kye

I have consulted all the internet experts I could find and the overwhelming consensus is that these are aliens that were cloaked and only visible to the camera! Seriously though, those are some rather distinctive internal reflections... I don't think they're quite to my taste, but the glow from the lights is rather nice. That lens is definitely an exceptional piece of glass.

Nice work! Video looked pretty clean to me, and colours etc seemed nicely rendered too, considering the crazily coloured lighting. I didn't get any odd impressions about what was in focus and what wasn't, so that seemed fine too. When you go the promo edit I would suggest adding a bit of sharpening on the slow-mo shots to even them out a bit, but I'm seriously nit-picking there. I don't know what NLE you're editing / colour-grading in but if you want to even out the parts with very blue lighting a bit then I have a bunch of cool tricks I've picked up that I'm happy to share, just ask.

Lots of lens deals on at B&H.... https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/Dealzone/di/13592?sort=PRICE_LOW_TO_HIGH Including the Tokina 11-16 which is reduced $200 to $299, and some of the Sirui 1.33x anamorphics are less than half price.

I'd prefer it to be adjustable in post to give extra control after the fact. For example, if I'm shooting out of the window of a moving vehicle on a rough road then getting a completely gimbal-like level of stabilisation may require too much cropping for my desired framing. Or if I'm shooting a static shot hand-held I may want to smooth any micro-jitters in there but keep a slightly moving camera for a hand-held feel, or I may want to lock it off completely, but that decision is one of those ones where you'd want to make it based on the edit. I wouldn't want to have a whole edit with just hand-held but not locked-off shots (or locked-off only) if I could have the ability to vary it in post. I'm not familiar with the plugin - does it handle gyro data from multiple manufacturers? If so, that would be great!

Or LIDAR..... as part of Panasonics partnership with DJI, which seems to be progressing, and works with manual focus lenses too. Not a lot of AF anamorphics, and with Pannys support of anamorphics on MFT maybe that's the direction they'll go...

That's an interesting product. Obviously you'd have to rig it up by adding a recorder, power solution, and some sort of control setup, but it's not too far off the "Blackmagic Box Camera" that so many people online seem to want. Depending on what controls are available, for example if there's a handle with these things integrated, then maybe paired with a recorder that can deliver power out, it might be a small setup. I'd also hazard a guess that as it's aimed at drones etc it might have more effective thermal management as the old logic of "just buy a proper cinema camera" doesn't really work.

I'm also starting to see the benefits of gyro stabilisation in the newer cameras. My preferred camera is the Panasonic GX85 but if they released a successor that had internal gyro data (and the tools necessary to utilise it in post) then that would be an attractive feature for me - far more than 10-bit or log or other more technical upgrades.

I found this video to be a breath of fresh air.....

I don't mind manufacturers segmenting by price, in a way that's sort-of reasonable, as long as it doesn't go too far in the direction of being anti-competitive. The thing I mind is that they also segment on camera size. If you want great image quality then the cameras just become unwieldy and attention-grabbing. Modern technology makes everything smaller over time, but they ate up that size advantage with extra megapixels. Of course, the elephant in the room with overheating is that it's caused by the blind pursuit of more and more pixels. Of course, some people have convinced themselves of the "need" for more pixels, but the frilly pink dress that the elephant is wearing that no-one will discuss is that you can't see anything more than 720p (at best) on a smartphone, which is the primary viewing device for most of what is being filmed by these people.

Nice!

I thought it was everywhere - one thing we're quite good at down here is shopping online! I think their prices must have come down over time. I'd imagine they'll be very good 🙂 Fingers crossed, but make sure to test them thoroughly when you get them so that if they fail then you can return them quickly enough to not have any issues.

They're the ones that I always hear the pros talking about, but they also seem to have "pro" prices!

I use a range of Sandisk cards, including some special models that work with the BMPCC OG and M2K, but I also have a Samsung EVO micro SD that seems to work well and was a good price. I don't really shoot long takes at horrific bitrates though, and my cameras all have competent thermal management, so I'm not really stressing the reliability of these.

Yes, 10-bit vs 8-bit is a much larger consideration, especially if you're shooting in log. It's rare to see issues with either 8-bit or 4:2:0 in real-world examples, but the ones I have seen appeared to have a similar impact where skin tones had larger squares of yellow/orange/pink instead of the same colours being much more granular and natural-looking. The other consideration is resolution. We haven't all changed to displays that are 4x the size since before 4K was released and 1080p was the standard, therefore the individual pixels are smaller today in the viewers field-of-view than they used to be. IIRC 4:2:0 in 4K is the same as 4:4:4 in 1080p.

The way to choose the best camera for you is to look at what absolutely sucks about each camera (every camera sucks in several major ways) then pick the one that would hurt you the least. Film-making equipment involves a huge amount of compromise, at every level, even regardless of budget (although that definitely sucks for most cameras!).

More sample footage from S5iiX and Sirui 150mm anamorphic lens. Nothing wrong with these images...

