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I have vague memories of seeing people attach a separate video camera to the rig so that they'd have a recording of what was 'in the can'. Later film cameras had analog video out feeds did't they? I thought they split the light and had a separate video sensor in there for monitoring and recording. Lots of benefits to having a recording (of whatever quality) for the delay (maybe several days/weeks) before getting your developed film back. I know big budget features would be using the studios overnight lab to watch dailies the next morning, but if you didn't have that access sometimes it was a long wait.

The fundamental problem is that no camera can see into the future, whereas stabilisation in post can look at the whole clip and do things at one point in a clip that anticipate something that happens further into the clip. It's why the cameras with heavy stabilisation have a delay in the display - they are literally delaying what they show you so that they are able to 'see into the future' a tiny bit. If it was in-camera and didn't have a huge delay (eg, no more than half a second) then it would be so inaccurate that it wouldn't be worth much.

My understanding is that there's a ton of work in designing a PCB, and it looks like their main PCB is large and potentially has almost everything on it (I haven't studied it though). 4K PCB: 6K PCB Anyway, making the 6K the same as the 6K Pro (notice how the 6K is now the same size as the 6K Pro?) would give them economies of scale and synergies, while being able to configure the other things (NDs, brighter screen, etc) to be different. It makes sense as a commercial move for them in terms of pricing and manufacture. I've had the sense through their seemingly random previous camera models that they were leaping from one design to the next perhaps based on what was cheap and available at the time. This meant that every camera was largely a new design, making them more prone to QC issues. Seems this update is aligned to that perhaps. Pity it wasn't a Komodo-style box design though. The BMMCC still has no replacement, and nothing even remotely close in terms of size, so I'm still holding out hope for a box camera. If it has a usable top display I'd consider it.

Great news indeed. I've seen some of the recent stabilisation done from camera gyro data (was it from a Sony camera?) and the stabilisation was truly truly impressive, and I'd know because I shoot handheld and have spent a lot of time on some tricky shots trying to stabilise them. I've developed techniques that I haven't found anyone else online even talking about so I'm pretty sure I'm quite far down the rabbit hole. Finally, an out of body experience that doesn't require 'self medication' and a hangover!

Please do share some G6 footage! I bought the GF3 for stills images and it didn't disappoint... it was an MILC that shot 12MP RAW images, and was actually pocketable with the 14mm f2.5 lens. Think of the hype around the P4K when it came out, when all it did was the same thing, only it shot those RAW images continuously and recorded sound at the same time. Ironically it was bested by the Canon 700D - the only camera I still own that I don't shoot with anymore, despite it being Canon colour science and the largest sensor I own! Being good for stills sure doesn't automatically translate to being good with video, that's for sure.

That was part of my motivation... to completely obscure the camera with treatments in post. We all focus on the camera, debating the fine points of the limits of camera features, and then only take advantage of a tiny taste of what is possible in post-production. It's like shopping all over the world for the finest ingredients, then taking them into the kitchen and boiling the crap out of everything. Will overcooked fine ingredients taste better than overcooked cheap ingredients, probably, but it's hardly the potential that existed. We're all running around shopping for ingredients and steadfastly refusing to learn to cook, or for those that do know their way around a kitchen, passing up the opportunity to learn to cook well.

Good luck with that! At this point I think half the people on these forums should list "Panasonic AF hater" on their CV under "Personal interests". Besides, all it takes is a quick look around and see all the flat-earth, plandemic, moon-landing / holocaust deniers, and you realise that it's more of a miracle that anyone is remotely sensible about anything at all!

Yeah, it's about having the highlight/shadow rolloffs and blur/grain. The OIS on the iPhones really is phenomenal - I wasn't ninja-walking and don't have particularly steady hands and even the walking shots were pretty good. I don't think I stabilised anything in post either, which would have over-stabilised things - the walking shots were already a bit too gimbal-like for my tastes. Having a nice 10-bit codec on a phone would make such a difference - Prores would be spectacular.

