kye

1) colour The sensor in cameras is a linear device, but does have a small influence in colour because each photo site has a filter on it (which is how red, green, and blue are detected separately) and the wavelengths of light that each colour detects are tuned by the manufacturer of the filter to give optimal characteristics, so this is a small influence in the colour science of the camera. The sensor then just measures the light that hits each photo site and is completely Linear. Therefore, all the colour science (except the filter on the sensor) is in the processor that turns the Linear output into whatever 709 or Log profile is written to the card. 2) DR DR is limited by the dynamic range of the sensor, and of the noise levels, at the given ISO setting. If a sensor has more DR or less noise then the overall image has more DR. The processor can do noise reduction (spatial or temporal) and this can increase the DR of the resultant image. The processor can also compress the DR of the image through the application of un-even contrast (eg crushing the highlights) or clipping the image (eg when saving JPG images rather than RAW stills) and this would decrease the DR. 3) Highlight rolloff Sensors have nothing to do with highlight rolloff - when they reach their maximum levels they clip harder than an iPhone 4 on the surface of the sun. All highlight rolloff is created by the processor when it takes the Linear readout from the sensor and applies the colour science to the image. There is general confusion around these aspects and there is frequently talk of how one sensor or other has great highlight rolloff, which is factually incorrect. I'm happy to discuss this further if you're curious.

I guess I haven't kept up! Oh, who am I kidding... I never kept up 🙂

Yeah, like early internet filters protected people from learning about breast cancer, etc.... What is new is stupid, like how what is old was stupid when it was new 🙂

No need to flipping censor yourselves! Speak flipping freely!!

She didn't compare them with a cinema camera - how am I supposed to watch a review that doesn't do that??? What I concluded from this review (and others) is that: 1) this entire category is half-baked and camera companies are light-years away from providing a solid and slick vlogging experience, and 2) these reviews are like watching people half-way-through the process of getting Stockholm Syndrome.... they clearly don't love them, they clearly don't enjoy the process, they don't like the price, and then their conclusions are positive - like they're saying "please send me the next one to review". Blink three times if you need help!!

I don't recall seeing her rely on other people to film actually, normally it's selfie-cam or table-selfie-eating-cam or POV cam. Most of her vlogs are out with different people too, so I don't think this is the typical example of a vlogger dating a camera-holder as I'd imagine is quite common.

Indeed. I'm aware that at least two of the YT channels I follow are filmed with these, although (shock horror again) these aren't camera channels, they're channels that talk about other things, so I've only noticed when they caught a reflection or something like that. I suspect there are likely lots of these out in the wild being used. Their size alone makes them incredible for the minimalist travel digital nomad types who are all travelling out of a pencil case. Yes, that was much better considered. I'd forgotten it has an internal ND - that's a serious feature. Does that make it a cinema camera? FX3 users please send in your thoughts.... I was a tad unkind when I mentioned the ZV-1 because there is the ZV-1F which has a 20mm equivalent lens, but what I said was true, so there is that. I guess the old marketing trick of "this thing I'm selling is good for whatever problems you are having" never gets old! At least this one bears some resemblance to the task at hand. If I was vlogging it would be an interesting option. Did you watch any of the other reviews? The setup where it's on a table top looking up at you sure reminds me of this young lady.... Not only does she tend to film herself eating a lot, but I'm 99% sure she uses a G7X. @IronFilm would be proud - in windy / noisy situations she whips out her iPhone and uses it like a lav, sycing in post I would imagine.

Actually, when you turn it sideways, it sort of does? @IronFilm - what's it called when you put two omni mics in vertical alignment facing the direction of your non-vlogging hand???

I'd say that's because vloggers don't want to vlog while wearing headphones, but.....

