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This looks very deep to me - certainly a lot deeper than the mirror in the DSLRs it is emulating. For our lens experts - does this mean there is glass inside it? and what implications does that have? It's certainly not a compact setup then, to use the new body and a small pancake lens!!

Cool. I've said it can be useful in some situations, you've said it can be useful in some situations. I'm just not sure how any of that added up to the below....? Unless it was autocorrect and you meant to say "yes, you raise valid points, but have you also considered....."

All of us our-country-is-also-a-continent people over here have a club, one of the main things is cool names. The US says "across the pond" about the UK, but actually that was started by the UK, because they are technically a member of the club too, and we let the US use it because we're all very nice. That's part of the club rules too. All you have to do is start being nice, and to merge with Canada, Mexico, and all the South American countries and we'll consider your application ???

@Tone1k the point I am trying to make is that AF is useful in some situations, can be reliable enough to use (as long as you have other footage to cut to if it occasionally screws up), requires less equipment and can be cheaper. I'm not sure why you're arguing against AF, and maybe it's not your intention, but it sounds like you're completely opposed to it ever being used, and I think that's a very impractical position to take, given the vast range of shooting situations that the DSLR revolution and YouTube has put within reach of todays film-makers. If the OP reads my arguments for why AF might be useful then they can look at their film-making style and aspirations and see if my arguments fit their situation or not. Debates are useful to some extent, which is why I have continued to reply, but taking a position of "never/always" is where the debate stops being useful. You obviously have a great deal of experience, and in many situations that means that your advice will be relevant and valuable, but for film-makers who have learned / are learning the craft with features you didn't have when you learned, are shooting situations you haven't ever shot, for film distribution channels that didn't exist when you learned, for audiences who haven't graduated high-school yet, I'm not sure the traditional knowledge or ways of working are always going to be the most relevant. I see a lot of people on here who are solid industry operators with lots of experience who think that the methods used by Hollywood are always applicable to every film shoot, and I look at my 14 year old daughter who shoots videos with her iPhone with her friends, edits them on her iPad and uploads them to YT, and think "nope!". When someone posts a question I think it's valuable to offer opinions and information about pros and cons, but as soon as we start making statements about what they should do, without really knowing their situation and individual style, that's when we have veered off course. When we think about the user Charlie who posted about making the wedding video like the fashion ad, many/most thought he was crazy to attempt such a thing, but he delivered in a big way, so we shouldn't pretend to fully know what is best for someone.

You may well be right, all this talk of the industry is all speculation after all. I think that the move to mirrorless will be looked back on as why a whole bunch of companies went from good standing to being put out of business. Kind of like how we talk about Kodak basically inventing digital photography and then screwing it up by abandoning it.

It doesn't make sense TO YOU. That doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. When we hear about string theory or calculus or Byzantine poetry we might not understand it but that doesn't mean that no-one understands it. This is beginning to sound like you've never shot an interview before... The answer why you don't have one camera is jump cuts. If you shoot with multiple cameras this gets around the issue. As an example, here's an interview (one of many) shot by a professional film-maker who is on-screen interviewing, this example is not that bad and she could have used MF with a smaller aperture but if you want a close-up with a bit more production value then not only would AF be required, and from Canon or Sony it would be 99% reliable too. Like @jonpais says, you're assuming. I think the misunderstanding is that you're used to shooting things that are either in controlled situations, or if they aren't controlled (like ENG isn't) then there's a dedicated camera operator. AF starts to make sense when things aren't controlled AND there isn't a dedicated camera operator. Also, AF is also cheaper. MF requires manual lenses with nice fly-by-wire focus or mechanical focus, it requires a camera with a screen that is bright, large, and has good enough focus assist features. A face-detect DPAF camera costs a few hundred dollars, and you can film yourself and not have your feet nailed to the ground. It can also be turned off too. That's definitely a thing. Just in case you weren't aware.

I read something somewhere saying that being memorable is about setting an expectation and then violating it. I guess it's the essence of those "I did something - YOU WONT GUESS WHAT HAPPENED" clickbait titles. If Canon is going to release a corker then the best prelude would be the luke-warm expectations that everyone has. If we all get excited about the Nikon mirrorless it will be hard for them to shock us, but a C150 in DSLR size with 6K downsampling would break the internet

