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I'm guessing you're quite sensitive to 180 shutter then? I see more and more wedding videographers and even high-end YT channels use super-short shutter speeds rather than NDs. With phones exposing via SS I think that most social-media-oriented folks have just gotten used to it.

Did you think they were breaking the 180 line? I'm curious because I didn't notice anything like that, or don't remember noticing anyway. Maybe you're more sensitive to that than I am.

I think it's highly dependent on the situation. This article details the process to get the below shot - apparently these birds dive at around 25mph and even when using 10fps burst mode on a D4 most frames didn't even include the bird at all so it took about 720,000 photos to get a perfect one: In terms of if it matters or not, I find that in my own personal work my experience of shooting is highly dependent on if I feel that I'm getting footage I like. That might be different if I was merely trying to please a client in order to put food on the table and new lenses in the collection, but who knows - we're all different and keeping up morale and creativity is a personal thing.

Yeah, that's the kind of challenge I have with cameras.. the rules aren't clear, the security guards aren't experts, and you don't want to have to leave anything with them (or sometimes you simply can't leave anything with them). One temple I went to in Bangkok had a sign... 8mm film cameras are OK, 16mm film cameras are not. This was in 2018. I wish I'd taken a photo of it. I'm not sure how they'd have classified my GH5, so I tried to keep a low profile.

Here's a video showing some ARRI Alexa Classic footage upscaled to 8K with Topaz. It's in bits throughout the second half of the video. https://youtu.be/YJpQCSFZMTM (link won't expand, not sure why) TBH I thought the results looked quite mixed - some shots looked much higher resolution but other shots just looked the same (had the same 2K film-like rendering and noise) so I guess it depends on your tastes and input footage. This might be a better real-world test as it doesn't seem to be only the cherry-picked footage that gives great results.

Oh yeah, extra resolution is noticeable - especially when you're the one taking the shots and able to pixel-pee in post. I guess the challenge I have with high resolution is that it only excites my brain - any image that has made me FEEL anything has either been 2MP or analog, and most of the seriously emotional images were actually slightly blurry. I don't know if higher resolution stops me from feeling something or stops the shooter from creating emotive images, but whatever it is, as resolution goes up they become less important.

I've heard he wants to take it in the direction of WeChat. If that's true, and he pulls it off, he'll make an absolute killing. There is definitely demand for many of the extra features that WeChat has that twitter doesn't, so it'll be a matter of implementation. Twitter seems to have been devoid of any serious innovation for quite a long time now.

How do they assess if it's a MILC or fixed lens? I wonder if a small enough camera with a "fixed" looking lens would work?

Yes, being able to anticipate the moment and compensate for it by hitting the button early would be highly dependent on how predictable the perfect moment is, how long the delay time is, and how good you are at compensating for the delay. It seems like you have particularly good timing and are operating in less predictable scenarios so the performance on offer isn't sufficient to meet your needs. Pity. Ultimately though, you have to go with what gets you the most keepers. After all, cameras are tools, not toys, right 🙂

I've found that adjusting diopters can be really tricky because if you adjust them then your eye just adjusts to compensate, so your eyes kind of don't tell you when the diopter is adjusted wrong - you just end up with eye strain after a while and you don't really know why.

Getting used to there being a delay in something is absolutely a thing. I've had the experience several times where I went from something that had a delay to something that had less delay and the sensation that you get is that the thing happens before you hit the button! Obviously it wasn't beforehand, but I was so used to the delay being there that my brain had eliminated it. Some people may be better at adapting to small delays than others of course.

What is the bottle-neck on most cameras? is it the sensor, or some chip that is receiving the data down the line? If it's the latter then it could be something that could get a bump by buying a faster processor for whatever function that is, but if it's the former then it's really about the sensor and I suspect there's probably no free lunch in that regard. If you want a faster read-out then you tend to only get one with lower resolutions or lower bit-depths. In that sense, manufacturers have been upgrading the data rates but instead of giving us the same resolution as the last generation and better RS, they're giving us more pixels and same/worse RS. Just another reason why this resolution fetish is screwing the majority of us for the sake of a few people who actually benefit.

I'm also downloading, but it'll take some time (both to download and to check them out!). Thanks, this should be really interesting. Do you have some thoughts after shooting it? I presume you've had a bit of a look at how they compare?

No, but I think it might have been either on the DSLR Video Shooter YT channel or on the Anamorphic on a Budget channel. I vaguely remember that it might have been in a monitor roundup style video where they compare various monitors, but I can't recall exactly. Hope that helps, although googling things like "custom desqueeze monitor" etc might generate some results?

