Is anyone seriously using their smartphone for video?

[mercer]

I think he probably meant to hit laughy face and hit downvote instead? And now he’s being an old, stubborn S.O.B. about it... lol. 

[BTM_Pix]

I like the ranting that @webrunner5 does though.

When he's on a roll I'm always put in mind of him doing it in the style of Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles 

And I mean that with all due affection @webrunner5 do don't down vote me

 

[webrunner5]

3 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

If you look at the down vote in the bottom right of the post and click it, it says that you down voted it.

Don't know whether there's something going on with your account automatically doing votes because there's a post in another thread that says you did the big laughing one when it didn't seem like it was a funny post in the slightest! Mind you, us gentlemen of certain advancing ages do tend to laugh in all the wrong places !

I'll be damned, I did down vote that post. I have no clue why. Nothing you said in it goes against my thoughts. Only person I ever intentionally down voted was Jon. He seems to sort of be the Old Jon again. That is good.

I removed my down vote. You are a virgin again. Praise the Lord! ?

28 minutes ago, mercer said:

I think he probably meant to hit laughy face and hit downvote instead? And now he’s being an old, stubborn S.O.B. about it... lol. 

I think it might have been the old "Too many Beers" syndrome! ?

[kye]

On 6/9/2018 at 7:21 AM, PannySVHS said:

Form factor is such a weird thing. The body i prefer the most with a pancake is from the GF1. Somehow it feels so much cooler and fun in the hand than my GX85. Don´t know why. So, if they put out a smartphone in that formfactor, heck, that would be cool. Or wouldnt it.

The GF1 had a real following.. I read a few reviews that loved the ergonomics when I was buying my GF3.  I think the GF1 had a button combination that worked well for some people, and they're seriously small and solidly built.  I'm not sure about the GF1, but my GF3 has a metal body, which was excellent considering I dropped it once and it slightly wrinkled the corner and that was it - a few more mm of damage would have damaged the LCD screen!

[MKjaer]

I watched unsane last night and didn’t think it looked that bad - at the beginning. I actually though that it gave a certain docu style to it, and some parts even looked awesome to my eyes. Of course it didn’t look like a normal Hollywood movie - A bit like an art film, a filmSchool project or like a lot of other indies which have gone on to great reviews. In the last part of the movie it was like the picturestyle fell apart and the limitations of the phone became an distractions to the story.

Tangerine was shot on a IPhone 5s and a Moondog adapter, and it looks great. 

 

To sum up: if you are planning on shooting weeding or the next charter in the Transformers saga then maybe your phone it not the camera you should choose. However, if you are working on an indie story-driven piece then I don’t think a phone is necesarraly the wrong choice. It gives the film a certain autentic look and then it all comes down to the storyline and style and working within it limitations.

In the end, it is all about the story - and if your story isn’t good enough to be told through a phone then maybe one should spend more time improving the story, than thinking about getting a better camera. And if one doesn’t already own a camera the maybe the money is better spend on other movie-related items than on an expensive camera. Better to get a great story told with a IPhone, than not to get it told at all. 

[webrunner5]

Out of Likes. Great write up. Well stated.

[hijodeibn]

9 hours ago, MKjaer said:

I watched unsane last night and didn’t think it looked that bad - at the beginning. I actually though that it gave a certain docu style to it, and some parts even looked awesome to my eyes. Of course it didn’t look like a normal Hollywood movie - A bit like an art film, a filmSchool project or like a lot of other indies which have gone on to great reviews. In the last part of the movie it was like the picturestyle fell apart and the limitations of the phone became an distractions to the story.

Tangerine was shot on a IPhone 5s and a Moondog adapter, and it looks great. 

 

To sum up: if you are planning on shooting weeding or the next charter in the Transformers saga then maybe your phone it not the camera you should choose. However, if you are working on an indie story-driven piece then I don’t think a phone is necesarraly the wrong choice. It gives the film a certain autentic look and then it all comes down to the storyline and style and working within it limitations.

In the end, it is all about the story - and if your story isn’t good enough to be told through a phone then maybe one should spend more time improving the story, than thinking about getting a better camera. And if one doesn’t already own a camera the maybe the money is better spend on other movie-related items than on an expensive camera. Better to get a great story told with a IPhone, than not to get it told at all. 

In general I agree, if you only have an iPhone, go out and shoot with the iPhone, but to be honest, Tangerine artifacts were very distractive to me, when I was watching the movie and I saw all the effort and money spent in all the aspects of the movie, it was clear to me that the decision to use the iPhone as a camera was just a commercial choice, who knows how much money Apple put on the table, but I guess was a lot, today you can get a very good camera for almost nothing, less than $600 for a Canon M50, that's virtually nothing compared to what you are spending in other areas, or if you are really tie, $150 for an original Canon EOS M and ML to get 2.5k RAW, that's peanuts!!!!

