kye

My reference to $5M was actually about camera equipment, and was around the point that anyone using a >$5M camera setup would think of the entire DSLR revolution in the same way that this board seems to talk about vloggers.. basically as spoilt whiney teenagers You're right that the situations I describe don't have anything to do with budget. You can shoot in a highly controlled environment with a phone, a couple of desk lamps and a wired lav mic if you wanted to. On low budget films as soon as you don't pay people minimum wage you can get away with spending almost nothing (except lots of social capital!). I co-produced films at $2K and $5K that were absolutely situation A with months of pre-production, >20 cast/crew, and one of them had >10,000 person-hours in it (I didn't estimate the other). I understand that my post is a huge simplification, but I think the principle stands. As someone who shoots at the C/D end of things its amusing/frustrating when I mention a challenge I have in shooting my home videos and the reply is to add crew (take extra people on my holiday), to multiply the weight of my rig by three (or more!), or to get my family to repeat parts of the holiday over and over until I get a shot with the right lighting! This topic is an attempt to get people to understand that there is a huge variety in film-making outside of the niches they seem to live in. I was going to say this! Film is too slow for most commercial shoots, and for indie it is too expensive!!! I think I heard somewhere that it's cheaper to rent a RED than to shoot on film these days?

Yeah, 4K at only 15p is a bit rough. That's what my GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition had, but I don't think they advertised it as 4K...

$1M?

Absolutely I mention $50K because I thought that was expensive enough to distance it from what we're talking about (mainly GH5 / GH5s / BMPCC4K / A7 series) which aren't anywhere near $50K. Also, a production that large is outside my experience I watched the ARRI Academy HDR Masterclass series and just about had to poke myself with pins to stay awake, the pace of the guy running it was so slow that I would consider him a fire risk - ie, if the place caught on fire I'm not sure he would be capable of leaving the premises fast enough to make it to safety! During a real shoot he might move faster, but it's hard to drive a Ferrari at walking pace so... I'm aware that one metric is 2 minutes of final footage a day for a feature film and that's not a case of going fast by rushing, it's a case of going fast by being thorough and doing things right the first time, so that pace is understandable and I'm not criticising it at all. However, if you compare a big film set like that where a squillion people worked a 12+ hour day to capture 2 minutes of final footage with a production like event or documentary shooting where a single operator captures 2-10+ minutes of final footage in a day the ratio of speed is huge.... (maybe 50-100 times?) .....Let alone a vlogger like Casey Neistat who captured, edited and published videos 5-15 minutes long every day without a break (with no gaps for planning) for months at a stretch then the ratios may as well be in parallel universes because you have to include all of pre and post-production person-hours. In terms of people thinking their situation in C or D but it's really situation A, yeah, that's inevitable. Film-making is an industry so big that people can be involved in part of it but be completely unaware that other parts of it even exist. One of the challenges I have with home video stuff is that because it's mostly kept private there's very little visibility of it. Just like how many people use fancy DSLRs to take pics of their kids - it's hard to understand how many are doing it because people don't publish photos of their kids much - it's an iceberg where only a little of it is visible from the surface. I should also add that in a sense the people operating in a faster environment need to demand more from their equipment rather than less, high DR is useful when you're not in controlled lighting, higher resolutions / bit-rates are useful when you want to punch-in digitally in post instead of changing lenses and doing another take, etc etc.

Your post inspired me to start a new topic about how I see the differences in priorities that film-makers have Here's an example with a battery... It's from this campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gimbal-with-focus-control-skyvideo-pro#/

