kye

Gerald Undone tested the RS and found it to be reasonable (unlike previous Sony APSC offerings). Seems like a good overall camera without any significant downsides, other than it potentially being a new system to buy into.

Sony have released the FX30. Key specifications Oversampled UHD 4K (6K capture) up to 60p UHD 4K/120p capture with additional 1.62x crop In-body image stabilization 10-bit 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 capture in a choice H.265 or H.264-based AVC formats S-Cinetone color profile S-Log2 / S-Log3 with uploadable LUTs for previewing or applying to footage '16-bit' Raw video output No mechanical shutter mechanism Front and rear tally lamps Anyone interested in it?

Extremely sorry to hear this news. Take care of yourself.

Thanks Davide. I suspect it could be either, he used to use a GH5 but I haven't gotten a look at his setup for some time and was curious. He still does a lot of stuff hand-held when he goes into restaurant kitchens and films food preparation etc so the stabilisation and AF are a big deal. It makes sense he'd be rocking a Sony with 16-35 for those, with the AF modes and also the IBIS, plus if it's the 16-35 F4 he'd have OIS on top of that.

Yeah, I don't think that the Japanese nor the French have a monopoly on stupidity and other human failings! All countries / cultures have their pros and cons. It's just personal preference that makes each of us prefer one over the other 🙂

Interesting stuff. Pulling out a few select faces to look at detail and skintones etc.... bearing in mind these are all very small in the frame so these are blown up quite significantly. From 2:04 From 3:55 These are all excellent results! Considering that the Prores tests of the iPhone 14 show that their implementation allows the Prores codec to do the best job yet of preserving the complete desecration that the iPhone performs on its image!

It's from one of the YouTubers I watch and this is the best look I've gotten at his setup in a long time. Source:

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, it would just be nice to have more than one or two comments in a row in a Panny thread that didn't talk about AF. It's like in the entire world of film-making that nothing else exists. It makes it so that nothing else can be discussed, doesn't add anything new to the discussion and just wastes everyones time.

Yes, the FX6 is a much more 'complete' cinema camera in that way, no doubt. I mentioned it just because I think that's the only real venture that Panasonic has made in the direction of a more cinema camera since the EVA1, which was what - 4 years ago. Considering the headway that other brands have made in the small cine form-factor (Komodo, C70, FX6, etc), maybe there's a place there for an appropriately sized Panasonic camera? Would be interesting to see what they'd come up with.

That's an interesting comparison - not one I'd contemplated before, but makes sense.

...or who don't know enough about cameras to have moved on from AF being the only topic they think matters. Do we have any idea how things like the BGH1 sold? I heard basically nothing online about it, so I'd assume that the market for Panasonic small cine-style cameras probably isn't that big. and if it didn't sell then Panasonic won't be rushing into that segment either.

Which means that Sony and Canon can afford to do it and Panasonic absolutely cannot. I find it amusing that people are so self-entered when it comes to what they want. As a customer they declare that the best strategy for a brand is to basically do everything they could possibly want, and then as a business, those people will turn around and criticise their own customers for not understanding the realities of what it takes to run a business. Most of the claims that people on here make about cameras are equivalent to the delusional demands that a bridezilla would make at the first sign that the work doesn't revolve around them. *shrug* Panasonic makes cameras exactly the same as any other manufacturer - some good points and some bad points. If you want good AF then Canon will gladly accept you as a customer once you've been knocked in the side of the head with the cripple-hammer, or go to Sony who will gladly have you as a customer once you've been smashed in the wallet with their price-hammer.

Lots of scam listings in the vintage lens market too. Anything expensive seems to be fair game unfortunately.

