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eatstoomuchjam

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Everything posted by eatstoomuchjam

  1. For the vehicle, a Landy is a great option. venture4wd has one as his secondary vehicle and a lot of his content lately has been driving it all over the mountains in Arizona. For a trailer to take off-road, you should think about that long and hard before making the jump. I'd rank buying a pull-behind camper as one of the worst decisions I've made in my entire life. The one I got was not specifically an overlanding camper or whatever, but it had decent enough ground clearance - but even as a fairly short trailer (about 15 feet), it plus the tongue basically doubled the length of my car (my Wrangler is about 19 feet long) which is awful when you're on a small dirt road that someone gated off. And that's note even starting to get into how often it broke, the difficulty of repairs, etc. I ended up selling it at a huge loss (bought for $10k, put in about $2-3k in upgrades, sold for about $3-4k) and felt grateful to be rid of the fucking thing. YMMV, of course. Given your plans, you may also want to check out Dan Grec's page/channel. He hit every country in Africa in a Wrangler with Ursa Minor camper shell, a setup similar to venture4wd's beloved Orangie. He also has a lot of thoughts about what is and isn't important. What sort of NAS do you have in mind? Keep in mind that bouncing around on rough roads will have a negative impact on spinning hard drives, even if they're turned off/parked. My solution for longer-term trips is a handful of 4T SSD's and just copy everything to two of them and keep them in different parts of the car (and/or trailer if you have one). I also have some OWC thing that takes two 2.5" SATA SSD's and does hardware RAID-1 - so I use that with 2 4T drives in it. This depends a lot on the rooftop tent and your goals. My hardshell RTT (iKamper Skycamp Mini) sets up and comes down in around 2 minutes and I can leave a pillow and some blankets inside it. That's faster than any ground tent I've used (I've used Coleman pop-ups which set up in about 5 minutes and come down in, realistically, about 10 if you actually pack it back into a bag properly - the bags suck). It also facilitates camping on a pullout in a dirt road where a tent isn't feasible. If you're moving around a lot, it's great. If you're going somewhere for a week at a time and staying there, the extra few minutes in setup/teardown is a lot less annoying. I'm actually going to sell mine this Spring, but not because I don't like the tent itself - but because despite having a heavy-duty Rhino Rack roof rack, after tens of thousands of miles with the tent on the car, the roof rack started falling apart. Two years ago, my camping trip was cut short by it nearly falling off the car (roof rack loosened) and last year, I ended up immediately taking it back off the car (and injuring my arm in the process) because the now-repaired roof rack re-broke, this time requiring a replacement part that Rhino took something like 4 months to ship to me (despite that the rack is still a current product that they are selling). Now I'm revising my platforms in the car so that I can sleep inside. Again, it depends on the use case and where you are! For me, if I'm staying in an established campground, I can use their toilets. If I'm off-grid, I have a Cleanwaste Go, a sturdy folding plastic toilet that can be used either to poop into a hole in the ground or into a little plastic baggie full of what is basically kitty litter. It ain't glamorous, but it works. But if I were trying to camp out in an event center parking lot for a week, my setup sucks. I'd just get a hotel room at that point. 😃
  2. As far as IQ goes, it depends on the presentation. If the intended presentation is a computer/TV screen (which most are these days), it could be argued that anything above 24 megapixels is more about cropping than IQ. 24 megapixels is more than 2x what a 16:9 4K screen can display natively. If the presentation is going to be a 16x20 print at 300 dpi, around 30 megapixels will suffice. For video, in a lot of ways, a high megapixel sensor is less-than-ideal since it will need either a crazy readout speed and fast processor or it will need to result to various forms of binning/skipping.
