kye

Perhaps the critical concept is that AI is calculators trained with only human input data. This whole thing is like when people learned anatomy. At first people thought that we couldn't possibly understand how the body worked because it was made by God. Over many hundreds of years we've basically worked out more and more of the organic chemistry and various principles etc, and now no-one who is familiar with modern medicine would question our ability to understand the physical body. Now comes AI, and we're back to saying that we couldn't possibly understand or replicate what it is to be human, because we're etherial magical special and knowable only to God. I think that line of thinking will suffer the same fate, and will suffer it at thousands of times the pace.

Footage looks good, and global shutter is a definite plus of course, but I'd like to see a side-by-side with the OG BMPCC or P4K or Sigma FP etc. To be honest, the CST in Resolve can convert Linear gamma to whatever you want, so that part was done already. Adjusting the primaries can be done with a 3x3 RGB matrix, which isn't easy but also wouldn't be too hard if you knew what you were doing. I commend him for pursuing the project, but it's probably half a days work for a professional colour scientist, at most, maybe even an hour or two if they are setup for it already. This is an example of a RAW shooting camera with a good conversion to LogC and then a nice LogC LUT put onto it, nothing more. This has been done by Juan Melara for a range of cameras including the P4K etc, which are almost indistinguishable in side-by-side comparisons. https://juanmelara.com.au/products/bmpcc-4k-to-alexa-powergrade-and-luts This is why I moved to colour grading rather than going from camera to camera, the RAW-shooting cameras are all nearly perfect already and improving them without improving the colour grading is a waste of time really.

I agree that "reality TV" won't be saved and didn't put it in my list. Apart from the fact it's scripted or the participants are poked with a stick until they explode, and the editing is practically perjury, but in the end the audience doesn't know or care who they are as people - they are simply characters that no-one knows and so could be anyone (or no-one). I think it's pretty easy to look at AI and think that it looks like an awkward and clunky human being and conclude that it has a long way to go, but I think that's a misleading way to think about it. AI is literally trillions and trillions of incredibly fast calculators. Literally. So, acknowledging that, it's more useful to think that AI technology has managed to go from being a calculator to being a human-a-like, which is a thousand billion miles from where it started. The journey from where it is now to where it will be refined and sophisticated and creative and expressive isn't nothing, but it's short in comparison to the journey it's already taken. ... and in case you're not getting a sense of it, here is how human it was to begin with: 1+1=2 3>2=true 8/2=4

I agree, but I think there is a distinction here between videos that contain people I know/care-about/etc and people I don't. If a movie people see has Brad Pitt in it, people probably don't care if it was the real Brad Pitt or an AI version of him, and if they go see a movie they probably don't care if the actors are even real people or AI generated fictional characters. However, if I watch a video that has anyone I know in it, and it's a depiction of a real-life event then it matters if it was real footage or not. This might seem to be irrelevant detail, but I think that this means that the following parts of the industry may not be completely gutted: Documentaries Sports videography Engagement/Wedding videography (although some might want a more 'enhanced' version than reality) Event videography (birthdays, bar/bat-mitzvah and other religious occasions, etc) Corporate videos All live-streamed event videography News and current affairs TV perhaps others? These are pretty significant percentages of the entire professional moving images industry. It's easy to start thinking that no-one will pick up a camera professionally any more, but that's just not likely to be the case. Even if you're right that people born from now onwards don't have any special relationship with reality (which I don't think will happen for a very long time), the people who are 10 years old now might live for another 100 years and they probably want to continue to want to see real life content, so that will be phased out pretty slowly.

If you're doing the colour grade yourself then here's my advice: If it looks good, it is good (and it doesn't really matter how you got there) If you're not sure what a setting does, and it doesn't make the image clearly better, then probably just leave it at whatever the default was That's literally it. As you gradually get better you'll build up a sense of what tools make what situations look better, and you'll get that from trial and error / reading forums / watching tutorials / etc, but as soon as you start using the word "should" a lot then you need to go back to the first bullet point above - if it looks good then it is good. The goal of the tech is to learn it enough to start thinking about other more creative aspects.

A resume isn't meant to be a page-turner. It's a document built for a purpose. This is the same. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be interesting, but if the sound design isn't that great then that's not the point of the video, unless you're trying to get hired to do that. IIRC I've seen colourist reels without any sound at all, but I might be wrong about that.