Indeed! It might even align with @Emanuels philosophy because when it's being held normally it's in widescreen and when you turn it then it becomes the "wrong" alignment of vertical video. So it's oriented around landscape by default, but for those doing vertical it easily supports it. That's quite cool, and the styling is one flavour of "what the future looked like in the past" which are always interesting - this one is quite 'Casio digital watch meets dictaphone' 🙂 One thing I've found fascinating, and sort of prompted my comments about this being an innovation, is that the biggest attempts to sell cameras for "vlogging" were of cameras that were so clearly not suited for vlogging, and yet, there have been many cameras in the past that are much more suited but weren't marketed nearly as much under the 'vlogging' banner. Something like a GoPro is actually a killer vlogging form-factor. It's very small and combined with a handle is still smaller and far less noticeable in public than even a small mirrorless or P&S. The lens is easily wide enough, and when combined with their killer EIS is still really wide, is fixed focus so has no AF issues at all unless you want to focus on something closer than its minimum distance, etc. The DJI Osmo Action is a solid choice too, for all the same reasons, and the Osmo Pocket literally has an integrated gimbal, and is a 20mm lens which doesn't need any cropping to get perfect stabilisation. Actually, it has a tripod thread on the bottom too, so that's covered. In terms of video quality, it seems pretty lacklustre unfortunately, unless it's given really good lighting and conditions. Here's one of the reviews I watched that shows lots of sample footage, I've linked to a section that shows it in less-than-ideal lighting and its got lots of ISO noise + NR + macro-blocking: I thought that the bitrate was low, but actually it's 120Mbps in 4K, so that's not too bad actually. There are a few vloggers that I follow that have Canon G7X cameras and unfortunately I know that because the quality of their images is noticeably lower when they go handheld and it's super shaky or when they go indoors and it's grainy. I'm not sure how much of that is simply the small sensor, or if it's older tech or what, but as long as it's priced appropriately then I think that's fine. Absolutely, especially compared to something like the Sony ZV1, which according to Sony "Watch the announcement of vlog camera ZV-1. A new compact camera from Sony designed for content creators and vloggers." The review in Forbes put it quite plainly: "That flaw? The 20-megapixel Zeiss lens has a 24-70mm lens, so the widest it can get is 24mm, which after accounting for the crop factor of it not being a full-frame camera, plus more cropping from EIS (electronic image stabilization), it's essentially a 30mm lens." Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bensin/2020/06/14/sony-zv-1-review-baffling-decision-almost-ruins-made-for-vlogging-premise/?sh=7a741bff5715 How hilarious - Sony made a vlogging camera with a 30mm FOV! This one has a 19mm lens and the EIS didn't look like it was that much at all - Kai shows a side by side in his video.

I didn't say it's good... just that it's designed for vlogging! The Canon PowerShot V10: Pocketable, flip-up screen, integrated stand 19mm equivalent FOV, and the EIS crop isn't that much Everything else is just like a PowerShot though..... 1" CMOS sensor, Contrast AF, low bitrate, etc It's a sad day when simply combining an ergonomic chassis and a wide enough lens counts as innovation, but it does. I've seen at least one camera YouTuber say that if they keep the form factor and improve the specs then this might tempt them away from the high-end S35/FF cameras they currently use.

Seems like it's the same reason that everyone else thinks more resolution is better... We've been shooting moving images for over a century and most of that time it was genuinely below the optimum resolution/sharpness, and now we have achieved it, very few people are smart enough to realise that we've arrived and we need to move on and focus on something else. Plus, you know, brands do marketing for a reason - it works.... and if your product doesn't fulfil an existing need then job #1 is to create the need.

While we're talking about event shooting... What are people's attitudes towards slow-motion and speeding things up (timelapses)? I'm curious from the point-of-view of the edit, rather than just the logistics of shooting them. @herein2020 already talked about shooting 60p in case you need to stretch footage in post, which is an obvious use of this and makes total sense in the context of social-media event hype trailer style videos. This could be sort-of an "invisible" use where it's not so obvious (or visible at all), but things like 120p conformed to 24p or time-lapses are a lot more obvious. Do you find they have a place in your edits? I'm asking because I'm contemplating what place they have, if any, in my edits, and looking for opinions....

Thinking about this a little further, this won't change much at all. The problem with CGI people is that they're fake.......... but so are a vast number of influencers so no change there. The other problem with AI-generated scripts is that AI tends to "hallucinate" and be factually incorrect as well as potentially getting into the realms of bigotry.......... but so are a vast number of influencers so no change there either. TBH this is true of lots of traditional media too. Keeping Up With the Real-Life Leave-It-To-Beavers of Beverly Hills Who Wants A Wife was actually more typical of TV rather than an exception. It was blogging and then vlogging that actually started the trend of being authentic - TV and film never did it.