 

[IronFilm]

11 hours ago, MKjaer said:

 In the last part of the movie it was like the picturestyle fell apart and the limitations of the phone became an distractions to the story.

Why was that, did they run out time/money during the later stages of shooting? (if it was shot chronologically)

[hijodeibn]

15 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Why was that, did they run out time/money during the later stages of shooting? (if it was shot chronologically)

Tangerine fell apart in several scenes, specially during low light situations, at the end was most noticeable since there were more low light scenes....

[webrunner5]

10 hours ago, hijodeibn said:

Tangerine fell apart in several scenes, specially during low light situations, at the end was most noticeable since there were more low light scenes....

I know they have not advanced that much in Low Light but the difference between a iPhone 5 and a iPhone X now is incredible photo and video wise.  If Smartphones were Cine cameras we would all be using a Arri Alexa Mini for 1800 bucks new. But I must admit even cheaper cameras have jumped up big time, 10 bit, Raw, IBIS, 4K, HDR on and on.

[BasiliskFilm]

I think we are stuck with small sensors on phones - anything bigger and the lens scales up too and you won't get it in your pocket. To me the main question is can they get away from infinite DOF? Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ fools most folk most of the time, but that is stills only, and I imagine we are still a couple of cycles away from getting that stable and reliable enough for full-time video mode. Close inspection usually reveals the odd artefact, and with moving subjects that will probably happen all the time. Maybe next generation of processing, and 3 cameras rather than 2 and we will get there. I also imagine that computational imaging will increasingly bear down on noise - inter-frame noise reduction, combining images from multiple sensors - there may be options for cleaning up low light video.

[kye]

14 hours ago, BasiliskFilm said:

I think we are stuck with small sensors on phones - anything bigger and the lens scales up too and you won't get it in your pocket. To me the main question is can they get away from infinite DOF? Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ fools most folk most of the time, but that is stills only, and I imagine we are still a couple of cycles away from getting that stable and reliable enough for full-time video mode. Close inspection usually reveals the odd artefact, and with moving subjects that will probably happen all the time. Maybe next generation of processing, and 3 cameras rather than 2 and we will get there. I also imagine that computational imaging will increasingly bear down on noise - inter-frame noise reduction, combining images from multiple sensors - there may be options for cleaning up low light video.

AFAIK the iPhone has a 3.99mm f1.8 lens, which gives a crop factor of 7, which means the lens is equivalent to something like 28mm f4.5.  F4.5 isn't a bokeh monster lens by any stretch of the imagination, so unless they can push it to something like 3.99mm f1.0 or dramatically increase the sensor size, then the answer is no - near infinite DOF will be with us for a long time.

That's why they're using multiple cameras and digital processing in the first place.

Computational photography is the way of the future, but it'll be a while away so I wouldn't hold your breath.  The Lytro L16 was ambitious but ultimately didn't really pull off what they were attempting to do, and I take it to mean that it's a lot harder than they were anticipating.

In terms of using multiple cameras for improving low-light that's something that will need to be done computationally because of parallax error.  You can't just do dumb calculations on the images (like averaging them) because they won't line up.

[webrunner5]

I don't think Computational Photography and AI are as far away as you think. The next iPhone, what ever it will be called, is less than 3 months away for sale. It has already been designed and it is being manufactured as we speak probably. And I am sure the one after that is already being engineered, maybe even tested in a crude form. Smartphones are on Warp Drive for development. Even that new Red Smartphone is probably pretty scary specs wise internally truth be known.

I think we are a lot closer to just mind blowing stuff coming in phones than we think. Now if Canon was making phones they would still be pushing flip phones along with Nokia!

[kye]

52 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

I don't think Computational Photography and AI are as far away as you think.

It depends on what we're really talking about here.

They're not far away in the sense they're already around, but it's what they can do that is up for grabs.  Humans and computers are VASTLY different and we're completely rubbish at predicting what computers will and won't be good for.  We have AI lawyers already operating in real life but I still can't buy a robot to take the rubbish out and a 3-year-old can do that.

It's best to think of AI like a living organism.  It will have intelligence (IQ, EQ, etc), memory, ability to learn, physical coordination, etc, but at RADICALLY different levels to how humans are.  Humans have a bunch of hard-wiring for operating in a 3D physical world, and because humans develop these things first we tend to think that AI will, but it's not so.