Or mil-vuc Or mil-vac Or M-ilv-K In terms of the label, it doesn't help at all. Every camera from an Alexa LF to the OG BMPCC to a Sony VG900 Handycam is a MILVC.

That makes more sense. I'm assuming the de-squeeze functions of the monitors aren't orientation specific - otherwise just tilting the monitor would fix it. I'm not aware of any, but I'd suggest that @Tito Ferradans might be the best person to ask, if he's around and notices I've tagged him 🙂 I know there are monitors around where you can enter the squeeze factor yourself rather than choosing pre-defined values, but I don't know if they would go <1.

I'm confused. Anamorphic lenses squeeze the image and the monitor de-squeezes it so that round things stay round and your actors don't sue you. If you're shooting with an anamorphic lens then wouldn't you still need to have a monitor that desqueezes it? Or do you want to have people looking like bean poles / trolls?

This is how I operate my GH5 - using MF primes and getting extra reach using the 2x digital zoom which recording 1080p on the GH5 is still oversampled from 2.5K. The only issue with such a setup is if your lenses are sharp enough! Hardly anyone seems to shoot this way as it's basically never talked about, which means that this feature set isn't that common - even the GH6 doesn't have it. It's a big deal for me because I've literally designed my lens set around this feature. I agree that it should be compared to video/cinema cameras, not hybrids, although these days there's a spectrum on the video-side of cameras between completely manual cinema cameras and completely automatic video cameras, with many cameras sitting somewhere in-between, so a lot of cameras have video features that are hybrids of cinema and video cameras. This spectrum isn't something that most people are really that aware of, and people just seem to look at the video functions of cameras as a random soup of potential features that have no overall structure or philosophy, which TBH couldn't be further from the truth.

There were sign replacement VFX shots? Didn't notice them at all.

Have you tried adjusting the EVF diopter? It sounds like yours isn't adjusted properly. My understanding of how to adjust them is to set it so that your eye doesn't have to change focus when looking at the subject directly and looking at the subject through the viewfinder. These adjustments are super-powerful - my dad wears pretty strong glasses (which obviously aren't compatible with putting your eye right up to the viewfinder) and he's always been able to adjust them to compensate for his vision, so they're at least as powerful as a pair of relatively strong prescription glasses.

Yes, the FP is a fascinating data point - having a spectacular image but it not being "better" in many/most of the specs that we tend to pay attention to. Food for thought.

+1. I think that how the camera makes you feel when operating is very under-rated, and even more-so if you're also directing. I've shot with cameras before that just make you feel like you're fighting it the whole time - the exact opposite headspace than you want to be in when doing something creative. I know that I find the GH5 to be particularly pleasing to use, partly because it's a reliable and comfortable in the hand, but also because I know the images it captures are almost always really nice to edit / colour in post, to which I attribute the IBIS, high-bitrate 10-bit log, and my favourite lenses which are fast primes.

Fun thread! I'm happy to dig up a few stills. Did you want nice easy ones, or some more challenging ones? 🙂

Yeah, I thought that 12-bit RAW sensor readout (and the corresponding 10bit log) was pretty much the standard on almost all cameras that have a log profile. I thought that some cameras had a 14-bit readout but it wasn't that common. Of course, that is just another feather in the cap for 5D with Magic Lantern - 14-bit RAW straight to the card. Still a standout spec and stand-out image, 14 years later.

The latest batteries for the OG BMPCC get WAY more than that - I got 49 minutes of RAW recording from one 1200mAh battery, and 33 minutes of Prores HQ from a different battery (but it wasn't fully charged). I unpacked the brand new Wasabi 1200mAh batteries and put them on to charge, so the test was done taking a brand new battery straight out of the charger. I was recording in RAW the card filled up after 23m, with the battery at 54%, so I formatted the card and hit record again, and when it got to 5% battery life it was at 26m, which makes 49m for one the life of a single 1200mAh battery. That's probably a best-case scenario, but it's pretty darn good if you ask me. Second brand new battery recording Prores HQ died around the 20% battery mark, and recorded a 33:22s file. I'm not sure if it charged properly as the charger kept turning off but it only registered 81% in the camera when I put it in, so maybe not fully charged, but that's also not bad. This is approaching the battery life of the modern gigapixel monsters that dominate the market now. The BMPCC battery life complaints are something that used to be bad but are much more 'normal' now, not great, but not unheard of either.