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I think the best way to do things is this: Test your equipment to understand its limitations Use your equipment to shoot real footage Edit and deliver a real project Look at what issues / limitations there were in the final edit, then.. If you can fix them by using your equipment differently, do that (and do lots of tests) If you can fix them by learning to plan/capture/light/edit/colour/master better then go learn (understand the theory, then go do lots of tests and practice) If you can't fix them any other way AND they're worth spending the money to solve AND it won't hurt you in some other way THEN spend money to fix them Go to step 2 That's it. Only ever fix problems that you encounter in post on real projects - the rest is just BS. Step 7 is particularly brutal as well, because often we're faced with choices where we can improve one thing but it kills other aspects of the process. This is where the "60 seconds can seem so long" comes in. I routinely find that I have clips that contain 1s of good video but that's hard to use in an edit and I'd actually want to include 1s prior to that, but I wasn't fast enough in setting up the shot in order to get it. I developed the technique of hitting record on the camera before I frame and focus because it means that I can use the clip from the very first frame that is in focus. In that sense even 1s is the difference between a usable shot and it being very difficult to use.

I totally understand why people are trying to buy their way to better videos, it's a much easier experience to research cameras and discuss (dream) about what cool new things you could buy, and it's brutal to admit you don't know much about a subject and start studying it (forcing your brain to work hard) and to do that for months and months. Unfortunately, that's what it takes to actually become a better film-maker. I posted over in the "Once in a lifetime shoot" thread about the Tokyo episode of Parts Unknown that won a bunch of awards, but long story short, the cinematography didn't include any shots that were amazing in a grandiose kind of way, but it had a huge variety of solid shots from creative angles the editing and sound design were absolutely spectacular - end result.. awards and nominations, and a great viewing experience that is far from the pedestrian nature of most professional content, let alone us mere mortals. The innovative nature of that episode alone is enough to make you crawl into the foetal position under the blankets, but the news is actually tremendous... most of the content in the world is so bland by comparison that to create solid professional-level edits you don't have to get to knowing 80% of what the greats know - a solid 20% will do just fine.

Don't buy anything unless the lack of it gets mentioned by a client, or drives you nuts in the edit. Instead, focus on colour grading, editing, sound design, storytelling, etc etc. Some of the biggest videos that get the most views or likes etc are shot exclusively iPhones, lots of working pros are shooting on 5+ year old cine/ENG style cameras, and some of histories most critically acclaimed TV and movies were shot in SD on a single prime or zoom lens - if you can't make good enough videos with your Z6 and a Ninja Star and a few AF or MF lenses, then the problem isn't the camera.

Or so complicated that it's only Gerald that will tell you that when you're in a certain codec and connect a HDMI monitor then the eye-detect AF doesn't work any more. That's a real example from the S5, and it was mentioned by others too, but I've seen heaps of gotchas like this that matter to people and no reviewers ever dug far enough to find them.

