kye

Even then, the cost of the bodies might have been cheaper than paying everyone to mill around waiting for the lighting to be moved and fine-tuned in setup after setup after setup. I remember the first student film set I was on had a girl sitting at a table in a cafe, at first alone and then she was joined by someone else and they had a conversation. There was a small vase with a flower in it on the table and it took about 2-3 minutes every time we changed camera angles to move the flower to somewhere that looked remotely natural. I think it ended up covering about half the tables surface, and we all had a good laugh when both the Director and AD swore that they would never let an art director put a flower on a table ever again!!

Actually, @Oliver Daniel reminded me that often on other forums they have an "anything goes" type of sub-forum which is for the hot topics. In audio there are lots more hot topics than in cameras.. things like cables, ABX testing, etc. At least here we all agree that Mojo and Motion Cadence are real things, despite there being a complete lack of technical explanation ???

I have to laugh when I see the lowlight of these cameras. For years I have been using cameras that start being pretty shameful, even for home videos, at ISO 3200 or 6400. Nit-picking these cameras at ISOs this high feels like being judgemental of someone that won bronze in the olympics!!

Great responses I agree with most above and think that it is what people make it. I've had the most gratification with content where there is no dialog. Channels like Primitive Technology and many of the "maker" channels like Laura Kampf's early videos are excellent - I think it's easier to edit footage with no dialog, and it makes storytelling elements easier to see, so videos are more likely to be well paced instead of rambling, tedious and self-absorbed. Channels where people talk but the emphasis is on making something other than a video is probably the next most useful ones. I watch a lot of videos by people that have made their own log cabins, who restore old mechanical devices, or do wood or metalwork. Partly because it's fascinating seeing how people make beautiful things, partly because I'm living vicariously, and partly because the emphasis is on making something rather than on the creators typically unfocused thoughts that make most videos way too long. In terms of how people monetise videos, I notice a distinct gap between two different approaches. The first approach is to encourage people to buy something after watching the video, and so the temptation is for this to have vested interests skew the content, and to do tricks for views. The other is people who are paid by sites like patreon where making videos is the point rather than making sales or whatever. There are some who attempt monetisation via the former method but state that their views are entirely their own, but it's hard to keep credibility and not many manage to get it right.

Intersting overview of mirrorless technology aimed at people who aren't familiar with it, but he goes into all sorts of things we talk about on here, like AF, flange distances, sensor sizes, m43, etc..

I was surprised by a lot of the negative comments about YouTube and YouTubers in the Casey Neistat vs Logan Paul thread and wondered what the overall vibe actually was on here. I wrote deliberately polarising options in order to separate out the luke-warm opinions from those who feel very strongly about it. Please vote and share your thoughts

I agree that people are unlikely to change their minds on the subject. During the aftermath of the US election I read a couple of excellent articles that really gave me an insight into the thinking of people who voted differently to how I would have (I'm not a US citizen) but unfortunately most of the content / discussion on such topics does nothing to increase understanding or empathy of people with views that differ from your own. In addition to the freedom of speech aspect of art, I think there's also the impacts to the industry and people's livelihoods. I'm not familiar with the specifics of it, but things like globalisation, immigration, etc are likely to be relevant topics to those who are industry professionals.

Thanks @John Brawley - fascinating stuff! I was trying to work out the disk space required but there appears to be some confusion online around Prores 444 vs Prores 4444 which seem to be referring to the same thing? Assuming 330Mbps for Prores 444 the 12 hours of dailies would be around 1.8Tb/day I count there being 6 other master-quality copies of the footage made, which equates to over 12Tb per day, or 100Tb per episode of total storage for all involved..... ouch! (please someone double-check my logic / maths here...!) When you shoot with the BMMCC + BM Video Assist 5" what codec do you shoot then? BM doesn't list Prores 444 / 4444 on the tech specs. Perhaps 422? Otherwise I suspect transcoding would be required. Is there any discussion around what would be required if the network switched to airing 1080? Obviously the goal is to master in a higher quality than what is aired, but would the increased dynamic range and bit depth of your current capture be sufficient, or would you have to switch to a higher resolution as well? If so, I'm imagining that means 4K capture, but you could likely get away with a much more compressed codec in order to avoid the data rates jumping by 4X. Many years ago we tried encoding SD and 720 footage to h264 with the same bitrate and the 720 was the clear winner, so I suspect that the codec (but not bit depth) could be compromised substantially and still downscale nicely to a 1080 output. I think it makes sense commercially that studios aren't interested in 4K to future proof their productions, and I think this is where the prosumer might differ from commercial TV shows. I know one of the reasons that I shoot is that (I'm hoping) the family videos I make will be kept and referred to by future generations. If my grandparents and great grandparents had made home videos I would certainly be interested in them. Certainly its an excellent argument to justify camera upgrades to my wife!!

