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Cool video. I shoot almost exclusively handheld and one technique that seems to work is to either hold the camera still enough for the IS to simulate a locked off tripod shot, or to be deliberately moving the camera in a direction (pan, tilt, whatever) because then the micro-movements from hand-shake kind of get hidden by the larger movements you're making intentionally. I've also found that panning with IS is a bit strange. It's like the lens has 'modes' where it thinks you're stationary or you're panning, and it can be very difficult to get the lens to understand that you're panning (and will jerk and be strange) but once it works it out then it will stabilise the pan quite well. I guess that depends on the lens though. The main lenses I have experience with for IS is the kit 18-55 and 55-250 APSC lenses and the built-in lens of the XC10, but they're all Canon so might be similar to the IS in your 85mm.

Regardless of if I end up buying one I'm going to benefit from it by forcing myself to consider buying it. I agree with @webrunner5 and others above that it will disappoint some people and I plan on making sure that isn't me. I already know that it doesn't meet some of my criteria (mainly stabilisation, AF, fast zooms and a tiltable screen) however the image from the Pocket 1 is so lovely and the promise of ultra-high-quality 4K so enticing that I'm going to use my existing equipment with those limitations, learn the required skills, see if I can make it work for my style of film-making and then read reviews before buying. Worst case is that I can't live without one or more of the features or it has some unanticipated Achilles-heel and I get an A7III and then learn to grade it to get the look I want (or I get the Canon FF unicorn and instantly die happy). If @webrunner5 is right that it can't be the only camera you own buy does a lot of what I want I might consider a Pocket 1, perhaps with a small fast prime, as a second camera. I'm sure that the Pocket 2 regret selling will further reduce the Pocket 1 used price. Anyone who has a manual camera now, buys the Pocket 2 and then sells it again because of its shortcomings really should have done their homework properly I think.

Nice little edit ? Because I only tend to get enough motivation up to get through editing when I go on actual trips or family outings I think it would take me more like 500 years to get 10 years experience! I do camera tests and kind of get to know my equipment and what modes work etc, but the feedback I'm missing is the storytelling and finer aspects you only get through going through the complete edit process. That's kind of how I work - I shoot a lot but don't edit much except big projects. It still takes a long time before the camera sits nicely in the hand and the dials stop squirming around and just sit nicely where your fingers go to access them when you're not looking etc. Nice! Yes, young children would make excellent practice subjects running around having fun. My kids are 14 and 12 and are more in the 'get that thing out of my face' stage ???

Like all skills, film-making improves with practice. As my focus is on family videos of holidays and special occasions, I get one shot at capturing them, so my skill level really matters. When I was a stills shooter I took up street photography for practice as it is a similar environment. With video I find that haven't found a suitable replacement - partly it's because editing is such a burden after shooting stuff, and partly it's because of a lack of interesting things to film. Yet, with the Pocket 2 and other cameras coming out, there's an even greater temptation to learn to manual focus, manually expose etc, all things that require a lot of practice to become proficient at. At film-school they start you off with 'editing in camera' and even do so with 8mm film so you can't cheat. I wonder what other interesting methods there are like this. Do you practice? How often? How?

Yeah, something like that. IIRC the shots I looked at yesterday were about 250Kb? I would have been maxing out all the settings - I remember I took about 20 disks out shooting with me that day... disk space to BURN!!

Recently there was something happening maybe a KM from my house but visible (flashing lights and all sorts of things) and so I fired up my 700D 55-250 and ML 3x crop mode on a tripod (120mm equivalent) so we could see better what all the commotion was, and I was surprised at how much the IS was drifting around. It might have been drifting perhaps 10% of the width of the screen, was going in all directions, and was perhaps moving around at a 2-3 second timeframe. I was surprised that the lens obviously didn't have the fine sensitivity to detect these movements and correct them, it was like these were rounding errors in its algorithm.

