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Just to pile on.... Source: https://goodereader.com/blog/bookselling/reading-books-is-on-the-decline Those stats are from 2018. I don't think the trend would have reversed in the meantime.

There's a name for this already, which I've heard on occasion in videos. IIRC it is "Hollywood" - ie, "we grabbed a few runners and just Hollywooded the lights because we had to shoot quickly as the sun set".

Any industry that seems glamorous will have newcomers and amateurs undercutting the pros and starting a race to the bottom for all but the top performers who have managed to build a reputation. Meanwhile, in industries that don't seem glamorous, there are skills shortages and prices are going up (or quality goes down)...

True, but he used pretty good clubs too. No "I use the worst clubs I can get because it's all about skill not equipment" going on in the real world....

If you're doing something in person and have a sunny disposition (or a personality that others are drawn to) then yeah, very difficult for AI to replicate that, at least in the short or medium term. If you're separated from your customers and the clients only experience of your work is the deliverables then that's a much tougher proposition. We can't change our stripes to suit the current whims of capitalism and technology, but we have the ability to choose how respond to the world around us, even if we can't decide how it should be, and that might be enough for quite a few people. In my corporate day job there are AIs that can do the practical stuff way better than I can, but one of the primary reasons they're "better" is that they ignore the human factors and make rational decisions. As a human, I know that the preferences and personalities and politics and culture and history and various X-factors that are in play often overshadow the "rational" answer, and even beyond that, I know when they do and when they don't take precedence over the practical answer. Perhaps the biggest challenge in this sort of environment is when the human factors are at odds with practical matters and the only way forward is to take the humans through the materials, educating and validating and clarifying along the way, to hopefully close the gap between what was palatable and what was required. In this, AIs are still light-years behind.

Absolutely. In this particular case with this video, I think the aesthetic choice was creatively relevant. The idea of the song is that Taylor got swept up in someone else and lost touch with herself. In the start she says "It's not really anything he said, or anything he did, it was the feeling that came along with it, and crazy thing is I don't know if I'm ever going to feel that way again, but I don't know if I should.... I knew his world moved too fast, burned too bright". Then at the end she says "I don't know if you know who you are until you lose who you are". For the video, creating the sense of her living in a dream seems appropriate, and the dream being great, and then terrible when it ended, I think the creative choices were all aligned: Soft rendering lens, not sharp Shallow DoF more often than not Very wide anamorphic Extreme colour grades, changing from shot to shot The opposite would be to create a sharp, deep DoF, normal aspect ratio, lifelike looking image that would completely miss the entire point of the song. The width is part of that "his world moved too fast, burned too bright" world. It's dreamy to the point of almost being surreal. I think this is where "camera people" fall short - they make cinematography decisions / assessments in a vacuum without considering the creative intent of the video. The thing I realised about cinematography and colour grading is that they're subtle arts, and work through symbolism and nuance, and are the sum of many tiny decisions. This kind of thing isn't obvious to the technician, only to the more experienced creative. With todays' camera culture of sharper this, and lower-distortion that, and accuracy above all, it's no wonder that the layman throws out the baby with the bathwater.

The images look great. My point was that you need to be careful when using images like this to decide if you should buy the camera. There are many cameras out there that can provide a lovely image, and some of those cameras are easy to use and will reliably create lovely images for most users with moderate skill levels, but there are other cameras that require extreme skill or luck to create lovely images and for most users with moderate skill levels they will be frustrating and disappointing. Those sunset images looked a little too polished and I suspect they're the result of someone that either got lucky with a LUT that happened to do great, or they have a LOT of skill in colour grading.

Interesting how some shots look very similar and others looked completely different. Colour grading dominates the test once again. Still, the early images were very nice and gave a very low-fi but high-quality feel. Very nice!