  3. As far as action cameras, if it's your own vehicle, I'd use GoPro's adhesive mounts for things like mounting the camera on the underside of the bumper - and it's not just a naive suggestion. I've done exactly that with my own Jeep. At least in the case of the Jeep, there are also screws in the bumper that are intended for mounting things like winches - in my case, I custom-made some mounts with 1/4" and 3/8" screws for mounting camera gear - at least on the front bumper. I also custom-made some mounts to add a 3/8" screw to my roof rack. The driving footage in this video is a mix of bumper cameras and roof rack camera, with a Sony ZV-1 for some of the handheld and car footage and the OG GFX 100 for the rest. You can also get clamps and strong suction cup mounts for less-permanent attachment of gear to the vehicle, just with the caveats that usually come with them, like the spot for the suction cup needs to be clean or you'll lose it with whatever is attached. And the clamp, similarly, needs to be well-secured (lost a cheap action camera (Yi 4K+) in Chile because the clamp apparently got loose and the camera wasn't mounted in a place where I could see it. You don't need a lot of action cameras for this and you don't need the latest/best either. In fact, if a rock knocks off your under-car action camera and it gets lost, you'll feel a lot less bad if it's, for instance, a Hero 10 than a Hero 13. Depending on how smooth you want the footage to be and how dusty the area is, you could also look into something like the movmax blade arm to mount your Osmo Pocket 3 to the car.
  4. I was also about to post about Chimp Empire which I watched after that recommendation! Also, I haven't seen all of King Coal yet, but the trailer and various clips that I've seen from it looked great. The C70 is also pretty affordable nowadays, as things go. Is it the sharpest camera on the market? Nope. You can always rent it, though, to see if it meets your needs. As far as lenses for the C70, instead of buying the latest shiny RF glass, you could also consider permanently affixing Canon's 0.71x focal reducer and using EF glass which is plentiful on the used market and very good. If you're focused on Canon, you could also look at the original R5 which is now available used for about $2,000 and has a nice 8k raw image. I'd also say that, had you not already said you're using the DJI Pocket 3, it would have been my first suggestion... or maybe my second suggestion after an iPhone 16 Pro (or whatever the latest fancy Android phone with a great camera is, probably a Samsung something-or-others). The iPhone can put out some really nice-looking ProRes log footage and it's one of the few cameras out there which will work well in every scenario you mentioned - whereas the C70 is not fantastic in low light and unless you buy a housing costing as much as the camera, won't work well after you submerge it in the water. Working on technique and editing/storytelling is going to do a lot more for your overlanding vlogs than buying $10,000 in gear... venture4wd, one of the most popular overlanding YouTubers uses a combination of action cameras and a Panasonic - I think an S5 II? And he didn't upgrade to the Panasonic until his channel was already big.
  5. In a lot that I've seen, they conclude in the end that the Alexa's picture is nicer, but not 20x nicer (or whatever the price multiple is). They're completely correct. If you're an owner-operator shooting corporate talking heads or weddings or short films with a budget of about $1k, you'd be crazy to buy an Alexa for it. On the other hand, if you're shooting a feature film with a budget of 200 million dollars and the cost for several Alexas is about 0.2% of your budget (as IronFilm pointed out), you're probably not thinking in terms of value, but about the "best" tool to create the image. Similarly, you'd be crazy to buy a 12-18 million dollar F1 racecar to commute to work. It's a terrible value compared to like, a Toyota Camry. But if you show up on the track at Interlagos on race day driving a Camry...
  6. My mistake! I didn't realize you were limiting the pixel shift comments to it being processed in-body. Last I checked, it still needed to be done in post. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
  7. Are you talking about a higher-resolution mode using sensor shift? Fuji does this too, at least on the GFX 100 series. Though if the Olympus/Panasonic/Pentax implementations support doing it handheld, that's an improvement over Fuji's which requires a very stable tripod. The original Canon R5 could do it too - no idea how well it worked, but I think I read that they removed the mode from the R5 II in favor of "AI" upscaling... a place where "progress" isn't.
