kye

Well, this is a lively conversation!!

As I see it @markr041 and @webrunner5 are both right with excellent points.  

The big one for me is that @webrunner5 is right to equate run-and-gun with poor quality, and that is exactly why we need smaller high quality devices.  A few points:

1) why shoot run-and-gun?  
Reason #1 - because some things move very quickly and you need to move quickly to follow them.  Exhibit A - kids and any family outing.  No pauses, no waiting, no do-overs.  
Reason #2 - because content is king and most of the world is more than 20m walk from where you can park your equipment truck!  You need to get to the places worth shooting - and these are often at the end of long hikes.
Reason #3 - because many historically or culturally significant places don't let you in with a tripod - Vatican City wouldn't let me in with a ~25cm tall Gorillapod!  And good luck getting into almost anywhere with a camera that looks 'pro'.

2) why do run-and-gun shooters need high-quality equipment?
Reason #1 - it's precisely because we don't have control of the environment that we need higher quality recording.  If you shoot slowly and in controlled situations you can shoot with a camera with 6 stops of DR in 8-bit.  Good luck with that if you're outside and the sun is shining.  Part of the reason that camcorders and home videos look so awful is because people used them where the action was, not where the lighting was like a film-set.  
We need higher DR because the sun shines on things we're filming.
We need higher bit-depth because sometimes the sun goes behind a cloud when we're recording and now the exposure is way under and we need to significantly boost the gain to get a sensible exposure.
We need higher frame rates because we haven't got the ability to predict what will need to be in slow-motion and what won't.  So we would ideally like to film everything in slow motion.

Do I need to keep going? :D

Hi Simon, welcome to the forums.

I'm no expert on what cameras are in the market at the moment, but your requirements and your budget look like they might not be terribly compatible.  I could be wrong and people may reply with great recommendations, but if they don't, then that's probably the reason.

If you don't get helpful replies I'd suggest having a look through the recent threads on the forum (ie, the last few months) - there are threads talking about most of the well liked cameras.  Eg,  there's one talking about the BMPCC active right now, partly because the camera is well-liked by people here.  Threads talking about cameras that aren't well liked sink like a stone because no-one replies.

Best of luck!

16 hours ago, mercer said:

That’s true on some level, although I think ProRes HQ out of the Pocket and Micro has a higher bitrate than that. But your 4K examples aren’t the price point I am referring to. In the sub $1000 market, 4K bitrates hover around 100mbps, so really not that much higher than the 90mbps all-i 1080p out of the 80D. With that being said, I don’t hate 4K, I just feel consumer 4K is often thin and brittle and oversharpened with too heavy of noise reduction. For $500 used in ProRes and Raw you are getting a purer, thicker image, with a better basis for cinematic grading.

Interesting.  I remember back in the day I compared the quality of a 720p file and a SD file of the same bitrate and the 720p definitely had more information in it, but perhaps this isn't what it you are looking for.  I've been playing with ML on my 700D and trying to work out if I should bother, and if so, what the benefit was over 300Mbps 8-bit 4K.  I had in mind that perhaps the colour was what people were liking about it, and 'a purer, thicker image' might be a good way of describing it, with 'thin and brittle' perhaps being the opposite.  If you're going to grade heavily afterwards then putting more data into colour bit-depth wold make sense as well.

Regardless, the high bit-depth / bitrate of cameras like the BMPCC can't hurt, is difficult to find at any price-point us mortals can afford, and is almost unrivalled in such a compact package.

The BMPCC made the top 3 when I was buying the XC10 - it was the non-IQ related aspects like battery life and poor sound quality that meant I didn't end up with one.

On 31/03/2018 at 1:02 PM, mercer said:

Yeah they really are special cameras. Every time I read too much discussion about 4K this or 4K that, I go back to my Vimeo favorites and watch some videos from the Pocket, the Micro or some ML Raw.

I wouldn't be too down on 4K...  Think about it like this - we like things like high DR, higher-bit-depths, higher resolutions, lack of over sharpening, etc.  If you think about it, except for DR, all of those are related to compression.  Bit-depth is colour value quantisation and resolution is about image detail quantisation (over sharpening creates artefacts similar to JPG compression and is related to the distortion of high-frequency image information) but all of these are related to throwing away information.  Assuming the camera manufacturers allocate the bitrate in a sensible way, which they are pretty good at doing (ie, not 480p with 30-bit colour depth or 8K with 3-bit colour depth), then image quality will be roughly proportional to bitrate.