TBH, I think this is probably well into the realm of diminishing returns. The way I see it is that there's stuff that happens before you colour grade and stuff that happens afterwards. 10-bit (or more) matters when you're capturing footage that you need to significantly alter in the colour grade (log, linear) but after it's in a 709 space I think it becomes far less important, unless you're capturing in a 709 profile and plan to heavily grade it after that. I've found that there's essentially three groups when it comes to colour accuracy: The general public, where there is zero guarantee of quality, adherence to standards, or consistency in what they're looking at. They also (mostly) don't care, and most probably can't tell the difference between the colour of a Sony A72 and an Alexa. Professional colourists, where there is almost no limits to the degree of accuracy and the investment in minutia around this, and is often accompanied by a failure to understand the practicalities and compromises of the world. Their clients are occasionally directors or producers who have some of the most refined taste and colour perception imaginable, so they are aspiring to be good enough for the worlds best. They will argue to the death about things you've never heard of. Us practical folks in the middle trying to do what we can but without it being the entire universe that we live in. We care so much more than the general public that they can't understand a word we say, and we care so little in comparison to the pros out there that we can't understand almost anything they say. If you've got a vaguely colour accurate monitor setup in a vaguely controlled environment then I think you're going above and beyond for what most of the audience really cares about. For this, 8-bit monitoring is totally fine.

I've read quite a lot about the customer strategy for various companies and your above post (and the one on the previous page) have a couple of things that stand out to me. The first is from your previous post where you outline your own style and seek clients who fit with that style. This is an excellent approach, and as you have noted, tends to give you customers you enjoy working with. The second is the idea of the wedding album and what is associated with it. My thought is maybe you should consider providing one as a standard offering in all your packages? I say this because customer strategy can often contain things that are counter-intuitive, like giving the customer a better experience by not giving them what they want (because they are wrong in their assumptions about which things create which outcomes). Reading between the lines on your posts about your business, you are fully booked and are in the position to turn away clients. If you included a wedding album in all your packages and added the cost of the album (printing and all the admin required by you) to each package, maybe you could keep the same profit over less bookings? Or maybe you wouldn't keep the same profit per booking but might have more referrals and thus make a saving in any PR and sales efforts? Lifetime Customer Value and all that. I'm reminded of this post from Noam Kroll about having less clients but of higher budgets: https://noamkroll.com/how-i-built-a-7-figure-production-company-with-no-advertising/ In terms of tech, the aesthetic is made from the tech. The tech isn't a side-topic - it's not even a separate topic by itself (contrary to how it is discussed online) it is simply the details of telling the tools to create the result you want. If you are bored by it then you have forgotten why it is important and lost sight of the objective. The people who are truly great, in any discipline, obsess over the minutia involved because the final outcome is the product of the thousands of choices made during the process. Perhaps the biggest issue with modern film-making is that people have forgotten these are tools, not toys.

Actually, that's not true at all. Let's imagine that Panasonic announced their plans for the next few years. Scenario 1: they announce they won't upgrade their AF. The internet goes bat-shit crazy (the way they always do) and people start trash talking the brand, which causes people to believe the system is going down, which makes people sell to get out, which causes more supply than demand, second-hand prices crash, game over. Scenario 2: they announce they will have PDAF, certain resolutions/framerates/codecs, and perhaps other features. Putting such stuff out into the market is basically a commitment (the saying "under-promise and over-deliver" is used for good reason and this would be the opposite) so now the competing brands can work out what they need to do to prevent Panny from having any competitive edge during this time. Sensor manufacturers now know the public commitments Panny have made, which means that Panny won't have as good a bargaining position when buying sensors. If Sony make a sensor that Panny need to meet their public promises, how aggressive do you think that will make them when it comes to negotiation? Panny will either announce features that are currently available (eg, sensor specs) in which case they will not be cutting edge, and if they announce things that are not yet possible then the sensor manufacturers could deliberately adjust their own strategy so that they can make new products but Panny cannot meet their promises. Product design for high-tech products like this are typically done in phases where the outcome isn't yet known. For example, in year 1 they might confirm the overall architecture of the device and (with some rough performance / features as placeholders) would make sure that the controllers and screens and batteries and all the other stuff is worked out. Year 2 might have working prototypes being built with placeholder chips (maybe you use the latest version of whatever that chip is but know a new version is expected in the final year of development - most chipsets have similar instructions etc so you can kind of prepare for the newer ones in this way). Then year 3 might be the final year where you get samples of the final chipsets and sensor, do your optimisations to things like sensor configuration (in ARRI they have multiple divisions whose only job is to tweak the sensor and image processing voltages / clock speeds / algorithms etc), and get commercial relationships confirmed like ordering the parts in the quantity you need and arranging deals for codecs and IP stuff. This is why companies are often pushing products out without the complete set of features, and why things like the GH5 unlocked lots more modes and codecs, deals with RED / BM / Atomos / Apple for codecs are often added after launch or shipping, etc. So in the final year you have a few versions of a working camera but haven't confirmed which sensor you'll use, so you can release a camera with the older one (and probably price it a little less) or go with the newer one and have better specs and charge more. If you announce your roadmap you're giving away all your options when these stages of the camera design arrive. It might be a nice thing to have as a consumer, but it would completely screw the company.