Congrats on getting your FS5, I'm not really familiar with it but judging from that image, it looks like a winner! In terms of DR, there's a reflection of the sun in the picture and it appears to have clipped? If so, it really handled it in a very elegant way because the rolloff to clipping is basically indiscernible. Overall it looks like a high-end image to me, and I'm definitely a believer in getting a high quality 2K capture. In terms of wardrobe and costume design, I definitely sympathise and am hesitant to share test images that include me in them. In this case you should have just said it's a test from a project you're working on, and I would have assumed it was an actor on a set and was the result of a full production-design process 🙂 Also, cool to hear you ordered the Sirui lenses - I've seen some reviews/previews of those and they look like a sensible option, so hopefully it'll be a solid and "no-fuss" setup for you. What projects / plans have you got for the setup?

Footage is definitely impressive, but not really a DR test as much as a low-light test. Most cameras can capture enough DR if you wait long enough after sunset and use a fast enough lens to keep noise low. Still, it may well sell cameras, that's likely to be true. Also, you have to be super-careful when it comes to evaluating colour unless the test involves only the manufacturers LUT because the skill of the colourist reigns supreme here. Most people don't have the faintest idea what is possible in post if you are truly skilled - here's a snippet from a video on the L*a*b colour space (which is completely different to RGB) showing how you can "create" amazing sunset colours almost from nothing: I hear professional colourists talking about things like this (that are basically mind-bending if you're new to alternative colour spaces) regularly, and these aren't even colour scientists. If you pay money for professional LUTs or power grades (as opposed to buying the flaming garbage that YT camera bros are selling) then there are all sorts of alternative colour space tricks that get used in these LUTs. Also, you can see from the above video that it took a single node and single curve to do that, whereas the pros often use dedicated software to build LUTs that go beyond what Resolve can do. I know colourists that write their own software for building LUTs. Get the right LUT and the right scene and magic can happen. I'm just saying, buyer beware unless you know the full pipeline.

I agree, and sadly, that seems to be a lot rarer than it should be.

There are obviously lots of definitions of 'professional' but one of the most important things I'd associate with someone being a professional would be the ability to get solid results out of even very modest equipment through applying their knowledge and skill built over years of experience. Before I transitioned from stills to video I used to love watching those "Pro Photographer Cheap Camera Challenge" videos on Digitalrev with Kai and Lok. Seeing how the pro photog would take the barbie camera (or whatever other completely ridiculous camera they were given) and take a test shot which looked average, then make 2 or 3 small adjustments and get a shot that really had something to it, it really was something to watch and enjoy, and try to learn something from.

I thought when the first RF lenses came out that they were premium lenses, both in optical quality and pricing. I remember thinking at the time it made sense because the newer RF cameras tended to be premium models and that with all the EF glass around they wouldn't sell RF lenses if they were more expensive but weren't also premium products. Interesting that people thought they weren't superior. I don't own or follow the system but I always thought that the (non-budget) Canon glass was high-quality and that they really knew what they were doing.