  8. As others have said, for the most part, proper lighting and grading is often more important than the image straight out of the camera. Though with that said, Alexa is still the most flexible image that you'll find coming out of a camera, That's followed by Burano and V-Raptor and most recently, apparently, Ursa Cine (still needs more time for user tests to confirm/deny, but the tests on paper are impressive. If you're shooting a film with a big budget, your A camera is almost definitely Alexa. Why? Because it's the most flexible image. Because your high-end gaffer will automatically know how to light well for it. Because your high-end editor and colorist will instantly know how to push the footage around and probably have pre-defined workflows for working with it. Is it still the best image? Arguable. If you're shooting a decent budget indie flick, you're more likely to find Burano/Venice or V-Raptor? Why? Similar things to the above, but you're paying less than Alexa. If you're shooting lower budget than that, it's a complete crapshoot. It'll probably involve the letters F, X, and 6, but if it's a run and gun documentary, it might involve C300 and/or C70. From what I've seen, if you want to penetrate the bigger productions, you're better off not trying to compete with Alexa for A camera, but to aim to make secondary cameras that fit in places where it doesn't. Civil War, for example, famously used the Ronin 4D for a bunch of the handheld stuff because it's a quick/easy gimbal camera with decent autofocus. I hear they're making inroads on other productions too for similar reasons - and on other stuff because, like, the 4d flex is great for tight spaces and/or car-to-car shots. The most recent Mission Impossible and the upcoming one use Z Cam E2-F6 as crash cameras because they're cheap (for Hollywood), make a great image, and are reliable (no overheating, you can basically hammer nails with the body all day and then go record some video at night). That footage of Tom Cruise flying off a cliff on a motorcycle? Nearly all Z-Cam. Anyway, the point is that the image SOOC on high-end cameras should look good. Should it look THAT much better than a mirrorless camera in the hands of a proficient operator? Nope. Just a few weeks ago, Kye posted some stuff that he shot in Korea using, if I remember right, the original BM micro studio camera from like a hundred years ago. Looked great. You could project it in a cinema as part of a feature and the audience would be none the wiser to the camera used.
  9. It's also not super inspiring to say that a camera from 2022 is "latest and greatest tech." 😅
  10. I think Leica already beat you to that idea. Except they reduced the usefulness of it by making it only work with their app, for some reason.
  11. I read the announcement and watched the PetaPixel video and all I could think was "So you're telling me that I can get the guts/specs of a middle-of-the-road camera from 2022 in a sort of different body with no handgrip and it'll only be $1,999? Where do I sign up?! I can go get any of a few vaguely retro-styled Fuji X-something-or-other bodies with IBIS for less money and they will also have better resolution (25ish megapixels), 6K video, and probably better readout speeds/dynamic range. Or I could get a GH7 and use many of the same lenses and have 6K raw internal recording. Not looking good for OM systems if this is the best they could do. The 100-400 update is nice, I suppose - but even with that, isn't that just a rebadged Tamron lens? The big upgrade is that they convinced their partner to enable sync IS?
  12. Or before he completely crashes the economy and gives us 3000% inflation. 😕 I suppose that I should stock up on vegemite too, just in case.
  13. They already have a compact body around a full frame 6k sensor and an L mount. Also, if I'm not mistaken, that very camera was on sale last year for a crazy low price like $1500 or 1600. So... they already basically did what you're saying, especially in the context of 6k being plenty for 4k delivery with enough room for non-aggressive digital reframing. The pricing strategy on this one was originally V-Raptor [x] performance for about half the price of a brand new V-Raptor [x], but it's 12k and supports 3:2 open gate and 16:9 on a taller sensor than the Red - and also, within about a stop of Arri at... well, a whole lot less than half the price of Arri. The new pricing strategy is the same as a Komodo-X, just a bit more than a C80, and less than a C400, but the performance of V-Raptor [x] and 12k. Will it catch the first time camera buyer? Nope. Does it make their system a compelling option for the mid-range owner-operator? Yup. Theoretical, sure, but I don't think it's even remotely unreasonable to think that they'd support 8kp60 with a v-mount and CFE. Komodo-X does 80fps at 6k and at their chosen price point, that's sort of the competition. Still waiting for some to get in the hands of real users to hear their experiences, but once I'm back in the US, it's likely that I'll be exploring my options to trade in some of my stuff now (and probably some cash, sadly) toward one of these. It's kind of crazy, fwiw, to think that I could soon have a video camera that almost as much resolution in video as my GFX 100 II has for photos... though with maybe a little bit less dynamic range still... at least for single shot mode. When shooting in continuous mode (which never reaches more than 8fps), the GFX reduces DR.