I'm not being sarcastic, but you're not understanding my point either. If you have the skill to MF and make the film you want then that's great - focus is an artistic tool (as you rightly point out) and having exact control over focus will benefit your end product, no doubt. However, if you're operating in a situation where you aren't able to pay attention to everything and you have to sacrifice something, then relying on autofocus is a good thing to 'delegate'. If you're interviewing someone who moves around a lot and have two cameras, using AF and concentrating on better questioning will bring you a better film. It seems like AF hunting is a real turn-off for you, and I get that - everyone has their preferences and that's totally fine, I'm not a fan of it either. Your statement "Id rather watch a good story shot on Betacam with no AF hunt than a good story shot in 8K , 16stops DR with DSLR type AF hunt." isn't my argument and isn't the comparison I'm making. In your comparison both are good stories. If we re-frame the comparison to what I'm saying then we get this.. I'd rather a great story captured clumsily rather than a boring story captured with outstanding cinematography. Maybe it's a difference of shooting situation? Maybe you're used to shooting films that are well planned, shot under predictable and controlled conditions, where there are enough hands to cover all the necessary jobs. If so, MF would be totally fine. If you're a single-operator, with multiple cameras, interviewing someone while trying to hold a boom mic, then adding MF to that will mean something else is compromised. People can't be an expert in everything simultaneously and sometimes something has to give. AF hunting can be very distracting, but it's rare that you can't get around it in the edit room. It's impossible to get around a dull story, bad sound or pointing the camera at the wrong thing, you simply can't edit your way out of those things. It's a question of priorities, and focus is important, but it's not the most important.

Assuming that during filming: you're not too busy operating other equipment to operate the camera if you are operating the camera then you have control of focusing (eg, gimbals often prevent MF) if you could do MF that you're not too busy doing anything else with the camera you can see the image well enough to actually see focus (screen bright enough, focus assists are good enough, etc) and also assuming that the time spent learning to MF (which is a skill that isn't easy to pick up) isn't better spent doing something else. Remember, the object of all of this is a high quality finished output, not mad MF skills. It's better to tell a good story and use AF than to use MF and tell a shitty one.

Nice I tend to think of grading in three 'levels': Level 1 is knowing what a tool does on a technical level (eg, curves, LGG, contrast/pivot, keying/windows, etc) Level 2 is knowing how to use it to get the effect you want (eg, how to make the shadows brighter, how to desaturate the reds, how to change the colour of a t-shirt) Level 3 is being able to look at an image and understand what adjustments you need to do to it to make it look great I'm pretty good with the first two, and am now working on the third. It's taken a while to get to the point where I can work on the third because you really need to play with things to learn what looks good and you can't play until you are good with at least one tool. That's why I recommend getting good with the LGG wheels - they're the best 'bang for your buck' tool.

I thought it was that rich people were called "eccentric" but for the same behaviour not-rich people were "crazy"

On the topic of changing lenses, changing lenses inside a bag can be useful. My travel setup is a camera insert at the bottom of a nondescript backpack. The insert has a padded lid, so there's essentially a little flat surface and room within the top half of the bag where you can you can change lenses. If the area is touristy (and likely to have thieves around) I wear the backpack on my chest, so changing lenses inside the bag is really easy and convenient. The bag is open a little for your arms to go in the sides and to see in the top, but it protects from dust relatively well and no-one can see what you're doing so it's not entirely obvious that you have multiple lenses in there either.

Your argument is a good one - 1080p stills are never sharp even if the footage looks like it was - I've played that game before! I'm not sure that photo and video resolution should never be compared in a general way, but I agree that they shouldn't be compared in a like-for-like sense.

Avery Peck is also worth checking out (https://www.youtube.com/user/theavenogfilm/videos), Ripple Training gives some good free content (https://www.youtube.com/user/rippleguy/videos) and also the articles at PremiumBeat are really good (like this one: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/create-illness-davinci-resolve/). I suspect the real reason that excellent colourists aren't all over YT is that they're busy doing actual work and producing free content doesn't pay their mortgages. Of course, if you're willing to pay for courses then I think it's a different story. If you want to work hard and learn fast I'd recommend a few things: Practice matching clips from different cameras using only the Lift Gamma Gain and Offset wheels (for log footage you need to convert to REC709 first). Once you've got a basic handle on how to use them and what they do, pull in clips from as many sources as you can into a project, put on some music, and grade them to visually match as fast as you can. I know what you mean about pros working really fast, I've noticed they pretty much use these controls and only use others if there's some specific quirk in the footage. Getting good at this helps train your eye to see contrast and colour tints. Find a bunch of before and after grading videos, pull them into your software and have a go at replicating the grade. I'd suggest using scopes to help you see what is going on (waveform and vectorscope are tremendously useful). Videos like this are great if you put in the work, but useless if you don't: Basically, the best way to learn will be to work at it. Set yourself challenges and dive into them. Watching a video is easy, replicating it is painful but is how you'll learn. Real learning is about changing what's in your brain and that's not easy and doesn't happen if you're passively involved, which is why people watching cooking shows on TV don't end up as brilliant cooks!