Those Floppy Disk cameras were really something! I borrowed one from work one day and went out shooting, giving the camera the best fighting chance by taking shots in full sunlight. Behold the brilliance of how well the tech did, even in those days, when used in forgiving conditions If the timestamps are correct, these were 2003, but who knows - these files have moved from HDD to HDD over and over and over during their existence

The problem is that everyone speaks from their perspective, and humans are adaptive, and contextual creatures. $2 for a cup of coffee doesn't sound like a lot, but to someone in the 1,000,000,000 people living on less than $1 per day income, that would some like a ridiculous luxury. Considering that most of us can afford hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy camera equipment, and care about things like Dynamic Range and Colour Science, we are all in the vastly deluded minority of people whose concerns seem trivial and frivolous. Potentially the largest problem this forum has is that the members habitually fail to acknowledge that we are each coming from a different environment, trying to accomplish different things, and have different priorities, and then we howl at each other furiously because of our lack of almost the tiniest bit of perspective.

Actually, if we apply the analogy to photography, they'd say "That's a great looking hammer - it must make spectacular houses!!"

I think it would have made a difference.. of course, if the one with the larger lens selection and sales history had licensed the technology to the other then it would have been better than inventing a new one as there would be a range already available. I think people underestimate the influences of lenses on body sales - everyone is critical of Canon DSLRs for video yet they still manage to make lots of money and some of that has to be because of the huge range of glass available.

You were clear, my summary might not have been The more I learn about the A7III the better it looks and the less likely the alternatives will suit my purposes.. Then I will begin the journey of learning to tame its colour science

Collaborations and sharing between companies can significantly impact the success of a product line... Imagine how different it would have gone if Panasonic and Olympus had competed with each other instead of making their m43 lenses compatible. In many industries there is only room for a set number of 'systems' so if two manufacturers who aren't currently occupying one of those slots team up they've got a much better chance of throwing someone off a throne and taking that slot. Of course, even if this ends up being a camera, we'd have to wait a long time and even then all it takes would be for it to have poor AF or no IBIS or one of any number of other 'sins' and it won't do well in the marketplace.

I've seen people add noise in preparation of harsh compression to prevent banding and other compression artefacts, especially for online compression. It's a common technique - they add noise in audio under very specific situations because it can lower artefacts (dither). Oh, I don't know. There's talk in other threads about just using a small kit lens or a single wide angle, so if you do that and have cargo pants or one of those vests that can take a 70-200 2.8 then it might be just fine! ?

I know that subtlety and nuance isn't very welcome on the internet, but I shall persevere and say it probably depends. The important thing is knowing what you're trying to achieve and using the right equipment and settings to achieve that goal. If you're in bright sunlight and using a fast aperture and you want the aesthetic that the 180degree rule supplies then NDs are required. If any of those aren't the case then they may not be needed. Same with a tripod - if you want a shot with zero motion or a very controlled motion (a tilt or a pan) and you're not shooting slow-motion and you don't want to stabilise in post, then yeah, a tripod is a must, otherwise if any of those aren't true then it may not be required. An example to illustrate the above. The other day I was shooting my kids football game. I was using my Canon 700D, ML RAW, and my 55-250 lens. The 55-250 at 250 with the ML crop mode is 1200mm F5.6. I wasn't using a tripod or ND filters, however, this is an example of when that did not matter because: the IS in the lens combined with my seated position meant I could get a motionless shot, and F5.6 combined with the cloud cover gave me roughly a 1/100 - 1/150 shutter speed which gives a slightly choppy feel which is appropriate for the kind of 'fast and rough' style of video I would make in this instance. Start at the end and work backwards. The lowest level of anything is blindly following the rules, the highest is knowing why the rules exist, what happens when you break them, and then chasing your end goal via whatever works.

Thanks, that clears up the confusion I had around the CIZ function. In the video the guy showed it at 1.5X but the others were talking about how it can go beyond that, so I wasn't sure if it was a mistake or firmware differences or whatever. Still, combining crop 1.5X and CIZ 1.5X to get 2.25X is hugely useful!

Hooray! Finally a spec race for something useful ?