If we look at a few random cameras, this plays out:
My Canon 700D natively outputs <50Mbit 1080, but ML can do ~300Mbit.
The Canon 5DIII natively outputs <50Mbit 1080, but ML is something like 500Mbit? (I'm not sure on this but it's a lot)
My Canon XC10 records 1080p25 in 35Mbit, 1080p50 in 50Mbit (which is 25Mbps when conformed to 25p) and 305Mbit in 4k25
IIRC the GH5 records 1080 in 100Mbps and 4k60 in 400Mbps (166Mbps when conformed to 25p)

The BMPCC records 1080 at 230Mbps in Prores and 569Mbit in RAW.

When you look at IQ like this it makes sense about why the BMPCC and other models in the range still stack up.  It also makes sense why people are drawn to 4K recording modes, and why despite lacking 4K TVs have looked fine for decades.  I don't know what the signal-noise ratios of analog television was, but the combination of a good signal, high DR TV and a darkened room would have represented a high bitrate, as would film.

With a few exceptions, 4K is the only way to get high bitrates out of the 'stars' of the DSLR revolution.

9 minutes ago, markr041 said:

The size is right, and given the wide angle it is possible to shoot blind. But, does this model record 10bit 4K via HDMI? Unfortunately not, just 1080. We need an upgraded model.

I completely agree.  A new model that did 10bit 4K (and maybe a 'premium' model that does 10bit 4k60) would be excellent.

However, it's worth considering that the RX0 isn't as much of a shooting-blind-action-camera as others because of it's 25mm equivalent lens, as compared to the GoPro at around 14-17mm. For the RX0 the rig where it's mounted to the top of the monitor makes more sense.

Considering that the RX0 isn't fixed focus, how much of a challenge is it in getting focus?  I'd imagine it's got a relatively deep depth of field.

9 hours ago, markr041 said:

Now we have another reason to want a small external recorder

Some time ago I was looking at external recorders and learned about the Atomos Ninja Star - something that I assumed would be a spectacularly useful and popular product.  Then I discovered it was discontinued and was stunned.

If you were using the RX0 as an action camera (ie, mounted and used 'blind' - unlike most of the examples here which treat it as a normal camera) then the Ninja Star would be the perfect companion.

Maybe Atomos is the Canon of external recorders and protecting the higher models in their range..

What kind of setup would people use this in?  I thought that by the time you add an external recorder (and likely a cage of some kind to connect the camera and recorder) that the benefit of having an action camera was lost and you may as well have a larger camera.

Not criticising - I'm interested to hear how it would be used

4 hours ago, Snowfun said:

Why don’t we try to do a “festival” here on eoshd? Someone suggest a theme and give everyone a week or whatever. We link our offerings, sit back and enjoy... we’d have to agree to do the beer/weed thing remotely.

Big question - how many would participate?

Liam - organise it!!!

I'm in!

Maybe it could be weekly or fortnightly (just don't submit if you are busy during that time) and maybe have an optional challenge, like "something red" or "up high" or "complicated".

I find that the optional challenge might be inspirational.

14 minutes ago, Liam said:

Yeahhh.. I'd do that if I had film buds.

*cries a lot, but in a cool way*

Is this film festival a way to find film friends then?  if so, maybe social media might be a good place to reach out to people.

Especially if there's a film festival already in your area and you want to be a bit counter-culture about it, you could post on a bunch of forums or whatever saying something like:

Quote

 

The Other Film Festival

Didn't get into BigFilmFestival?  Come to ours.  Hell, come to ours anyway.

No frills, no budget, and no taste.  All films under 5 minutes get screened.  Bring beer.

Email Liam at ........

6 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

If I were you I'd just call up the buddies and have a night of it. 

Completely agree.  

Perhaps calling it a "short film night" might have better connotations?

How often do you finish a project and 'publish' it by sharing it (either with the end audience or, if you do one step in a larger production, with the people who do the next step)?

Do you want to finish projects more frequently?  Less frequently?

What are you doing to accomplish this?

I'm interested in hearing about other people's workflows, efforts to increase efficiency, and barriers people face.

Personally, I make home videos and 'publish' to family and friends.  I don't publish as often as I should and recently I've just gone through a phase of reviewing my equipment in preparation for a couple of big trips I've got this year, so the production line of editing (and getting through the large volume of footage I've got) has stalled in preference for technical evaluations of lenses, camera settings, etc.  I'm almost coming up for air, but I've made a few key improvements to get a good workflow setup, something I wasn't completely clear on previously, so I feel it's been worthwhile.

