and got the biggest capacity rechargeable 9V batteries, didn't know how many batteries it would use but I figured it was more than two a day so searched the earth for a 9V charger with more than two slots. I was getting battery life of sometimes only 15 minutes, sometimes more, but I didn't know if it was the Beachtek, the batteries, or the charger. I did tests and kept notes by recording time lapses with my phone that included a clock. The battery shop blamed the charger so I bought one from them and discovered it wasn't the charger. Then I found some anecdotal accounts of what the battery life was and realised that I was getting about what I should have been. What I didn't know through all this was that the battery life on this thing is abysmal, and this was even without it sending phantom power to the XLR. The Rode VMP+ gets something like 19 hours from its single rechargeable battery, and I was getting something like an hour or two. So, for my shoots I would have to have been carting around maybe half-a-dozen batteries, a large charger, and the Beachtek. In the end I just bought a VMP+ and had a smaller, lighter, simpler setup that I don't have to fuss with, and it charges over USB!

It makes a lot of sense to me. I think it also links into what inspires us as creative people. I know that when I was writing electronic music I would hear a sound and it would make me really excited to make it into a song and to add other cool sounds to it. When I look at the output of my GH5 It motivates me in a similar way because the aesthetic is what I want to create and it lifts my mood just looking at it. There are likely many story-tellers who also appreciate the aesthetic of various elements of the camera system. I would suggest that this emphasis on aesthetics is what drives some people to look at vintage lenses instead of using modern lenses that are technical superior in most cases. Some want that 'look' whereas others just want something that will capture the image accurately and get out of the way. I also think that neither has any advantage. I watched the first episode of Russian Doll on Netflix and I was hooked because it had a unique story element that really engaged me as a viewer. It could have been shot on a potato and it would still have been engaging and made me want to watch more. It's also beautifully shot, which sure helps, but it's not why I watched the entire first season in one go, only finishing at 3am. The advice of playing to your strengths is really good I think. You can be good at every element of film-making but you're not going to hit real success unless you really differentiate yourself by getting great at one thing. If you're a storyteller then tell great stories with whatever camera is easiest. If you're a painter then paint exquisite pictures.

My completely uneducated perspective is that if they needed to make it a bit deeper then they could adjust the optics to focus the lens slightly further away to compensate, but that might not be easy to accomplish? If they were trying to make an ND adapter that didn't have an optic in there then I think that's not possible.

Yeah, that's pretty much the next thing he told me. Basically his point was that writers can do whatever they want, but no-one will buy your script, so you have to be careful and understand how films are made and write around those limitations. I heard that he had a bit of a reputation in less mainstream circles because his scripts often featured particularly realistic street fighting and criminal elements and most of his scripts were made by low budget productions to cater to people that like shows like Underbelly or whatever. It was funny because he didn't really seem the violent type at all, either in his tone, his home, or his career. Although he did give me some dating advice once, and that was to date as many girls as possible, to have multiple ongoing relationships at the same time and be completely open about it with everyone, and basically see who would be willing to fight hardest for his attentions. He said that that's how he ended up with his wife, and I think they'd been together for 30+ years at that point, so he was an advocate for his approach. That's not the kind of strategy that I could bring myself to ever do, but thinking about it now he really was a cool guy. Meeting him in his younger years might have been a much more exciting experience!

I sure like my GH5, but if I was constantly having to match it to something else I'd probably like it a lot less! This is excellent advice. Lenses are really the place to start with building your setup to deliver the aesthetic you want to create. Also, don't underestimate the benefits of only having to buy one set of lenses that can be used across all your camera bodies. And also maybe things like batteries, media, and accessories, although they're potentially more universal, or aren't the same across a brand. Also also, if you have a setup with different brands and different non-compatible lenses then if a body fails you can't swap in another unless you have duplicate lenses and everything. From a purely artistic perspective having a mixture might be an appealing thought, but from a "get it filmed, get it edited, get it out the door, get paid" kind of perspective, compatibility has real advantages.