Great post with lots of practical / useful info! A few thoughts.. I would argue that no-one can help imparting their style to anything they shoot, simply because shooting involves so many decisions that it's practically inevitable that everyone will make them differently, at least in subtle ways. I can tell you, being someone who has never shot for a client, my "style" would likely involve not keeping the client happy, and based on some of the amateurish coverage I've seen online I think lots of working "pros" are also falling hugely short of hitting it out of the park, so if you're really delivering what the client wants then that's a big statement about your style right there 🙂 How close do you think the low-light performance of modern FF cameras are to letting you use a single lens (maybe a 24-70/2.8) for all (sensible) lighting conditions? When I combined my GH5 with the 17.5mm f0.95 my testing showed that the combo saw better in low-light than I did, so I was happy with that. Obviously the lens wasn't the sharpest wide open and this was to my tolerance of noise levels etc, but I have pretty good night vision and I figure if I can film everything I can see then that's success. There's a critical distinction between "feeling like they were there" and "feeling jealous they weren't there" and I think that the former suggests using a 35mm of 50mm lens and the latter suggests using the full range of focal lengths to make everything seem as awesome as possible. In terms of a lens giving the "feeling like I was there" feeling it's a subtle thing, but definitely there, and it's something that you can learn to see if you're interested in it. I know you're a working pro and are getting what you want so there's no need to explore this if you're not curious. For those that are curious to understand how lens choice can give this kind of feeling, there are some fun exercises I can recommend. The best one is this: Get a camera that can shoot in three focal lengths, a phone with three cameras is a great choice. If you're not using your phone I recommend either 16/35/80mm or 24/50/100+mm combinations. Film a very quick video, maybe of 8 shots, and film those same 8 shots with each lens, making sure to match the composition between the lenses. This means getting closer with the wide and being much further away with the tele. I suggest, to make this fun, making a video of an outing to a cafe with a friend who will let you film them. Either shoot each shot in quick succession on the same outing, or make a shotlist and go for coffee three times! Edit the 3 versions together with the same exact timing and matching the framing (crop in post to fine-tune it). Watch the three back-to-back and see how they make you feel about the person in the video, and about the experience in general. If you don't feel the difference, watch them on loop for a few cycles each day and see if you gradually start to feel differently about them. I haven't done the above directly, but as I tend to shoot videos using prime lenses, and often shoot little personal projects with a single prime, I've had lots of experience of making videos with one lens (anywhere from 15mm to 80mm FOV) and seeing the differences. One of the things that made me graduate from the "what new camera should I buy to make my videos better" mindset was really understanding what requirements a good edit had and where I was falling short, and that was in getting sufficient variety of shots. Not only do the variety of shots allow for keeping the visual interest up by having lots of shots ready to cut up into faster montages, and not only did more shots mean that the ones that made it to the final edit were more visually interesting, but it also gave me more shots to solve problems in editing. I've heard editors talk about editing as mostly solving problems, and I think that's true. To this end, I realised that just shooting more shots was a higher priority than the absolute quality of the shots I was getting. Of course, you can't shoot a million shots that all look like crap, but if you're making videos that are more b-roll driven (like you and I are) rather than dialogue driven, then the shots don't need to all look spectacular, just solid and with good composition and with the technical elements done properly. There's an episode of Parts Unknown in Tokyo that won or got nominated for a bunch of awards (American Cinema Editors Awards: Best Edited Non-Scripted Series - won, Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards: Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program - nominated, Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards: Outstanding Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program - nominated, Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards: Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction or Reality Program (Single or Multi-Camera) - nominated). It's free to watch on YT, even if you don't watch the whole thing (although I recommend it highly highly highly), just watch the intro to give a taste of the content of the episode... I pulled it into Resolve and cut it up on the timeline (as I showed in this thread) and the Tokyo episode was spectacular for a few reasons... Over 40 minutes it contained about 2500 clips, which is a cut per 1.04 seconds on average. But, that's not the full story, there are shots in there that are 9s and there are shots in there that are 4 frames. Lots of them! The edit sort of ebbs and flows, creating and building and releasing tension, etc. The shots aren't special. I mean, it's professional cinematography, but just skip around randomly in the YT video and see if these are breathtaking shots or if they're just solid normal shots that you and I could take. It's the latter. This is professional TV but using techniques that are rarely seen outside of trendy puke-inducing YT travel influencers. It includes speed-ramps, extreme slow-motion, crazy wide angle follow shots, overhead shots, under-shots looking straight up at people, etc. This is professional TV edited to the music to the extent it's more musically-driven in sections than most music videos are. It's shot in 1080p, on limited DR cameras (some shots in this or other episodes have the skies clipped or other issues) and often uses slow-mo footage at normal speed, which means it has very short SS video - and it still won an award for cinematography..... In short, it's a film-making masterclass for anyone who wants to edit fast, to music, for shot-on-location unscripted materials. Here's the timeline of it: V1 and A1/A2 are the actual show cut up at the edit points, the V1 on top shows the different sections of the show (different topics), the bottom three audio tracks are (top to bottom) voiceover, on-scene audio, and music. I use this view to understand the macro structure of the edit, which reveals how much of the show is essentially a music video, how much voice-over there is, etc. Here's a little bit zoomed right in to show the ebb and flow of the edit: For scale, the selected clip is 3s16f and the ones after the playhead are 7-9 frames long. What is clear from this section is that there's an interview section with music in the background and a 'normal' editing pace, then the music comes up and we get very fast editing of the band, then it goes back to the interview again. I have cut up 10 episodes of Parts Unknown, as well as a few other episodes of food shows like Chefs Table (as these are all heavily shot-on-location unscripted b-roll and music-heavy shows much closer to what I film than narrative or dialogue driven shows) and my overall lesson that I took away was these: The camera basically doesn't matter except in how fast it is to shoot with and how little it gets in the way The camera settings basically don't matter except if they make the footage literally unusable Get lots of shots and get as much variety and coverage as you can Learn to edit Learn to do sound design Everyone on YT who isn't also a working pro is either a featherweight or an outright joke who is just wasting everyones time To this end on my last trip I moved from my GH5 to the GX85 and using my phone as a second camera with a wide angle. Yeah, that's one of the most important aspects. The biggest critic of how you shoot is the person that needs to edit it together. I'm still getting to the edit and seeing gaps and all manner of issues in what I shot and trying to make mental notes for next time, but I'm also remembering the edit process when I'm out shooting so I'm learning and improving. TBH most folks around here talk about cameras like they exist in a little bubble and it's clear that most are trying to compensate for their lack of colour grading skills, editing skills, or sound design skills.

