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The newest version of Resolve (that I haven't upgraded to yet) has a visual keyboard shortcut configuring tool that might be useful for that.

When I was seriously considering the A7III and GH5 and trying to understand the lens options etc, I PM'd with @jonpais about his experiences and he was really helpful and wrote me quite a few long and informative messages. This despite he and I seriously butting heads a few times in the general forum. I don't claim to know him, but I can see that he has a lot to offer - unfortunately other factors got in the way.

Remember that you can always buy more drive space if a project ends up being larger than expected. Worth noting is that RAW comes in different flavours and I suspect there is very little difference between them in the real world. People talk about Prores HQ being good enough for most projects, and considering the difference between 272MB/s and 117MB/s you might end up shooting RAW 3:1 or 4:1. You're looking at some serious drive space though - 4K RAW 3:1 at 30:1 shooting ratio for a 90 minute film is still 20TB. That's just the source media - you will also need to render proxies to edit with, and various other assets.

I spoke to my dad and it turns out he has Minolta 135mm and 250mm fixed primes, which he'll be putting in the post and sending to me. Win!! He can't remember which versions, but he said that at the time they were better than the most common ones that people had. I asked about how good they were optically and his answer was very interesting, he said that he couldn't really tell me because he only ever used them to take photos of things very far away, and at those distances atmospheric disturbances were the biggest challenge, not lens sharpness or film grain. Anyway, we'll see when they arrive. I'm managing my expectations though. I suspect that lenses were made to be good enough for the resolution of the best film stocks and probably no more. If we take a FF lens and then crop into it 2x for the MFT mode, and 1.4x more for the ETC mode, and if that is 4K video which is 8.3MP, that means I'm viewing the lens with the equivalent scrutiny of 65MP. There is hot debate around what the resolution of film is, but most estimates are below that figure, so I'm anticipating that they will probably be a little soft! Of course, I'm only using the middle of the lens, which is where it is the best, but 65MP might still be a stretch.. ???

I sympathise. More than once have I decided to solve a problem, done the research, and found the thread on the BM forums where I asked the exact question a few months prior. Or found the answer, gone into Resolve to map the function to a hotkey and discovered I'd already done it! I've said before that learning Resolve is like learning to fly to space shuttle. Probably a good idea would be to make a set of notes for yourself, perhaps organised by each page, of hotkeys / menu functions / etc that you use, then next time referring and adding to it. I say this as advice as much for myself as for anyone else.. lol ???

Most camera tests are more influenced by how accurate the focusing of the lenses is, or how similar the shots are (true A/B comparisons require you to point the cameras at the exact same thing under the exact same lighting - something most reviewers don't understand!). You want to do normal tests and also stress-tests. Trees blowing in the wind is a good stress-test. I designed a torture test by making a 4K video file with 3 frames of completely different photographs, exporting it as Prores and playing it on repeat, then setting the camera to a very short shutter-speed and framing up the monitor. Codecs normally do well when frames are similar to the previous ones, but do badly when frames are very different. This test absolutely destroys some cameras and others hold up very nicely. It's a total exaggeration but gives useful information if you don't have a tree handy. It's also 100% repeatable between cameras so is a valid test. My advice is to test things properly, make your decisions, then move on to making real content

We spend a lot of time here talking about different systems, but remember to take into account the practicalities of actually owning multiple systems. Fuji and Canon both have nice colours, but they don't have the same colours, so there would be work in post to match them, especially in scenes like the wedding ceremony where I imagine you've got a multi-camera setup and are cutting between them frequently in the final edit. There's also the advantages of having compatible lenses, media, etc. Unless you knew that you were always going to use the C100 with the wide, and the Fuji always with the long lens, but I suspect that's not the case.

@KnightsFan is right, but to re-emphasise, this isn't a hardware problem. When you're rendering video, it doesn't need to happen in real-time. I frequently export projects at anything down to 1 frame-per-second, and the HDD, CPU, GPU, etc all just chug along at whatever speeds they can manage and eventually the export is complete. YouTubers often talk about rendering out their 10-minute videos taking an hour.

