eatstoomuchjam

I have multiple types of raw available to me here (Canon, BM Raw, PRR, and Red). They're all very nice and if you spend time working with them, you can get very good results. A lot of times, the perceived secret sauce seems to be in how nice the images look immediately after import and before adjustments are made - and that's how I perceive it. The Komodo-X has it, the Komodo has it (but a little less). The Ronin 4D has it. The C70 has it (maybe I'll miss mine now that I traded it in). The Ursa Cine 12K... might have it? The one time I took it out was inconclusive since the weather here has been a bit shit for the last couple of weeks. The sunset I shot looked nice, though. The GFX 100 II has it, but less than some of the others. The EOS R5 does not have it. The raw that comes from it is totally fine. You can work with it and get nice results. Skin tones are generally very nice SOOC. I don't think I ever once, though, have imported files from mine and thought "Wow, that's amazing."

This is why I standardized on Arca-Swiss a long time ago. They're available in all kinds of sizes, native on a bunch of different tripod/monopod heads, converter plates for them are plentiful and cheap (for those that don't natively accept them), and there are even some that have feet. They're also available in a bunch of different lengths - from little Peak Design square models to great big 6+ inch plates - and the same goes for the receivers. I use the ones with feet on bigger/heavier cameras where they don't change the weight meaningfully and it's nice to be able to set them down without them tipping one way or the other. Also, for some tripod/monopod heads that don't natively use Arca-Swiss, there are sometimes converter kits available - I converted a couple of my older Manfrotto heads with kits from Hejnar.

To be clear, the only "complaint" is that it's in a bulky $3,000 camera that probably won't produce an image that's better than a smaller/lighter camera that I can buy for $800 which has the same sensor and can, I assume, record the same raw codec if I connect it to a VA 12G. Keep in mind also that "mediocre" does not mean "bad." I'm using it in the context of middle-of-the-pack. It's also hard to judge from some random clips that somebody on a forum might choose to show something - especially when you have no idea of the conditions in which a clip was exposed. Like with a lot of things, it's best to do the test for oneself. And if you have no real interest in the camera and in testing it for yourself, that's totally valid too.

Oh! I have absolutely no idea! Seems plausible, given frame rates, etc. I have no personal experience with either, though stuff I've seen shot on the original S5 has looked very nice (and outside of YouTube, I've not seen much shot on the II). "Looks a bit better than a $1800 camera" is still not a great selling point for a $3,000 camera, though. 😅 There's nothing wrong with Pyxis and it even has some great additions like doing power+display over USB-C for the monitor - which also apparently means that I can get a pretty nice touchscreen monitor with camera control for my Ursa Cine for $300 (if I don't want to use the fold-out screen that's already the same size)? That's pretty cool. Though I think that I need to give the camera 26v to deliver power over the front monitor port. Yes. And now that I go to look at their site to understand it, I see that there is the "Pocket Cinema Camera" line-up which contain M43 and S35 sensors with the "Pro" at the top of the lineup. And then I see that there's a "Cinema Camera" which is full frame. I guess that since none of the cameras could possibly fit in a pocket (Matt Granger excluded!), the "Pocket" must refer to the size of the sensor? Anyway. Without meaning to, I'll forget all about that now so apologies in advance for the lack of clarity when future me calls the full frame the "Pro" again.

Evil boss: "Now... we're going to kill you with these lasers. We have the best lasers. Elon made the lasers. Folks, nobody has ever even seen lasers like these. And the best part is nobody knows you're here." Henchman: "Sorry, boss. I accidentally included the other agent who escaped on a text message chain about the execution and gave lots of details about the location and time. You know how you sometimes have a contact, but it has somebody else's number attached to it" Evil boss: "I'm sure they didn't notice. Everybody makes mistakes." (After Bond escapes yet again with the help of the other agent) Evil boss: "I never said anything about lasers. I don't even know what a laser is. Biden probably left that laser on when he left."

