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I guess I never trusted him, so was never betrayed. In terms of being neutral and even-handed, facts are always neutral and even-handed, so that part hasn't changed - unless he's outright lying of course. To me, reviews contain facts and fluff, with the facts being the only useful things. The challenge was always what facts were missing, which is always a problem because it doesn't matter how deeply a camera is reviewed, they're never going to cover every aspect. When I first got into video, I did a bunch of reading and came to (what I thought) were reasonable conclusions. Those were that 4K, bitrate and AF were the most important things, oh how little I knew! Could I have saved myself from going down that particular dead-end road by trusting the right person? No. No reviewer was saying what I needed to hear, and the ones that I later found that were pointing in (at least) partially the right direction would have been waaaay out of the realm of what I was ready for (Steve Yedlin for instance). It's a process, you have to learn for yourself, and unless you're a YouTuber making camera reviews, then the YouTubers making camera reviews couldn't possibly steer you in the right direction, even if they were squeaky clean. I don't think we are spoiled. Cameras have gotten more and more features, but the manufacturers aren't giving people what they want, they're improving the specs that drive TV sales and then marketing the crap out of them in order to brainwash the customers into thinking the new features are actually desirable. Did you see the two recent videos by Crimson Engine about cinema cameras? I thought he did a great job. The first one is what the manufacturers are pushing, and the second is what people actually want. Spoiler, there's very very little overlap.

Maybe this is the thread where we discuss how well the camera can make cat videos?

The major issue with cameras these days is the cripple hammer / technical limitations they put in them which aren't in the marketing. Sure, a camera might be 8K, 240p, 10-bit, but the fact that it's not all of them at the same time is the information that isn't mentioned, and which combinations are available are hard to find out. Gerald is useful because he seems to systematically find many of those gotchas whereas other people don't go that deeply. In terms of Sony and his opinions, to put it bluntly, who gives a crap? If you're spending thousands of dollars then you should be making your own decisions rather than simply listening to other peoples conclusions. Gerald is good because his videos are full of facts about the tech details... just ignore his opinions and you're fine. Most other camera reviews are ONLY opinions. That's where we should be getting annoyed..

Just remember, there are two attributes that define how well IBIS works, and this is the one that doesn't matter.

I was really just comparing 2K Prores HQ to 4K Prores LT. If we're talking about anything more than that, then we have to start talking about what is visible, and that means discussing a certain resolution test that makes sensible discussion basically impossible.

To me, the FP or FP-L seem like the natural choices, but I do wonder how far away other options are. I see three essential criteria: Rolling shutter amount Zero is ideal of course, but I wonder how much leeway there is for this. IIRC film had a degree of rolling shutter so some is likely tolerable. Colour science I've tried at length to replicate the colour of the OG BMPCC and BMMCC with my GH5, even when recording RAW stills, and have fallen short by miles every time, despite being able to match other cameras together as well as match grades etc, so this tells me there is something magical about their colour that perhaps simply isn't captured by other cameras. NR / noise performance This happens in-camera from deliberate processing and also as a side-effect of compression in the codec The Sigmas are great because they seem to have some of the nicest colour science around at the moment (I'm not sure if it's the camera or the transformations and management afterwards but the results speak for themselves), and the output is (AFAIK) completely unprocessed and uncompressed RAW. I watched that video some time ago and one thing I noted at the time was the OG BMPCC having NR built in to manage the noise of the circuitry inside the camera. I have played with digital circuits and optimising for signal quality and have done a reasonable amount of research into the topic, so it makes perfect sense to me that a product designed like any camera with many circuit boards and high-frequency digital busses would be noisy as hell, but I never thought that they would need to process it within the camera beyond just keeping a digital signal viable between ICs through careful PCB design and the odd bit of shielding. I'd be extremely curious to learn more about this.

Yes, acquisition tried to keep pace with the tech I'm sure, and this was also in the days when cameras didn't downscale in-camera which made oversampling at capture even more important. My point was simply that if a 2K Prores HQ didn't have intolerable macro-blocking when used in a workflow that was projected in multiplex cinemas, that 4K Prores LT with a similar/superior bitrate wouldn't be worse than that. Also, the people in this discussion are pretty unlikely to be shooting for projection on a 590" cinema screen, so a codec with 400Mbps being streamed at 15-25Mbps, LT is probably good enough.... even with our post-millennial biologically superior eyesight 😉

lol... I guess it's just me and my logic again, getting too big for my britches 😛

What were they distributed in? and what about the DI? I ask because once something has had things like macro-blocking then there's no fixing it downstream. I thought that a 2K Prores DI was common for colourists, and they'd deliver in 2K as well. Not sure if that would have been 4444 or better though.