Is there also the question of style? The traditional thinking is to use the tools and techniques that allow you to take whatever shots present themselves in the scenario you're put in. This is what leads to the hand-wringing that comes with wanting a 16-200mm F1.2 lens that weighs under 1lb and fits in your pocket. The alternative is to abandon the premise that you need to able to take every possible shot and instead focus on the shots that matter. World-famous photographers have developed a signature style that people hire them for, which often involves a very limited variety (but very high quality) in their output. I understand that the client will have expectations of at least some variety in coverage, but I wonder if there's a middle ground? ie, what options from the below can be eliminated? Super-wide (<24mm) - used for taking shots of the whole venue, or of one or two centre-framed subjects in close quarters Shallow-DoF shots Telephoto shots (>70mm) - tight portraits or for compressing the background If you can work out what you can do without, and still keep the client happy, then it will better help you work out what to take. For example, I can imagine a situation where a 24-70/4 and a 35/1.8 could give enough coverage but also not be prohibitive. Or even a 16-35/2.8 and a 70/2. In terms of variety in the shots, you can shoot wide/mid/tight/macro from high/mid/low/overhead angles which is 16 different 'shots', and by the time you get a variety of those with each subject you'll easily have enough variety. Plus the variety of shots you get will also be subject to how quickly you can work. If I can work five-times faster than the next guy then I can get five times as many different types of shots, so even if I was limited to a single prime I'd still have the advantage just through quantity. There's also the goal that people 'feel like they were there'. For that, you should really be filming the whole thing with a single 35mm or 50mm prime as that's how the human eye sees. If you make a nice edit with 16mm and 100mm shots then it's not going to have that same feel.

DR.. sure. A camera can have as many stops of DR as you like - unless you're delivering in HDR then you just have the problem of what to do with all those stops in post. If you spread them all out evenly then you end up with footage that looks like it hasn't been converted from log to 709. Where do you think the "flat look" trend amongst YouTubers came from? Think about it - professional outputs don't lack contrast and saturation, just the YouTubers. The flat look is when the DR of your camera exceeds your ability to colour grade the footage. In many ways then, more DR is actually hurting you rather than helping. Don't believe the specs - better specs are only "better" when you don't actually make films.

The number of stops in IBIS is irrelevant - except for marketing purposes. The difference between a great IBIS and meh IBIS systems isn't the number of stops, it's things like the travel of the system (how large the movement can be before it runs out of travel to compensate), how fast it can react (high-frequency performance), motor strength, etc. When you see an IBIS system failing to compensate for camera movement it will be limitations of these aspects. The GH5 has similar number of stops as many other cameras at the time with inferior overall performance, it was some combination of other factors that made the difference between them.

Great job! This has that quality where everything seems to flow nicely and the film-making doesn't draw attention to itself, which is a lot easier said than done.

There are a few things that would benefit you to understand. Firstly, no camera on the market these days is "accurate" - they all apply a strong look to the image. Those that apply a colour profile (either 709 or log) apply a significant number of colour tweaks to the image, and those that shoot RAW get similar tweaks in post when converted to 709 by a colour space transform or a LUT etc. Secondly, all the looks from all the manufacturers share a number of common traits. I've compared quite a lot of different cameras over the years and shared the results here, so go digging if you're curious. These traits are essentially things that the human eye finds desirable, and they began with film (which was in development for decades and decades with the all the worlds best image scientists all working on it) and then when digital gradually took over this processing continued in development. If you don't agree with this, or aren't aware of it, find footage of a colour checker from as many camera brands as you can and just look at the curve applied to the greyscale and look at a vector scope of where the hues are falling - they're not falling where they should if the image was even remotely "correct". Thirdly, non-camera nerds see the world very differently to us, and it's not like we all agree on everything. I suggest you find one of these people that prefers Fuji and load some images into Resolve and start adjusting things and see which things they don't care about and which things makes them hate the image when you change them by only a tiny amount. This is how you can find out, in broad terms, what it is that they like and are sensitive to about Fuji in-particular.