So... a pretty old sensor that's a bit "meh" by today's standards. It's a fantastic sensor to find in an $600-800 used camera - a bummer to find in a brand new $3,000 one. I strongly considered picking one up when they got so cheap - as above, that was a hell of a value. I will freely admit that the naming for BM's consumer/prosumer cameras confuses me. 😅 Well, that's actually awesome! Nikon cameras suddenly got a lot more interesting to me! 😅

Pyxis uses a pretty old sensor that is extremely meh by today's standards - and it's basically the same one as in another cheaper camera from BMD that was out for at least a year first. I think a lot of the target market already had the other one and if you already have a 6K pro, there's not much reason to buy a boxier camera with the same sensor. That said, it's full frame and has dual native ISO so depending on use case, it could still be a desirable choice over Komodo. Same if a person has a bunch of L mount glass. It's a good point about 16-bit vs 12-bit raw encoding. Also, FWIW, I suspect that at least the alpha channel of ProRes RAW is 16-bit to match ProRes 4444 XQ - even if the color channels are encoded as 12-bit log. It might be one of the reasons that Ronin 4D files seem to have extra "mojo" since it, like some Sony cameras (with Atomos), is sending 16-bit linear to the encoder. Whatever it is, it's enough that DJI advertise on their website that it stores 16-bit ProRes RAW. 😃

There's not much point in arguing about whose raw codec is best. There's a good chance that N-RAW, ProRes RAW, and even BM Raw are better than it in many ways - unless something has changed, Red's is apparently based on Cineform raw which was released in 2005. It's nearly as old as H.264. In some ways, sure - but one could say also that in a well-lit scene, a lot of people wouldn't notice a difference between a GH5 and an Arri - or BMPCC 4K, Panasonic S5, or any number of cameras available for less than $1k on the used market. Of graded footage? That's going to be down more to the skill of the person doing the grading. And for a side-by-side comparison of ungraded footage, I don't have a Z8. I also suspect that if you google it, you'll find a bunch of people saying that the Red footage has magic for them and a bunch of people saying it's nothing special. If you've found nothing special about Red raw from your Epic, I doubt that you'll find Komodo footage to be special. 😃 I like it, though. Understandable. An Epic brain is more than 2kg, even before adding I/O modules. I suspect it's closer to 3kg before it could be used at all. The OG Komodo, on the other hand, is just about 1kg (a whopping 90g more than the Z8) and the only thing is needs to become usable is a fairly small Canon battery. I'd add a monitor so that doesn't need to be held at waist level to see the small built-in screen - that's more weight than the integrated screen on the Z8, but it's also a 5" screen instead of a 3" or so screen. In terms of dimensions, the Komodo is barely bigger than a Canon R5 - and even closer in size to a Z8. I've gone on hikes with the Komodo-X which is a bit bigger/heavier than the Komodo. It didn't bother me at all to carry it with a small v-mount and some of Canon's plastic consumer RF primes - or with the EF adapter with an inline filter slot and smaller EF lenses. That said, it's not my first choice for hiking or travel. There are a whole lot of reasons that I'd choose the GFX 100 for that - and it's the opposite of the Komodo in almost every way. 😅

If your basis for comparison is a small mirrorless camera, the Komodo is certainly a bit big and unwieldy. Though with the right accessories (which, of course, increase the cost), it's not really all that much so (I'm excited for RVLVR to get in their production cables for using Clutch with Komodo). Compared with the Nikon Z8 specifically, the Komodo has about 1 stop more of DR at base ISO and is global shutter (6K) vs 15ms (in 8K). Are either of those things going to be world-changing? Would things like EVF and IBIS make up for them? That's up to the individual and their use case. For Z8 vs OG Komodo, I'd also be willing to bet that the Z8 looks a hell of a lot better in low light since it's dual native ISO - and Komodo is ISO invariant and everything is just metadata from ISO 800. For mounting to a car on rough roads (my use case), IBIS is not only a minus, but may result in destruction of the camera after a while - those magnets are only so strong and unless some manufacturer has changed it, turning off IBIS doesn't result in a physical clamp holding the sensor in place. They just try to hold it in place with the same magnets that do IBIS. Komodo was created to be a crash camera and it shows - a lot of the UX for it is weird and awkward. Ports are in a dumb place on the bottom rear of the camera. There's no front record button - just a weird little nub on the side of the camera. I'd also say that vs my OG R5 or my old Sigma fp, I feel like there's some "magic" in the Komodo files when I edit/grade them - but that sort of thing is highly subjective.