Vloggers aren't crazy.... but there sure is lots of debate around the topic! My theory is that they are making films in a different situation and the fact they have different needs is why they appear to be crazy to film-makers from other situations. This is my attempt to explain it. I think film-makers fall across a spectrum of the speed of film-making and the amount of control over the environment that exists. Situation A: low-speed / high control. In situations where things happen very slowly (eg, on a controlled set, or perhaps shooting landscapes and B-roll) you can have everything on full-manual and get the best results because you're in full control of what is happening. This means time to level a tripod, setup whatever lights you want, use a light-meter, adjust all camera settings, setup and rehearse camera moves, etc etc. In this setting having the camera do things for you is counter-productive because you want to have full control over everything. Therefore things like autofocus and IBIS are unwelcome, camera weight and size might not matter, but image quality probably matters a lot, and cinema-primes are a good fit. I think the GH5s / BMPCC4K are aimed more at this type of application. There is always room for a sound-person and various crew here. Situation B: moderate-speed / moderate control. In situations where things happen faster but you have a good degree of control there is value in having some 'helpful features'. This might be something like run-and-gun film-making where you have time to setup an interview station where you have a moderate amount of control. Things like manual focus can still be used, but reliable face-detection would be useful. You might set shutter speed and aperture but have auto-ISO enabled. Camera size and weight potentially matter because you might be filming B-Roll or featuring clips of things that aren't in your control (eg, shooting an event) so having a lighter tripod setup you can carry around and shoot with quickly is useful. Having a sound-person and other crew also works here. Situation C: high-speed / some control. In situations where things are happening in real-time but you have a degree of control over some aspects the priorities shift again. This might be something like ENG film-making where when the action happens you have to capture it with no second chances, but you might also be interviewing people and have some degree of control about how the interviews are done. For example if you were covering a building fire you have no control over when or how the fire will burn, what the responders will do about it, etc, so you need to be able to move very quickly, having a rig that can be hand-held (shoulder rig normally) and also having a tripod that is quite portable. In this situation IBIS, reliable auto-focus, an all-in-one zoom lens, etc become desirable features. However, during the interview situation you can still have input into what is asked, where it is (interviewing the fire chief with something burning in the background makes a nice shot) but if people fumble their replies you can often ask them to repeat something or prompt them in a variety of ways. These can have crew, but often due to the economics of the situation there isn't budget. Situation D: high-speed / no control. I add this mostly for myself and my home videos, where my priority is to capture what happens without directing anything, as I prioritise the experience over the film. This is 'fly-on-the-wall' film-making in a sense. Technically this is within the previous situation, but I choose not to exert most / all of the control I have. I teased that this discussion was about vloggers, so I think they sit across situations A-C, but the controversy comes in when vloggers are in situation C. There is a hierarchy of needs for vloggers in situation C: They REQUIRE that the camera be small and not attracting the wrong attention because situation C is about shooting in public (I've posted elsewhere about being stopped by authorities when shooting in public) and they require that the camera be able to be turned on and recording at a moments notice and they are almost exclusively a self-shooter with no allowance for any dedicated 'crew'. This is basically iPhone / RX100 territory, and creates films where the content better be great because the picture will be shaky and the audio will be noisy and full of ambient sounds. They often WANT to improve the basic quality and so they add a directional microphone of some kind (typically Rode VideoMicro or Rode VMP+) and try to make it more stable by adding a handle (typically a gorillapod). However (and this is where we get the controversy between vloggers and other film-makers in situations A and B) they LUST after having more 'cinematic' videos, which drives them towards higher-bitrate codecs and large aperture lenses (which means they're now looking at the same cameras - 5DIII, 1DXmII, A7SII, BMPCC4K, XH-1, etc), and they want 'buttery smooth footage' which means world-class stabilisation. Film-makers in situations A and B get these by having setups that are have at least one of the following challenges: slow to setup, cumbersome to use, large and attract attention. When a vlogger looks at a high-end DSLR and sees that it doesn't meet one of the basic things they require (small, inconspicuous, no-setup time) they see it as a fundamental flaw in the camera. This perspective makes no sense to a film-maker who places these features of a camera quite far down their priority list, and this is where the controversy occurs. Of course, vloggers often don't know a single thing about how the pros do things, are often self-centred and unwilling to learn about other styles of film-making, which enrages the pros and thus flame wars ensue. (Of course, exactly the same can be said of a minority of film-makers who are uninterested in how vloggers do things, are self-centred and self-important because they view their film-making as somehow better than other types, and are equally as responsible for the flame wars as the vloggers...). Hopefully this helps to explain some of the key differences and why we keep tripping up on these topics. I know that this is a huge simplification of the variety of situations, that this is a spectrum and film-making can exist anywhere between the four situations I listed above, and that many film-makers have projects that are on different parts of the spectrum and require equipment that is flexible. However, each film-maker and each purchase decision will be made by prioritising the features in one category against the others. BTW, the entire DSLR revolution (ie, the vast majority of people on this board) probably look like vloggers in the eyes of those shooting on big-budget sets with the $50-100K setups and equipment that requires a truck to lug it around. Anyone criticising the BMPCC4K is going to look like a spoiled millennial when we criticise a $1300 camera that shoots 4K RAW!

I did a quick google and found these - hopefully they're helpful? Most people are doing this to mount an external microphone, but a battery should be similar. Skip to about 2:30 in the above for where he connects the external microphone. Spoiler - making sure the cable has some slack in it is the key. Here's another example: The gimbal will need to have the horsepower to move the cable around, which normally isn't a problem. If it were me and it was a more permanent part of my setup I'd buy a longer cable and run it from the camera to the handle by attaching it to each moving section of the gimbal, allowing lots of slack at each of the motors to ensure it has the full range of movement. This would prevent the cable from flapping around or getting caught on anything, but would take some time and effort to setup.

