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This debate has been solved already by the art world when faced with what to do about forgeries. The answer, and I think what @Benjamin Hilton was potentially referring to, is provenance. The art world has established very clearly that humans value the original creative item, even if the forgeries are perfect and made by humans. The idea that the Mona Lisa will have no value because robots can just paint you a perfect replica, or can make their own portraits of women with ambiguous facial expressions is silly. I expect that a very large percentage of the content (and art) consumed will be from AI and robots, but I think that an authentic object will always have some extra value because it has the provenance, even when compared with an identical copy made by assembling individual atoms into a perfect replica.

There sure is.. and the music people are freaking out more than the film-making people.

Maturity level 1: specs are everything Maturity level 2: specs don't matter Maturity level 3: let's talk about specs in a nuanced way Let's try and elevate the discussion, shall we?

Seriously impressive stuff.. I wish the camera manufacturers were even remotely interested in incorporating this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, online all these bozos reduce the discussion to PDAF = GOOD / DFD = CDAF = BAD and so there is no knowledge or demand for it from consumers.

This is true, but you're forgetting the bigger picture. One of them: has intermittent subject-recognition failures occasionally focuses on the background instead of the subject focuses on the wrong part of the subject focuses on the wrong subject can be blinded by flares can be completely clueless when a new subject is introduced and is meant to be the new focus, etc and can track a subject for AF-C in the right conditions. The other: has intermittent subject-recognition failures occasionally focuses on the background instead of the subject focuses on the wrong part of the subject focuses on the wrong subject can be blinded by flares can be completely clueless when a new subject is introduced and is meant to be the new focus, etc and can't track a subject for AF-C in the right conditions Like I said several posts ago. Apart from the pulsing of DFD, by far the most common focus issues I see have nothing to do with that last bullet point, and are a variety of examples of PDAF systems having issues from the other bullet points. Only the other day did I see a beautiful slow-motion follow-shot of a model running and turning to smile at the camera and the golden light from the sunset behind her bathing the whole scene and then she just slightly went to one side and the AF-C quickly racked focus to the background and then back again when she moved closer to the middle of frame again. Shot ruined. A long conversation ensued about how to use it in the edit and cover up the AF failure. PDAF not for the win... not even slightly. I wonder if future devices will have a little fisheye camera on the back that does a facial recognition on the operator and detects a variety of facial movements and can map them to controls. This isn't about to happen any time soon, but maybe. In IT systems design the general idea is that you work out all the things that need to happen and then work out how to make the humans do the things that humans are better at, and the machine do the things that machines are better at. It might take a completely different approach, like having a button next to the focal ring of the lens that will engage AF and you can manually focus and when you're almost there just press the button in and it will do the rest to fine-tune and hold the focus. Maybe the button just finds the part of the frame closest to being in focus and chooses that, so no issues with it choosing the wrong thing.

Those examples are just how I described.. PDAF knows where to go and CDAF doesn't.. No new information here 🙂 But you're right, there are a great many things I don't understand... Cameras over 4K that aren't needed for VFX Seeing that high-end movies and TV shows have been softened using filters, vintage lenses, and softened in post, but then pixel peeping the sharpest lenses and highest resolution cameras Trying to compare cameras without discussing what they're being used for Making decisions on the aesthetic of an imaging system without considering the emotional impact it has on the viewer Not understanding that the purpose of an imaging system is having an emotional impact on the viewer People perpetuating myth after myth when each one can be easily proven to be false with a smartphone and an hour of work etc etc... I mean, I also don't understand why people insist on shooting interviews with a 135mm F0.8 lens, then blaming their AF mechanism for not being able to track the subject, but maybe secretly I'm the dull one when they are deliberately going for that "talking head in a sea of blurry confusion and it seems like I've been drugged and the background is growing and shrinking" aesthetic.

LiDAR really is the future isn't it! It's an interesting question, how to get the benefits of AF without losing the expression of MF. Some cameras have that thing where they look at where your eye is pointing in the EVF and can set that as the focus point, which is intuitive and great. I wonder if maybe we need a pressure sensor to press on where the harder you press the faster it moves the focus towards where you're looking. That way you could lift off for no focus changes, press slightly to really ease in, or press lightly-firmly-lightly to ease out of focus and then ease in again at the destination, capturing the need for focus adjustments that are not only smooth but faster or slower depending on context, and with all the precision of the computer in focusing on the eye and not eyelashes or nose.