People tend to transcode to Prores HQ or DNxHD HQX files as proxy media, often depending on what platform they're on (PCs can't make Prores files IIRC), but my research didn't turn up any differences in quality between the two formats, so use whichever you like. If you want way too much information about proxy formats, here you go.... https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/15/choose-the-right-codec/ https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/13/50-intermediate-codecs-compared/ The second link shows the bitrates of the various codecs and you'll see that Prores HQ and DNxHD HQX are very similar, but note that DNxHD HQ is 8-bit vs DNxHD HQX is 10-bit, and this will likely make a difference so is worth checking if you go the DNxHD route. With all things, when you make a compressed copy of something you only degrade the quality. However with high quality codecs like these the degradation will be minimal and likely not a factor in the end result. As you say, this is about story and storytelling, and I think that the ability to edit with smooth playback will add more to the storytelling than the very slight degradation of the image will detract from it.

Not that I know of. IIRC Resolve has some built-in tools for backing up databases and otherwise managing them, but creating one per project seems like a neat and tidy kind of approach. I'd suggest a bit of googling to just check it's not got some unknown issues - Resolve can be a bit like that sometimes. This process makes sense. Copying the whole card/cards to the SSD array, editing it there (likely with directories for music, SFX, exports and other project files), and then backing up that whole directory structure to your archive drives when you're done seems good. If you want to revisit the project once it's been moved from SSD array is actually not that hard, as Resolve has a great function for relinking source media. If you go to the media pool, highlight all of your offline clips, right-click and choose the option Re-link Source Media (or similar) it will ask you which directory to look in. If you point it to your source project directory it can look through the whole directory structure and find all the files. I use this function all the time and it works really well. If you just needed to render out a new export, or make a couple of small changes to the grade or whatever then you may find that working off the slow archive drives is quite functional. One thing I'm not clear on (and am still working out for myself) is the pros and cons of archiving completed projects. My current approach has been to delete the optimised media and render cache files (via the Playback? menu in Resolve) and then renaming the project "ARCHIVED <project name>" in the database so I know I've deleted them. Otherwise you gradually fill your SSDs with cache files (stored in a non-human-readable directory structure), like I did. This means I have a database with all my past projects in it and can revisit them whenever I want to, re-linking to the source media as I described above. However, Resolves project archiving feature might be better for you. It appears that it copies/moves (?) the whole project, all the source media, optimised media and render cache files to a drive. From reading the section "Archiving and Restoring Projects" on or around page 76 of the Resolve Manual it seems like the directory structure is non-human-readable and to re-access the project you'd have to restore the project, probably copying/moving all the media once again, which is a large overhead. If that's true it would also be a PITA if you wanted to look at the source media from that project (eg, if you were making a showreel) or quickly re-export with slightly different settings. I shoot home and travel videos of my family, so I copy all my footage to a directory structure based on a /YEAR/YYYY-MM-DD <event or location>/ naming convention, which contains all the video and photos I take with any of my cameras, and I often want to include footage in multiple projects, for example a trip video, a year-in-review video, etc. So having my footage all locked away by Resolve in archives wouldn't suit how I work. I've re-written this post a few times as I fact-checked and learned more during writing it so hopefully that makes sense! ???

So many good cameras out there.. When I watched the GH5s vs P4K video I was more impacted by the slight changes in focus between the two cameras instead of the cameras themselves, which is in the skill department not the equipment department. I remember someone (@kidzrevil perhaps?) speaking about the Resolve Super Scale feature and how great it is, so that's something that might breathe new life into lower-resolution footage. More info: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/resolve-15-super-scale-feature/ In terms of using slow-motion, I would suggest it's a new genre of film-making. Like all genres it will have fans and critics. Personally, I agree with @mercer around testing a camera by actually making a short film. That way, not only do you test the equipment by using it how you would on a real project, but you also get a real short film at the end of it, which is what all this fussing with cameras is ultimately for, right? ?

Australian Rules Football.. Wikipedia says that fields are "typically 135–185 metres long goal-to-goal and 110–155 metres wide" but I don't think he's on the full-sized field just yet. It's amusing that there isn't a standard size too - hooray for being Australian and basically not giving a sh*t about anything! ??? I'm seeing lenses like the Nikkor AI-S 100-300 f5.6, Tamron 80-250 f3.8-4.5, Canon FD 75-200 f4.5, Vivitar 75-205mm f3.8, etc that I can get for under $100 including shipping. The problem is that I don't know which are good and which are lemons, and considering that I can basically adapt any lens mount, I have a huge number of lenses to choose from. Today all lenses are optically excellent, but back in the day they weren't, so you can end up with something with nasty CA, isn't sharp (which matters as I'm seriously zooming in to its FOV).

Wow.. did he? I guess he'd probably be pretty bland on YT considering the extreme toxicity there!