I remember GoPro saying that the 12/15p modes would be good as in-camera time-lapse modes, which didn't make that much sense to me to be honest. However, giving customers the option of something is often nice, instead of limiting what can be done because many/most can't see a use for it, so there's two sides to the argument.

Perhaps there's a way to rig up a gel that spaces it a bit from the light? It looked like it only burned in one place and if you can get a few inches between the gel and the light then you'll get a bit of cooling airflow over the gel. It might be a bit of a PITA but if the light has other advantages maybe it salvages it as an option for some situations?

Could you mount the external monitor on the handle of the gimbal and run a (very flexible) cable to the camera? I've seen people running cables from fixed microphones or power banks to the camera on a gimbal before and they seem to work. 230g isn't much but every bit counts!

Totally agree.. the first time I saw the Fuji approach with separate dials I was amazed, then amazed at why other brands don't do this. Can we start a petition of some kind?? I've also been totally pissed off in the past at cameras that don't allow Auto-ISO in manual mode, which means there's no way to control SS and Aperture but still have the camera expose for you - like you would do in street photography!

Werner Herzog talked about this as part of his masterclass too - that actors can't hit their marks properly and you have to work with them to help them understand that a few cm movement on a tight shot can ruin framing or focus. IIRC it was almost the only thing he used to judge actors - the class was full of blanket statements that I thought were quite strange. I also remember him saying that a DoP should know what framing a given lens would provide without needing to look at a monitor, and if they couldn't do that then they didn't know their stuff and you shouldn't work with them!

Circular argument.

Makes sense technically - the two uses are at odds with what they would want in terms of behaviour. For a photo mode you would want the IS to zero out movement to the full extent of its range of movement, but for video that results in a shot that is still and jerks suddenly in the direction of the pan and then becomes still again. For video you want to have it zero out movement for a percentage of the range of movement, but when motion gets towards the edges you want it to start allowing movement in the frame, this would allow for smooth pans (and transitions between stationary and moving shots) but would provide less stabilisation for stills shooters.

Seems like a pretty fair overview of the camera, and interesting that it's more sized like the BMCC rather than original BMPCC.

It's interesting to hear snippets like this as who knows where on the spectrum from is-that-all to I-didn't-even-think-that-was-possible-take-my-money it will end up. One of the natural things it could end up being is to essentially turn your smartphone and your monitor/recorder into the same device, which would be sweet - imagine having a monitor that supported apps from third-parties! Who knows what else it will do beyond that, but this board sure does like hype and not much information!!

Everyone knows you need 8K RAW for flower videos.. I mean, they're flowers, right?

I can't offer any answers, but in terms of reducing over-acting I worked on a number of student films and getting actors from theatre was a common practice. I remember that everyone struggled with over-acting but can't remember that anyone found any solutions. One thought though, I do remember that one problem was that these actors aren't aware of how much they were over-acting, and didn't understand when you try and explain that you've got a tight shot and their face is filling a third of the frame. Perhaps it might work to have some practice sessions where you record a few lines then play it back to the actor (on a big TV!)and then you talk about it, and repeat that process a number of times? At least that has a good chance of them re-calibrating their sense of how what they are doing will appear in the final product. They will likely have had this process done to train them in theatre with "more more more" being the guidance offered - this is what you have to counteract. Or it may not work - just an idea Good luck!

Is it still a thing to try and buy your memory capacity in less larger sticks than more smaller sticks? I haven't had a desktop PC in a long time, but I remember back in the day having to re-buy all my memory because I had 4 sticks of the same size (eg, 4 x 1Gb) and no free slots, therefore to upgrade you have to go to bigger sized sticks (eg 4 x 2Gb) and then you've got all this old RAM you paid for and can't use..

@OliKMIA You raise excellent points, however I still believe that "black box" testing as I've described above would still be useful. The same kind of testing would apply, but you'd have to re-test given firmware updates. It doesn't matter what the mechanisms are within the gimbal, it can be reduced to a "black box" and tested by providing a known input vibration and measuring the output vibration (which would ideally be zero above some cut-off frequency). In analog audio circuits there are two main parts of the circuit - the signal path and the power supply. The job of the signal path is to create an output signal as close as possible to the input signal but amplified (voltage and/or current amplification). The job of the power supply is to take the awful noisy mess the AC power from the power company normally is and make it a DC power source with zero AC on it, both at idle and during heavy amplifier loads. There are dozens / hundreds of designs for signal paths with varying architectures (global feedback / local feedback / zero feedback / Class-A / Class-AB / Class-D / MOSFETs / JFETS / pentodes / triodes / etc) and there are as many power supply designs (linear / regulated / passive filtering / active filtering / valve / solid-state / etc) but all of these can still be tested by looking at what they output with a given typical load. In fact, these don't even require the same testing signal to be applied for calibrated testing setups to create measurements that can be compared to each other. Everything I said above about audio applies to the analog components of video processing and broadcast as well, just at a higher bandwidth and with the video embedded on a carrier wave instead of 'raw' through the circuitry, but the principles remain. If an analog video signal path had a high-frequency rolloff or the power-supply was noisy or didn't have a low output impedance it would result in visual degradation of the picture - something that the test pattern would ruthlessly reveal, which is why it designed and used.