I feel completely safe in doing my own home videos of family and friends. I don't care how photorealistic the AI will get (and it will get to be perfect), there will still be a fundamental difference between what something actually did look like vs what something might have looked like. This difference will remain as long as people are attached to a physical reality at all. There are parallels in other mediums as well. Art forgeries are still forgeries, even if they're perfect. If you think that no-one will care, just google "art providence" and see how much people really do care.

HLG isn't a standard, it's more like a semi-technical marketing phrase, however, rec2100 and rec2020 are HDR standards and you can use a CST to convert them to whatever you like. If I shoot a clip in 709 and then HLG on my GH5, then the conversion from rec2100 to 709 is pretty close to the 709 version SOOC. Close enough that the difference is irrelevant, because you're going to want to push and pull the image in post, and those adjustments will easily override the differences out of the camera. It's easily tested - just record a clip in HLG and then in V-LOG and use the CST to convert both to rec709 and see which input colour space / gamma is closest to the V-LOG conversion. The better you get at colour grading, the less you care about which camera or colour space was used, as long as it's a robust and efficient codec and has colour management support.

I decided with my GH5 that HLG was a better log space than V-Log, because in HLG the amount of bits for the midtones and saturation were higher (and therefore suffered less from the compression). This comes at the expense of the shadows and highlights, but these are far less important than skin-tones, so I figure I'm making a good trade-off.

22 pages on... and nothing has been learned.

The other thing that occurs to me is to watch BTS videos of music video shoots. These will include lots of tricks about how to achieve various looks, as well as showing what the final looks are. Yeah, a 58mm F2.0 lens isn't so easy to manually focus, especially on a gimbal, unless you had a remote-follow-focus, a very good monitor with excellent focus-peaking controls (that can compensate for the softness when wide-open), and are practiced at operating a gimbal and follow-focus at the same time. It's not that difficult to degrade the image in post to achieve at least some of the major optical aberrations that these vintage lenses have. One power grade you could setup for yourself and just pull out when needed might include: a power-window that darkens the edges (ie, vignette) and also adds a blur towards the edges (bonus points for mixing a normal blur with a radial blur) a lens correction that adds some barrel distortion a glow / haze effect to lower contrast (can easily be done with a blur that is put over the top of the footage at a low opacity) a very small-radius blur over the whole clip to knock the sharpness down a bit When fine-tuned, the above can do a pretty decent imitation of a vintage lens, so is worthwhile putting into your toolkit if you're a fan of the vintage look. Now we have AI there are other things you can play with too.... The Resolve Magic Mask is able to identify objects pretty well now (see the red overlay over the man): So you could potentially mask out the main objects and then do things to the background like darken it, blur it, make it a different hue, etc. The Depth Map feature is also interesting: I would suggest that neither of these is good enough for really strong adjustments (without visible artefacting - they're roughly like the iPhone DOF simulations) but in music videos the look might be appropriate. Filters and blend modes are definitely your friend with music videos. If all else fails, you can pull a key of the skin-tones and then do whatever you want to the rest of the image. With all these things, if the edges aren't great or it doesn't quite stand-up then just back off the opacity. You should always be applying too much of an effect and then pulling it back to something acceptable. Then you can A/B it with and without the effect and adjust to taste. If you don't go too far and then pull back, you will always be used to the image without that effect and so it will always look like it's overdone. Also, most colour grading breakdowns show that it's about applying a number of small and subtle adjustments that add up - it's very rare for any one individual adjustment to be significant, with the exception of colour space transforms and the basics like adjusting exposure and contrast and saturation.

I've heard anecdotally that tertiary education (university and technical colleges etc) is being stripped bare by cost-cutting and efficiency programs, to the point where a friend of mine did a Graduate Certificate (which is the first third of a masters degree) and wanted advice on which course/units to choose when re-enrolling in the next part and there was literally no-one he could talk to. All lecturers were only accessible to students enrolled in specific units and he was ignored / actually turned away, the course controller was also the head of the school and not even contactable and the entire enrolment process was all online and there literally wasn't even a student services desk where you could talk to a human being. This was at a major university here in Australia that appears in lists of top universities world-wide from time to time, so it's no backwater institution, and it's not like the fees aren't putting a truckload of money into their coffers either. Maybe life is different in the marketing department?