I think there are three things going on. 1) People can't colour grade and they're trying to buy their way out of learning. As Resolve has grown in popularity the number of people that got access to a colour-managed workflow or colour space transformations has grown, and the number of people that can get the look they want from whatever camera they are using has also increased. 2) People don't remember what film looks like. The number of "filmic" images that look nothing like film has gradually turned from a trickle to a vast deluge, to the point now that many people trying to get the look of film may have never seen it, or wouldn't recognise it even if it showed up with the film-strip not yet cropped out. Over the last year or so I've been rewatching older movies and TV shows shot on film, from back when this was how all TV and movies were shot, and at times I've watched several hours of film a day for weeks or months straight. Most so-called "filmic" content online looks nothing like film, in practically any way. It does, however, remind me a lot of 4K GoPro footage, but with 15 times the dynamic range of both a GoPro and most film processes. 3) People have changed what they like. As time goes on, "cinematic" looks more and more like video every day. The so-called "cinematic" videos that people like, speak fondly of, share, and aspire to, all look nothing like what cinema actually looks like. I lost count of the number of times I argued online about sharpness and resolution and depth of field and colour science and colour grading and began to question myself in the face of almost universal online opposition.... then I'd go see a movie and I'd be reminded that I was right and everyone else was blind, has stopped going to the cinema, is full of shit, or all of the above.

Why not Alexa 35 with one of those Angenieux EZ zooms? That's also not quite a camcorder.

Why camcorders aren't discussed? Simple - pure prejudice. For all the claims of people being shills for one company or other, online forums are almost universally brainwashed to prefer whatever the manufacturers have been cramming down our throats most recently. I suggest doing an objective comparison between the various options - mirrorless and camcorders - across the same criteria. Even writing a simple list of criteria is beyond the level of analysis that most are capable of doing prior to four or even five-figure purchases. Taking a critical look at how important those criteria are and doing real world experiments to verify them would make you rarer still. Linking them to the goal of making a creative end-product would make you practically a unicorn. Beware though, the more critically you evaluate things, the less you will 'fit' online.

What's VP? Virtual Productions? Is that for green-screening and VFX?

Test it and see. It's free and you'll know how it sounds.

From the April edition of Film and Digital Times page 42: https://www.fdtimes.com/pdfs/free/120FDTimes-Apr2023-150.pdf and later on... and It also showed that the BMMCC were put in fireproof boxes. BMMCC and P4K on a €30,000,000 film shot in 2021 that screened on IMAX. Just goes to show that these cameras are still relevant and in active use in productions larger than anything being discussed on here.

Thanks, that's good to know. My main focus for this is the GX85, which doesn't have a mic input, so the internals will have to do. I also shoot a lot with my phone now, but I'm not sure how I would integrate windcovers there. I looked at external mics for it but they're not super pocketable, so I'm still pondering that one.

Nice.. subtle, but these have good shape. The WanderingDP examples are typically a lot darker than you'd want for corporate work. Maybe that's what you were thinking of 🙂

To elaborate a bit more on the lighting discussion, I heard about shooting on the shadow side from Wandering DP, who does excellent cinematography breakdowns on YT: https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingdp/videos I went through a phase of binging his videos and although I couldn't find a good self-contained example of him talking about it, just look at all the thumbnails on the videos of his channel and you'll see that in most of them you are looking at the shadow side of their face (just look at their nose). I highly highly recommend his stuff if you haven't seen it - he's obviously a working pro and his videos contain just as much talk about how to light so you can work faster and deal with the sun moving throughout the shoot day as he does talking about how to get things to look nice (they actually go together too rather than competing with each other).

Nice. Production design is cool, and the skulls as the drums made me lol.