This raises an interesting question for me about what role resolution plays in the quality of Prores. Prores bitrates scale proportionally with resolution, so 4K is ~4x the bitrates of 1080p because there are ~4x the pixels. I would assert that 2K Prores HQ is "sufficient" (not perfect, but sufficient) as countless feature films were shot in 2K/1080p Prores HQ (at ~180Mbps) and were projected in theatres worldwide on the largest screens available (short of IMAX), so the macro-blocking can't have been too bad. So then, if we're talking 4K, Prores HQ is ~700Mbps and LT is ~330, which is almost double the 2K HQ bitrate. If you film 4K you don't project it onto a larger screen just because you have more bitrate (plus there aren't really many screens larger than real cinemas anyway), so even if the macro-blocking is larger from LT in terms of how many pixels wide the artefacts are, the fact that there's more bitrate for the whole image, surely the artefacts would be less visible than on 2K HQ? Does anyone know how this comparison actually fares in the real world? I've never tested this particular aspect.

I'm not really into Halloween (and it's less of a thing here in Australia, although it is growing in popularity each year).... but, Alien is seriously good sci-fi cinema! I can't imagine you haven't seen it, but if not, wow are you in for a treat! My first experience with the series was Aliens, which I watched as a ~7? year old alone in the lounge room of someones big old scary house where my dad was visiting and the adults put it on to keep me entertained why they talked somewhere else in the house. I had a major jump-scare when during a particularly tense moment in the film someone suddenly stuck their head into the room to ask me what I wanted for dinner! A memorable watch! I've often wished that I could 'forget' a movie so that I would get to watch it for the first time (again). I purposefully don't watch my favourites for years so that I have forgotten at least some stuff and get some surprises and fun twists. Other fun movies that come to mind: The Forgotten 2004 with Julianne Moore (watch it without any spoilers or previews at all if you can) The Ring The Fourth Kind 2009 with Milla Jovovich (again, watch without spoilers or previews if possible) and of course, just for fun... Shawn of the Dead 🙂

and if you stop both lenses down at least a couple of stops from wide open then they should all be nice and sharp so there won't be any resolution issues between them.

Two very useful sentiments that I try to live by are: If in doubt, don't buy anything If the solution isn't obvious, you don't fully understand the problem

In addition to my previous post above, I think the optimum amount of processing is having more NR/sharpening than RAW has, and less than the GH5 has. If the FX30 is closer to that mid-point then that's another plus for the camera. Despite not liking Sony all that much (both their company behaviour as well as the design of their cameras) and not wanting to move from MFT to anything but FF, the FX30 has an appeal that I can't understand. Is there some sort of X-factor for this camera? or is it just me?

That's very interesting. One thing that I've noticed is that there is very little colourist content available (for free and even in the paid stuff I've seen) discussing sharpening techniques or discussing NR techniques. Yet, my personal experience with both of these topics (as well as seeing the brief mentions they get occasionally) suggests that they're hugely important to building a look and also quite a deep subject. I've done comparisons myself of comparing different sharpening methods (IIRC Resolve has at least three, not counting the manual techniques you can do with various combinations of nodes) and they are all different. I keep meaning to do a deep dive into them, sharing it with the group as I go for discussion and feedback, but just haven't gotten the motivation up for it. In my previous attempts to grade RAW footage I've struggled to get the results I was looking for. Even when the subject gets mentioned on the colourist forums the discussion doesn't seem to go into that much detail. I wonder if it's one of those subjects where the colourists all just judge it by eye and therefore think it's obvious and not worth talking about. Or, it's something that directors/producers/etc have strong opinions on and they just look to them for guidance and therefore don't feel it's worth discussing.

@FHDcrew could always grade the footage and then run the finished edit or selected shots through it. Not sure how that fits with the workflow though.

Any idea what the differences are from a technical perspective? I've never heard of dual base ISO as distinct from native ISO.

Probably no camera would survive the temps in the depths of hell, but if you're only shooting at the gates of hell (in Turkmenistan) then I don't think you'd need great low-light as it's self-illuminating.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater

That would do. There are lots on eBay, just get m42 (the mount of those lenses) to whatever you have. It's a fully manual lens so just a dumb adapter is fine. That also means you can look into any of the other m42 mount lenses, which there are many. I'd avoid m39/l39 lenses though, as there were multiple standards and often the adapters don't work etc - I've got a couple of m39 lenses and I can't get them to work on my camera, even though I've bought multiple adapters and even modified one of them.

I've noticed that there is now, finally, feature films in Hollywood being edited on Resolve. This has really only started in the last year or two, so in that sense Resolve is still very young as an editing package. However, once the pros start using it in any serious capacity I think the features it lack and the little niggles and pain points will probably start to get addressed and it will become a much more polished editing platform for large projects. I know that FCPX and Premier have worked with editors taking feedback and suggestions for many many years, so Resolve would benefit enormously from similar attention. They could end up surpassing FCPX and AVID by taking the best of both of them, and its also integrated into the colour suite, so negates the need for cumbersome round-tripping between them. It's all just possibilities at the moment, but Resolve has consistently made significant improvements (and adding entire pages!) year on year, and show no signs of stopping, so I suspect its development into a professional-level editor is probably inevitable.

Only if you have a seriously powerful computer. A quick google gave me two sources that said that h265 requires 5-10x more processing power than h264. It likely is the processing, but unfortunately you don't get to choose any/enough options on that. Most cameras that offer Prores treat the image with respect and most with h26x do not, so the codec acts as a proxy for the intended market and therefore the level of molestation the image will have gone through.

