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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).

Tony Northrup mentioned the dolly-zoom effect on the new Parrot drone, which does a zoom (digitally I think?).

Totally agree. The current (small) batteries give flexibility to those who want a smaller setup - carrying batteries in a pocket or bag is much nicer than the weight being on the camera if you're carrying the camera around. If you want the extra battery capacity and don't care about size then external power options are available. For all of the talk of it not being a 'pocket camera', which essentially comes down to how large your pockets are(!) no-one would argue that size differences don't matter, otherwise we'd all be making travel films with old-second-hand cinema cameras!! Yes. I looked for such a thing and found the WD ones that backup SD cards, as well as some with USB ports, but I could never get a straight answer if a CFast card reader would work so never bought one. Plus it annoyed me that I had to buy it integrated to a HDD - modular is better. Even if you have a laptop, if you're out in the dust then you'd probably leave the laptop in the hotel safe and take this kind of device out into the field for user throughout the day. I've looked for this in the context of my family and travel videos, but my dad (who used to be in IT and is now retired) also asked me about such a device for downloading the footage from the SD card in his dashcam for his 4WD trips, so I think there's a market both inside and out of the film industry. This sounds excellent - having something with flexible connections would be great. If you can make it so it connects almost any type of storage to any type of HDD and can be powered by anything (USB is my preference, but I would also imagine that Sony MPF(?) batteries or the DC power sockets from those huge external batteries might also be useful for some) then that would really hit the nail on the head. Make it work in rain, dust, the heat / cold, and other tough conditions, and have a screen/LEDs that are easily visible in bright light and you'd have a winner. "It's the device that copies your data from the cards you have to the storage you have with the power you have in the conditions you're in" would be all the sales pitch I'd need to buy one. Usually an option for verifying the data after the copy should suffice (from a technical standpoint at least). It would take more battery life for sure, but would be a level of protection good enough for most. I'm assuming that if you're making sure that you're detecting read errors, write errors, and verifying the data then it would be trustworthy. This would be a pretty good user experience for me: You connect it to power and the POWER led lights up You connect a card and the CARD light turns on green (or red if there's an error) You connect a drive and the DRIVE light turns on green (or red if there's an error) You press the copy button and the COPYING light turns on and starts blinking (Maybe the COPYING light turns a different colour if it detects an error?? eg, orange blinking) It finishes the copy and unmounts the drives and then the COPY COMPLETE light goes green for "no errors" or "copy verified ok", or amber for "errors detected but copy completed", or red for "copy failed" If it had this level of communication I'd be fine with it. You'd probably need to build in some kind of recovery mode if a copy is interrupted and you reset it and try again. This is absolutely a device I would buy if it does what you have described and doesn't have any silly design flaws.

Totally agree. 5 years is also long enough for most of the late-adopters to see that others have gone before them and been fine, and that when they make the switch there are people they know who can help with questions etc.

I don't for a minute think that ARRI feels threatened by Sony, but if they did, and if they wanted to talk about how their cameras might be better, this would certainly do the trick!!

I did notice one thing in the video that got me thinking. In the final shot where he overexposes the most and clips some sky detail the histogram is only showing data levels perhaps at 70% of full values. That seems strange to me - why wouldn't you take 100% exposure on the sensor and translate that to 100% brightness in the output file? It would give you more bit depth to play with - the whole point of ETTR I thought. Unless there's some aspect of S-LOG that needs to be calibrated between cameras, with other cameras having greater dynamic range perhaps? It just struck me as odd..

I think you missed my point - I have internet at a speed that's totally acceptable, but the upload speeds to the cloud servers is only a fraction of my internet speed - therefore it's a problem with the capacity of the cloud storage companies servers. If you have fast internet and fast cloud upload speeds then that's great and good on you, but it doesn't mean that everyone in the world will experience the same thing.

Setting aside my word choice (maybe 'reluctant' isn't the best word) this is agreeing with what I've been saying (in a number of threads recently actually) - that business decisions are very different to technology decisions. I even included a video on the last page of this thread showing that the pros at the olympics need reliability and speed through the entire chain from capture to publishing. The video I showed was linked to the moment in the video where the photographer said that it took less than a minute for the photo of the winner to be taken, uploaded, processed, and published. If you review my previous posts you will see that I am far from taking a 'spec only' perspective. In fact, I often take a "photography is a business" perspective on here and get chewed out because I didn't say that everyone in the world should buy the latest shiny thing! If you're having trouble finding where I have said such things, just ask. I'll happily link to a few

and they need to publish them pretty darn quickly.. this was an interesting video, and I've linked to the time when they mention publishing in under 1 minute from the photo: