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I think there's a whole industry of people deliberately selling things under false listings, taking the money from people that don't notice or know any better and very very quickly refunding anyone who complains. I've bought a few small items that didn't work or weren't as described and within about 0.1ms of submitting a report they give you a full refund and close the case completely, no returns or anything. I've seen amazon listings for tech products where there are 500+ reviews, but you go and read the reviews and they're all saying "this shampoo is great" so it's obvious they're manufacturing listings for high-value items by gaining positive ratings on low-value products and then completely changing the listing to something else entirely. Regardless of what the product is, there's always a brand that is great "but you'll pay for it" and I think that perhaps those brands are selling products for what they're actually worth and the remaining 99% of the market are doing dodgy-brothers stuff.

Died completely? and were they the V30 (green) ones, or faster ones? There were reports of people using the green ones and after a while they start dropping frames, but other people said that they would format the card each time they put it in the camera and they had no issues. Dropped frames sounds to me like the card speed was only borderline, but everything these days is made to a price..

I don't think any updates are coming - these are old cameras now. Even in the Blackmagic Camera groups on FB if you say "OG BMPCC" people think you're talking about the BMPCC 4K. I can't confirm these, but in the FB group for the OG BMPCC multiple people like the Kingston Canvas Select Plus but don't get the V30 version - you need the V60 or better. Also, apparently there's an Angelbird card specifically for it (it might have it on their website?).

Cool film, only let down by the poor codec and lack of ND. I understand why you'd want to have a sponsor and why you'd want to tell a story with a phone in comparison to not telling it at all, but if you had freedom to choose and you were already getting a bunch of people on set and putting all that time and effort into something and then a phone sure isn't my first choice. Same comments as above, but you can definitely see the stronger codec in this piece compared to the Xaiomi.

We did collaborate on some films, and submitted a few of them into the festival circuit, which is quite active here in Australia. That was mostly an exercise in frustration as it was all a game of who-do-you-know instead of the merits of the actual film, but it gave her experience in directing and, because of the performances she was able to get, contributed to many actors showreels. It was amazing the trouble we went to considering the camera of the day was the mighty PD150!

I think that having something to show for your efforts is a pretty significant motivator, and if you can see that what you did actually helped someone then that's even better. My sisters story is long and complicated, but it boiled down to two factors. The first was that after not being able to 'make it' as a director, she retrained in another role, but in her location there wasn't enough work for her year round and she would have had to have found a second career for the off-season. The second factor was that the work-life-balance was non-existent, and through the combination of her working essentially 18-hour days when she was working (working on-set all day and doing prep work all evening) plus the fact that she couldn't make plans in case she got offered a gig, she had just become separated from the rest of the world. I'd say the horrific misogyny and directors / producers with emotional / mental problems was also in the mix, and it was, but the other two factors were easily enough. She would call me and we'd Skype for 5 hours and she'd describe the situations on-set and I can tell you, however bad most corporate environments were, the directors and producers she routinely described would fit into the bottom 30% of management in corporate offices. It's amazing to me how incredibly incompetent much of the workforce is, and yet, they still manage to find enough money to remain fed/clothed/housed. I tell this to people who I mentor - if they can navigate the workforce then we, as people who are trying to accomplish something, can thrive.

It really depends on the situation you're in. For me, the choice between the M4K and the FP and the R5 gets solved with lenses. Specifically that I have them for MFT and don't for the others. So the above comparison wasn't to say "here are many options to explore", it was really saying "the M4K isn't perfect, but everything else is far from it". The M2K is a very unique camera in terms of its size/performance/features (especially the fact it can do 3:1 compressed 60p RAW internally) and the M4K is better in some ways, despite also being compromised in some other ways, but for some situations it might be a step forwards.

Maybe not....