If you haven't got one already - get a Helios!

I think when it comes to 1080p vs 2-3K it really matters if it's downsampled or not from the sensor, as obviously the downsampled will have more detail. You're absolutely right about ~2.5K sensor cameras outputting 2K or 1080p, hugely underrated. I'm not sure how I'd go with a 1080p sensor - I've got both the OG BMPCC and BMMCC but I've struggled to get the level of resolution and sharpness I want. The GH5 downsampling to 1080p is a bit on the sharp side but easily adjusted with a very slight blur. I think that my requirement for ALL-I codecs might not apply once I go to the new Apple silicone, as my MBP is intel based and really lags in video editing performance in comparison. It's still lightening on 1080p ALL-I footage though, so it's fine there. I remember researching the intel ones on h265 hardware acceleration and could never find if it was hardware with 10-bit files, although I think they said that it was with 8-bit. The Apple chips should have enough power just to muscle it regardless I'd imagine - especially if it's a 4K or lower file. For some reason the manufacturers still seem to think that only the good codecs/bitrates are needed on the native resolutions, which is a pity to have to choose between 50-100Mbps 1080p and 2000Mbps 6K! In that way an external recorder would be great as you'd have in-between options, but it's a whole other level of hassle.

It's also worth pointing out that the IQ that you get from a camera depends on: the codec the bitrate the performance of the camera the processing the camera does prior to compression the quality of the processing algorithm in the camera The C100 downscaled from 4K sensor to a 24Mbps file that was easily better than the 100Mbps 4K files from many cheap cameras. Sadly, in this subject, everything matters.

Great topic. Short answer is that I don't think I really need much more than 200Mbps. I'd prefer an internal downscaled compressed RAW, but as that's not available, I'd settle for ALL-I h264 or Prores in either 1080p or 4K. Long answer is - I wish you could control bitrate and codec independently on all cameras! Sadly, they're preset and not uniform between cameras/brands. As you know, I shoot my own travels and the odd adventure, which means I have a low number of projects per year, but shoot a lot of footage during those projects. It also means I'm shooting while in moving vehicles, while walking / on stairs, and it means I'm shooting in (essentially) completely uncontrolled conditions. Most venues ban tripods and frown on "professional" looking rigs, so an understated appearance is a criteria not a preference. I care about two things. The first is what the camera can capture, and the second is my experience in post. What the camera can capture is determined by stabilisation, DR, and practicalities (turn-on time, battery life, etc). This is why I've got the GH5. It's also why I'm extremely reluctant to get an external recorder. With a MILC, lens, and mic, the rig already gets long stares from security guards and members of the public alike. My editing experience is that I want an ALL-I codec so my MBP can edit smoothly (forwards and backwards is crucial when you edit to music like I mostly do). I edit on 1080p timelines so that my colour grading doesn't kill the machine, which is necessary when shooting in high-DR available-light situations, and might also need stabilisation in post too. I publish to YT in 1080p because it's good enough, and even if I wanted to upload in 4K for the YT bitrate I can just upres from 1080p and be fine - no-one can tell. I store the files on internal or external SSD for editing, which is why I care about the total file size for an individual project. It gets archived on spinning disks so my overall storage costs aren't huge. Considering all the above, I'd prefer an internal downscaled compressed RAW format, maybe in something like 3K, which would give some latitude for the stabilisation and cropping in post. This would be ALL-I and with less brutal compression so would be fast to edit, it would have excellent bit-depth for serious grading from bad lighting, it wouldn't have strange colour profiles baked-in that make WB refinement in post a challenge, and the bitrates wouldn't be prohibitive. Second to this, I'd be happy with either: 1080p Prores HQ (~170Mbps) ~200Mbps 10-bit 422 ALL-I h264 (not h265 as it's more intensive in post) 4K Prores LT is a bit larger in file sizes but the ease of Prores decompression compensates for the extra resolution (on a 1080p timeline) and the extra resolution would be useful if I wanted to stabilise or crop in post 4K 400Mbps 10-bit 422 ALL-I h264 (not h265) is also an option too Since the pandemic made my cancel all my travel I've taken a step back and concentrated more on editing and sound design, and been paying more attention to the look of professional TV/movies and ignoring camera YT, I've become less precious about IQ and more focused on what will be smaller and faster and inconspicuous to get more of the shots I need even if the image is a bit more rough-n-ready. In reviewing past projects I've found that I would have liked more shots for montages, so it's about coverage. In high-end travel shows (e.g. Parts Unknown and even things like Chefs Table) there are shots with things clipped (other than the sun) and shake and various artefacts of difficult shooting, so if it's good enough for them it should be good enough for me. It's obvious they edit for content, rather than making pretty (boring) pictures. My ideal shooting experience would be a smartphone with acceptable image quality. Sadly, the latest iPhone only uses Prores to faithfully reproduce the disastrous image processing they do prior to compression, so that's unlikely to be acceptable for a long long time. Maybe over sharpened 8K is good enough on a 1080p timeline to match un-molested 1080p footage? Maybe it'll need to be 12K before the artefacts are blurred out.