I heard a story (no idea if it's true) about someone in the industry - maybe they were a film critic(?) - that had a large shed in their backyard that was setup as a makeshift cinema and they ran a video night every Friday night.  In summer they had it outside on their lawn.  Anyone was welcome to attend, they showed short films on any format (I think he had a collection of players for different formats, like VHS, Beta, etc).  It was famous for being a completely mixed bag - great films mixed with awful crap.  I heard that often the best ones were shot on poor quality equipment as his night was known to accept all formats so it attracted those people that either didn't know how to get access to good equipment or didn't know it mattered to film-festivals until after they'd finished.  Apparently he screened a film shot on one of those Barbie cameras (where the camera was mounted in the doll) and it was well received by the audience despite being very poor image quality.

On 24/03/2018 at 2:49 AM, Liam said:

So I kind of want to start the smallest film festival ever…

In contrast to the other helpful and valid posts above, I'd like to challenge you a little bit around making it smaller rather than larger.

If I record a clip on my phone and then show my fiancé then is that the "smallest" film festival?  I would imagine that you would probably say that's not a film festival, and I'd probably agree with you, but what is important is WHY isn't that a film festival?  What are the minimum elements of a film festival that make it a film festival?

If I invite some mates over and we watch a video I shot, is that a film festival?  If not, what's missing?  More people?  More films?  Films must be edited?  Must be advertised?  Must be judging and a winner?

Make a list of what you think you require.

What are you hoping to get from hosting it?  Fame?  Fortune?  Gratification?  Gratification of what?  Making community?  Making a lot of noise?  Making a mess?

When you've done that, try and figure out how to minimise it - if you don't need a huge audience then you might not need a venue, which might mean you don't need insurance.  Try and think outside the box on this.  Ask yourself what you're willing to do in terms of 'breaking the rules'.  For instance if you were only interested in the community aspects of it you might drag out a an old Ebay projector (good films look fine in SD) into a park and use your mates car for sound, you'd probably be in violation of some kind of county laws or whatever, but maybe you don't care about these things.  Maybe there's a park that no-one will notice you using if you get there later in the evening (in summer it gets darker later so that works too).  Word of mouth and maybe photocopy a few fliers would get you enough audience for your own purposes.  

I think it's an awesome idea and I wish you all the success in the world, but I challenge you to think about what is important to you and have the smallest simplest cheapest least-official event that meets your expectations.

5 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Yup! Some YouTubers punch is so extreme is must be like 240p or worse!

I think many times it's "worse" rather than silky smooth 240p!

1 hour ago, Aussie Ash said:

Many you"tubers" have this problem, ten minutes of "talking head"to say something that could have been summirized in 60 seconds.

Yeah, and you know what 'streaming' is and why it's becoming so popular right?  It's making videos without the editing.  Or, as I like to call it, "you save 4 hours editing and 100,000 people waste 30 minutes watching crap you should have edited out - creating a total waste of 50,000 hours minus the 4 you saved yourself".  Or shorter - "selfish and worse".

Of course, some you tubers had already worked out that not editing anything saved them time before streaming became a thing.

In case any YouTubers are reading this, please drink deeply from the following statement...   IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PRE-WRITTEN SHOW WITH MULTIPLE PRESENTERS AND AT LEAST ONE PERSON PRODUCING THEN YOU ARE WASTING THOUSANDS OF HOURS (OR MORE) OF HUMANITIES TIME.  IF YOU'RE NOT A PRO AND CAN'T DEVOTE THAT KIND OF TIME THEN DON'T STREAM, AND IF YOU ARE A PRO AND YOU'RE NOT DOING THIS THEN DO YOUR F**KING JOB AND KEEP IT INTERESTING FOR THE WHOLE F**KING SHOW.

I know I don't have to watch, and I'm optimistic that eventually everyone else will work this out, but in the meantime the person whose time you wasted might have done something that helped cured cancer instead of watching you read the comments section without saying anything useful.

Ok, rant over.

1 hour ago, brianwahl said:

Another quick little clip using 60 and 120p footage and Eterna (graded in Resolve).

Nice footage.

If you get a chance it would be interesting to see the quality if you exported and uploaded this in 4K/UHD to YouTube.  I've done tests and found that YT compression is far less brutal on 4K.

I see lots of compression artefacts but it's hard to know what is the camera and what is YT.

If you don't have time then no worries - thanks for sharing!