  14. Speaking as a person who needs anything over 24fps only rarely, it's great to know that I could easily do that on this camera, even using just standard CF Express cards, albeit with pretty frequent card swaps. And when needing higher speeds, increasing compression ratio is probably fine - not to mention that they're quoting open gate on that page and not 16:9 which I'd be more likely to use (looks like 17:9 crops 16:9) to crop to 2.39 for delivery (it can do scope internally too, but it's nice to have a little bit of room to shift the image up or down a bit in post, without needing a full 3:2 frame for it). Plus as long as there isn't a hit to the DR, I'd also be more likely to use it at 8K or 9K most of the time than to use it at 12K. It'll be interesting to see what people report once more of these suckers start getting into the hands of real people. Most of the tests I've seen have focused on performance in 12K mode which is understandable, but I'm really more interested in the very high dynamic range combined with very low rolling shutter. Edit: I just realized that in cined's lab test, they at least did the xyla 21 with the 4K mode as well as 12K and they were nearly identical - so the 8k/9k modes probably are too. The biggest drawback so far seems to be low light performance - but my Komodo-X is ISO invariant at 800 in raw with the camera-chosen ISO being more of a suggestion for where to distribute tones than adjusting sensor gain - and that's not been a problem at all since I got it.
  15. The $7k version comes with a dual CF Express Type B module. That'd make its media costs no higher than most of my other current cameras. And sort of "free" since I have like 4-5T of decent CF Express B cards around. If recording to SSD is supported, even better. I have some of them too. 😉
  16. At that point, though, why put the f/2.8 zoom on the A7CR and not... forgive me if I'm forgetting my Sony lenses a bit here, but the 35mm f/2.8 or the 55mm f/1.8? I remember that when I shot Sony, I had both and they were technically excellent (and overly clinical to match). At the time it came out, the 55/1.8 was, I think, considered the technically best 50-ish millimeter autofocus lens ever made. It'd bring the A7CR a lot closer in size to the Leica. And with the 35, it's even smaller than the Leica. I remember there was also a 28mm f/2.0 and a 24mm f/2.8 which were also pretty small/tiny, but I can't remember if I ever had/used them. Anyway, as long as the Sony has 61 megapixels, using a relatively wide lens like a 24, 28, or 35 gives plenty of resolution to crop in post (or maybe the camera supports crop modes for still images internally?). And for video, lots of clear image zoom with minimal/no loss of quality. With the S9, the zoom seems more important since 24 megapixels gives a lot less flexibility for zooming in post or using internal cropping modes. That's the Leica Q3 with a more fair comparison between the A7CR and 35/2.8 ZA and 24/2.8 G. At about $2500 for a used A7CR and $350ish for the 35/2 and $450-500ish for the 24mm, the Sony would be a pretty compelling option vs the $5500-6000ish used Leica. Though Sony shooters won't get as many groupies as Leica shooters so you'll have that working against you.
  17. Yeah. The price is kind of crazy - adding back all the stuff that isn't included doesn't seem to equal the price difference. It seems like there must be something else going on. Battery plate - $99 PL mount - $395 Top handle - $199 Media module - $1,695 Base plate + power supply - prices not currently shown, but apparently about $5,600? Even if the normal kit included the media dock (about $2,000) it doesn't all add up.
  18. It looks like today (or very recently, if not today), BMD announced a body-only version of the cine 12k for $7,000. This camera just became a whole lot more interesting (and I'm now thinking about what I could sell/trade in toward one). Compared with the $15k kit, it excludes the top handle, baseplate, power supply, battery plate and PL lens mount. It also omits the 8tb BMD storage device for a module with dual CF Express slots. It ships with an EF mount (which I think is just great, given how many of my lenses are EF). Suddenly, the Ursa Cine 12K just became a lot more interesting to me. I doubt that the dual CFE module can record in all (or even any?) of the 12k modes at any of the higher quality settings... but I'm even more doubtful that 12k is really that important to me (and a lot of other things about the UM12K are really interesting). https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursacine
  19. The C70 does have some of the highest DR of any shipping camera - it's a DGO sensor. If highest dynamic range is your deciding factor, you won't find many cameras under $10k to match it. Is your project run and gun which is why you want the internal ND - for super fast changes? Some other options for "internal" ND: - Use EF or PL lenses on an RF mount camera and use a converter with swappable inline ND (such as Canon's EF-RF adapter) - If you don't need it to be on a button and just don't want to deal with front filters, look into a rear clip-in filter - they are available for many cameras and in my experience, work well.