@tellure I agree that manufacturers probably have equipment that does this - it's a pity they can't (or won't) share their results with us! Of course, having all the setups calibrated is another whole thing, I'm just talking about a single test regime applied to all the gimbals. @capitanazo & @elgabogomez I agree that gimbals are more than just how well they stabilise, a lot matters in terms of ergonomics, features, how well the app works, etc. this is just one aspect, but a pretty important one! @elgabogomez I'd imagine that you'd need test setups for different weights, for example: smartphone, large smartphone, 500g, 1kg, 2kg, 3kg, 5kg, 8kg, etc. Of course you'd need a balanced version of those setups and an un-balanced one to test how well they do without a perfectly balanced load. You might also find that a gimbal may perform worse with a load a lot lighter than its maximum load, so you might want to test it near its maximum load and also at its minimum load too. I think there's a business opportunity here for a site that really reviews gimbals instead of the kind-of reviews that are being done now - perhaps the DxOmark of gimbals? I don't want to be that person, I just want that person to tell me the answers so that I can buy the right device when I'm in the market for one! This thread is kind of an open letter to that person - please go ahead!!

Are you saying that because it can't be perfect forever that it shouldn't be done at all? I guess we should stop testing cameras because no-one can test Mojo (TM) yet!

Not at all. You simply have to have an arm that you can mount the handle on that can output repeatable vibrations, and then mount a camera (have a few different weight setups) and record what comes out, then analyse it for how much motion came through on the footage. In a way it would be a device like an orbital sander, but where you can control the direction and amount of vibration. Think about music, it is infinitely complex and hugely complicated but that doesn't mean we don't have measurements for frequency response, distortion etc. Light is hugely complex with infinite shades and colours, but we can measure devices in terms of DR, colour gamuts, etc. The testing method would be straight-forward - setup and balance the gimbal, put the device on the arm, hit record on the camera and go on the arm, the arm does several 'passes' where the vibration gets larger and larger, then you download the footage and analyse it for motion. You'd see that gimbal A eliminated all motion up until 7s in, but gimbal B made it to 11s in, or that gimbal C let through higher frequency vibrations, etc. It's not simple, but it's not impossible. Edit: In order to test different camera setups, you might have a few weights and for each weight you might test a camera that's well balanced and then one that isn't (eg, it's front-heavy to simulate having a long lens). If gimbal A setup with the off-balance setup stabilised better than gimbal B then you could assume that this difference in performance would translate to all off-balance setups as this typically is down to the strength of the motors. You could also test battery life under identical loads.

We have standards for tonnes of things, why not gimbals? Specifically, how well they stabilise? As far as I can tell, a gimbal is a physical device that receives vibrations from the handle and through the three motors forms a low-pass filter such that only large slow motions are able to make it through to the camera. This should be easily test-able via a test rig of some kind. I would expect a graph showing dB of attenuation across a range of frequencies over the three axis's of motion. That way we'd be able to say things like: "gimbal X has better attenuation than gimbal Y up to vibrations of strength Z, but above that X runs out of steam and Y is better, therefore for fine work X > Y but for difficult environments Y > X" or "gimbal A has much better attenuation of higher frequencies than B or C or D, therefore if you plan on mounting it to a vehicle (which has a vibration frequency distribution shown in the graph below) you're better off with A". Instead, what we get is "I'm going to watch youtube videos where people compare two different gimbals by running with each in turn, therefore seeing how well each performs IN STABILISING A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SET OF VIBRATIONS". Hardly the best way to compare devices costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

My experience has been discovering that I also can't grade, but I discovered that Resolve has built-in transforms for C-Log (and name others) and they look lovely to my tastes. I'd bet that the Pocket 4K will integrate beautifully with Resolve, and simply by using their recommended settings will produce nice images that you can then adjust to taste if you want to do something specific. If you're not a Resolve user then I'm not sure how easy it will be to get good results..?