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Currently the Canon APS-C cameras are probably eliminated due to no IS in wider aperture lenses, the Pocket 2 lacks AF-C, the GH5 can't focus well enough, the XH-1 battery life and AF issues, the C100 and Canon FF I believe only have AF points in the middle of the sensor. The remaining candidates are the A7III, but I'm waiting until the magical Canon FF camera and all the other 'just in time for xmas' cameras are revealed before moving forwards. The Pocket 4K looks like it will be a spectacular camera and I really wanted to want it, but it's just not aimed at me. If you're shooting in a situation where you can pause long enough to change lenses or you can tailor your shots to one focal length (eg, like street photographers often do with a single prime) then it would be just wonderful, but I want cameras to fit in to my style of shooting not the other way around. I shoot my home videos sometimes without even stopping walking etc, so things are often in motion because that's how life is and that's what I'm capturing. TBH it would be great if I could end up with a camera where lots of people use it and there's lots of support in terms of products and online discussions etc. I do have half-a-mind to pick up a second-hand Pocket 1 (are we calling it that now?) and get a single prime, like maybe a 35mm equivalent, and kind of have it as an 'art' setup to compliment whatever I get for my 'documenting' setup, but without IS, good low-light, zoom, or AF, it would only ever be an experimental camera. The Pocket 2 will suffer from the same compromise that the GH5 and all other cropped sensor cameras suffer from, you can get zooms and you can get shallow DOF but not both. The fastest zooms you get are F2.8 but that isn't as shallow as f2.8 on FF, so you're forced to choose between fast and flexible.

Currently I have two setups - 700D running ML and Sigma 18-35 f1.8, and XC10. The 700D takes lovely stills and nice shallow DOF but lacks image stabilisation and reliability, and the XC10 has great IQ, reliability, better low light, etc but the AF isn't great and it lacks shallow DOF. The XC10 is almost perfect but just doesn't give the look I've now come to realise that I want. My list of criteria is: Shallow DOF (equivalent to FF at F4) Looks nice at ISO 6400+ Walk-around lens available (at least 24-70) Reliable auto-focus with face detection Codec giving approaching-RAW 1080 or 4K Stabilisation good enough for hand-held work Overheating not an issue Low RS Reliable

Have you tried a different SD card? It looks like it might be a video file on the edge of being corrupt. Other things to try: unplug any external accessories that are attached if you have access to a second setup, try different lenses, different batteries, etc re-load firmware for camera, lenses, and batteries (not sure if these batteries have firmware but some do) Good luck!

Geoff is completely wrong. The numbers are absolutely critical. We have far too much dynamic range, resolution, reliability... and even colour!! I did an experiment on Instagram for a while of trying to capture the most evocative images, and luckily if you're suffering with too much image quality then don't worry - there's an app for that!! This is one of my most liked photos from the campaign, using an app called Tintype to simulate those glory days where images had soul and nostalgia! Sometimes I had to use two apps to also blur the middle of the frame as tintype didn't do that. IIRC tintype also had a shooting feature where you were limited to taking a photo every few seconds, it would apply the filters in random ways with random amounts, to simulate the unreliability of early processes. It was far from an exhaustive project but I did discover that the lower the image quality the more feeling the images seemed to have. I'm sure there are exceptions in this and I'm sure there's a sweet spot too. But, luckily for us the tools we have available in post are wonderful and can save your footage from "the prison of the pristine" (to paraphrase morpheus). (in the spirit of AND thinking, this post is completely serious, as well as being complete satire...)

Thanks for sharing. Out of curiosity, why the 16-35 over the 24-70? I thought your style might have been more aligned with the longer focal lengths (but I could be wrong). There's always the combination of crop mode and clear-image zoom to take the 35 to 79mm equivalent, seemingly without much loss in quality. I was assuming I would get the 24-70 but then realised that a wider lens might be useful so now am torn.

I used to write electronic music and my experience was that you can clip quite a bit before it becomes audible, but that doesn't mean that you should. I second what @IronFilm says above of using a conservative gain value and using a safety track - that's how I try to record my audio. You'll find that things will seem quiet, but that's why you use compressors and limiters in post, which gives you much greater control over how things end up in the final mix.