It's like this: AF step 1: analyse the frame and choose a thing to focus on AF step 2: adjust the focus motor until that thing is in focus PDAF and CDAF are in step 2. The pulsing is a symptom of CDAF in step 2, because it goes back and forth looking for the point where the thing is least blurry. All the subject recognition such as person-AF, eye-AF, animal-eye-AF, etc are all part of step 1. I suspect that CDAF systems are using a lot of processor time to do the CDAF analysis, and that takes processor time away from the subject recognition that happens in step 1. This would explain why CDAF tends to move the focus point slower than PDAF. I suspect that if you had a dedicated processor for step 1 then the overall differences in performances would be greatly reduced, which would mean that the majority of issues are economics, not CDAF vs PDAF. Don't get me wrong, we should be choosing the best focus system, which is LiDAR > PDAF > CDAF, but saying that the differences in real use are CDAF vs PDAF is about as correct as saying that the differences between 13Mbps 4K on YT and 3Mbps 1080p on YT is because of the resolution difference.

In a contrast detect camera, the camera can tell how in or out of focus an area of the sensor is, but not which direction is more in focus (closer or further). In a phase detect camera, the camera CAN tell which direction is more in focus. A CDAF focus system picks a direction randomly (nearer or further), and goes the whole way looking for focus, and often it would pick the wrong way, and that's why that old P&S camera from 2010 would spend 3 seconds racking the whole focus range before zero-ing in on the focus, despite the fact it was only a little bit off. That's it. That's the ONLY difference between the two. What you are talking about is differences in the mechanism that CHOOSES what to focus on. A PDAF system can randomly choose to focus on the background just as easily as a CDAF system can - the PDAF system will just do it slightly more confidently because it knows exactly how to get there and roughly how far away it is. Apart from the Panasonic DFD pulsing issue (which is a side-effect of CDAF), I have not seen a focus error that was CDAF related in probably years. The issues with focus today are that it chooses to focus on the wrong thing, or on nothing at all. This has nothing to do with CDAF or PDAF. It's a whole other thing. Sure, PDAF cameras focus much better overall, but it's not the PDAF, it's something else in the AF implementation. CDAF and PDAF are a very minor part of the whole AF mechanism.

Absolutely. Priority 1 is getting the shot. Priority 2 is making the shot that you get a better one. You can't edit what you didn't capture.

I totally agree that BM cameras are really good for the small budget production / owner-operators - great image quality for modest investment. As soon as you get into the world where you're paying people minimum award wages then camera rental costs become insignificant and you're better off going with whatever the standard is for your genre (Alexa for narrative / studio, and Sony or Canon for doc work) either because the people that are involved will be familiar with them or that getting familiar with them would be a plus for getting chosen for larger projects.

I love these discussions - it reminds me how people have almost no understanding of how anything works. CDAF vs PDAF has almost nothing to do with the AF performance of modern cameras.

Start by asking yourself what your needs are. Only then can you evaluate the options. I would suggest that the decision is likely to revolve around the biggest differences between them - the Osmo is a fixed focal length camera with built-in gimbal, and the RX100 has a zoom but far worse stabilisation. Depending on how you like to shoot, and the lenses you have for the GH6, the gimbal might be more useful, or the zoom might be more useful. The end goal is to create the best final edit, so work out what the biggest challenges are for getting this, and then work backwards.

True, although being pragmatic about decisions is also useful, and any time/energy you spend on learning a new camera is time/energy you could have spent on story or production design or lighting etc.

This is why. I've heard from the pros that at the first production meeting of a large project, like movie or TV show, there is a moment where someone asks "what are we shooting on?" and if the answer is "Alexa" then everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and if it's not "Alexa" then there is an anxious conversation about it. If you have the most awesome camera in the entire universe, and no-one has ever worked with it before, it's still a risk to the production. "Alexa" is the answer that tells everyone there is one less risk in the project.

Also, the 'n-stops of IBIS' spec is a measurement of how much reduction in movement there is of the sensor when that movement is within the movement range of the IBIS mechanism. There are two problems with this: When people do IBIS tests, the movement that remains in the footage is almost 100% of the time due to the camera shake being larger than the movement range of the mechanism. So this 'n-stops' no longer applies. Different cameras have different ranges of movement of their IBIS mechanism, and therefore, different levels of ability to compensate for camera movement. When you understand that this is what is going on, you realise the 'n-stops of IBIS' measurement is a practically meaningless number that doesn't really predict the level of performance of different cameras.

This was true with RED and yet it barely made any penetration into the industry. It almost makes you think that the image coming out of the camera isn't the thing that determines the fate of the brand.....