I just looked up how big a lacrosse field is, and our football fields here are quite a bit larger, so that would factor in too. Hang on, a 200mm lens is enough, because with the 1.4x crop of the ETC mode and the 2x crop of MFT sensor size, a 200mm lens will have the same FOV as a 560mm lens on a FF camera. There are a bunch of lenses in the 70-200mm or 100-300mm range that look good.

When I was shooting with my Canon 700D and 55-250mm lens I used it in the Magic Lantern crop mode which turned it into a 264-1200mm equivalent lens. The 1200mm took waist-up portrait shots from the other side of the field and I got a few really nice shots like that, so that was the most zoom I would want. With a 600mm equivalent lens I'll be able to get 1200mm in 1080 by cropping into the 4K from the GH5. The 55-250 was a total pain to pull focus with because it is a cheap plastic lens and had a bit of play in the focus ring which made small smooth adjustments very difficult. Any half-decent manual lens should be 1000% nicer to use in that regard.

I want a lens to shoot my kids sports games. I will be using it with the GH5, which has IBIS, ETC crop mode, and (paired with a non-speedboosting adapter) the MFT 2x crop factor. I'm therefore thinking a fully-manual vintage lens could fit the bill. From shooting previously I've found that 600mm equivalent is enough reach, so if that's with the ETC mode, then the lens only has to be up to 200mm. A zoom would be really handy. My preferences are for a lens that has good IQ, is nice to use, has MF the right way, and has a longer zoom range. I can probably extend into the $100-200 range if there's something really nice, but cheaper is better What lenses should I be looking at?

Cool video. I know that 4K / colour science / AF / etc are not required for film-making, and I know that you also know that. It kinda makes me question though... I thought that most people here know that too. Do you think that there are lots of people on this board that don't understand these things? We all get excited by the tech, but when it comes to the art I thought we all calmed down a bit and regained perspective.

Cool. So, 3680 dots <is about> 1.2MP <is about> 1240x990 resolution (assuming a 5:4 aspect ratio). I just wondered because the viewfinders in the video I posted were 720p and 1080p and I wondered how the GH5 compared. He said that there was a slight difference between 720 and 1080, but that 720 was ample. I must say that the viewfinder is very nice, especially when you put on fast and high quality glass

Also, a question... The Panasonic quotes the GH5 EVF as having "3,680k dots" but does this mean 3.6MPixels, or is it counting the RGB lights in a pixel separately (which would mean it's about 1.2MPixels)?

I don't know about "affordable" but this might be helpful?

Shooting 4K and downscaling in post is a pretty good way of getting high quality 1080p, and it may record in a higher bitrate too. I have done image quality comparisons of different resolutions given the same file size, and you're normally better off with the higher resolution, so even if the camera shoots the same bitrate for 1080 and 4K, you'd still be better with the 4K file.

Great question.. I assumed @User was just using Resolve to generate media for use in some other software, but maybe that's not true?

Cool! Let us know how you go when you've had a chance to test it all

True, but only for longer focal lengths. If you're looking for a lens in the 100mm+ equivalent range then 50mm f1.8 lenses are great and cheap, and longer and slightly slower lenses are (almost literally) a dime a dozen. If you're looking for lenses in the range of, say, 50-100mm equivalent then you can get things like 28mm or 35mm FF lenses, but they're either cheap and slow or expensive and fast. If you're looking for lenses around 35mm equivalent then there are lots of 18mm APSC lenses around but you have the same cheap and slow or expensive and fast problem. And if you're looking for lenses under 35mm equivalent then you're basically screwed with a 2X crop on adapted lenses as 8mm or 14mm lenses are more expensive, and if you want 8mm and non-fisheye then it's time to sell a kidney!

Nice looking image. I'm doing the same thing with my GH5 and adapting lenses - using the GH5 10-bit mode to get the colour depth (not quite like RAW, but better than 8-bit) and the lenses to render the scene in a non-clinical way. I've got a couple of Helios lenses, and I have both SB and non-SB adapters for it. One thing to note is that modern lenses can be used as "semi-vintage" lenses too, if you use them wide-open or completely stopped-down, as this will normally soften the image significantly and is one of the things that people like about some vintage lenses. You can also 'cheat' a bit with them and use a bokeh modifier on the front of the lens to change the shape of the bokeh from the normal shape to something a bit more interesting. I suspect that if you have a 3D rather than 2D bokeh modifier then you can get different shaped bokeh in different parts of the frame, the way vintage lenses do, but I'll have to test this. It depends on what you're interested in.