I read that wedding photos are often the last photos of the grandparents in a family - a wedding photographer commented this and said that in group photos their first priority is the bride/groom and the second are the grandparents. I'd imagine that she'll get over it and in years to come will find it's a lovely momento. Give it time 🙂

I think it's a fascinating topic, and the way that I see it is that essentially I only make one style of film, the 'happy memory', and so while I try to learn a bit about all the genres, the one that I am really paying attention to is this one. To expand slightly, my work is mostly about my friends and family visiting interesting places, so it's about the relationship between the people and the place. This is the fundamental principle / singular vision behind all my creative choices. My thought process is: 1) to try and capture the people reacting to the place, with b-roll being general shots of the location 2) to edit it in such a way that I show the feeling rather than the facts about a place Folks like Walter Murch are quick to say that we're still understanding the psychology of editing, but the parallel to dreams is quite a significant thing. For example, in early editing they weren't sure if they could cut out travel sequences because they thought that we might not understand that a person had travelled if we didn't see it - after all we don't teleport ourselves. However that proved to be false, and the theory is that we teleport in dreams all the time so it's something we understand. But we're quite adaptable, as early motor vehicle development wasn't sure if people could drive a car faster than a horse can gallop because no human had ever travelled that fast before. Of course, this is something that humans are easily capable of. In terms of editing, we're still learning new things. Biologically, we're not that different from nomadic hunter-gatherers who couldn't read or write or understand math etc. Now we understand there are different sizes in infinity. The capacity of our biology isn't anywhere near understood, so the potential for visual communication is by no means reached, or even mapped. However, having said all of that, we still dream the way we dream, so that's a pretty good yardstick for me and how I'm trying to film / edit.

I don't think the rest of us have the calibre of facial hair to get away with it!

@kaylee I didn't think that I did, but maybe I do. I have a Dell Ultrasharp and the manual lists it as a 10-bit panel, but it doesn't describe it in such a way that makes me absolutely positive that it's a 10-bit image pipeline. I know that I am driving it with a 10-bit signal from my BM video output device, and Resolve supports the 10-bit output. Why do you ask? I'm happy to have a look at my setup if there's any questions you're curious about? IIRC Resolve lets me choose things like the bit depth of the signal out to the monitor, so I think I can change that easily enough. I have a vague memory of swapping between 8-bit and 10-bit but don't recall if I saw differences.

