kye

True, but only being able to get shallow DOF outside or in a warehouse isn't always practical. Buying lenses is kind of like buying a set of paints. If you buy a slow lens then you're missing some colours, and you might want to use them sometimes. Of course, if you buy a fast lens and get all the colours, you'd be stupid to only use the extra colours you don't get with a slower lens. Buy all the colours and then use the ones that make the best painting.

It does look like a good program. You're right that Resolve doesn't support non-48khz outputs yet. This thread was interesting: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=47367 Of course, if you compare $399 for Fairlight with $60 for Reaper then it doesn't look so good, but there's more to Resolve than just the Fairlight page

Thanks @Towd - that's useful. I didn't think about the ETC mode being unavailable. I guess you can just crop in post, although that would be a slight shift in how I work so I'd have to get used to it. In terms of being too sharp, I'm curing that with lenses - like many people do. Although if you're delivering in 1080 I'm not sure how much that really matters, I haven't done much testing to see, and for me it doesn't matter that much for my projects. I love the combination of small form-factor, image quality, and that it's a workhorse not a diva. Very few cameras can claim all three.

You could be right, but those shots don't seem to be good examples to prove your point. The first two shots are two-person shots and in both the closer person is similarly out-of-focus, it's just that the Indy shot has a closer background and the Iron shot is further away. The background isn't important in either shot, so how obscured they are doesn't matter. In the second two single shots, what matters is how related the character is meant to be to the background. The Indy shot shows the character in the setting more strongly, whereas the Iron shot shows the character disconnected from the setting, perhaps for dramatic reason and perhaps not. The thing about DOF discussions is that saying "DOF is great and looks lovely" or "DOF is a cheat and is overused and was never used in cinema" are both completely missing the main point of DOF, and that is that it is an artistic device used by the film-maker to control the scene. If you want to isolate a subject then you blur the background, which is true from an optical perspective but also from a dramatic perspective. They famously used very shallow DOF in The Handmaidens Tale to give it a claustrophobic sense, in accordance with the dramatic context, and the fact you couldn't see that far or get a wider perspective was also in line with the dramatic context of the world of the main character. DOF should be used to communicate and reinforce the dramatic context of the story. I make home videos as a hobbyist and it seems like I'm the only one here talking like fast lenses are a tool rather than a toy. It's like people think that buying a fast lens means you have to use it wide open the whole time.....

What compromises for video do you think they're making to get good photo quality? What does the G9 do better for photographs? What about timelapses?

Here are some of my impressions... Simple compositions, often with a single subject centred in the frame Lots of closeups, often with shallow DoF, both for product shots but also headshots Camera movement combined with speed-changes, often synced to the music Another thing I noticed is that your style is kind of 'loose'. What I mean is that a less relaxed / more up-tight style would only do movement with fixed sliders and tripods, wouldn't be comfortable getting as close to people, wouldn't use different speeds on the same shot, wouldn't use the fancier transitions as editing punctuation, wouldn't use the odd fisheye shot. It's like you've taken a more boring style and turned it up a couple of notches, but haven't abandoned the fundamentals. Nice work!

I don't know... I only own Resolve and now these $10 plugins. Considering that Resolve includes Fairlight, the $60 for Reaper seems almost outlandish! I say this partly tongue--in-cheek, but the value for money benchmark keeps getting higher and higher

No no no @kaylee.. your style as a film-maker, not as a forum-user ???

This sure is a pretty complicated topic. I get that if you shoot in Prores it is applying a log curve of some kind which shifts the middle point more than the highlights and shadows. A variant of BMD Film perhaps. But i'm still confused about RAW - is the RAW signal still in Linear? Sensors see in linear, so if they're somehow changing it then surely that's no longer RAW?

Yeah, I've been on maybe a dozen no-budget film sets, probably all 6-12 people crews, and it's nothing like making films by yourself. Being a Youtuber might half-qualify you for being a runner, but that's barely a qualified position anyway, so....

Yeah, and let's talk about something other than equipment

Done.