The TL;DR is that you're incredibly valuable to any office environment, but the challenge is that compared to the average (borderline useless) office worker you're so different that the entire system won't be able to see your value, so the challenge is how to get in the door and then get your bearings. I've spent my whole career in offices - starting with IT background and working through project management to program management to various consulting and transformation engagements. I am an independent consultant not under the umbrella of any consulting firm, so I'm on my own for networking and finding new contracts etc, so have navigated this territory for a while now. The most significant things I have observed are these: Almost no-one understands the concept of transferrable skills. There is no understanding of this in the recruitment process or HR department at all - zero. Offices and corporate environments are designed to treat staff as pre-programmed robots. If your entire career history isn't the same job title over and over again then they don't know what to do with you. Offices and corporate environments are places where the rules of the game do not include things like productivity or practicality (or probably anything you'd recognise), they are about perceptions and processes and culture and not rocking the boat. The only people that appreciate people who can take ownership of an outcome and actually get things done are a select group of middle/senior managers who are being suffocated by red tape and actually trying to move the needle on some outcome. There are two types of people, those who change things and those who run things and maintain the status quo. You are the former, not the latter. As you are someone who knows how to actually get things done, I'd suggest the following: Any kind of role with a focus on making changes or solving problems and hitting deadlines should be a good fit - this is likely a management role but don't confuse the management roles that are just managing a team of people that do repetitive tasks Smaller organisations are likely to be a better fit, as they'll be more comprehendible for someone not familiar with the corporate world (think of it as a parallel universe completely separated from reality with different rules) As much as you can, bypass any recruitment process, and try and establish contact with the people inside the business who make decisions and can see your worth (and if necessary can ensure you're not filtered out in any recruitment process that is required) Try and meet these managers directly - many people have needs to hire good people but don't have advertised positions because the job market is pretty devoid of sensible people - so if you get in contact with these people they might make a new position for you What you want to do is get talking to the managers who have money and decision-making authority and have them decide to hire you. This is the whole purpose of networking. The other challenge is once you're in the door, how do you work out how to fit in and get people to work with you. Things like running meetings, getting people who don't work for you to do work, how to explain things to management types so that they understand you (including how to tell them things they don't want to hear without making them want to fire you), etc. My sister made the transition from film to 'normal' work. She retrained in Business Analysis (basically analysing a problem and designing solutions) and Project Management. She got hired into a large corporate firm into the call centre, but very quickly started doing things on top of the normal work (which she absolutely hated) and was internally promoted, and has now been internally promoted several times as they gradually see her potential, and as she gradually learns the new culture and ways of doing things. It's a long learning curve, but it can be done. Good luck!

Yeah, it's hardly the ideal package size if you want a tiny setup. If I went this direction I would fit it with an external SSD and small monitor like the Ikan VL35 3.5" 4K monitor I have with my M2K and a battery plate. Still, the other options for a RAW setup also have pretty significant compromises: OG BMPCC - small all-in-one package and internal RAW/Prores but only 1080p and screen is fixed and not bright and tiny batteries and no 60p and no dual-ISO OG BMMCC - same size as this plus internal RAW/Prores but only 1080p and no dual-ISO P4K / P6K etc - internal RAW/Prores but ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS Sigma FP - small with internal RAW (in limited resolutions/bit-depths) but fixed screen and RAW not compressed so file sizes are large and some modes require external SSD Various mirrorless cameras - much larger to begin with but also require 5"+ external recorder to record RAW The ideal package would be this sensor in an updated P2K chassis, but I doubt this will ever eventuate. In terms of this only recording BRAW and not Prores, I do wonder what the computational differences would be between BRAW and Prores - they might be similar in practice.

60p at 360deg shutter looks like poop. 60p at 180deg shutter looks like poop. 60p at 45deg shutter looks like poop. 60p at 1deg shutter looks like poop.

What do you mean "will be"....

It's easy to tell... When you look in the mirror do you see a long majestic flowing magnificent beard? If so, then you might be Ironfilm, or potentially a member of ZZ Top, but if not then it's ruled out definitively.

More M4K footage.... Cat video was apparently shot on the Voigtlander NOKTON25mm 0.95, but details are sparse. The second video has no details at all, and the first simply had "#cat" as the description, but someone asked about the lens in the comments!

The latest Samsung USB SSDs get 2000MB/s, which is 16,000Mbps. The BM 6K FF camera does 6144 x 3456 (6K) with Blackmagic RAW 3:1 at 323 MB/s for 30p, so 2000MB/s would be able to do 10810 x 6080 at 60p. Of course, that's BRAW, but I don't think it being a removable drive would be the bottleneck. Also, if it was removable, not only could you swap them out in the field, but over time when the SSDs got larger / cheaper you'd be able to benefit from that progress.

Not an odd request at all! These days it does seem that the preference is to go with ProresRAW or BRAW in order to get file sizes under control though, and after looking at the Sigma FP I can understand this trend because WOW, those data rates are just stratospheric! One thing I'd dearly love for the manufacturers to offer is downsampled Cinema DNGs. So, if you had a 6K sensor then you could choose 4K, 3K, 2.5K 2K, 1080p resolutions that were still the full sensor width. This gives much of the benefits of both worlds. Are you talking about internal storage like a small internal SSD inside the camera? I have definitely noticed that many cameras record externally to SSD at much higher data rates than their card slots are able to muster. Perhaps, and I know I'm being optimistic now, an open standard might emerge where NVME shaped SSDs in a slimline hard-case could be used as removable media via a slot. Any camera that supported it would have the benefit of not requiring a fragile lump+cable to be attached, but the user would get the benefit of a fast drive.