Do you mean technical parts like the chips etc? If so, maybe they're out of stock and no longer being manufactured, so would be practically infinite in cost, rather than cheap.

I also thought that the colours were overzealous, but this is actually a good thing - increasing saturation on poor quality footage really reveals weaknesses in the codec and colour science, so the fact that the colours don't reveal such weaknesses is a real plus. Had they posted only desaturated images I would have immediately suspected they were covering up some weakness, but this is obviously not the case.

Triple post... *sigh*

Double post

That's very promising looking footage, and definitely the right sized cameras - 80 x 80 x 50mm and under 400g (3.2" x 3.2" x 2" / 0.89lbs)

Yeah, the sponsorship would have meant the default app and the anaemic codec. I don't know if this one supports RAW, but that would have been the ultimate choice.

Wow.. good to know the Kingstons aren't reliable over the long term. My dad does a lot with Raspberry Pi computers, which use SD cards for storage, and apparently they chew through the cheap SD cards, but the Samsung ones are reliable over time, so they must also be made properly. I haven't heard much discussion about them, but I have a Samsung EVO card that I use with my other cameras and seems ok. I haven't tested it with the BM cameras though.

I think there's a whole industry of people deliberately selling things under false listings, taking the money from people that don't notice or know any better and very very quickly refunding anyone who complains. I've bought a few small items that didn't work or weren't as described and within about 0.1ms of submitting a report they give you a full refund and close the case completely, no returns or anything. I've seen amazon listings for tech products where there are 500+ reviews, but you go and read the reviews and they're all saying "this shampoo is great" so it's obvious they're manufacturing listings for high-value items by gaining positive ratings on low-value products and then completely changing the listing to something else entirely. Regardless of what the product is, there's always a brand that is great "but you'll pay for it" and I think that perhaps those brands are selling products for what they're actually worth and the remaining 99% of the market are doing dodgy-brothers stuff.

Died completely? and were they the V30 (green) ones, or faster ones? There were reports of people using the green ones and after a while they start dropping frames, but other people said that they would format the card each time they put it in the camera and they had no issues. Dropped frames sounds to me like the card speed was only borderline, but everything these days is made to a price..

I don't think any updates are coming - these are old cameras now. Even in the Blackmagic Camera groups on FB if you say "OG BMPCC" people think you're talking about the BMPCC 4K. I can't confirm these, but in the FB group for the OG BMPCC multiple people like the Kingston Canvas Select Plus but don't get the V30 version - you need the V60 or better. Also, apparently there's an Angelbird card specifically for it (it might have it on their website?).

Cool film, only let down by the poor codec and lack of ND. I understand why you'd want to have a sponsor and why you'd want to tell a story with a phone in comparison to not telling it at all, but if you had freedom to choose and you were already getting a bunch of people on set and putting all that time and effort into something and then a phone sure isn't my first choice. Same comments as above, but you can definitely see the stronger codec in this piece compared to the Xaiomi.

We did collaborate on some films, and submitted a few of them into the festival circuit, which is quite active here in Australia. That was mostly an exercise in frustration as it was all a game of who-do-you-know instead of the merits of the actual film, but it gave her experience in directing and, because of the performances she was able to get, contributed to many actors showreels. It was amazing the trouble we went to considering the camera of the day was the mighty PD150!

I think that having something to show for your efforts is a pretty significant motivator, and if you can see that what you did actually helped someone then that's even better. My sisters story is long and complicated, but it boiled down to two factors. The first was that after not being able to 'make it' as a director, she retrained in another role, but in her location there wasn't enough work for her year round and she would have had to have found a second career for the off-season. The second factor was that the work-life-balance was non-existent, and through the combination of her working essentially 18-hour days when she was working (working on-set all day and doing prep work all evening) plus the fact that she couldn't make plans in case she got offered a gig, she had just become separated from the rest of the world. I'd say the horrific misogyny and directors / producers with emotional / mental problems was also in the mix, and it was, but the other two factors were easily enough. She would call me and we'd Skype for 5 hours and she'd describe the situations on-set and I can tell you, however bad most corporate environments were, the directors and producers she routinely described would fit into the bottom 30% of management in corporate offices. It's amazing to me how incredibly incompetent much of the workforce is, and yet, they still manage to find enough money to remain fed/clothed/housed. I tell this to people who I mentor - if they can navigate the workforce then we, as people who are trying to accomplish something, can thrive.