IIRC there were some comments around the release of the S1 that the GH6 might be with us soon. Assuming that's the case, it would be a pretty huge thing for Panasonic to add that to their lineup before all the other higher-end cine cameras had it. Not saying impossible, but I wouldn't bet money on it. In terms of there being a GH7, who knows. You might be right and maybe everything moves to full-frame. It would be a pity though as one of the strengths of the GH line is that the sensor size allows use of all sorts of non-FF lenses. Mirrorless means that you can adapt any DSLR lens ever made, but it would be a real shame then to only have mirrorless FF and have professional cine-lenses (which are made for Super35 not FF) either vignette seriously or would need to have either a optical or digital teleconverter. Having mirrorless M43 means that getting fast wide lenses is difficult, but everything else is easy and cheap. You only have to search ebay for 250mm or 300mm primes to understand that you can get 500mm, 600mm or more for less than the price of taking the kids to McDonalds, plus you're not having to buy a new bag to store it, or back surgery when you get home.

I'd like one because I don't have one on the filter thread. I have a 4-stop fixed ND on the end of my main lens, attached with the magnetic filter holder so I can easily pull it off or put it on, and I simply have it on during the day and off at night. Beyond that, my style of film-making is too fast and I am already worried about too many other things to fuss with an ND when I change lenses etc, and plus I just don't care enough to bother with all that hassle. I'd like it to just be built into the sensor so that it's there for every lens and every lens adapter. If it was built into a speed booster then that would mean that I wouldn't be able to use it when I'm wanting to take advantage of the crop factor of my GH5 to extend long lenses for sports or wildlife. Everything other than it being built into the camera is a compromise. I'm estimating that it'll probably be part of the GH7 but not before. It would be great if I'm wrong, but I'm not optimistic.

Yes, and I think we'll get there eventually. The FS5 proves it's possible, but when I looked into why we don't all have them I saw something from Sony saying they are difficult to make or expensive or something (can't remember) but basically there was a good reason why we don't all have them yet. They will get cheaper and easier to make (like all tech does over time) and we'll start to see more high-end cameras having them, and eventually companies will start putting them into adapters, and Metabones will do it and release the kind of product you want. It will be really expensive. Eventually it will probably trickle down to be in every camera, probably just built into the sensor stack, but that will be a long time from now. An integrated electronic variable ND solves a problem that isn't there for high-end cinema cameras, is there for mid-level cine-cameras used for run-n-gun doc work, is there for us hybrid shooters, and the consumer doesn't really care about, and in some cases is actually undesirable for the end consumer (eg, for any camera likely to be moving a lot that relies on post-stabilisation, like all 360 cameras). It will trickle from where there is the greatest need and money to where there is the least need or least money.

Start with the problem and then work your way to a solution. Otherwise the grass will always be greener, this is why companies do marketing - to trigger the "wouldn't it be great if..." reaction. Matching colour in post sounds important to you and will add more fiddly work to every project, which is the last thing any of us needs in our lives! If you buy an XH1 and XT2, what major problem will you have with that setup? Once you know what major issues you'll have, then you can work out what you might buy instead, then you can assess what issues that will add.

Lots of good info here already. One of the things that you have to understand is that you're in a situation that many here have found themselves in, being invested in the Canon ecosystem with lenses, and wanting to do great video while also enjoying the Canon colours and the great focus performance. Canon offers great quality from their cinema cameras, but unfortunately, when it comes to video quality from their non-cine cameras they are a long way from the top. Depending on what your expectations are, and what level of image quality you're willing to accept, there's really a few options: Stick with Canon and just be happy with the quality available Switch to another system that offers better video quality and keeps reasonable autofocus abilities, but have to reinvest in another brand (eg, Sony) Switch to another system that offers better video quality and keep using your lenses but sacrifice autofocus (and have to play with adapters etc) It's really a situation where no manufacturer offers everything, and you have to pick two out of these three: great colours great focusing great video quality You can also choose multiple brands of camera to keep your kit as flexible as possible (eg, have a camera that doesn't do great AF for interviews etc, but another with fast AF for gimbal work) but then you introduce the challenge of matching your cameras in post, assuming you used both cameras on a project, or want consistent colours between projects. There's no wrong answers, and I'm sure you can run a successful video business with Canon quality video, but every time a new camera comes out many of us here get all excited because we're all still chasing a camera that can really perform across these three aspects. Good luck