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Is the dark side Sony or Sigma?? Thanks @jonpais for mentioning the Sigma lenses, I hadn't spotted them yet in my Sony research. The 24-105 F4 and 70-200 F2.8 are quite a bit cheaper than the Sony offerings!!

Reliable AF-C is what put me off the GH5, and also takes the Pocket 2 off the list for me as well. If you're into hand-held stuff, then it's difficult because you need low RS, good stabilisation, reliable AF-C, and if you also do fast-paced stuff in difficult conditions like I do then you also need good high ISO performance, high DR, and flexible lenses. That combination is like finding gold at the end of the rainbow unfortunately!

To replace the GH5, or for different purposes? I'm leaning towards one as well. That is, assuming Canon (or others) don't pull a rabbit out of a hat later this year.

Getting zero on the test is only one element in a much larger picture. To get 'perfect colour' as @jonpais is talking about, you must be able to: see subtle shades of colour (which the test confirms) understand what you are looking at (eg, which hues are appropriate for skin tones, recognise an orange/teal grade) understand what you want (eg, if you like the 'Canon colours', or if you like a reduced contrast look, or less saturation, etc) know how to operate your equipment in order to get the look you want It's like poetry, you have to be able to hear/read, to speak the language, and to appreciate the art of poetry. Having only the first one is insufficient.

Good link - thanks for sharing. I got zero - perfect score. If you're really up for colour matching madness, there's a free iOS / Android game called Blendoku which is like that colour test, but much much more complicated and torturous!! http://www.blendoku.com

Datacolor Spyder 4, every couple of months. Old but still gets me in the ballpark.

The GF1 had a real following.. I read a few reviews that loved the ergonomics when I was buying my GF3. I think the GF1 had a button combination that worked well for some people, and they're seriously small and solidly built. I'm not sure about the GF1, but my GF3 has a metal body, which was excellent considering I dropped it once and it slightly wrinkled the corner and that was it - a few more mm of damage would have damaged the LCD screen!

That makes total sense.. in a way the typical 24-70 can be thought of as a laymans scenery-to-portrait lens, so the only other shot left would be the telephoto, but thanks to the ~50mm equivalent second camera on many smartphones they're now covering off both scenery and portraits, so telephoto is the only one left. Just wait until three or four lenses are common, the Light L16 has already solved the problem of how to get that variety of focal lengths into a thin body (the longer focal lengths go in sideways with a 90degree mirror):

We seem to frequently complain that the camera manufacturers can't do this or that, but they should be able to because the latest smartphone can. So, is anyone using their smartphone for 'real' film-making? I guess by 'real' I'm talking about trying to get the most out of it by using manual controls, 180-degree shutter, maybe higher bitrates via custom apps, external audio, and then editing and grading etc. If so, I'm curious to know what equipment you're using (hardware and software), what kind of projects you're shooting, and what kind of results you're getting. If you think about a smartphone as a camera with a fixed focal-length and small aperture then there's no reason that it couldn't produce stunning results in the right situations..

Before I switched to video I was a stills shooter, and I did this analysis on my photos, which were mostly taken on holiday. What I found was: The most used focal length was the widest (24-28mm depending on camera), the second was the longest focal length of the lens, where you would have zoomed more but didn't have the reach The vast majority (maybe 80%) were in between 24mm and 80mm, even on cameras that had a super-zoom like 24-240 equivalent lens (kit lenses are well designed in this way) The most common single aperture of photos I took was the largest aperture - any time the sun goes down the camera will be struggling to balance ISO and shutter speed for hand-held photographs, but aperture doesn't have a penalty so they max it without hesitation The majority of photographs had an aperture in the f5.6-10 range, which is where the camera puts it for daylight shots on full-auto mode The reason I did this was to research and buy a "good" camera for my next trip, because I got home and saw all my night shots were full of ISO noise and blur from shake and longer exposures, and got sick of fiddling with the panorama stitching software to glue together the 28mm photographs of the wonderful landscapes. I ended up buying a Panasonic GF3, which was brand new at the time and was the best compromise because it came with the 28-84mm kit lens for during the day and a 28mm f2.5 pancake lens that made it pocketable and capable for night shots of going out to dinner etc. I was planning to buy a longer zoom for it but when I finally got around to it I realised that it was cheaper to buy a Canon 700D with 18-55 and 55-250 zooms than buy a long zoom for m43!! I also looked for super-wide angle lenses, but the panorama mode on my phone took over pano duties. It was a good camera and it took many absolutely lovely images. The other thing that I learned that is relevant here is that my top 50 images (from 10,000+ photos) contained at least one image from every camera I owned, including the mighty Coolpix L19, and my GoPro Hero 3 (yes, that's using the GoPro as a stills camera!). Content > tech..... So make the tech conform to the content. Yeah, I'm waiting for the sensors from a high-end cinema camera to be combined with the processing and power efficiency from smartphones to make a much smaller but capable camera. We might be waiting a while though!!