This video talks a little about settings, but he didn't seem to change them that much, so I'm not sure if it will help: The reason I mention this YT video is that he shot a wedding with this camera and used AF on a gimbal with face detection and was really impressed, so he should know some stuff.. This is a snippet of that AF:

Actually, there are lots of excellent robotic solutions to the problem of mobility. This from 2006 (or earlier): Which evolved into a prototype that could wrap around things and then climb vertically, and then also evolved to have multiple legs etc. https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/how-carnegie-mellons-snake-robot-became-the-multi-legged-snake-monster/ this from 2010 - a robot that balances on a ball: and other approaches too: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/new-space-robot-would-hop-not-drive-across-other-worlds but this is the problem - we don't want robots to solve our problems, we want them to be like us, to be familiar. Which is why it's difficult to program them to do human things, like simulate a larger aperture in recorded video from multiple cameras, which is optimising an aesthetic experience that they never have and won't ever have unless we program them to have it.

Wow, that seemed a bit hit and miss @jonpais. I wonder if there's a setting somewhere in there that's derailing the process? Nice images though, the overall look and bokeh seems nice

I'd imagine that the Xume would attach to a magnet pretty well, so if you were to attach a couple of magnets somewhere then you could pull the filter off the lens and stick it on the magnets and install the second one pretty quickly. Of you could just have a kind of holster on a belt or strap somewhere handy. They're very simple to operate, if a little pricey as @Phil A correctly mentioned.

OMG.. please no! CAN does not mean SHOULD!!!!

In case anyone is interested, here's a good argument for and against Canon making an amazing mirrorless camera.. As usual there's lots of facts included.

Just shoot 4K RAW on the H6D-100C. Completely silent, very wide, large sensor for a nice cinematic look, and 8MP RAW stills are fine.

Maybe they go upmarket and have the A9S, include all the fancy features, give a bigger offering from the A7SII, and because it's A9 series they can charge more for it? In a way having the A7III is kind of a duplicate for the A9 but at a lower level - so an A9S above the A7SII makes sense.

You underestimate our desire for self-preservation!!

It depends on your frame of reference. For me, 'can do everything' includes wild-life one second and a wide panorama the next without time to change lenses, and coming from a world that thinks that a 700D is a 'big camera' a 5D or C100 are so absurdly large that people openly stare with mouths agape. Also, I'd like image quality approaching 4K compressed or 1080 RAW. We're in a difficult time - cameras have enough capability and accessibility to give us grand ideas, media consumption is high enough quality that we know nice images when we see them, but the tech isn't quite there yet. I know BM is concentrating on the slow/planned styles of film-making, but they're so insanely good at delivering awesomeness I'm just jealous I'm not in their target camera market!!

You're right about thinking at a human level. Robots building robots is definitely going to be a thing, and just like any other exponential process it's going to take far more time making basically zero progress than we think, and then bang - out of nowhere it will take off. Another problem is that robots are so different that getting smarter doesn't mean anything to us if they get smart in ways we don't appreciate or like. You might have heard about the Facebook AI robots inventing their own language. They did that because the programmers didn't incentivise them to speak proper English, so they went off the reservation. That is a pretty straight-forward example, but what separates computers inventing their own shorthand (which we don't like) and teenagers doing the same thing (which is inherently human), let alone how we would respond to an AI that made no sense because it was speaking to teenagers! There's a great quote from the snopes article about that language thing: Link: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-ai-developed-own-language/ It's an interesting article talking about lots of general stuff to do with AI etc, but the quote is interesting because we have stupidly high standards about doing things that are useful to humans. In a sense, if AIs were training humans they might say something like: I don't understand these humans, they can't accurately remember a f*cking thing, can't even add a thousand numbers a second (which any $0.02 chip can do!), but they manage to self-repair, resist rust, and develop virus counter-measures without even trying!! They will be capable of amazing things, but if you ask a robot to help enhance the photographs you took you're more likely to get back an image that has been optimised so that every n-th pixel has its colour values rounded to the n-th prime number, or simply made to be all black because it's easier to store. The idea they would simulate a wider aperture in an optical system in a 3D environment is far more alien to them than the other examples I mention because they don't have these things, or if they did, then they'd optimise them to have a deep depth-of-field because that's better for object recognition algorithms and accurate recording and cataloging of the world is more valuable than walking around half-blind or recording huge amounts of data to then throw away a lot of it afterwards.