I'd imagine it would make you slow down and be more deliberate? I remember when I was shooting stills there was a heavy "anti-chimping" sentiment, which mostly overlaps in rationale.

Assuming you're still reading this thread, I'd suggest the following: Ignore all the tiny pieces of technical detail that the tech-obsessed and argument-prone contributors have shared in this thread and return to first-principles. First principle - get your shots in focus. Nothing else matters if a shot is out of focus. If you're shooting kids or anything else that isn't under control then either get phase-detect AF or learn to manually focus. I shoot similar to you and manually focus - it's a skill and requires some practice but it's do-able. Getting shots in focus with the best auto-focus cameras is also a skill that requires practice. Second principle - get a nice looking image - whatever that means for you. The nicer the camera the more likely it will require colour grading and most people can't colour grade to save their own lives, let alone create lovely images. Once again, this is a skill that can be developed, but making lovely videos requires (literally) a dozen or more skills so you just might not have it in you to learn to colour grade as well as edit, mix sound, master, learning NLEs, media management, etc etc. If you don't want to learn to colour grade then you're going to rely on the picture-profiles from the camera and that will potentially limit the dynamic range and other image attributes, sometimes quite significantly. Third principle - get the first two right and then buy the camera and then don't look back. Go learn about the other dozen skills. Highly skilled people can create feature film quality results with any of the cameras you're talking about so there's a snowflakes-chance-in-hell that the camera will be a limitation, it will be your level of skill. Fourth principle - if you get to here let me say this again. The camera doesn't matter. The only people that will tell you otherwise are camera nerds (like here in this forum), camera manufacturers (who want your money, over and over again), and camera influencers (who want the views and royalties and commissions and manufacturer kickbacks etc). Seriously. Buy the camera that will get your shots in focus and then move on.

For some reason, I seem to get the most excited about using the worst cameras I have. I know I'm not alone...... @dreamplayhouse @PannySVHS @QuickHitRecord @mercer I have some spectacular cameras.. the GH5, BMMCC and OG BMPCC. The GX85, XC10, X3000, iPhone don't have 10-bit or RAW so aren't in my top tier, but definitely are no slouches.... and yet, it's the GF3 and SJ4000 action cameras that make me the most excited. My eyes somehow skip over the nicest lenses and camera bodies but yet linger on those cameras and cause "what if" thoughts. I have similar thoughts about some of my worst lenses too. It's like there's a satisfaction from getting results that are better than they should be. A thrill about 'cheating' perhaps? It's not about image quality, otherwise it'd be the GH5 or BM cameras every time, but it's not. I think there's something in here about limited dynamic range. I've noticed that many people seem to be afraid of contrast these days too - maybe it's from staring too long at LOG footage and forgetting that film created rich contrasty images? Sure, these lower-DR 8-bit 709 cameras clip pretty hard, but according to imaging-resource the GF3 has about 10 stops of dynamic range. According to ARRI, colour negative film has 5.5 stops of DR between 2% and 90%. Who knows what film they were talking about but it's a real measurement from a reliable source so it's in the ballpark and worth consideration. According to Sony rec709 has about 5.2 stops - pretty similar to film. This means that we can take the 10-stops from the GF3 and add contrast so that we compress a couple of stops into a highlight rolloff and a couple more into the shadow rolloff and we'll be in the right range of contrast. This equates to 'stretching' the dynamic range of the middle stops. Assuming that the in-camera profile hasn't compressed any highlights/shadows then we only have to stretch the middle stops by a factor of two, which is do-able - just, but in combination with poor quality compression it benefits from a little blurring to smooth over any jagged transitions. I also think it might be the level of detail and sharpness. Steve Yedlin showed that a developed 35mm film has about 2-3K resolving power and high levels of noise (Resolution Demo pt 2 ~19:00). The sharpness is interesting too - film is resolution limited by how soft it is, whereas digital isn't. However, on moderate bitrate cameras the codec tends to obscure fine detail (but not creating artefacts so bad they have overly sharp edges), so this is a comparable aspect too. It's one reason I shoot 1080p on the GH5 - to control the fine detail to a more organic amount. BUT, regardless of the above.. I just know that I get more excited by these 'lesser' cameras than the better ones. I'm looking forward to getting better at grading with higher contrast looks, film emulation looks, and other nicer and stronger and more nostalgic image processing.