I can't remember where I heard it, but apparently there are already some YT channels where the presenter is AI generated and so are the scripts. The person indicated that these were successful channels and that no-one had any idea. I don't know any more details, or if this is true, but it soon will be.

Here's an overview of the FX3 version 3.0 firmware and the "gotchas" that lurk behind the new features Sony claim.. Incidentally, this guys YT channel is very high quality, in terms of production design as well as quality of information. He's a DP-first and tech second kind of guy, so things are all practical and level-headed. My only criticism is that his uploads are few and sometimes far between, but maybe that's a fundamental problem of expertise - those that have it are elsewhere doing things in the real world instead of just being on YT.

Yes, this can be an absolute killer... I filmed a friends birthday party on a GoPro once, which was in a nightclub, and edited it up as a sort of birthday present for her. I put it on a handle and in it's waterproof case (it was an older one that wasn't water resistant when naked) and let them pass it around and sort of crowd-source shots. The footage I got back was great from the perspective of angles and content, and the noise was obviously an issue being that it was an older GoPro and the nightclub was almost pitch black in-between the light pulses/flashes, but the colour rendering from the various "white" light sources was spectacular, and not in a good way. This combined with the GoPros 709 colour science was an incredibly difficult challenge to colour grade, because so many shots were close-enough to neutral to need to be balanced but were so far from proper that it was a real challenge. I see similar things in street markets etc where every vendor has their own brand of 70 CRI LED lights that are all different colours to each other, with some vendors even having a mixture of several different colours just in their own booth. Or even string lights where you can tell which bulbs they're replaced and not matched the existing ones. It's like stepping into an alternative universe where you can see all sorts of colours, but not in a good way. I think this is potentially the most significant factor that defines what focal lengths you need. For my own videos of my family I worked out that what I wanted was environmental portraits, and I wanted to shoot them from where I was standing, which was generally at a comfortable distance from them (here in Australia the personal space distance is on the larger side) but without having other people in-between us. I settled on 35mm equivalent, as I felt that the 28mm that smartphones used at the time was too generic a look, but on my last trip I used the 14mm on the GX85, which works out to be a 31mm in 4K mode and I didn't mind or even notice that it was much wider, so I think I might have gotten over my phobia of the 28mm look. Certainly there are situations where it's too crowded for the 35, and in some situations (for example in a crowded local market in India where you were pressed up against at least two other people at all times) I had to film by using my phones wide angle and do it from above, as if I held my phone at eye height it might have been touching both my head and also my wife's at the same time! For my work I like to get the perspective that the video is from my own individual perspective, so I shoot the things I see from where I am when I'm seeing them, but within the confines of what lenses I have. Obviously this is counter to @mercers point about zooming with your feet, but I find that human vision can easily be "zoomed" in that you can easily narrow your attention when looking at a far away object, so I think there's some flexibility if you're trying for the perspective a human might have rather than just watching events and not being in them (as you are in most narrative work). Yes, your eyes are still a wide-angle lens and light from the table you're sitting at and from the people sitting next to you is still hitting your retina but because you're staring at the sailboat out on the water you're no longer aware of the people and the table, you've kind of zoomed in cognitively. Absolutely. My experience has mostly been that I'm experiencing all of them at all times!

I wonder when we'll see an AI that you point at a YT video and it creates a transcript for you to read. People like Gerald etc who script their videos speak in a relatively logical structure that wouldn't be too hard to read (unlike the vloggers who just do stream of consciousness to camera - those transcripts would be unreadable). Maybe it exists already?