If you showed your entire catalogue to a bunch of strangers, what defining characteristics would they identify in your work? Do you like your style? What makes you do things like that? How did you learn? And for bonus points, what one characteristic would you want to add to your style if you could just snap your fingers and have it? For me, I don't think I have a good answer as my style is still changing and developing, but I think I have pretty good composition, both in terms of framing but also moving the camera around to get the best angles. I make home videos and they are mostly set to music without much dialogue, kind of like moving photographs, and I think I do a good job of editing with music and incorporating that rhythmical element. I like my style broadly, but I'm still working on defining and refining it and each project gets better quite substantially I think. I learned composition from doing stills photography for years, starting as a way to document my vacations and then incorporating street photography as a way to "practice" while at home. In terms of editing to music I have written electronic music for many years, and so in a way I am familiar with how to break down a song in a rhythmic sense and kind of program the visuals like a beat, with some shots lasting a single beat, some two beats, some four, and also knowing when to go off the beat, how to shake things up from looking mechanical, in the way that you might perform a solo over the top of some rhythm elements and not always stick rigidly to tempo or timing. If I could learn a style I think it would be making dialogue-driven films, as in a way I'm kind of afraid of using dialogue because I'm not as comfortable with it, especially as my videos are kind of highlight reels and dialogue snippets might not make sense when edited back-to-back with each other, and so not being as familiar with that is kind of limiting. Even things like narrating would be good to learn how to do. Your turn!

Thanks. I also got the impression that the 5K mode are h265 and the 4K modes are h264. This is a big deal for me, from what I read h265 gets similar image quality at about heal the bitrate of h264, so going from 150Mbps h264 to 200Mbps h265 is more like the quality of 400Mbps h264. In terms of the 422 vs 420 it's definitely a down-side, but it's offset by the extra bitrate, codec efficiency, and slightly extra resolution, so it should result in a net gain overall. I'll have to do some trials with it. 30p limit doesn't phase me, I'm shooting mostly in 25p now unless something is obvious slow-motion material. Apart from the benefit of HLG, it also helps in low-light. Once you've cropped and downscaled the image, is the overall "look" the same as the 4K modes?

I've been reading about the 5K Open Gate mode and wondering if I should be using that instead of normal UHD? I'm currently shooting the 4K 10-bit 150Mbps mode in HLG (I only have a Sandisk 95MBs UHS-I card so can't shoot 400Mbps). I understand that the 200Mbps 5K mode will give an increase in resolution, bitrate, and will allow me to re-frame in post, which are all desirable features, but are there any hidden downsides to using this mode? What hassles or catches are there? I read that the 5K mode is h265, but is the 4K mode h264, or h265?

Isn't that what John does in the original video?

I don't know about messing things up, but I recall someone on other forums saying that sometimes YT people get hired on a film set and IIRC they said that they are pretty useless overall because YT is just so different to a large set and how it works.

Interesting. Not really surprising, but still good to see. Discussions of sensor sizes is a fun one - anyone who thinks bigger is better should see the Large Format photography guys struggling to nail focus on their landscape detail shots because their depth of field is so ridiculously thin and stopping down sufficiently means diffraction and longer exposure times, both of which soften image sharpness as well.

You're probably right in terms of marketing a better IBIS because that would be something that people care about and would help to sell cameras. More generally, I still don't think you can rely on marketing. Firstly, there are potentially large numbers of individual changes from model to model of a camera line, not all of which will get attention. Marketing treads a delicate balance between saying the new camera is awesome because it is so much better than the other ones on offer, and implying that the other ones are so much worse than the new one, especially when an improvement can be seen as fixing some kind of deficiency instead of just adding on awesomeness. Someone recently started a thread about the IBIS noise being picked up by the internal microphones in the G/GX ranges (IIRC) and someone else pointed out that the GH5 has added internal microphones to cancel out that noise from the internal mics, which was a feature that some people hadn't heard about. My guess was that this kind of thing probably wouldn't be marketed because it's fixing a flaw in other models that they really don't want to highlight, despite the fix costing money and being of some benefit to customers. In terms of why they might innovate without a need, it could be that they buy parts in huge volumes to get sustainable prices and after running out of the IBIS motors or controllers or whatever and when they did the next bulk purchase they could only buy the next model up because the old one was discontinued, so the decision to upgrade was made for them. Or the new features were available in a newer firmware in that chipset (and they hadn't allowed updating of that chipset in the previous models). Or they had to upgrade a part due to physical size, power consumption, pin layout (to enable different circuitboard layouts) or any number of other reasons. People tend to underestimate how complicated technology actually is. If we were to take the drive-train of a car (without the computer chips) and draw it out in a kind of functional diagram, you could fit it on a large sheet of paper, if we included all the switches and controls for indicators and heated seats and power windows in a luxury car then it might be the size of a small wall in your house. If we did the same for something like a laptop computer or digital camera (they're going to look roughly the same) the writing would be so small that it probably wouldn't be readable even if you made the diagram the size of the field in a sports stadium. How they build electronic devices is also a strange process. People think of it like they start designing a product, then they work out all the features, then they buy the bits and put them al together to do that. It's not like that. It's a massive shit fight between the marketing and design departments who want to offer every new feature imaginable requiring new parts and redesigns, the engineering department who want to add no new features but make it robust and reliable requiring better parts without a redesign, the accounting department who wants to make it the cheapest possible by buying older cheaper parts in bulk, senior management who are concerned with how their product is or isn't compatible with competitors products, all in an environment where the companies who make products are trying to do secret deals with the parts manufacturers to give them great deals on new parts but block the other companies from buying the best and latest chips. Add onto that the football-pitch sized complexity of what they're building and the ripple-effect of how changing one part can mean that other parts also need to be changed, potentially then needing further changes in other parts. This includes interconnectedness of other products which might already be on sale like lenses and memory cards and flashes etc. And after all that, companies like Nikon are known for implementing support for features well ahead of the time of launch. IIRC they released some kind of lens functionality which was previously unavailable but it was supported on camera bodies that had been selling for years - so those camera bodies had features that were sitting there waiting for the lenses to be released, so you not only have to ensure compatibility with current features but perhaps future features as well. It's a huge mess basically, so marketing isn't really a reliable source for all that stuff.