Definitely agree about shooting into the darker side of the subjects face, as @PPNS suggests, if you have control of the lighting etc. I'm also wondering @hyalinejim if you could get the fidgeters to stand right next to a desk so they had their thighs/belly against the edge? Maybe that would stop them moving around so much? It would also help keep them in focus too 🙂

People should be recording in whatever is the highest quality they can, absolutely. My point was that it's at least 44k 16bit, which absolutely creams video! These look ok, but my question on these things is how well do the adhesive pads work. I've bought a cheap no-name brand variation of these and the back of the fabric was a loose mesh that was about the worst surface you could imagine to try and stick anything to with (what is essentially) sticky-tape, and I can't see anything about these being any different. That loose weave is how all faux fur seems to be manufactured, and the images of these things seems to indicate they're no different? Even their product page indicates that the 30 stickies only gives it 30 uses, rather than them being a robust solution. If I bought these for my in-camera mics I don't want to have to re-install them every time I pick up the camera. https://www.rycote.com.au/products/micro-windjammer-30-uses I'd be happy to be proven wrong though. I'm wondering if multiple layers of a thinner material might be a better bet, if I alternated laters of fabric and adhesive tape. I bought a roll of 3M double-sided tape so I could custom-cut the shape so it could have a large sticky area and hopefully keep things in place for more than one or two uses.

I'm also wondering this. I plan on doing some tests to work out what the best solution is, but I haven't done it yet so can't speak to results. I do think, however, that the dead cat style is likely hard to beat because it's sort of got two 'modes' - when there's no wind the fur is sticking up in random directions and letting sound in without much resistance, but when there's a gust of wind then it pushes the fur flat and that forms a barrier against letting the gusts of wind through. Unless something has that kind of behaviour then it's likely to block more sound when there's no wind and block the gusts of wind less when they happen. However if you are looking for a smaller solution with good performance, I suspect that some sort of hybrid with multiple layers of different materials might be a good solution as the manufacturers are likely to have just gone with size rather than trying to engineer a more complex and higher-performing compact solution.

10s is positively glacial! Wow..... Yeah, those are all so much more compact that the Rode VideoMic Pro.... that's what I ended up buying years ago and it works well but its size and shape are definitely behind those ones above. It's nice to see that progress is being made. The other thing to take into account is the shape of the chassis that they put the mic capsule in. The more directional mics are more directional because the body is longer and all the holes along the sides all create an acoustic chamber where the sound from the sides gets cancelled out. If not designed properly the chassis can give the capsule a funny sound, even with the same electronics... acoustics are a very complicated topic!

Great to hear you've found something that works, that's the end goal after all. Just to comment on the above for anyone else reading who might be curious, matching the EQs of mics isn't that difficult in practice and doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to not notice. The tonal balance of any given audio source is much more likely to be impacted by the acoustic environment that the sound is in and the location and pickup pattern of the mic in that environment. You can make a piano sound thin, dreamy, harsh, velvety, full, grating, resonant, damped, etc etc etc by just moving the microphone and a blanket around in the room its in. Mic-ing up a piano is one of the skills that takes decades of experience to do at the level of a well respected studio engineer - I once rented a piano and spent six months making recordings with it and the same mic so I'm aware of this. From a technical standpoint, audio is stunningly higher quality than video is (if that's your reference point). It's uncompressed, 16bit (or more), and has over 44,000 samples per second. In professional audio settings audio can get EQ'd again and again and again and no-one is fragile about it. The internet practically a desert when it comes to deep knowledge about what audio quality actually is and how things actually work, and the level of understanding that most 'reviews' show is less than most YouTubers who think colour grading is buying the right LUT. I mean, there is knowledge out there, but to find it (and discern what's correct and what's not) requires skills almost equivalent to being able to live off the land in an actual desert - you have to know what you're looking for and where to look. EQ is practically the last thing that you would judge quality on, because it's the first thing that you can fix in post, and pay basically zero cost in terms of audio quality. The only real barriers to EQing something to sound how you want it is the access you have to decent quality plugins (although the basic ones get nicer and nicer) and the skill to use it. Learning to EQ something to get the sound you like is roughly equivalent to learning what a log profile is and how to convert it to 709. Anyway, rant over. EQ is one of the first and most fundamental of audio production skills and shouldn't form the entire basis of how you judge equipment, let alone the entire skillset of the reviewers you listen to.