I also agree with @mercer about building a collection of MF vintage primes, and to get as fast a set as you can, but if you're really budget constrained then just focus on what focal lengths you'd need/use. You should also consider the 'worse' budget lenses - the more I looked into vintage lenses the more that it's the imperfections that give the image its feel, and the more I ran across people discovering budget lenses. Take this for example, a recent 'discovery':

Yeah, marketing is tricky. I suspect that these days all products are priced so that the "join today with the link below and get 10% off!" is actually the real price and by having every sales channel being careful to use their unique code you are basically adding traceability to your sales funnels. You could recommend to the event organisers that each post they make in the marketing campaign feeds a unique ID to their sales funnel, that way they'd be able to get at least some sense of how many people saw the hype edit and then bought tickets. Of course, lots would see the reel, then go to the main site later, or buy tickets through some other channel. Do you deliver one edit, or a few? I'm not sure how the economics goes, but maybe there's an opportunity for you to deliver one edit like you currently do, plus a few shorter teasers? Once you've edited the normal edit you do, the other ones could all be based on a single shorter audio sequence (maybe just a single build up / release, and maybe only having 6-15 shots in total) and would all just include shots that were already in your normal edit. You could feature only one sponsor in each of these teasers, and just edit these in bulk, replacing the sponsor on each one and replacing the crowd shots for identical but different shots. If the sponsors were included in multiple videos (the main one and their own teaser) maybe the event organisers can do a better deal with the sponsors perhaps.. just a thought. Social media people who are live posting images also have the potential to sell this years event by posting images from this years event, rather than a hype reel from last years event. It's difficult to do that with video - have you seen the "same day edit" thing that some wedding videographers do where they show an edit of the wedding at the reception? That's film-making at it's most extreme! Two great rules of thumb I find very useful are: For each shot, when the cut happens and this clip appears your brain starts looking at it because it's new, but there's a moment when your brain says "ok, I saw that" and stops looking.. you should cut just before that happens. The edit should feel too fast when you're editing it. I've cut things to be the right speed and then when I've come back to them weeks later I found they felt a bit slow and needed tightening up a bit. Obviously with hype reels you're trying to cut fast and really make it a spectacle, but it's a good rule of thumb I've found. I've gone through a learning curve to get here, and I guess it's easy to say that things don't matter, but that's only true once you've developed an understanding of how to use all the technical settings, which focal lengths and apertures you use and how they relate to the shots you get and the situation and approach you have to where and how you shoot, etc etc. The other challenge that I have that you probably don't have is the size of the camera rig. For example, if I'm using the GH5 out in public then it gets far more attention than the GX85. Even the GX85 is less noticeable when it's got the 14mm pancake lens on it vs the 12-35/2.8. In that sense, knowing how good the 2x digital zoom is matters because I'm pushing the equipment right to its limits because I can't just rig up more without creating issues in post (like people in the shot staring at me because they've noticed I'm filming). Even this is larger than I would like..... It's amazing what you see in the edit that you didn't see when shooting! Early on I worked out that hitting stop immediately after something happens is a bad idea, partly because the camera often chops off the last second, but also because having some room to breathe in an edit is useful. So now when I think I've got the shot I count to three before hitting stop, but it's funny how many times I've tuned out while shooting and then when I get back I see something great happen that I have no recollection of and the clip just ends right in the middle of it. One thing I learned from street photography was to always be aware of what is happening around you and to anticipate the moments before they happen so you can be setup and capture them. I guess maybe I've switched to that mode during the 3s wait at the end of a shot and didn't see what was happening right in front of me! Absolutely. I also really like shooting - much more than editing actually. So I am frequently treating shooting days as one of those 'how many different shots and variety can I get' photography challenges, but with video. This often means I have a good variety of shots, but often means I have 20 shots of the same thing if I happened to be somewhere with only one thing worth shooting lol. It is funny though, I might have thought I got heaps of shots at a particular location but then in the edit it always seems like so much less, so much so that I've often wondered if clips are missing but when I try and recall all the shots I took they're all there on the card. Too much is not enough. You have to experience it to see it. If you're curious then make the test films I suggested. 60p would be great in that instance, but considering that most of my footage is normal speed, how would you suggest I conform the 60p onto a 24p timeline? It would result in a 3:2 cadence, which I don't really like the idea of. Plus my bitrate would be stretched significantly. I'd contemplate shooting 48p but none of my cameras have that, which is unfortunate. I'm also shooting on iPhone, GX85, and GH5, so they'd all have to have it. I've tried a strap in the past, even a few variations, and also things like gorilla pods etc. I'm a much more agile shooter than these things tend to allow and I find they get in the way too much. I'm just as likely to be doing an overhead follow shot from as high as I can reach, putting the camera out the window of trains etc, or doing low angles etc. I've also moved away from movement in my shots because I didn't really know what I was doing in the edit with them and they tended to restrict my options. Now I mostly just try and hold the camera as steady as I can (considering it's so small). I often have to add stabilisation in post and sometimes get frustrated with how much movement there was, but then I remember that I was freezing cold and the wind was howling and I was holding the camera at full arms-length, so there were reasons. I've chased better stabilisation for years but have concluded now that anything I can do will make the camera larger (so the footage suffers in other ways) and whatever camera shake there is after the IBIS and my best efforts to hold it still is actually a reflection of what happened and so has a place in the final edit. A nice smooth slider footage of an arctic base being blown away in a snowstorm wouldn't be the best aesthetic to convey the experience!