Interesting thread, and a topic I've come at from a different perspective.

I bought my XC10 partly as a stills camera.  I'm sure that will come as a surprise to many, however for my needs it does make sense.

Firstly, I'm a rubbish photographer in terms of 'the decisive moment' and even sports photographers don't rely on hitting the shutter at just the right moment.  In this sense video is constant 25 FPS burst mode, so I should be able to pick the perfect frame in post.  Even sports cameras don't offer anything much more than 25fps burst modes.  One of the camera manufacturers (is it Red?) has a page on their website for magazine cover images taken from video.  I remember watching a video of headshot photographer Peter Hurley trying uncompressed 4K instead of still images, and he said there were too many frames to go through, so video is the 'ultimate' burst mode in a way.

Secondly, if a singular moment of fun is about to happen (it's my kids birthday and they haven't seen the cool cake yet, someone is receiving an award, etc) do you video it, or take still images?

Thirdly, building on point #1, the quality has to be sufficient.  Taking a stills frame from an ageing Canon DSLR will likely not be sufficient.  Therefore I wanted a 4K camera with a high-bitrate, which the XC10 fit the bill for.  In preparation for this I posed a few key questions to myself:
Q: What is the most demanding use I will have for still images?  A: printing at 8x10.  I'm not likely to print larger than this, and online won't go larger than this for a long while.  There's an argument that no-one needs more than 5MP because the larger you print something the further back you stand from it when looking at it.  That might not be 100% true, but it's worth taking into consideration.
Q: What is the most demanding user I will be putting these in front of?  A: these are photos of family and friends, so no-one who will be super-picky, and no paying clients.
Q: What is the minimum level of quality that I will require (in line of above)?  A: I did tests - 1080 frames were captured as still images from a point-and-shoot video, processed in LR, then displayed on the computer screen at varying sizes.  I found that 2MP isn't quite enough, that the codec was quite fragile and anything other than slight brightness/contrast/sat adjustments 'broke' it - this is worse in low-light.  This created my requirement for a 4K, higher bitrate codec, high DR camera with decent high ISO performance.

One compromise in the above was that shooting for stills requires a shorter exposure time than the 180-degree-shutter-rule, but that's life.

My tests from the XC10 were that still images taken from the 4K and then re-compressed were at a level of quality equivalent to about JPG quality 11 out of photoshop.  This is the equivalent image quality of higher-end compact point-and-shoot cameras with full manual controls that lack RAW capture and only support JPG image formats.  Obviously RAW would be better (!), but if you think of this as being an infinite 25fps burst mode of 12MP quality level 11 JPG images, that's a pretty decent level of performance and would suit many non-critical applications.

I only have personal experience with the XC10, however the above logic should apply to all current high-bitrate, high DR, 4K cameras, and those with 10-bit instead of 8-bit will of course be higher quality again than what I have from my setup.

I guess the question to ask is - how good is good enough?

8 hours ago, eoslover said:

Many other smartphone companies are also developing multiple focal lengths like 25mm, 50mm, 80mm packaging in one unit

I'm really looking forward to that.  I remember reading somewhere the estimated cost to Apple for the camera assembly in an iPhone and thought "Shit - I'd gladly pay for 4 of these if you could work out how to output a better image because of it".  Different focal ranges is the obvious step, and would make a phone so much more useful.

I went to go see one of my kids in the school play last night.  I wasn't sure on their policy on taking cameras as they widely publicised they were making their own video of the production.  They had signs up that said that we were allowed to take photos / video of our own kids, but no-one was allowed to publicly upload video containing any other kid without written permission of that kids parents.  I understand that totally.  This is the kind of shooting environment that phones find their way into, and having a wide lens really doesn't help with this at all.

I took high-bitrate 4K footage and will crop in post, but if my phone had 24, 50, and 100mm lenses to choose from then it would be far more suitable for things like this.

What's the small thing on top of the main camera?  Is it a remote viewfinder?  Or a small digital camera being used in parallel for footage review and management?

19 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

  I think jpfilmz is talking about the buggy LiveView on the LCD that still has some problems. It is probably better now since this statement was written by A1ex.

That makes sense..  sorry for the distraction.  Nothing to see here - move along!!

2 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

I think he means the view on the LCD?

Just re-read @jpfilmz comment and now I'm not sure what he means?  

But what I am sure of is that the image quality coming out of these setups is absolutely phenomenal, even before you consider the price!