IBIS and OIS exist in a realm that we have very little insight into, and may never have. From an engineering perspective, stabilisation is a very simple concept: you put vibrations into a camera from the outside and the stabilisation system attempts to perfectly compensate for them such that the optical operation is immune to their effects. This type of feedback circuit is like any other, and will have a percentage of vibration removal across a frequency range across the 6 axises of potential vibration up to certain limits of amplitude. Ideally, the manufacturers would publish these curves and let us as consumers understand which system performs best overall, or in the case of strengths varying among manufacturers, which is best for a given task. Instead we get a single number - "stops". It is so overly simplified a specification as to both be completely useless, and also, quite frankly, extremely insulting to the consumer. Marketing is also equally unreliable. "if this was the case they would market it" suggests that the job of marketing is to communicate everything about a product regardless of what is trendy, what a particular market segment uses for purchasing decisions, etc. Obviously this is not the case, so you can't say that if they didn't market it that it doesn't exist. Instead we get YouTubers who do completely uncontrolled tests and then proclaim conclusions that not only violate the scientific method, but often the test footage that they publish along side their judgements. I've seen more than one test where the person declared a winner and I compared the footage and couldn't see any real difference in performance at all. Our own experience of using a camera for a long time is perhaps the most reliable, but even then, our technique changes, our projects change, the weather changes, our blood-sugar changes, etc etc etc. Unless we design a machine that we mount a camera to that puts the camera through a completely controlled and repeatable set of vibrations and then compare the results from different cameras with identical fields-of-view, shutter angles, and both centre and distribution of mass, then we will never really know how different systems compare.

I think making something cinematic occurs on every level within film-making. The purely creative elements such as narrative and story structure, layering, complexity, poetry, and world can captivate the viewer and take them to another place. The artistic elements of film-making such as lighting, composition, casting and dramatic performances, wardrobe, art-department, sound design, music, editing and grading etc can create the texture of the world, matching the visual aesthetic with the conceptual elements previously mentioned. The technical elements such as camera movement, 180 degree shutter, etc. The YouTuber "how to be cinematic" focuses on the technical elements because they're easy to talk about, unfortunately the above categories are in descending-order of importance. It's like how most YouTubers fill their vlogs with cinematic b-roll sequences, when instead they should fill them full of interesting and useful content instead

With tools like this, quite a bit, apparently!

Good video - I thought the soundtrack made it quite cinematic.

Nice! There are some interesting projector lenses around, but the lack of a standard mount or adapters means they're a little too out-there for me, at least at the moment. Plus them having no ability to stop down does limit their use in a creative sense. Still, considering that adapting FF vintage lenses seems pretty mainstream now, they're probably where the real bargains are

Hang out on these forums more often... People here use native lenses, speed-boosters, non-speed-booster adapters, vintage stills lenses, vintage cinema lenses, and even free-lensing of lenses! I don't remember anyone using non-camera lenses like projector or enlarger lenses, but someone probably has.. Welcome! Personally, my m43 kit has both native and vintage lenses in it. I do own a m42 to m43 0.7x focal reducer which I might use with a ~50mm to fill in the 80-100mm equivalent spot in my kit, but I might end up just using a 35-50mm lens without a focal reducer and therefore not end up using it at all. The crop factor makes it a spectacular choice for longer zooms too, for sports or for wildlife. A 135/150/200mm vintage FF lens will set you back less than dinner and a movie, and combined with a $10 dumb-adapter you get a fast, high quality and solidly built manual telephoto lens, plus because you're cropping into the lens with the sensor size you don't get all the CA and soft-focus of the corners of those lenses so they're even better than when they were new!