Wow! The Komodo-X is, generally speaking, a better camera than the Komodo. Button placement is better, low light performance is better, I/O placement is better, CF Express vs CFast, native V mount, and (of course) frame rates. But it is not, and I mean not 2.3x better (K-X is still selling for $7k as far as I can see). The difference got smaller with the latest firmware release when they added user pages to the OG Komodo (they're huge for making the camera faster/easier to use). I just sent in a bunch of stuff for trade-in and held back my Z Cam E2-S6G for mounting on the car in dusty environments since it's robust and fanless. The new pricing has me thinking that maybe I should just trade it in toward a dedicated car mounted Komodo and I could just tape a dust filter over the air intake. Once used prices catch up with the changed new pricing, this becomes a crazy good deal! Dang, it's an exciting time to be a low-budget filmmaker.

Sheesh. They're making the $1k "flex" cable I got for my Ronin 4D seem downright cheap!

I don't know - whatever "read noise (e-)" and "saturation (e-)" are, they seem much better on the Panasonic at the same ISO value in general (except 400?) and especially at the lower ISO's, they seem much better - and DR seems better at every ISO as well. "Does a bit better than a camera that many consider to be one of the industry leaders" is not nearly a condemnation that would lead me to say that Panasonic got it wrong. 😃

Yes, as ac6000cw said, a reputable brand from Amazon (or B&H or Adorama or any other decent-size online seller) should be fine - ideally sold by Amazon (since the "marketplace" sellers sometimes have differing policies from the main company).

What Alexis said. I'd need to measure and/or pop off the EF mount to confirm, but I'm not completely certain that an M mount is even feasible for the camera. The film plane indicator is surprisingly far back on the camera's body and the EF mount that it came with is fairly flush with the front plate of the camera.

Assuming that you're talking about the price of the lens that you have, sold item search on ebay puts it between $700 and $1,000 depending on condition. I'd guess that the simmod mount swap would put you near the higher end of the range.

SK Grimes is one of the most famous lens technicians, though sadly is priced to match - located in Rhode Island. https://skgrimes.com/product/repair-services/

I considered getting that back when I had the fp and fp-l. I'm just a bit too ham-fisted to trust myself to install it without destroying the camera. 😅

I'd still say that in a lot of ways, this is going to be a fantastic travel/vacation camera. If I slow down to think about it, when I travel, the Fujinon 32-64/4 was on my original GFX 100 - and now on my GFX 100 II about 90% of the time. As long as things are sunny, I'm usually shooting between f/5.6 and 11 for landscapes/urban stuff. Shallow DOF is not important in those situations. If you're on a scenic overlook pointing the camera at a valley with some mountains in the distance, shallow DOF is mostly useless (and half the time I just use my phone for this stuff instead of digging my camera out of the bag in the back seat or trunk - which might be changed if the camera is small enough to keep on me). When I change lenses, it's usually for portraits with the 110/2 (usually used wide open) and the 63/2.8 (smaller and a stop faster for use in the evening and for a smaller profile). The more I think about this camera, the more I'm excited for it to hit the used market - especially anticipating that Fuji will update firmware sooner or later to allow cropping in video mode (and hopefully 5.8k full width and 8k 1:1 modes) as well. Are there things I'd miss about swappable lenses? Sure. Would some of them be erased if Fuji release a small teleconverter and wide angle converter? Yes. If they don't, do I have a half dozen of them in a drawer somewhere? Probably. Are any of them any good? Unlikely, but... worth a shot.