3 hours ago, jpfilmz said:

Canon 70-200mm f2.8 II and I think the 24-70mm f2.8.  Definitely the 70-200 on the closeups.  The first 3 shot were mirror reflection shots.  If they could stabilize the live view the 5D3 would be a beast.

Considering what you'd have to pay to get equivalent image quality, maybe there's budget for a gimbal in there?

In addition to the above, it's worth noting that the larger the wheel diameter the better they deal with any loose objects they have to run over.  ie, a bike can easily ride over a power cable but a skateboard would have issues.

You haven't specified where you'd use it, but it's something to consider if it's going to be used on surfaces that aren't perfectly smooth.

2 hours ago, Kisaha said:

I would never base my workflow in future AI decisions. This is the religious equivalent of Science, being our Lord and Savior! You can not plan in technology that hasn't been invented yet.

I'm assuming you're referencing my post as I was the one that was talking about AI..

it seems there was a mis-understanding.  I wasn't saying to rely on AI to somehow future-proof my footage.  I was saying the opposite - I was saying that although AI will do fascinating things, in the not-too-distant future things will have changed so much, and from there looking back our 4K will be potato vision.  It will be unusable except for nostalgia.

and to directly answer the OPs questions:

On 19/03/2018 at 10:46 AM, User said:

I'm wondering, with the current crop of reasonably affordable 4k cameras today, if the difference between cameras will be less noticeable in 10 years?

Yes.  They will look back and see no difference.  To them both will look like complete unusable mindblowingly bad poop, or it will be cute and retro and trendy and have no seriousness about the IQ applied at all.

How much do you look at Charlie Chaplin films and distinguish between the ones before he could buy a sharper lens and those before?  Do you care?  Could you even tell if you wanted to?

If you want to future-proof your films, make them good enough that people in 10-years will still watch them even though the quality was bad.  Charlie Chaplin isn't still a famous name because of the image quality of his films!

On 19/03/2018 at 10:46 AM, User said:

Have we more or less arrived to a place where digital image quality is will hold up the way motion picture film did? 4k seems adequate enough, and we have that. Dynamic range will probably see incremental bumps, but how much further can that go?

We can go further than anyone in this forum can possibly imagine.  

IIRC we've created sensors that can detect individual photons of light, so once they're miniaturised sufficiently we'll have sensors that have the bit-depth of the universe and billions and billions of pixels.  The Apple A11 cpu inside my iPhone has 4.3 billion (BILLION!) transistors in it, and is probably smaller than full-frame.  If those transistors were photo sites (a reasonable comparison as it's a simple circuit that requires power, data in and data out connections), that would be about 90,000 pixels wide by 50,000 pixels high.  Just for fun I'm assuming the future is still 16:9.

@jpfilmz that is absolutely stunning.  reminds me of the likes of things like ARRI promo videos etc..

7 hours ago, User said:

Ain't that the truth. And towards this, and the idea of using (documentary) material captured on older/ lesser cameras to be combined with new cameras in the future, part of me wonders, if in ten years, there will be software that will be able to bite in these 'thin' codecs and 'fatten' them up. Now I know you can't exactly pull something out of an image that isn't there, but it feels like this is, somehow, about to change.

You can't pull something out of an image that isn't there, but you sure can have a good look at what is there and take a guess about what is missing.  Humans do this kind of interpolation all the time... there's a loud noise and we miss a few words in a sentence but we can guess by the context what they were, it's raining really hard and the windscreen wipers on your car aren't keeping up so half the time the view of the road is blurry and the other half it's got big drops all over it but not only can we keep the moments when we could see properly in our heads when the rain obscures everything but we can somehow correlate what we saw clearly with what is now blurred and if something moves suddenly during the blurry part our brain has kept track of what it was and even what it might look like if we could see.

This is how computers will do it.  The first phase is being able to recognise objects (which Google etc now do pretty well from photographs), the net phase will be to be able to understand an image in multiple layers and for them to have an understanding that the part of the person that is behind a pole still exists but is obscured, and the third will be to have a huge database of objects and be able to stretch and manipulate them in 4D space with all the physics applied and then match them to what it's seeing and put in the detail that isn't in the image.

If you and I see a blurry image of a person wearing a scarf we know that the scarf is probably knitted (coarse pattern of woven thread) that has an array of fine textured fur around that coarse structure.  AI will soon know this and substitute it in for us.

5 hours ago, tomekk said:

What's the point of having my movies future proofed if they suck and I'm forgotten tomorrow? 

Absolutely!!