@QuickHitRecord @PannySVHS @dreamplayhouse iPhone 12 mini..... processed in Resolve with Kodak 250D and 2393 Print Film Emulations 🙂

Yeah, a raw to raw conversion shouldn't take that much processing at all - almost nothing in comparison to the other processing required when editing and grading footage.

It converts on the fly, I believe. It's a great option because it's one less step in the workflow and you don't have to have extra disk space etc. Of course you pay for the conversion when editing and rendering because the conversion is being done every time a clip is accessed, but it's a raw to raw conversion with All-i files so shouldn't be anything like editing from an IPB codec.

Nope, not GX85 either 🙂 It was all shot in 4k24p, maybe that's a useful hint?

Nope! Definitely an 8-bit camera...

OK - I was inspired by this thread, so I took some footage with an 8-bit camera of a shopping trip and gave it a film emulation treatment. Any guesses on the camera?

Yeah, it's definitely lacking the sorting and retouching parts and if you have a few images would be a reasonable alternative for Lightroom, but absolutely not for Photoshop.

There seem to be some discussions appearing now about using Resolve to edit stills. This thread on the colourist forums has one such discussion. I haven't tried it myself, as I no longer do stills basically, but I'll admit that Resolve isn't that intuitive a tool for working with stills and the associated workflows.

Great little edit. Film emulation is on-point too - great stuff!

Cool edit, and especially amusing transition at the end to the reality of the situation! Honest thoughts about the grading: You've done well, and some shots are definitely there with the film look I think the saturation is too high - if you do a google image search for "super 16 film stills" and just scroll through then you'll see that film doesn't get that saturated, or if it does it's because it's been pushed in one direction (e.g. when the whole frame is very warm or very cool) I think the "look" is applied too strongly - the look pushes the warm and cool colours and mutes the magenta/green colours but if you look at the rainbows (the bag and the girls t-shirt with the heart on it) the purple is almost colour-less compared to the warm and cool tones which are bordering on electric Some shots are too sharp - different film stocks all had different colour palettes but one of the give-away things of film was the texture of details and of grain. Some shots are soft and have the right amount of detail, but other shots are much more detailed/sharper and are reminiscent of 35mm or MF film, which doesn't fit with the camera being hand-held outdoors. A slight blur of those shots would really help. Getting the "film look" is a rabbit hole that's very very deep, and I've seen colourists say that they've never seen a film grain emulation that looked real to them - but that's because they stared at real film for 12-18 hours per day for 30 years. Obviously the rest of us aren't so attuned to it! If you apply the film emulation slightly less strongly, make the whole thing less saturated and blur the shots more evenly then I think it'll be quite convincing. The awesome thing about these three treatments is that they all help to make lower-quality footage from a cheaper camera look better. I've played this game with very very low-image quality cameras and you'd be amazed at how much you can 'save' a horrifically digital image by making it look low-quality film. Image quality doesn't get better, but it's much much nicer to look at.

Yeah, that lens should be a spectacular performer. IIRC that's the same glass as the Zeiss CP.2? @mercer is that right?

I can't speak to which VND filters to buy, but if you search YouTube usually you can find videos where people test and compare various VND filters. It's a bit of a difficult one because "good enough" is different for each person, so what is acceptable for one person isn't for another. I'd suggest doing some searching and seeing what you can find.

Awesome! Maybe it's a newer version of Resolve - I tried exposing a power grade to a LUT and it failed because it ignored the CST OFX plugin, and surprisingly, it didn't work right without that CST in the middle of it!! Resolve is better, no doubt. However, you can do a huge amount even with basic tools, so there's no excuses 🙂

You never said you had underworld connections... maybe we can use them to finally get someone to make the perfect camera!