Also interesting things I noticed when I actually read the manual for my camera (after trying to figure out a few things that were opaque, like why plugging into the rear USB didn't result in the camera showing up in the firmware updater app, turns out that only the left USB port over the assistant monitor works for that!) - - The 17K 65 doesn't have internal ND filters - The 17K 65 doesn't support the same high frame rates as the 12K, even in the same resolutions (Though the latter is a small complaint since the frame rates supported are fast enough for anything other than uploading videos to YouTube showing off your camera's 8K at 224 fps)

Looks like there are at least some 17K's in existence now and release must be imminent. BMD updated their Camera App and Resolve with support now - and they've also released some short films and BTS footage shot on the 17K. Let's see if this one also gets the body-only treatment (though I suspect that even the body-only version of the bigger one will run $15-20k) https://www.cined.com/blackmagic-ursa-cine-17k-65-footage-bts-davinci-resolve-19-1-4-gets-prores-encoding-for-windows/

Heh. Probably a friend. But... it can be hard to say!

I love the EF 40, but as we both said yesterday, the edges are a bit soft. In that picture, the tree branches near the left of the frame are soft even without pixel peeping. For me, that's not a problem at all and I think it looks just fine. But for a lot of Internet people, they'd be whining about edge softness almost as much as they're whining about f/4 now. Just including this one from reddit because it actually made me laugh. "An F/4 lens is simply too slow to shoot with normal shutter speeds in so many situations." 🤣 This guy's normal situations must be "unlit street at 3am' or something since they don't seem to think that one will be able to get 1/40 at ISO 6400 on an f/4 lens. 🤣 Anyway. I'd have traded a bigger lens for another stop, but I still don't think f/4 is a big deal for this sort of camera.

The Zenmuse X5. Zenmuse seems to be their name for their integrated camera/gimbal systems. The current version is X9 which is used on Inspire 3 and Ronin 4D. This is my very old and not very good video about the Osmo RAW. After the initial boring part where I talk about the camera and all of its accessories at a table, the rest of the video is all me talking over actual footage. The Pocket 3 is fantastic and it has some superpowers that the other gimbals won't have. Like you can stand 30 feet away from it and control it with your phone, including choosing a person/object for it to track. Like on a recent short film, I clamped it on a gun barrel and set it to track the face of the actor who was carrying the gun around. As they moved the gun, the camera swiveled to track their face. It was a great look. I also have a cheap cable cam mount (Wiral) that, because it's cheap, can only carry a very light payload and it's a bit shaky while it does. Put on the pocket 3 and it looks smooth as heck. You will be stuck with a wide angle lens (no teleconverter, but there is an adapter to make it even wider), though, so depending on what you want to shoot, it might end up being a terrible option.

Depending on what you're trying to do, and depending on whether they can even still be activated or have a mobile app that will work, you could try the old Osmo Pro and/or Osmo RAW. I really liked the image from the Osmo RAW, but ultimately sold it because the fan noise drove me crazy. Otherwise, it made a really great handheld camera - and there was a 4th axis accessory for it that made the user (me) look like some sort of clown while carrying it walking, but the footage was crazy smooth. I never tried the Pro, but it'd probably look really good also - plus it used normal recording media and didn't have the tiny cooling fan that the RAW had. Anyway, the pro on the used market goes for like $500-600 and the RAW goes for like $900. For the money, since you already have the fp, I wouldn't do that. Though depending on what all you want to do with a gimbal, have you considered just getting a Pocket 3 for those shots? It's very good.

To the best of my knowledge, phone gimbals wouldn't be usable with an FP. Among other things, every one that I ever saw had a non-removable clamp for the phone. Maybe you could clamp the FP with it and secure it with bungees/straps, but I'd expect that to be a path of pain and suffering. DJI just recently released the RS4 mini. It's about $370 and supports about 4 pounds. I have no personal experience with it, but given that it's from DJI, I'd expect it to work well. For about 2/3 the price (about $250), there is also the Zhiyun Crane M3-S. Again, I have no personal experience with it, but I've had some other Zhiyun gimbals in the distant past and they worked well. Not sure what its payload is, but I'd guess it's enough for an fp + light lens.