If there's spare weight capacity (and you can carry it) you could try counter-weights to get it to balance. The guys from Moment (who make add-on lenses for mobile phones) supply counter-weights for using their lenses on phone gimbals which aren't strong enough to 'hold' the imbalanced weight. Completely disagree. Hand-held is so useful. Your argument is also that lens manufacturers will stop making IS lenses because of gimbals - IBIS and OS are slightly different implementations of the same thing. Aside from adjusting the gimbal to your taste (as previously mentioned) they require a lot of practice. You will find that there is a 'response' - you rotate it by a certain amount and it responds by following you by a certain amount. It's like learning to drive a car, and how each car will have different 'feel' on the brake and accelerator pedals, but after a while it becomes second nature and you don't think about it. The advice I read was to practice using it around the house by practicing transition shots going from one item to another, following a person through the house, and then circling around an object trying to keep it in the middle of the frame. It's a bit of work but once you get the feel of it you should be able to get the kind of results you want.

No mic input is crazy in these days of everyone wanting a shotgun mounted in the hot shoe. But wait.. maybe it's not a vlogging camera after all? Hmmm.. What other situations is external audio not required??.......... if only it had spectacular image quality and shot RAW....... IT'S A CINEMA CAMERA!!! BREAK OUT YOUR CLAPPER BOARDS PEOPLE - THE POCKET 2 HAS AN AF-C BEAST OF A COMPETITOR!!!! ??????? [Edit - it's got a HDMI out - don't some external recorders have an audio in?? Maybe it's also a PRORES beast!!!! ?] (on a more serious note!!) I completely agree with this. My journey into photography started with a sub-$100 P&S which was completely crap in low light, and this made it basically useless after sunset. All indoor lighting is a challenge for small sensor cameras until recently, and if I was a non-camera-geek civilian and I was spending $1k+ on a camera and couldn't take photos of my candlelight dinner while on holiday I'd be pretty annoyed.

Of course! And if I add in filters and lenses then we get: filters on the end of the lens lens (with coatings and glass chemistry) filter stack light hits the sensor RAW data is read off the sensor (1) the data is de-bayered into an image the image is processed (colour science, resizing, white balance, etc) internal capture: the image is compressed via a codec and the compressed file is saved to a media device OR external feed: the image might have display information added, is encoded into HDMI/SDI/etc and output via a physical port on the camera OR camera display: the image might have display information added, is resized to the display resolution, and passed to the screen Did I put the filter stack in the right spot?

I agree about laptops having almost no hope here. The 'almost' is rendering lower resolution proxy footage...... but this really isn't saying much - my 2016 13" MBP can't edit the 305Mbit 4K files from my XC10!! The problem comes in if you need to be able to grade in front of a client - then it will take a supercomputer!! or maybe one of these...? https://www.asus.com/us/News/ZwwO4E0EimUoYyEi

I get what you're saying about the RAW still having a look, and I would have thought this would come from the different sensors in each camera? Isn't a camera something like this: light hits the sensor RAW data is read off the sensor (1) the data is de-bayered into an image the image is processed (colour science, resizing, white balance, etc) internal capture: the image is compressed via a codec and the compressed file is saved to a media device OR external feed: the image might have display information added, is encoded into HDMI/SDI/etc and output via a physical port on the camera OR camera display: the image might have display information added, is resized to the display resolution, and passed to the screen I would have thought that at (1) this was what was saved by ML or other RAW formats? Maybe compressed via lossless compression. Which would mean that the only difference between cameras would be the sensor?