Wow. That's not an incremental improvement!!

Anything worth doing will always upset some smaller-minded people. No-one is perfect but he's going in the right direction.

Totally agree with @Anaconda_ - assuming you can get things in focus then go with the better codec. Of course, you should make sure that whatever camera you get fulfils all your needs in terms of lenses, battery life, IBIS, and everything else. Codec is great but there's more to a camera than just that. You should also be aware of how good the A7III images are - @jonpais has shared some lovely ones here.

You're making it hard to wait for the other camera announcements!! Just think, if this is a hybrid then how good will the pocket 2 look at 4K RAW!!

LOL, yeah, I'm with you. I think I find myself in a few situations, 1) taking things that are well shot and making them lovely, 2) taking things that weren't well shot and trying to make them look passable, and 3) trying to work out how to not make the same mistakes next time I shoot so I don't have as difficult a time in post!! I've spent a lot of time in grading trying to learn how to fix things, for example turning this GoPro and iPhone footage at a club from this: to this... which doesn't look like it's day turning to night, or that some of it is shot in LOG, or that some of it was from another planet with a green sun, etc ??? I think I'm better at turning problems into usable footage than I am in taking nice to brilliant, but I sure know how to dive deep into the Resolve panels for things like "why does the shadow pixellation have strange purple and orange bands and how do I get rid of them?" I guess it depends on what your objectives are, learning how to get by is ok if that's all you want, but if you want to go further then it's probably better to start with the pros

This can happen to all of us if you cherry-pick the words you don't like out of a 12 minute video of us talking about basically anything?

Ted from Art of Photography weighs in.. More discussion of what is required instead of predictions, but also has some discussion about the other players and overall industry.

I picked up a few things too, but I tried your line of reasoning at liftgammagain and got slammed for it. The problem with watching people who don't know how to grade is that for every piece of information you pick up that will help you in the future, you're risking picking up other information that will hurt you, either in bad practices or in a lack of understanding of what is going on, and you won't be able to tell which is which. As an example, think about how many YT colour grading videos talk about how to use LUTs, and then think about how many of them tell you that LUTs clip the data, and then think about how many talk about HOW luts work and WHEN not to use them. This is one of the reasons that I find the Juan Melara grading videos such a revelation - almost every sentence in his videos contains information that would take you hours or days of watching YT videos to find in those "buy my LUT" colour grading videos, but on top of that he presents the information in such a way that it builds an understanding of how to link techniques together in simple but powerful ways. The way I see it is that colour grading is the same as shooting - it takes 10% equipment and 90% skill to get a great result. I've also noticed that the more skilled the colourist, the more that the grade is about using the basic tools well but knowing exactly what to do with them. After spending dozens of hours watching YT colour grading videos, buying multiple paid colour grading courses, site subscriptions, and hundreds of hours of fiddling in Resolve over a dozen or more camera tests and a dozen more real projects trying to match multiple cameras, I learned that if you shoot it right, the less I do in post the better it looks. I think I am at the point now where my adjustments do more good than harm, and much of that is training my eye, but I think I might have gotten there a lot faster without watching all those YT videos of people who blindly apply LUTs and twiddle the knobs until their "how to make your footage CINEMATIC" video is ready for upload.

LOL!!

I might be wrong about it being digital, you'd have to watch the video in detail to confirm. In terms of advantages of doing things in-camera vs in-post, if you have a limited bitrate for the output file there's a non-trivial difference between the camera scaling the RAW data and then compressing it with the full bitrate of the codec vs taking the already compressed file out of the drone into post and then cropping in to that image and effectively discarding some of that limited bitrate. The disadvantage of doing things in-camera is that you're stuck with them in post, whereas doing it in post allows you to exactly match the zoom with the crop. Ideally you'd shoot RAW and then it wouldn't matter, but that's not the price-point we're talking with these drones!

Sorry but that video is awful - I had to stop watching before the finish. I believe that he likes HLG better than SLOG, and he may well be right about it, but the fact he uses film-emulation LUTs and then jumps around all the time between controls that weren't set to default settings is very strange. Plus his comment about "SLOG gives you purple shadows and you can't do anything about that" indicates that either he doesn't understand the basics of using the Lift wheel or the Curves panel, or the fact that the tint is likely coming from the film emulation LUTs, but either way, no-one should be taking grading and colour advice from someone who can't add green in the shadows!! I am intrigued to learn more about the HLG profile though, because it seems like it might be how to get high DR but avoid the low bit-depth in colour information issue (which is the downside of 8-bit log profiles).