@John Matthews @EduPortas @MrSMW @Kisaha This conversation reminds of a couple of pretty important aspects of film-making that are often not discussed as often as they should be, audience and longevity. I feel these have a fundamental role in considerations of specs and outright image quality. The audience, in the context of this discussion, seems to be predominantly people who know the people in the film. I think this is important because trying to make a film that engages and entertains people who don't have a personal connection to the subject is, I think, many many times harder. For wedding / engagement work, and for the personal work that I do, the intended audience is people who know the subjects in the video, and for that, the outright technical quality isn't so much of a defining factor. Longevity is the other major factor that I believe is at play here - this content has almost an infinite shelf-life. Most content becomes less and less relevant the older that it gets, but not this. Corporate work is fundamentally different in this sense, and is mostly about looking modern and fresh and new, to which the aesthetic quality of the images (clean, modern, professional, etc) can be vitally important, at least in the clients eyes. When you're filming a wedding (or other key family events - not sure if you guys do other family related work like mitzvahs, etc) or the "family videos" that I make, you're acting as a historian. Older rich families have entire departments of people who keep the family archives, and this is the creation of that material. In a sense the value of this content goes up over time rather than down. If I had a choice to send videographers back in time to film a key event of my ancestors, earlier would be of more interest than later. I've tried to maintain a clear distinction in my technical efforts: capture and preservation first, aesthetics second. Even when it comes to aesthetics, what is the aesthetic of a wedding or historic family event? It's nostalgia. Sure, you absolutely want to try and capture who the people are, with their own styles and character, but even if your client is demanding 12K video because it's the latest and they always have the best, in 50 years time the 2D linear sequence of images will look antiquated regardless of what you do. I would also suggest that the sharper you make it (as distinct from resolution - they're independent aspects) the more quickly it will age, rather than appearing more modern. Aesthetics, even when I concentrate on them, push me towards a less 'trendy' look. The modern look is high-resolution, clean and noise-free, colours so pure they seem electric, and sharpened to the point you could fillet a fish with it. This is the exact opposite of nostalgia. The aesthetic of nostalgia, especially of positive events which is what we are trying to achieve with weddings and family content, is the aesthetic of the dream, the warmth of remembering people you loved, especially people who are gone - either because they have grown and aged and who are not who they were or because they have passed. The aesthetic of warm remembering is fuzzy, which requires very low sharpening and often diffusion, it is noisy and organic, the colours are of an older time, a time when colours were less 'pure' and more likely to have come from nature somehow rather than single NM LED lights. It's also lower resolution just because the tech of the past had lower resolution. The more I learn about film-making, the more I prioritise content and then colour. From a practical point of view, in my own work documenting family trips and moments, my priorities are (starting with the outcome): To create a great final edit that is deeply sensitive to the subject matter (people and places) In order to do this, I must have a great editing experience with footage that is easy to edit and makes me feel inspired in the editing process What inspires me in the editing process is getting great shots of the people, having great colour, and having enough content to allow freedom and options in the edit If you think about those things in reverse order, for me who shoots without permission and without re-dos or direction, it means I have to have a small camera that doesn't get barred by security and doesn't influence the people I'm shooting too much, it means it has to operate well hand-held, and must be a workhorse that is always ready and doesn't get in the way. Once I have narrowed my options to those that can do that, it means I want the best quality colour I can get from that camera, and it means I should shoot a lot. I find that most camera talk exists in absence, or without discussing explicitly, the end goal of the entire endeavour. Contrary to what people might think, I think that more resolution is actually a good thing, all else being equal. The problem is that all else isn't equal, and any extra resolution actively hurts the things I value that are more important to the end product than the resolution itself.