I don't read or post in the political threads, mostly because things just make me unhappy. I think that politics is one of those things that can make you go from liking someone to not liking them if you discover they have different priorities to you, so I don't think it really adds to the overall sense of community.

My condolences. As much as I like all the ins and outs of camera gear, the best footage is the stuff with our loved ones in it.

Do it!! I know people who specialise in directing dramas and they found that most scripts don't result in natural performances without a lot of effort. I think the progression went something like this: The script likely isn't natural, or isn't immediately natural for the actors, so the first run-throughs are mostly about remembering the lines instead of acting fully After more run-throughs they either internalise and/or tweak the language to feel more natural, but they get tired and the acting suffers After many many more takes you can sometimes get magic before you burn the cast/crew out for the day I've been on set when the 30-40 second long monologue got nailed on take twenty-something, and became the cornerstone of the artists showreel, but it's a pretty brutal way to make a film. The alternative is to improvise things, which makes the language natural, reactions genuine, but shifts the storytelling from the script and on-set to the edit room, and normally involves a multi-camera setup if you want to have multiple angles of the first time an exchange is delivered. This approach should also allow more authentic performances from less experienced actors. You can also run through a lot of variations and then combine them in post, perhaps taking the line from the "you've just found out she cheated on you" and the reaction shot from the "you've just found out she cheated on you because she found out you cheated on her first" etc. Six hours is a very short time to edit a 10 minute film, let alone do the whole thing! I started paying attention to my editing efficiency in terms of how many minutes of final edited footage I would create per hour editing / grading, and comparing that to feature films, TV shows, vlogs, etc. The comparison didn't really work because the shorter the film, the snappier and more carefully crafted it tends to be, at least for me. Each of the films below took only a few hours to shoot, but took perhaps 10+ hours in the edit despite being quite short.

No worries Kens site is a pretty good resource - his depth of knowledge is matched only by the strength of his opinions! Sometimes I disagree with him, but at least you know he's speaking his mind and not pulling any punches. He writes well and is entertaining and informative - I really like his site. Some fun articles with lots of opinions in them: https://kenrockwell.com/tech/how-to-win-photo-contests.htm https://kenrockwell.com/tech/carry-less.htm https://kenrockwell.com/tech/upgrades.htm https://kenrockwell.com/tech/artist-or-technician.htm https://kenrockwell.com/tech/spectator.htm

I agree. There are still many many thousands (millions?) of Canon and Nikon lenses out there in the wild, and it costs a lot of money to change systems. Canon has continued making a profit despite providing quite poor video quality compared to others. Assuming they can make high-quality adapters for their own lens lines, this will continue to be an advantage. Ken Rockwell (a long-time Nikon follower) mentioned that sometimes Nikon included a feature in a lens in advance of it being supported by the body and wouldn't advertise that feature until it was fully available to consumers, and that this gave them an advantage over third-parties who could only support features that were full enabled, so who knows what tricks lie dormant in these lens catalogues that can only be unlocked by them. Source: https://kenrockwell.com/nikon/nikortek.htm (IIRC he spoke about this much better elsewhere but I can't find it). But the moral of the story is that the company that manufactures the lenses has a very real advantage over other parties, and Canon and Nikon have huge customer bases. Even if Canon or Nikon waited until many people have converted to Sony / m43 / other systems, this would simply mean that the second-hand price of their lenses would be even lower, so if they released a good camera at that point there would be a huge availability of cheap lenses to entice people back to their systems, or new users to start with them.

With the introduction of Prores RAW and the soon-to-be-released BMPCC 4K, professional quality codecs are now really entering the prosumer market. We've had some contact with RAW and High Quality codecs through BlackMagics BMPCC and Magic Lantern, but this is probably only a small percentage of us, even on these forums. There are quite a few challenges I see associated with this, including: Absolutely huge data rates Most 1080 prosumer cameras are around 25-100Mbps, BMPCC went up to around 600Mbps (6-24X prosumer), Prores RAW is 640-1120Mbps (6-45X prosumer), but the BMPCC 4K will go up to around 4352 (44-175X prosumer data rates!!) RAW requires extra processing in post-production DaVinci Resolve includes this functionality but it might require a separate piece of software for other packages, and will take significant time to transcode to large proxy files Image quality beyond 'good enough' The image quality from these RAW / HQ cameras is potentially more than is needed - in many cases shooting RAW 1080 or compressed 4K for a compressed 1080 output is going to be almost indistinguishable from shooting RAW 4K Commercial TV workflows are perhaps the best place to learn how other people manage these issues and why. I think they are better suited to our concerns than feature films because Prosumers and TV shows shoot over and over again using the same setups, so issues like scalability, efficiency, and so on are relevant here, whereas feature films only have to be done once. Who has worked on serial productions with RAW / HQ cameras, and what can you tell us before we fill our HDDs with RAW 4K files?