Yeah, that's another direction that smartphones could do with a boost in. Maybe the smartphone of the future will have 10 cameras... a colour / B&W pairing for four focal lengths (28mm, 56mm, 84mm, 102mm) and on the front a normal camera plus a depth camera for Face ID. And then 3D will hit!! 18 cameras and counting!!

Excellent... The next 100 pages will be hard to fill otherwise

I love the assumptions here.. It's like there's only one type of film-making ??

If they do go triple-camera, let's hope it's not just 1x, 2x and 3x like those articles say. 28 and 56mm is a reasonable range, but adding an 84 when you already have a 56 doesn't really add as much as a 100+ would. I guess the problem is having stabilisation worthy of such a long focal length on a very small device prone to handshake. As I've said in previous posts, 28mm is general wide, 56-80mm is portrait territory and 100 and up are sports. Having two lenses for portraits and none for sports isn't a good 'set'.

I recently heard a wedding film-maker explain that they don't use NDs, and use Aperture priority and just let the camera expose with SS. I thought about it for a while and I guess with weddings there normally isn't much fast action during the day when SS will be short, and then after dark the SS will be longer anyway so the fast-paced dancing etc at the reception will be more cinematic. So weddings is particularly suited to that mode - if you're shooting sports it's not going to work. I'm contemplating moving to that style of shooting for my personal home and travel videos as having the camera auto-expose from full daylight to full dimly lit interiors would really make shooting that much easier. The alternative is full manual and having to expose with a variable ND, which is just another thing to think about while shooting.

Crop mode and Clear-image zoom compared... the clear image zoom looks pretty darn good to me. I didn't realise that the zoom goes beyond 1.5x - that means even more flexibility! And now with the A7IV, we can just get a 16mm F1.4 and with crop mode, clear image zoom, and automagical fractal AI interpolation modes, it's a 16-200mm lens!!

Very unlikely. The whole selling point of the A7S line was video, and having less MP meant larger photo sites and thus better low light performance. If they increased the MP count then they'd either just crop into the sensor (18MP is about 5K for video) or they'd have to downscale, which would add more processor requirement and more heat, which is the LAST thing that camera needs! If they did do that and implemented a thermal solution then they'd have taken a step to turning it into a cinema camera as no doubt they'd use the processors from their cinema line. I suppose they could just output 5K video, leaving people to deal with it in post, but that is so far away from the way the industry works I cannot even imagine it (although it would be a selling point for some, it would blow up YT with other people whose tiny little minds had been shattered!)

(Apologies if you already know these things) In audio they have a number of measurements related to relative volume levels or Signal-to-Noise ratios, maybe a similar mechanism would be good. No idea how to get an industry to adopt a standard term though! In line with my above comment, this is also a problem in audio, and unfortunately they haven't nailed it yet. Different types of distortion have different aesthetics but will measure the same in absolute levels. I suspect that things like Motion Cadence and Colour Science will be quantifiable, we just haven't worked it out yet.

@Charlie Nice work!! It's always nice to see a finished project come together and this one sure did, style and then some. I said in my post some time ago you were either a genius, or you were crazy, and I think it's somewhere in between, considering that it's pretty out there, but it still ticks the boxes for a wedding video in showing the right moments, showing the right people, and having a celebratory vibe that matches the couple but will still be ok for grandma. Everyone has an opinion, but there are only a few that matter, firstly the clients and if they were happy with it, and secondly if you were happy with it. If you were happy (with allowances for you taking notes on improvements for next time - none of us ever thinks a project was perfect!) then that is what will get you over the line with the next couple when they call and you start talking about what you could do for them. Absolutely. Walk tall, offer a reliable service where you deliver on what you promise and the world is your oyster. My wedding wasn't a traditional one and whenever anyone asks about it they always say things like "I wish I could have done that" or "wow, I'm not that brave" etc, so there is a latent desire in a surprising number of people to do something that's a bit more about them and a bit less like how things have been done for hundreds of years. Plenty of people get married and the Hallmark cinematographers will get the bulk, but live the dream and do it your way! ????