I just watched a video where Kraig Adams (who is a professional travel film-maker on YT) sold his A7S3 to swap to using the iPhone 14 as his main travel camera (except for his drone). He's got 700K+ subs and used to be a professional wedding film-maker, and really knows how to edit footage with music etc. He's shot with 5D/ML etc so does know what good images look like. You could say that phones have gotten so close to prosumer cameras that they're replacing proper cameras, but I'd say it a different way - that prosumer cameras have become so shit and everyone has gotten so used to it that you may as well go to a phone because there's so little difference in image quality. I don't think that there will be a fourth phase. There are huge parallels here between audio and cameras. In audio, there were three phases. At first, everyone used analog because digital didn't exist or was awful. Then high-end pros used high-end analog and everyone else used mediocre transistors / digital but weren't happy about it (unless they were spec-heads who claimed to be happy because the specs said it must be good). Now, solid-state and digital has gone up enough, and expectations gone down enough, that everyone except the true high-end uses digital and solid-state electronics. The parallel doesn't end there either, as not only does the majority think that the 'old stuff' is worse because the specs on paper are worse (which happens if you measure the wrong things) but also people aren't aware of how good the high-end really is. Aesthetically, the vintage stuff was 'musical' but not 'impressive', and the modern stuff was 'impressive' but only moderately 'musical'. The super-high end is both and has to be heard to be believed. To give you a sense of it, I'm talking RRP of $400K and up. I think of it as emotion vs brain - which translates directly to cameras - emotions translate to motion and colour science and the right amount of sharpness and brain translates to resolution. I think that the mediocre spec-driven market will get better and better to the point that everyone will settle. I don't know what will happen once 8K is ubiquitous, as pushing 12K or 16K seems like it is completely pointless, but having said that, if blind tests show that most can't tell the difference between 4K and 2K then 8K is beyond pointless already. But the two things you should never make the mistake of underestimating are: the creativity of marketing departments to come up with new things you should care about, and 2) the gullibility of consumers to adopt these things, even in direct contradiction of their senses.

I watched this some time ago and unfortunately can't find my notes (I did it blind and made notes before I got the answers). I've done a number of these tests before and normally they compare a number of cameras at a similar quality level and of a similar vintage, and in those cases I rank things mostly in order of ascending price! This test was different though and tended to correlate with the cost of the camera but also how good the codec was, with the low bit-rate bit-depth codecs not looking as good. This is great advice but no-one wants to hear it. We've gone through three phases that I can see: At first non-Hollywood wanted higher resolution and higher quality digital because digital was inferior to film. During this phase Hollywood just shot film. Then Hollywood went to high quality 2K (Alexa etc) and the consumer market was justifiably dissatisfied with their low quality 4K cameras with poor codecs and colour science. The manufacturers were pushing higher resolution to try and sell more TVs and the consumer market bought into the hype, demanding more low-quality pixels rather than understanding that they needed better pixels rather than more of them. Unfortunately, Hollywood has now succumbed to this resolution hype as well (largely kick-started by RED and Netflix purely for business purposes with nothing to do with image quality itself). Normally I'd say "to each their own", but unfortunately it means that those that want to buy a new camera have to pay for all the BS resolution that the gullible market has demanded. To get a great looking 2K timeline you have to either: Use a low-resolution high-quality camera from 2010-2015 with their support issues, crap battery life, poor pre-amps, and lack of modern features Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to record ridiculous file sizes like 4K uncompressed RAW, 8K uncompressed RAW and then put those on a 2K timeline, costing you a heap in storage and computation Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to send ridiculous resolution images to an external recorder that downsamples to something sensible and then uses a high-quality codec (like 2K compressed RAW, 2K Prores 4444, or maybe ~2.5K Prores) The missing combination here is for the camera to downsample in-camera and to write a high-quality but sensible-resolution file onto the card, but this option is very rare You can post about image quality until you're blue in the face, but people either can't (or don't want to) see past the marketing BS from TV companies that tells them that they need to quadruple the resolution of their camera every 5 years, even though it has almost zero effect on image quality.

The gulf between what people need and what they think they want has never been wider. Unfortunately, people vote with their wallets for the latter rather than the former, and then when they're not satisfied, they vote for it again, and then again.... It's no wonder that the market is the way it is.

Take the iPhone and concentrate on content. Plenty of YouTube stars shoot only on iPhone - for example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd8wC6TEa04SP9p4FjED12A Additionally I see stuff shot with fancy equipment all the time that just sucks and has very few views.