  20. For me, the biggest question for the Fuji compact is about the size. If the body+lens are within 5% of the size of a GFX 100S II + 50/3.5, I'll roll my eyes and not care. If, on the other hand, the size is closer to like a EOS R5 + the Canon consumer 24mm RF prime... I suddenly start to become interested, with or without IBIS. Double bonus will be if it includes the 4k full sensor video mode, 5.8k full sensor width 2.35:1 mode, and the cropped 8K mode... or even better, if it has a 4K mode that can do something like Sony's clear image zoom where I can just zoom by changing the readout window on the sensor all the way down to 1:1 pixels. Starting at 100 megapixels, that's a hell of a lot of zoom before reaching 4096x2160 (starting from a sensor that's 11648 x 8736) (I think that 4k 1:1 would be close to S35? The 8K 1:1 mode on the 100 is pretty close to FF). (I already use the 8K mode on the GFX 100 II to get a bit more telephoto in video mode - usually I prefer the 5.8k 2.35:1 mode for my stuff, but if I want a bit more reach than my lens has...)
  21. I still say that the RX100 V is one of the most fun cameras that I ever owned - and I still have mine somewhere, as well as a ZV-1. Even though the 960 fps mode is potato-quality, the 240 fps mode wasn't bad. And even for photos, 24 fps in raw for around 5 seconds is kind of crazy in a camera that size. In theory, if one didn't need sound, one could do 5.5k raw video for very short clips using that mode. I never did that, but on the occasions when I'd use it for something fast-moving, I remember that the rapid fire tick-tick-tick while I held down the little shutter button on the tiny camera would just make me smile. Also, the built-in ND filter was so useful! It was only about 3 stops which wasn't perfect (c'mon, Sony, give us a 5 stop!), but it meant that shooting s-log video was just possible on a sunny day, albeit stopped down (I'm not home right now to check the base iso, but I think it was 640? That seems about right since I remember shooting at f/11 put highlights just in danger of blowing out). It was also kind of nice for dragging the shutter for like a waterfall or similar.
  22. You can also do a wrap if you really wanna look cool like the kids. https://www.wrapcart.com/products/matrix-design-orange-2-camera-skins https://alphagvrd.com/collections/panasonic/products/panasonic-s5-ii-s5-ii-x-generic-camera-skin?variant=42902796959882
  23. It's definitely improved for very short takes. While I didn't watch the whole thing, the bits I skipped around to see were all very short clips. Anyplace with letters was also a give-away (the wording on the truck). I also wonder how many "takes" they had to do of each clip to get one that looked good and where the physics were mostly realistic. I saw a few clips that seemed in the "weird physics" space - that continues to be a major weakness of AI-generated video. But the main thing that could still slow down the enshittification of everything through AI is that AI-generated material is still not able to be copyrighted - at least not in the US. How long that lasts before the shitheads in Congress/Senate/Presidency "fix" it? Unknown.
  24. The questions are overly broad and lacking in enough detail to answer effectively. What's the crew look like? How "limited" is "limited budget?" Do you already have a set of lenses? Since phones got pretty good, how many of your goals can you accomplish with a modern iPhone? In general, focus less on the camera body - as long as you find something with no recording time limits (or long limits), nearly any camera that has been sold in the last 10 years will be more than sufficient for concert videography. If you need good autofocus, then that's certainly a consideration as well. Also, the cameras you've chosen for the "without budget constraints" option are kind of weird. Why the GH6 if on an unlimited budget? If nothing else, the GH7 exists and is, by most accounts, a far more capable camera.
  25. Looks like it was shot about 40% on the SL2 and about 60% in Blender. 🤣
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