Yeah, it's deceptively deep!

There's also the concept of Enshittification, so actually there is no rule it has to be better at all.

The idea that justice is even common, let alone the norm, is a fantasy. The world is a place where people can get away with almost anything, provided they were lucky, or smart, or had help, or were in a situation that condoned it. My approach to staying sane is to try and view injustices as reality, and try and focus on what happens next. If you got robbed one day and you spent the rest of your life being angry and sour about it, your attitude would cost you a lot more than what you lost.

I wouldn't suggest beginning things as a colourist now to anyone - the impacts of tech evolution have barely even begun and they're practically incomprehensible already. I'm in the Resolve Professional Users invite-only group on FB, I understand only about half the questions being asked, let alone know the answers, and the group recently decided there were too many basic questions being asked and has created another invite-only group with a higher standard. In terms of who is where on the scale, one comment I've heard from quite a number of colourists is that anyone can make great looking images, it's the skills beyond that that separate the amateur from the good from the great. Considering I can't even reliably make great looking images, I shudder to think of how deep the knowledge goes of the folks at the top, who can reliably make great looking images from footage shot on random cameras in random ways with a random number of mentally unstable people giving them creative direction in sentence fragments and gesticulation that would scare most mental health professionals... and make enough profit doing so to prevent themselves from becoming homeless. I'd suggest that the list of criteria to get even 2/10 would probably contain a number of phrases that most camera YT folks wouldn't even be able to pronounce, let alone define, let alone work with, let alone troubleshoot. There are people out there shooting with mirrorless cameras, getting impressive looking results, who don't even get to 1/10 on this scale.

We all know that professional colourists are more skilled than the rest of us, but one thing I've started to become aware of more recently is that there is a huge gap in the middle ground between us and them. Sort of like we're down the bottom in the 0-2 range, and the serious pros are up in the 6-10 range. Of course, there are professional colourists who are in that middle 2-6 range, but the thing is that because they're working on images 20-80 hours a week (20 at first, but very quickly building up to 80 hours a week - they work crazy crazy hard) they very very quickly progress from that 2-6 range of skill up to the 6-10 range. I say all this because I've had very unpredictable interactions with them - sometimes I ask a question or request a feature and they all turn around and answer and discuss it, and other times I get zero reaction at all. Every so often I learn something and realise the questions / comments that got no reaction were actually just enormously ill-informed or don't make sense when you start thinking about things the way they do (which is very very different to how its described on forums / YT). So, all that is to say that I genuinely have no idea what the rationale is behind various decisions in Resolve. It might be that it's a tech company introducing a random feature because someone worked it out and it actually sucks, or there's some technical limitation, or there's some special reason it's like that but we'll never know because it's designed to work in a way that fits into a particular workflow that solves a problem that you and I will never have. The more I learn about the world, the more I realise what I don't know, and the more I realise there are many things that I cannot know. Most of my progression these days is unlearning things I've learned in the past that are just flat-out wrong, useless, misleading, or all of the above.

Actually, that's an interesting idea - you could take the 4K image and Super Scale it to 8K, then when you crop into it on the timeline you'd be cropping into (let's say) a 6K area of the image, which was originally a 3K area. It's definitely worth trying along side dialling in the sharpness yourself.

If you haven't done it already, I suggest you do a test to see how much you can zoom in post before it becomes visible. I did this test and was able to zoom to 150% without degradation. Here's what I recommend (and I did): Get your sharpest lens Find a subject with sharp edges / textures Put high contrast lighting on the subject, so the edges have maximum contrast Setup up the shot, be sure to stop the lens aperture down 2-3 stops from wide open so you're in the sharpest part of the lens Take one shot from this perspective Move the camera a bit closer, refocus, take another shot Repeat 6 a few times In post, take the first shot and crop it to roughly match each subsequent shot For each crop, go back and forth between the cropped and normal shots, and add sharpening to the cropped shot until the overall level of perceptual sharpness is even Apply a colour grade across all the shots Export / upload the footage how you would normally deliver Compare each pair of FOVs and see if that level of crop is acceptable I've done this test, and I've seen others do this test too, and the results are surprising. I've also seen a bunch of morons do this test but without applying sharpening, then when the sharpness didn't match they declared that they needed the extra resolution - talk about embarrassing yourself in public! Of course, this test is grossly unfair, as in real shooting it takes a much greater difference to notice, and what is visible on the timeline is often not visible in the export (and is obliterated in the stream...)

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.