It depends on what we're really talking about here. They're not far away in the sense they're already around, but it's what they can do that is up for grabs. Humans and computers are VASTLY different and we're completely rubbish at predicting what computers will and won't be good for. We have AI lawyers already operating in real life but I still can't buy a robot to take the rubbish out and a 3-year-old can do that. It's best to think of AI like a living organism. It will have intelligence (IQ, EQ, etc), memory, ability to learn, physical coordination, etc, but at RADICALLY different levels to how humans are. Humans have a bunch of hard-wiring for operating in a 3D physical world, and because humans develop these things first we tend to think that AI will, but it's not so. My take on AI is that it currently: has unpredictable levels of IQ (depending on the type of problem) has almost zero EQ has almost infinite memory has very poor ability to learn (even out-classed by most pets) has basically no physical coordination Being able to see the world in 3D and (properly) blur the background, that's something that requires huge spatial processing ability, sophisticated object recognition, and sub-pixel level of processing, all of which are orders-of-magnitude more than we currently have. Otherwise we'll be stuck with what we currently have, which is basically a trick to compare two cameras, make an extremely low resolution mask, and blur the shit out of whatever happens to be vaguely in the right place. Blurring the background but leaving the fly-away hair of the model in focus is a world away from where we are currently.

It's the entertainment industry. There's room for exquisite art, but let's not forget that fart jokes are also very popular, and there's nothing wrong with that - in fact they keep lots of people employed. Good write up - it sounds interesting

In a way Canon could be in the perfect position to WOW us with a big change.. they have had the ability (from their cine camera lineup) for many years, have tested similar form factors with the EF-M range and the XC10/15, but now the market has said loud and clear that video quality really matters (eg, with Sony taking market share), that it matters with Canon (with the response to the M50) and also Sony will have shown them what putting excellent video in mirrorless form-factors will do to your cine range, so it might be a case of conservative management having satisfied itself that it's not too risky and is worthy of significant investment. I'm not saying they will (although I'm crossing all my fingers and all my toes!) but there is a logic to it, so it's not out of the question.

AFAIK the iPhone has a 3.99mm f1.8 lens, which gives a crop factor of 7, which means the lens is equivalent to something like 28mm f4.5. F4.5 isn't a bokeh monster lens by any stretch of the imagination, so unless they can push it to something like 3.99mm f1.0 or dramatically increase the sensor size, then the answer is no - near infinite DOF will be with us for a long time. That's why they're using multiple cameras and digital processing in the first place. Computational photography is the way of the future, but it'll be a while away so I wouldn't hold your breath. The Lytro L16 was ambitious but ultimately didn't really pull off what they were attempting to do, and I take it to mean that it's a lot harder than they were anticipating. In terms of using multiple cameras for improving low-light that's something that will need to be done computationally because of parallax error. You can't just do dumb calculations on the images (like averaging them) because they won't line up.

Yes - unfortunately for me! Now, if only BM made a purpose-built camera for ninja film-making (can accomplish anything but is invisible!).

+1 for the Xume adapters. One thing to keep in mind is that if you go with fixed NDs then you're probably relying on your cameras ISO to do the fine-tuning, but with modern cameras that have many many stops of clean ISO it shouldn't be as much of a problem as it used to be, so that's a downside that matters much less. I ended up buying a Tiffen 4 stop to compliment my internal 3-stop in my XC10 because the combination gave me 180 degree shutter in full sunlight, plus there's not much visible noise at 4 stops of ISO gain so it wasn't too large a step size. I'd suggest doing tests ahead of time for how much ND you need, and how much noise you'll tolerate, and therefore how large the steps are in your 'set'.

If you grab from the screen you'll be going through your display LUT, and didn't you recently recalibrate your displays? That might explain it if something has radically changed.

I read that as "the best mirrorless camera is in your hand" and then got very excited, but was disappointed when I discovered it wasn't a fantastic camera in disguise, but was just as it appeared - a donut. All else being equal, those controls are spectacular. I've bitched about mentioned it before, but being able to see exactly what your settings are and to specify any combination of them is just fantastic. The fact that I can't set aperture, shutter speed and auto-ISO on my XC10 is basically against the Geneva Convention.