Me too. I think it depends on where we draw the line between pros and non-pros. The proportion of people who "do YT" but work a seperate job is large, but the "I've finally gone full-time on YT" posts seem to be very common once people have built up enough of an audience and income streams. From a usage point of view, I'd suggest that most people who are doing YT trying to go pro would buy the same cameras as a professional YouTuber (they have a job to pay for expensive equipment and they'd view it as an investment) and would also film and edit in the same way as a professional YouTuber. Obviously this greatly expands the number of people who fit into this discussion. I know lots of YT people record long takes and then cut them up in the edit, or speed them up to make time-lapses. The idea of filming a time-lapse by just recording video seems to have become the default approach now, as it means that if anything interesting happens then you can cut back to normal speed to show the interesting thing, and will have full audio of it etc. It also means there's no mode juggling. I see little hints frequently that people are recording many takes, or recording for much longer periods and cutting things up in the edit. One trend that happened a while ago was to include little "mistakes" in the edit, so you'd appear less polished and more authentic. Tom Scott talks about it a little bit here: Of course, some of the examples I've seen clearly indicate that they had done lots of takes, and had left the camera rolling between them. Occasionally I see an example where they've paused, then started the section or statement again, but didn't spot it in the edit and it made it through to the upload. I also don't know kind of YT content all of us are watching, so that when we have discussions like this we probably all have different ideas about what kind of videos people make. I watch a lot of videos of people who do things, and document them for YT. These are often people that want to go professional on YT so they can do their thing full-time. This guy is an example of the kind of person who I think might be in the market for a lower-budget Sony camera like the A6700 - he bought a $15K house in Portugal and his channel is about renovating it. I believe he has a separate job, but he's making great progress on YT. His first video was 2 months ago, he's uploaded 11 videos (although one is 18s, so doesn't really count) and he's got 13.7K subs and ~560K channel views so far. I suspect he shoots on his phone, but I could be wrong, and certainly there are people who shoot only on their phone despite being able to afford "better" cameras. One example of a professional phone user is Hannah Lee Duggan who has almost 1M subs and (last time I checked) shoots exclusively on several dedicated iPhones. https://www.youtube.com/@hannahleeduggan/videos My conclusion is that: People who do YT and want to be pros but aren't yet, still buy and use cameras like the pros (or are less prepared and therefore record longer clips) People who do YT have far larger shooting ratios than you'd think, and work hard in the edit to hide it People who shoot time-lapses commonly do it by just shooting real-time video so they can capture anything interesting.. People who film themselves actually doing something record everything and then find the good bits in the edit.. this is more akin to documentary shooting, where we all know the ratios can be huge

I've "discussed" things with him before in other threads, and all he did was keep moving the goalposts to avoid being wrong, so I just cut to the chase in this thread. In terms of the video... meh. It looks like a GoPro. A video signal that's been over-noise-reduced, over-sharpened, over-compressed, then "graded" and uploaded to YT. I'm not saying it would be perfect if it wasn't so compressed, but the RAW video from the smartphones I've seen looked like deep-DOF RAW video from any competent RAW-shooting camera, and this footage looks absolutely nothing like that RAW footage does. The fact that those smartphones have a similar sized and spec'd sensor tells me the GoPro look isn't the sensor, which only leaves the processing. The poster deliberately tries to go for the video look, and the GoPro does it wonderfully. Others, including myself, prefer the look of more expensive cameras, and this doesn't look even remotely close.

Yes, as @gt3rs says, the least they could have done is mount both to a $10 flash bracket, but they didn't. I believe there's a way to test the stabilisation of cameras such that you can repeat the same test and (shock horror) actually compare the stabilisation characteristics of various cameras. Of course, no-one does it, and sites that have the technical rigour don't have the budget and those with the budget (e.g. Undone, etc) don't have the technical rigour, so we're left with whatever random tests are haphazardly done online by random folks. Do you shoot 180 shutter, or go for a shorter exposure? If it's the latter then gyro data might also be of some help if either of them record it and if it's important enough to you. I suspect that even if you do shoot a 180 shutter, if you were able to stabilise in post at a low strength then you might not notice that the motion blur doesn't exactly match up with the image movement. I haven't tried it, but I suspect that reducing image movement by a decent amount, maybe half, might not be visible. I'd be curious to see a test of that, but I don't have a camera that records gyro data.

+1 for actually trying one in real life. In terms of stabilisation, there aren't any specifications that tell you anything worth knowing, you have to actually try the individual implementations to see how well they work. If you are going to try one in real life and stabilisation is of particular interest, make sure to take the relevant lenses so you can include how good or not their OIS is, and take into account their relative focal lengths, etc.

I'd be happy to talk about these things. In terms of ChatGPT, it is predictive-text on steroids with no understanding of reality or logic or anything else other than parroting the internet back to us, therefore it is probably a better bet than most online replies!

I've played your game before... if I say I see mush then you blame YT compression and you claim victory, if I say I don't see it then you claim victory. No thanks, I'm interested in film-making, not whatever mind-games you like to play.