To add to Andrews comment about Resolve, if you're considering it there are a few articles about editing with Resolve that might be useful. They're from editors, not all-in-one people who would colour grade as well, but they're still potentially useful. My take on them was that Resolve is promising, if you configure it with the hotkeys the same as your current NLE then it's straight-forward to learn, but everyone says it's interesting but they're not going to use it solely for editing yet. They don't normally give any reason, I suspect they're just being careful and not wanting to stand out as being too 'radical' as it may be too shocking for people. I use Resolve as an all-in-one but I work on multiple projects that are tiny so my experiences with it really won't translate to your situation.

@webrunner5 @dbp - what about the 5D RAW footage makes it so desirable for you? Considering it's RAW, we're bypassing colour science, codecs, compression, resizing, and most things that determine the 'look' from a camera. I'm guessing that what is left is the sensor itself and how it responds to colour and luminance, and perhaps lenses. But to play devils advocate a little bit, those don't seem (to me at least) to be killer things that would make 5D RAW footage better than any other flavour of RAW surely? I'm not criticising, just trying to learn

Everything is a compromise in product design. The trick is making the compromises that please the most people My approach has always been to record in a neutral style and adjust to taste later on, but I don't have radical tastes, so it's not a big change. Of course you're totally right that there's a bunch of things you can't easily change in post - try changing the shape or texture of the bokeh of a lens in post for example!!

Yeah.. The way I read it is that people have to choose between the features of the competitors and the reliability, DPAF, and colour science from Canon. We buy what we buy despite the weaknesses. Canon have shown with the XC10/15 that they can fit the guts of a 4K cinema camera in a very small package, and they've shown they can fit the guts of an APS-C DSLR in a small package. A camera somewhere in-between the XC10 and the C100 in both size and functionality would mean that people could buy Canon and it would be because of the features, not despite the lack of them! It's a rare glimpse into the dark underbelly of camera modifications.. like the people who grind off the VIN from stolen cars and serial numbers from guns!! ?

An A7III type camera from Canon that had a good codecs, DPAF, canon colours and reliability, and had 1080 that was downscaled instead of upscaled would be a win for me!

Interesting articles @webrunner5. It seems that in this market, if you want something in DSLR form-factor then there is nothing that has all the features you want - every camera has real weaknesses. I'm guessing that Canon and Nikon will release things that are news-worthy, but I suspect the best we can hope for is another camera or two that have different weaknesses. I'm hoping for one that has strengths and weaknesses that align with my style of shooting but I wouldn't bet on it!!

This is a good thing - film-making is a very complicated and complex topic and you're now aware of this. My advice is to think of all the equipment as tools, this is important because: you don't choose the tools then work out what style of art you'll make - it's the other way around great artists work inspires love for the work, not the tools - no-one asks what paintbrushes Monet used to a certain extent, the tools don't matter - as long as they are good enough to meet minimum standards then they're fine Start with what you want to achieve and work backwards. This forum is full of people with huge amounts of experience, but we can't help you to pick the right tool for the job if you don't tell us what the job is, or if you don't have a solid idea of it yourself. Much work is ahead of you, but if you put the effort in then you will receive lots in return.

Absolutely. One of the decisions was between 16:9 content (YT / TV shows) or 21:9 (movies). My previous 1080 display lasted 10 years before it died, making it economical even though I bought it early when it was really pricey. I kind of went that way with my UHD display, hoping it would last a long time, but secretly I think that if they released a 21:9 monitor with enough resolution to fit a 4K frame in it without resizing then I might be tempted! It would be a great editing resolution - in the same way that they market 5K displays to be 4K preview window plus menus. Totally. A wonderful way to see what quality is possible at various resolutions is to get a DSLR and shoot a time-lapse in RAW and then process it. If you film something that moves slowly then you can even use an ND and small aperture to have a 180 degree shutter to replicate natural looking motion. No cinema camera in the world will give you a better quality input to play with than an 18-24MP RAW 12-14+bit image sequence! I'd look up these cameras actual resolutions in the EBU test database, but I can't quite be bothered enough right now If someone else is keen to see the real resolution of these then have a look here: https://tech.ebu.ch/camera_reports_tech3335

@Trek of Joy great post - out of likes for today though.

