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The before and after shots in the video sure are pretty convincing. I had to laugh a couple of times though. What he should have said was: 1) It does a great job of removing moire, but on the other hand it also reduces the sharpness which improves the image more than the removal of the moire, and, 2) It introduces a slight colour shift, but here, I've radically overcompensated in post and made the WB much worse but in the other direction! My vague recollection is that the Rawlite ones seem to be the ones that go bad, but here's how I see it. Either your filter is about to go bad, in which case you have enough problems and the last thing you need is to make your life worse by worrying about it, or your filter will be fine for a long time, in which case worrying will stop you from simply enjoying yourself. 🙂 So, either way....

One downside I can think of is how long the OLPF might last? The ones that people put into their OG BMPCCs have some sort of problem - IIRC they go foggy? Anyway, people are always talking online about replacing them. It might just be isolated to that time-period or manufacturer, but something to look into. Otherwise, yeah, why not.

Cool video, and nice use of a projector as light-source. In terms of more normal narrative lighting, I highly recommend the WanderingDP YT channel for cinematography breakdowns, mostly from advertising but also some features. He talks about the whole topic of cinematography, but mostly concentrates on camera placement in the environment, location design, lighting, blocking, etc all together because they interact, but the focus is on the light, which is why I mention it in response to your question. Moving into more interesting lighting for things like music videos, I don't have a specific recommendation, but a couple of thoughts that did occur to me are: Try to create more contrast Music videos are where you can push things, and you can push the colour grade as well as the production design. In the situations like the outside shots where production design is pretty limited, you can still push the contrast in post, you can push the saturation too (perhaps pushing only select hue ranges, and perhaps darkening them to fit the grittier vibe), and you can also do a split-toning effect (like having cooler shadows). All these will create more contrast in post. Try to create more variation in the frame This relies a bit more on equipment, but try having more sources of coloured light and really push the hues. Maybe grab a second projector and shine one on the talent and one on the background but having different colours. Try shining one on the talent from the left and one from the right. Another more general thought is to create a bit more variation in shots. This involves shooting more angles, so would take more time, so maybe it wasn't in the budget, but getting more angles would really help in the edit. Even if you could get the artist to do an additional run-through in each location and you just film it getting as many different angles as possible - high-angle, low angle, close-up, shot of their hands, focus on the background with them blurred in profile etc. Then you can find any interesting little moments in that one and put them over the top in the edit. In terms of inspiration, do a bunch of google image searches for inspiration, and save any images you like. This is the images for the search "great music videos": Lots of cool ideas in there. Remember good artists copy, great artists steal! Why don't you like the Helios for run-n-gun work?

A hazelnut?

It's also nice to see signs of life from the brand and for the system overall, considering that lots of MFT users would best be described as..... skittish.

43rumours reports that on Jan 30th, OM SYSTEMS will announce: OM-1II 9-18mm II 150-600mm f/5.0-6.3 The article has more details, and also linked to this video. Anyone interested in these things?

Very very carefully?

Something like an F3 looks better than most of the latest mirrorless cameras regardless of how you use them.... unless you've got half-a-decade of colour grading experience, and even then....

We might be closer to Adelaide than you are to Sydney, but have you been to Adelaide? From any kind of perspective it's a non-place, so I'd rather be slightly further away from Sydney!

So, I realised that it kept failing on these files beginning with "._" I realised that they were actually there, despite Finder not showing them to me when I put it into the mode for showing hidden files, so it was only the command line that revealed their existence. Turns out they're some sort of Apple metadata file for storing info on lesser file systems. This makes sense that they'd be present in older projects but not in new ones, as I must have moved to ExFat at some point and Apple stopped creating them. After a bunch of problems trying to work with them, since some commands can see them and others can't, I found the dot_clean command, which merges all the metadata from these files back into the file it should be in and then removes them. So I ran it over my whole footage archive. I then successfully copied one project that had been failing before. Unfortunately, the next project I tried copying failed on a real file, so not just those ones. Further investigation revealed that my spinning disk was getting hot, really hot. It's a "Seagate IronWolf 12TB 3.5" SATA Internal NAS Hard Drive HDD 7200RPM 256MB Cache" mounted vertically in one of those USB docks, so probably had enough passive cooling for anything except going flat out for multiple hours without a break. I kept getting an error on a good file and couldn't figure it out, but eventually I worked out that the "Couldn't read the source file" was actually a very poor way of saying that the target drive was full. FML! Anyway, 2Tb of footage copied successfully!

I have the MacBook Pro, 13-inch, 2020.. specs here. The specs page quotes it as "USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)" so it sounds like you're exactly on the money, and if my math is right then 10Gb/s is 1,250MB/s which seems to align with the 850MB/s I was seeing. I'm not worried by this - I have an SSD that's faster than my computer and easily faster than I need for editing. The files I edit are typically 200Mbps ALL-I or 100-150Mbps IPB codecs, so the speed issue is when there's a cut the computer has to read the file to find the previous keyframe, then decode the file from there to catch-up to the first frame in my timeline, which obviously you want to happen fast enough so that the timeline plays flawlessly. I copied about 800Gb across multiple projects without errors, then I hit my first error and kept hitting them after that. I tried copying a few more projects and each failed for some reason. Overnight I unplugged the drives and this morning I reconnected them and am now trying again, so we'll see if it was just a random thing or if it's repeatable. TBH, the Clone Tool seems great when it works but it's a bit of a PITA when it doesn't. Having to export the logs, decompress them, then open up a file is very cumbersome. I also think it just hits an error and stops, whereas I'd rather it keep going and give an error log of all the files that failed and do so in a way that's easy to access. If you want to try again there's no way to only validate without copying the files again, or to resume a job, etc. If it keeps failing I think I'll look up what unix commands I can use to compare the files, I'd imagine there's a unix utility that will compare two folders and give me a nice report listing all the failures.