I would have thought that a hobbyist is as likely to shoot long takes in hot conditions as anyone else. Pros would do it because they're covering an event, and hobbyists would do it because they haven't yet heard of "shooting for the edit" and so tend to just wave it around indefinitely, potentially with a stream-of-consciousness narration to go along with it. One of the users who is most likely to want a nice camera with reliable AF is that person that insists on filming everything all the time. I'm sure we remember these people from the handy-cam days, and human behaviour hasn't changed, and neither has the fact that they're filming the kids swimming in the pool, the family on the beach in Greece, the tour on the boat through the islands of Ha Long Bay, the summer BBQ birthday party, etc etc.

Absolutely. I don't shoot long clips, and even if I did, I'm only going to end up pulling <5s sections into the timeline, so that makes a big difference. The AWB / auto-exposure can always change during a 2-5s shot, sometimes significantly, and I've had to deal with that in post too. I was introduced to the whole situation when trying to grade one of the first pieces of video I ever recorded - a single shot of my wife carrying my daughters birthday cake from the kitchen to the dining table, candles lit, with everyone singing. Turns out that kitchen and dining area had radically different lighting that wasn't visible to the naked eye, and I'd filmed it with my Canon 700D which applied a super-strong colour profile, and the AWB was really slow to react so the first 5s or so of everyone at the dining table was akin to one of the most "creative" picture profiles you might imagine. I should see if I can find that clip and give it another go. I think I spent over a dozen hours in Resolve trying to work out WTF was happening! It's all so situational, and we all shoot/edit/grade in such different ways, it really is an individual thing. Tying it back to the concept of contrast and saturation and the idea that increasing these is like playing the game on the most difficult setting, shooting in poor lighting and having to deal with these AWB issues in post has also pushed me to really get to the bottom of how to do it properly. Of course, I didn't have to deliver acceptable results in the meantime, so that's something to take into consideration too 🙂

I use AWB exclusively, as I'm completely crap at remembering to set it when conditions change and it doing the WB is going to be closer to correct than me forgetting to update it. It does mean you need to WB every shot, and I must admit that it took me many years to work out how to do that properly so that it evenly impacts the whole image rather than just making the shadows/mids/highlights all different colours and ruining the image. Now I've managed to work out how to get the colour management setup properly it's all good and things work as you'd expect in post. As I tend to shoot in situations where the lighting is rubbish with poor quality LEDs (often with differing colour temperatures all mixed together!) I need to adjust WB in most shots anyway, so it's something that would be part of my workflow either way, but there's no right answer and so it's just whatever you prefer and find gives you the best results.

I should also have mentioned that there's a school of thought in film-making that you leave your camera at a fixed WB, normally something like 5500K, and so during the day will look slightly blue and evenings will look slightly warm. The rationale is that this is how we experience reality, and also if you're shooting in a more documentary style, then having the time of day reflected in the images is also a visual queue that adds authenticity, because the WB of every shot is contextually relevant.

As long as you're not clipping anything (DR or saturation) then it's mostly better to push up the contrast and saturation in-camera because then in post you're not pulling the bits apart by adding contrast and sat. However, that's an "all-else-being-equal" type of statement because your camera will likely be doing things like saturation compression etc, especially in the profiles like Cine-V. In the end, the proof is in the pudding, so I suggest just taking some test shots at each of the settings and see what you see and draw conclusions from that. Perhaps the biggest problem with cameras and talking about them online is that there are so many tradeoffs that it's practically impossible to discuss something and take all of them into account. That 4K vs 1080p thread from a few years ago really highlighted that for me - decisions like that impact the image all the way through the pipeline and you need to understand the whole lot to really understand what is actually being discussed. Doing your own tests shortcuts all the variables, but only for your own situation and tastes.

88-90 degrees is only hot if you live in the global north where it snows in the winter. The only reason that manufacturers aren't concerned about things like this is they're making cameras for the richest countries, which are all freezing. The majority of the worlds population live in places where 90 degrees is so mild it's laughable. My sister lives in Edinburgh, and her summer is like our winter.