Basically, yes. To get from DWG back to 709, the common approaches to use are: CST to 709/2.4 CST from DWG to Arri then use the Arri LogC-709 LUT CST from DWG to Arri then use a Film Look LUT (PFE) like 2383 or 2393 etc As far as I understand it, only the new HDR colour wheels are meant to be "colour space aware" but I've found that the normal LGG wheel panel also works great, much better than I remember them working in years past. This is particularly useful if you have a BM Colour Panel (I have the Micro one) which can be used with either the HDR or normal LGG wheels but is more suited to the normal LGG wheels than the HDR ones.

I've found that the more I learn about colour grading the better my cameras become. I don't know if it's Resolve or just my experience but I've had a bit of a breakthrough in the last couple of years by using CSTs to change the cameras colour space to Davinci's Wide colour space, grading in that colour space, and then doing a CST / CST+LUT to get back to 709. I use this workflow even if the camera shoots in 709. This seems to give a process where WB changes and exposure changes work as intended instead of ruining the images, and you end up with great and consistent contrast and saturation, even between cameras of different manufacturers. I always struggled to get good colour from the GH5, and found the colour from the newer FF models to be much nicer, but Resolve now basically fixes this, it really is incredible.

I've developed the habit of hitting record on the camera prior to composing and focusing so that I can maximise the number of recorded usable frames that are available for the edit. My process is typically: Carry camera around in hand, with wrist-strap for safety/security If I'm in an interesting spot, camera is on and kept awake (half-pressing the shutter every so often prevents it sleeping) When I see something I start to raise the camera from by my side, and I hit record on the way up I compose and focus as quickly as possible Record the shot I find that even with this method I often end up with clips that have 1s of usable video in them once the focus and composition have been achieved, which are hard to use in an edit and had I been just 1s quicker I could have had a 2s clip and it would have been profoundly more useful in the edit. I sometimes reframe in post slightly so I can use earlier frames if the camera was still moving a bit. Literally 1s matters.

You've clearly never run a site or a business! If you've never run a site then you'll have no idea how much effort goes into running it and maintaining it in the background. Sites require constant maintenance as they are constantly under siege from spammers, hackers, new user requests etc. Even if you disable comments and logins and all the Web 2.0 functionality you still need to update the software regularly or hackers will pWn your site and turn it into an ad for viagra or to support Putin. That's the site, but to keep paying for it you need to have an active bank account and need to keep putting money in it. That bank account was probably under a business name, and to keep that active you need to keep the business name active, which means filing tax returns and dealing with whatever other accounting and government tasks are required. Did your business have anything else associated with it? Offices, parking, permits? You'll need to manage those things too. The list is truly endless. There's a good reason that social media sites like Medium or Wordpress or Facebook or YouTube are so popular - because maintaining your own platform is literally a full-time job.

I don't think so. Most of the photography blog were just endlessly repeating "more resolution cameras, more resolution lenses, more resolution computers" but using different words over and over again. The odd post of "15 things to do with a fisheye lens" disguised this myopia, but it was the water that the entire camera internet swam in, and still mostly is. Now cameras have huge resolution and social-media can sustain the endless resolution-navel-gazing that people seem to want. I think there's room for one or two blogs that discuss non-resolution-based-topics, but that assumes that the writers actually have enough knowledge of non-resolution-based-topics to keep a blog alive. That's drastically fewer people than there were camera blogs, thus the "market correction" we're currently experiencing.