I hit an error. Turns out Resolve has great logs. Go to Help and select Create Diagnostics Log On Desktop and it will create a set of logs. In one of the files, ResolveDebug.txt, the last line is: I tired it twice, it failed twice, and the same file is the one listed in the log as the one that gave the error. Interestingly, that file doesn't exist, at least not starting with a "._" prefix. There is a file there with that name without the prefix though, and it plays fine. The source and destination folders are the same size and contain the same number of items, once you remove the log files it puts in there. I tried syncing each of the subfolders individually, and the subfolder with the issue generates an error, and the other ones don't, so it seems to be consistent. Odd. Considering this is copying files from my master location to an SSD for faster editing, and that the SSD copy will be deleted when no longer needed, I'll just move on. I have noticed that OSX occasionally hits an error in moving files because a file will be locked for some reason, and there are other strange little hiccups that happen. I guess nothing is perfect.

Maybe posting some example images might help?

My 219Gb copy completed successfully, with Resolve saying the MD5 checksum validation was good. It has a range of options for validation, with MD5 being the default: I googled what an error looks like, and Resolve makes it pretty obvious that the job failed, so it seems like a good tool.

My Samsung T9 finally arrived*** (*** here in Western Australia (WA) people joke that the WA stands for "wait awhile" because we're 3500kms/2000mi+ from the main cities but when things are shipped from overseas like this SSD, this waiting applies to all of Australia....) Plugging it straight in to a dedicated port on my MBP with their supplied cable, it gets about 850MB/s read and write. The manufacturer claims 2000MB/s. My internal SSD gets 1700MB/s write and 2300MB/s read, so the computer probably isn't the bottleneck. Is there anything I should do to get better speeds? Samsung says on their website that "the UASP mode must be enabled" - is that something I should look at? Disk Utility says it's formatted with ExFAT, so that probably doesn't need reformatting. I'm testing the Resolve Clone Tool to copy a 219Gb folder to it from my Media HDD, and I think the tool does a checksum of each, so this will verify if the copy was bit-perfect @Jedi Master. It's got 30 mins to go so I'll post again once I've done some further testing.

Yeah, but not IBIS. The differences matter, so please fact-check yourself before posting.

A full review - this one is PTZ-focused. This one includes a direct test between the P4K and the M4K and the conclusion is it's the same sensor. (linked to timestamp) The side-by-side size comparison really is something!

My experience is similar. Definitely have lower lifetime in years, with batteries dying (no longer charging) after a few years but the OEM ones keeping on going, so I'm down to the OEM ones for most of my cameras now, as I haven't bought a new camera for a while! I've been lucky with the camera / battery / usage of my cameras and mostly get by with a single battery on each day, and recharge overnight, so the non-OEM ones are mostly for backup, but that's not likely to be the case for everyone. Some battery types remain relevant across camera upgrades over time (NPF being probably the best example of this, with some Canon batteries like LP-E6 etc being others) so it's worthwhile buying well as the OEM ones will have a much longer lifespan over the years than the non-OEM ones. Like the sayings go: "buy well, buy once" or "the poor man buys twice".

It has no IBIS.

Maybe there's tests on the performance of the battery somewhere online, that would include these considerations? I would imagine there are ways to test a battery, just like any other piece of equipment, so maybe someone is out there running those tests?

I'm not familiar with the Olympus lineup at all really, but that E-M5iii seems quite interesting actually. What are the relative advantages & disadvantages compared to the GX85? I can see it's more expensive, has a slightly smaller screen, and of course it has PDAF. If I was to upgrade from the GX85 to it what would I gain and lose?

Original Gangster. As opposed to the Komodo-X.

He'd have to be a pretty pessimistic estimator, or seriously experienced at doing mods like this, for that number to be anything other than wildly optimistic. There might still be a RED tax, even on the OG Komodo, but you're buying into an ecosystem, rather than than a very niche mod. Depending on the footage you look at online, there was a mojo to the OG Komodo that I haven't seen on the modern BMPCC models. Good luck to the person making the product, but I'm not really that sure where the final product sits. I watched a video from a documentary shooter about what matters and doesn't in buying cameras, and his number one criteria was reliability / ruggedness, which I suspect won't be high on a mod like this. R&D for commercial products is a long and complicated process involving many iterations of destruction testing and the like, which likely aren't going to be done here. Let alone warranty support etc.

Nice video! Especially nice camera work in keeping up with those two 🙂 How long did the fight go on for?

I have had success with the Wasabi brand in the past across multiple cameras. If the design is good and the real capacity-per-dollar is competitive then I'd say go for it. I wouldn't worry about them putting extra weight in there - Sony used to do this in the early days of manufacturing electronics in Japan because although they were making decent products the consumers were still in the mindset that the heavier something was the better it was made. I think it's easy to look at this peek behind the curtain and conclude that cheap NPF batteries are a minefield / rip-off / etc and then get disheartened, but I think that most manufacturing is like this and we only think these isolated examples are bad because we have some deluded fantasy that the rest of the world is mostly above board. If you feel badly about this then just wait until you discover that in a lot of situations the "authentic" brands do this too, only they're doing it with their "genuine" products that cost 5x the third-party ones. Then when the consumers find out and start buying third-party products the manufacturers put in mechanisms to deliberately cripple the competing products. The printer ink cartridge example is well known, but this happens all over the place. Here in Australia we have pretty strong consumer protection laws, so lots of stuff gets pinged here that doesn't overseas, but even here the law only matters if you get caught....