Thanks everyone, it's great to get such a helpful mixture of technical and more philosophical tips. As @OliKMIA says, it's the creative process, and I am definitely still working it out for myself but I have got a lot of elements down. I shoot a lot, and @mercer and @IronFilm are right that it shouldn't get in the way of the trip, but for me the logic is actually a bit different. I like shooting, the challenge of it, the way that it forces you to actively look, rather than just passively drift through situations. I also use photography if I'm a bit bored too as it's fun to try and challenge yourself about how to have as much variety in your B-roll for example, which is great if you're in-transit between locations. Also, I think I shoot a lot of clips because I want to enjoy my holiday and so in a way I'm shooting while thinking about my holiday instead of shooting trying to think about the final edit. I'm also shooting in-case something happens in much the same way as a street photographer would find a background and then frame and pre-focus and just wait for someone to walk through the scene, but in video you need to be rolling if you want the whole shot. It makes me far less efficient, but in a sense I'm trading off enjoyment of the holiday vs work in the edit suite. Also, I like to be spontaneous and let the holiday dictate what I shoot, rather than pre-visualising or planning as @mercer and @Don Kotlos mentioned and then making the holiday fit more into the shooting. I also don't like to direct, so these trips are mostly fly-on-the-wall (or massive-camera-on-the-wall as the case may be!) On this whole trip I might have asked someone to stand somewhere or to look at the camera only a handful of times. The last thing a family holiday needs is a bossy photographer ordering everyone about all the time I think I've got the technical aspects of editing that @tellure mentioned mostly in place, I use markers, scrub through longer footage, use an editing codec (720p Prores Proxy proxy files are smooth as silk on my MBP), and removing useless clips. I got this editing process from Kraig Adams at Wedding Film School who did a BTS of his whole editing process (10 x 1hr YT videos from nothing to finished films) and what I liked about it is that you don't spend time looking at 'bad' clips again and again, but @Don Kotlos is absolutely right about it being the "brute force" method, and that's definitely what it feels like!! The other approach that @NX1user and @Mark Romero 2 mention is that instead of starting with everything and deliberately taking out the bad stuff to only pull in the good stuff. This makes total sense considering that only a small percentage of the footage makes the final cut. The challenge I have with this approach is that I think I will start off finding some good footage that suggests a particular style of edit but then later on I'll find more footage that suggests a different style of edit, and now I've reviewed a bunch of shots with one style in mind but am now going in a different direction and so many decisions were made incorrectly. I think this would work well for videos that are pretty straight-forward, or for people who can hold a lot of information in their heads and can remember what footage there was and kind of hold multiple edits in their head as they're working. This is absolutely not me!! Breaking it down into bits as @Anaconda_ says is a good idea, and publishing them to keep up motivation is also a good idea - thanks @User. I'm still not sure if I'll end up with just one final video or multiples. In terms of the final output I'm also undecided. I've previously condensed week trips into sub-5 minute videos, but this one had a lot more locations and activities. I've thrashed this out with a couple of friends and we came to the conclusion that the length is irrelevant as long as it stays interesting - I've seen a 25 minute home movie from a 5 week trip through Europe that stayed interesting, so it can be done for home videos, plus there's the "super vlog" format that seems to work really well too. Getting more understanding about what my audience wants would be good. Unfortunately it's mostly relatives and friends that are in other cities / timezones and aren't up for critiquing my film skills so that is likely to be limited. Music is important too, but I don't think that starting with it would work for me. I think my editing process is more 'emergent' where my review of the footage (however tedious that is) gives me a sense of what happened and the vibe, then I can get a bit of a high-level view, which obviously you can't from 1100 clips, and then I bring the music in, and then the structure comes from that, and then the clips kind of conform to the music. It's not a straight relationship between the clips and the music. Perhaps the most crucial part of the whole picture is motivation and creative energy. As @tellure and @jhnkng suggest, it's limited and needs to be managed. I know that procrastinating is a sign to manage my energy - unfortunately I feel half-way to burn out just living normal life (full-on kids, full-on job, full-on family, etc etc) and I will look back on a month gone by and be annoyed that I didn't do any real video stuff (camera tests don't count!) but the truth is that I was just tired for the whole time. I'm trying to improve other parts of my life but it's slow going and I want to still be able to share some of these moments.