I'm not sure if you're being literal, or sarcastic (it's so hard to tell on forums..) but I think that fixating on just one aspect of this camera is a bit silly. It's also a RAW camera, a prores camera, a BM colour science camera, a m43 camera, a non-IBIS camera, a fixed-screen camera, etc etc etc. All equally relevant aspects to discuss. Talking about shooting 1080 in a thread about a camera that shoots RAW 1080 seems quite relevant to me, especially considering the enormous file sizes of 4K and high image quality of RAW 1080 I think a lot of people will shoot various flavours of 1080 with it when it comes out. My prediction is that lots of people will be viewing this camera as a BMPCC where they fixed the battery issues, the screen issues, the sound issues, etc, as well as the people who will be viewing this as a camera that shoots 4K. I'm not aware of many discussions around the BMPCC v1 where it was criticised for the image quality not being sufficient, and I'm sure that lots of cameras in 4K are poorer performing than the Pocket 1 or 2 are in RAW 1080.

Does anyone know how IBIS actually works? I mean, from a circuit / logic / engineering sense? Unless we establish that then we're all guessing.

This is the tech of the future for non-professional shoots I think. It's the perfect answer to recording everything and then sorting out later what was interesting and what wasn't. The fact you can hold it out in front of you and extract multiple camera angles from it and then cut between them is absolutely genius. It's basically a flying multi-cam setup that can record: You Wider shot of you in environment Where you're looking Interesting things going past etc. and all in a package that's no larger than a fat selfie stick. I imagine taking this to fairs, concerts, and on holiday. When it gets 8K capture with reasonable codec it will have the resolution required when you crop in, but currently consumer 4K doesn't cut it except for wide shots.

Not speaking for anyone else, but my imminent move to FF is motivated by getting shallow DoF from zoom lenses with good AF-C. This choice is important in a practical and artistic sense because my film-making is fast-paced, unplanned, and often in situations where I have little to no control, (eg, on the top deck of a tour bus when there's no spare seats and you're not allowed to stand while the bus is moving). The images I want need to be in focus, could range from wides to tele shots, and I want the DoF to give some depth to the images. The Sony A7III / 24-105 F4 combination that is currently the best offering for me (bring it on Canikon!) can't be beaten in one package by non-FF. Smaller sensors need larger apertures to match DoF which are normally provided as native primes (no zoom), or with a speed-booster which dulls the AF performance. My XC10 has good (but not great) AF, 24-240mm zoom, but doesn't have the DoF and so I am missing the 'look' I want.. a pity because it's a great camera otherwise. In a sense I agree that people might be getting too caught up on FF - if I was missing one of these three criteria then many more options would be available to me, including the Pocket2 which looks like it will be an absolutely phenomenal piece of equipment.

@Charlie @zerocool22 I've struggled to find places that talk about creativity rather than equipment too. There are a few threads here, but I think the real artistic knowledge is worth money and is held mostly by people too busy making films to hang out online or the people who do hang online are selling that knowledge via online courses. There is a lot of debate about "should I go to film school" and one of the arguments for and against it is that the best way to learn is to practice and actually make films - the people who say avoid film school say make lots of films instead and the people that say go to film school say that it's good because it forces you to make lots of films (as well as other advantages too of course). I've found that EOSHD is good for equipment discussions, forums like https://liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php which is about colour grading and post production, and manufacturer specific forums where users of that software/hardware sometimes talk about creativity, but they're often rare. I like liftgammgain because a lot of what colourists do is artistic judgement so those topics come up quite frequently.