I have always been fascinated by complex systems, and film-making is one of them. It includes having an understanding of: perspective and composition and camera movement optics and optical design analog electronics digital electronics data compression colour science editing concepts and the manipulation of time such as montage, cross-cutting, jump cuts, etc sound design music aesthetic perception such as colour theory, psychoacoustics, symbology, culture storytelling and explicit and implicit forms of communication like words and body language emotion and memory etc ..and more importantly it involves learning how each of these effects the others, and how to manipulate each of these elements within its domain in order to create a coherent and affective end product. In that sense, the fact I end up with home videos is only a part of the equation, and my goals are both to make them and learn about this system and what it can tell us about the world. I'm still thinking about this one but I think it really depends on how you do it. People seem to have a good intuition about cameras, and if the lens is sticking out a long way and you're pointing it exactly at them and moving to follow them then they'll know 100% you're filming them specifically, but if you change any of these then it's far less confronting. Perhaps the opposite of that is to pick a composition and hit record and just stand there and let people walk through your shot. If you look at something behind them and act like you don't see them then they're just as likely to assume you are shooting what is behind them. If you have your hands on the camera and are focusing on it then they might assume they've just walked through your composition and you'll wait for them to pass and then try to take a photo. The fact you didn't hit the shutter button while they were in front of it probably signals to them that you didn't take their photo. In aesthetic terms, I'm not particularly interested in taking telephoto shots of random people. To a certain extent the street cinema aesthetic leans more towards the idea that the city is the subject and the people are like ants, anonymous and scurrying and flowing in a mass like water within the larger environment, or that the city is empty and people aren't there, or if they are there then they might be alone, etc. These leanings are far less confrontational to shoot. In a sense if you want to capture the spirit of a place, the way it makes you shoot would be an ingredient in that, so would be aesthetically relevant. Wow, I had no idea it was prone to overheating. Interesting. That skews me towards the BMMCC if I go that direction.

Maybe I should have said "Amateurs buy one, slap it on their lens, and never take it off because they never thought about the decision in the first place and don't ever." Obviously this isn't you. Also of note is that in the wedding genre, the vibe is almost always towards a happy / dreamy / soft / luxurious aesthetic, which is what such a filter provides. This isn't the case with the "wave the camera around, cut on the beat, put on the LUT, upload, get the likes" folks. In my tests I found the Tiffen BPM 1/8 to be pretty strong. This was in daylight exteriors where you have huge DR, and in nighttime cityscapes which have even more DR from lights and shadows. On a set with controlled lighting that's a different situation. For my money, the diffusion that the 12-35mm F2.8 had was about right.

Equipment: GX85 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 12-35mm F2.8 primes: 14/2.5 and 7.5/2 and 17/1.4 and ~50mm F1.4 iPhone <unknown second camera> Setups: Daytime tourist mode GX85 with 14-140mm, and iPhone wide Night tourist mode GX85 with 12-35mm, and 7.5mm F2 Compact / pocket mode GX85 with 14mm Night low-light mode GX85 with 7.5/2 and 17/1.4 and ~50mm F1.4 The unknown second camera is still something I'm thinking about. Options: GH5 Great AF-S and modes. EVF. It's better than the GX85 at lots of things, but not by a great deal. OG BMMCC Much better DR than GX85, which is super-useful for sunsets. Larger. No AF. Slowest to shoot with. OG BMPCC Much better DR than GX85. Compact. Has slow AF. Slow to shoot with. Screen difficult to use in daylight. Now that the kids are grown and moved out it'll be me and the wife travelling, so I'm contemplating adopting a dual-purpose for equipment, shooting for myself but also shooting 'street cinema' videos for public release. The BM cameras would make a much better option for that.

Blasphemy! Don't you want the FF cinematic look? Here's me in NY: Here's me in Seattle: Here's me in LA: Here's me in Texas: (appols for the DOF, I'm saving for the F0.95 version of my lens)

I think the missing part that no-one seems to mention is how they're used. Pros will choose which filter, at which strength, if any, is used for each camera angle and each shot. It will be tailored to the exact contents of that composition, including the actor/actress who is in the shot. It was common back in the day for big-name actresses to include a clause in their contract that all shots that they appear in must have a particular filter used. Amateurs buy one, slap it on their lens, and never take it off. There's a reason that amateur footage looks amateurish. Probably the biggest giveaway is razor sharp footage with diffusion on it.

I was thinking about these exact images when I was writing my earlier post about the advantages of zooms! Such a great example - you have a seat and that's it. To only have a wide angle at such an event would make a very sad looking video. I also think there's a self-centredness of some kind when shooting with only a wide, especially with a gimbal shot where the camera is moving. I don't quite know how to describe it, but it's sort-of like the POV footage from a member of law-enforcement, even if you edited it together so that the person wearing the camera was never seen or heard in the footage every shot would still be whispering "this is where I was, this is what I saw", like the camera person is looming invisibly over all the footage. Contrast this to using a zoom and grabbing a variety of shots, the shots are about the things actually visible in the images, with the shooter no longer being the focus of attention. It's probably just a turn-of-phrase I'm not familiar with, but what did you mean by "can't get arrested"?

Talk about Freudian slips! But it's ok.. we all secretly want the software look.