Just watched this again, and my impression from the YT upload was that if you'd told me this was Alexa / FX9 / RED I wouldn't have questioned it. It definitely has that high-end look. @deezid I'm curious - to get this level of image did it require being really careful with every element of production/post-production? Or was the look achievable without getting everything perfect? I find that some cameras are super-fragile requiring everything to go right and others are far more robust and much easier to work with and get good results. For me, this robustness is much more important for getting a good result rather than how good the camera is when everything is perfect.

Nice work! No video-ish look at all (I've become super-sensitive to this recently), great edit with cool subtle little moments, and nice colour grade 🙂

Great stuff! First thing I noticed is that it didn't look like video to me. I seem to have become very sensitive to whatever makes things look video-ish, and it is rare that YT footage shot with mirrorless cameras doesn't look video to me, but you did well! I genuinely have no idea what elements of the process make things look video-ish to me, and I'm still investigating this myself, although I suspect it's got to do with sharpening. You didn't over sharpen the video (despite me watching it on 4K) so that could have been a major factor, so well done on that! Second thing I noticed was the colour grade. Obviously if the client is happy then that's a job well done as that overrules all other considerations. That said, I thought the grade looked a bit inconsistent in terms of skin tones - some shots were more on the yellow end of the skin tone palette and others looked more towards the middle, but they weren't so different that I thought they were deliberately different. Maybe they were and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so these are probably just my preferences, but I noticed it, and you invited feedback. I also noticed that it was relatively low saturation overall, which might have been the clients preference, but in music videos there's a tolerance (and sometimes a desire) to have much stronger looks, so that might have been fun to see as well. Third thing I noticed was a few times in the b-roll sections (the group out walking in the street etc) where the OIS jumped. You mostly hid it with jump-cuts (which was a good strategy and suited the video) and I think you could have gone heavier on those, having more frequent cuts. I typically edit my videos to music, so am aware of the strategies of cutting to the music, and I thought the percussion of the track would have been suitable to put in some additional cuts in places.

Keying is likely to be the biggest place where you'd notice, but second to that it's probably related to contrast. The flatter the log profile you record in and the flatter the image is (e.g. if it's cloudy, or the subject is low contrast like when in fog) and the greater the contrast / sat you want in your final look, the more that you might notice. @newfoundmass isn't wrong when he says that it really depends on your preferences. I hang out on the colourist forums and some of them think that Alexa footage is quite fragile and that you can't push it far before it degrades. I don't know about you but I think you can push it miles and it still looks amazing, so there are different thresholds that people are willing to tolerate!

Easy, anyone buying a cinema camera can go modular, and anyone that doesn't buy their cinema cameras isn't serious and doesn't deserve nice or reliable equipment.

It does seem like the affordable end of the technology is nearing maturity... good stuff 🙂

I did wonder about that. There's a reason that cameras like the BMPCC 4K is so huge and the iPhone camera is so tiny, when they both have a sensor that is the same resolution / frame rates and the iPhone compresses the footage and the BM doesn't, so in theory the iPhone should require far more power than the BM. I have a vague recollection of a BM representative saying that they need to use off-the-shelf chips for their cameras because they don't have the economies of scale to make custom chips like Apple does. One of the biggest factors is that when you join chips together into the same unit they often don't take much more power than each one of them did before, plus there's all the various circuitry that was needed to send from one chip and then receive by the other one that is no longer needed if they're on the same chip.

I remember when voice dictation was going to free us all from having to manually press an array of buttons thousands of times to communicate anything, but then it just.. didn't. In theory, phones are perfectly suited to this, considering voice recognition is built-in and the keyboards are so bad, but it seems that people just go for shorter communication rather than switching modes. I guess with phones it is a bit strange to talk to one when you're out in public or in a shared space like the office / cafe / bathroom / etc. Maybe we need those throat-mounted microphones that black-ops soldiers have? I suspect concision is a real factor online, especially for complex topics like politics or film-making. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies) Here on these forums we have a culture that is somewhat tolerant to dissenting opinions, but the burden of proof is definitely put on the person with the contrarian position, and requires either a large amount of typing or a very advanced understanding of the subject combined with extremely well developed written communication skills. I suspect in other platforms like Telegram / Discord / Facebook / etc even the people with both of these probably can't be bothered.

I think that's wise. My recollection was that the A7s2 was the "low light king", and that the A73 had similar/same low light performance. Before I bought my GH5 I was also considering the A73 and the low-light and other video features were a solid offering. The footage online looked very impressive too, from those that knew what they were doing. Also, the colour science on the early Sony cameras was known for being difficult, but IIRC they significantly improved it over the models, and the A73 was much improved from the earlier models, so you'd likely have a much easier time with that footage in post rather than from the A7s. With the A7s you'd probably be taking RAW stills? If so, the colour science doesn't really matter as there's no baked-in look, and you should have robust files with lots of leeway to colour them in post, including any crazy WB issues if you happen to take a shot when a very coloured light happens to be the one illuminating the scene. Have you got lenses sorted for the two?