@anonim thanks for the video - it's very nice! @sgreszcz I think there are degrees of low light performance. I have found that you need ISO 6400 to record anything with normal indoor lighting (unless you have heaps of lights on) which means anything after sunset, so birthday parties, dinners, etc. However, cameras these days like GH5 have relatively good ISO performance, but things like my Canon 700D get significant noise in even the highlights at 6400, so things are relative! @tellure pace is an interesting thing. The way I think about pace is from a few perspectives. 1) we often perceive pace according to our mood - if we are in a fast paced mindset then something slow and delicate (like @anonim's video) will seem too slow, but later on when we're in a slower mood it might seem fine. 2) I think the way we experience each shot is over four stages: "what is this", then "look at all the interesting stuff in here", then just enjoying the feeling of the shot / music, then "bored now!!". Obviously the art of editing a shot is to cut before we get to the "bored now!" part. 3) The length of a video, or each section, or each sequence, is kind of like the above, and this is where the storytelling aspect comes in. The trap of editing your own footage is to be too precious and include too much. I shoot and edit home videos and my sister (who worked in the film industry for 20 years) would always tell me to cut things out, and she was always right. The test for me is to get a narrative for each shot / sequence / section / film. In @anonim's video there were things like "the buildings are old", the shot with the note might be something like "these places have meaning for people" and the shots of pulling focus between the buildings and plants and buildings and the view is to kind of paint the picture that the buildings are overgrown, or that it's a rich and fertile area, or that the buildings are on the side of a hill facing the ocean, etc. The challenge is to understand what it is that you're trying to say, and then to say it with as few shots as possible, whilst not going too fast for the overall pace and music choices you have made. One piece of advice I thought was wonderful was that your video should feel "a bit too fast" but not a lot. So keep cutting until it's just feeling too fast and then stop. In terms of pace, I thought that @anonim's video had roughly the right shot lengths as it suited the music, but perhaps some shots could have been cut as they had the same story elements as other shots. However the Gone Fishing video of the little girl that @sgreszcz posted seemed way too long in parts - especially the shot of the girl walking which was way too long and was then followed by another shot that didn't offer anything new either! Yes, children are much more interesting to those who know them and love them, but there are limits and I think this might have pushed those even for relatives! @tellure I liked your video quite a bit. Beautiful place. @stv Your video was really quite wonderful. I think the filters you applied were actually contributing to the overall vibe of the film, and because they were aligned with the music and cutting style and subject matter I think it worked really well, despite them being really heavily applied. I am also not a fan of micro-jitters and camera shake, but I found your footage to not have too much of them, and the ones that were there suited the filters etc you applied. As I've mentioned before I think duration is a matter of cutting until the content moves fast enough. Much is written about the short attention spans of Social Media people, but look at Casey Neistat whose YT channel has almost 10M subscribers, 2.3B views, and whose top ten videos include five videos longer than 8.5 minutes. IIRC his total watch time averaged something like >5minutes per video, and his most popular age group is something like 10-12 year olds (happy to be corrected here - the stats aren't visible anymore). And then look at how many people watched 10 seasons of Friends, 5 of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones is still going strong, etc. The answer is content. Keep the pace up and you can almost go for as long as you like. My kids watch YT for hours, and will watch meme mashup videos that go for 30+ minutes, even without moving or even taking toilet breaks, and we talk about how people spend so much time on social media that it's is "addictive". People have huge amounts of attention - if they're not spending it on your content then it's the fault of the content, not the viewer! I've seen people setup gimbals with a quick-release plate that is balanced nicely (normally for the middle position on a zoom lens if that's what they're using) and then taking the camera on and off can be done very quickly. Shown at this point of this video (the rest of this video is really useful too):

Very impressive! Well done!! I think it's difficult for people who haven't done it to understand what an achievement it is to create a project with custom hardware and software and get it to actually work. Let alone be reliable, physically tough, etc in the real world. Large companies spend millions of dollars on R&D like this. It is a bit noisy, but I would imagine that with different servo motors this would be mostly / completely eliminated? But if you were using a longer lens and sound via a shotgun mic on a boom pole it would probably be inaudible anyway. Good luck with your wireless conversion - I would imagine that the system architecture would accommodate this without many issues? Perhaps just putting the wireless transmitter / receiver between the potentiometer and the processor? What kind of film-making do you use the setup for?

This is interesting and I can see the logic. In that sense RAID 6 is what you want. I'm being really pedantic here (and may well be telling you what you already know) but RAID 1 will need rebuilding if one of the drives fail. Yes, the disk will keep working in terms of having your data still available, but if you have RAID 5 and a drive fails it will also have data available too, so the RAID needs to be rebuilt in both of these situations. Rebuilding is the process to return the array to a state where it has one or more redundant disks. In terms of SSDs, do people run them in RAID? Is this a thing that is commonly done? I would imagine that for large data rates you might have the drives in parallel without any redundancy perhaps?

An analysis of the video previously posted, plus some conjecture.

Ah, I didn't know about the DX mode, and your optimism about both providing a crop mode and digital zooms is encouraging. 24-105 with the option to go 2.25x more is really a great coverage and F4 on FF is enough DoF separation, for me at least. Great stuff!