My take on AI is that it currently:

• has unpredictable levels of IQ (depending on the type of problem)
• has almost zero EQ
• has almost infinite memory
• has very poor ability to learn (even out-classed by most pets)
• has basically no physical coordination

Being able to see the world in 3D and (properly) blur the background, that's something that requires huge spatial processing ability, sophisticated object recognition,  and sub-pixel level of processing, all of which are orders-of-magnitude more than we currently have.  Otherwise we'll be stuck with what we currently have, which is basically a trick to compare two cameras, make an extremely low resolution mask, and blur the shit out of whatever happens to be vaguely in the right place.  Blurring the background but leaving the fly-away hair of the model in focus is a world away from where we are currently.

[webrunner5]

30 minutes ago, kye said:

It depends on what we're really talking about here.

They're not far away in the sense they're already around, but it's what they can do that is up for grabs.  Humans and computers are VASTLY different and we're completely rubbish at predicting what computers will and won't be good for.  We have AI lawyers already operating in real life but I still can't buy a robot to take the rubbish out and a 3-year-old can do that.

It's best to think of AI like a living organism.  It will have intelligence (IQ, EQ, etc), memory, ability to learn, physical coordination, etc, but at RADICALLY different levels to how humans are.  Humans have a bunch of hard-wiring for operating in a 3D physical world, and because humans develop these things first we tend to think that AI will, but it's not so.

My take on AI is that it currently:

• has unpredictable levels of IQ (depending on the type of problem)
• has almost zero EQ
• has almost infinite memory
• has very poor ability to learn (even out-classed by most pets)
• has basically no physical coordination

Being able to see the world in 3D and (properly) blur the background, that's something that requires huge spatial processing ability, sophisticated object recognition,  and sub-pixel level of processing, all of which are orders-of-magnitude more than we currently have.  Otherwise we'll be stuck with what we currently have, which is basically a trick to compare two cameras, make an extremely low resolution mask, and blur the shit out of whatever happens to be vaguely in the right place.  Blurring the background but leaving the fly-away hair of the model in focus is a world away from where we are currently.

I think the trouble is we are thinking at a Human level. Once Robots can build Robots as they say, Robots may come up with designs that we are not able to ever imagine on our own. Advancements may be on the magnitude of 100drds of our years in a decade. In 50 years if we don't blow earth up, we may be planning on going to the next Solar System, not just making it to Mars. One big ass breakthrough and we are at Plan D not plan B.

It is like CPU's now, they are a thing of the past with GPU's the way they have become. We can thank Nvidia for that not Intel. If you own Intel, AMD stock sell fast as hell.

[kye]

56 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

I think the trouble is we are thinking at a Human level. Once Robots can build Robots as they say, Robots may come up with designs that we are not able to ever imagine on our own. Advancements may be on the magnitude of 100drds of our years in a decade. In 50 years if we don't blow earth up, we may be planning on going to the next Solar System, not just making it to Mars. One big ass breakthrough and we are at Plan D not plan B.

It is like CPU's now, they are a thing of the past with GPU's the way they have become. We can thank Nvidia for that not Intel. If you own Intel, AMD stock sell fast as hell.

You're right about thinking at a human level.  Robots building robots is definitely going to be a thing, and just like any other exponential process it's going to take far more time making basically zero progress than we think, and then bang - out of nowhere it will take off.

Another problem is that robots are so different that getting smarter doesn't mean anything to us if they get smart in ways we don't appreciate or like.
You might have heard about the Facebook AI robots inventing their own language.  They did that because the programmers didn't incentivise them to speak proper English, so they went off the reservation.  That is a pretty straight-forward example, but what separates computers inventing their own shorthand (which we don't like) and teenagers doing the same thing (which is inherently human), let alone how we would respond to an AI that made no sense because it was speaking to teenagers!

There's a great quote from the snopes article about that language thing:

Quote

But what everyone fails to appreciate in these fever dreams is that human beings are the most adaptable, clever, and aggressive predators in the known universe.

Link: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-ai-developed-own-language/

It's an interesting article talking about lots of general stuff to do with AI etc, but the quote is interesting because we have stupidly high standards about doing things that are useful to humans.

In a sense, if AIs were training humans they might say something like:  I don't understand these humans, they can't accurately remember a f*cking thing, can't even add a thousand numbers a second (which any $0.02 chip can do!), but they manage to self-repair, resist rust, and develop virus counter-measures without even trying!!

They will be capable of amazing things, but if you ask a robot to help enhance the photographs you took you're more likely to get back an image that has been optimised so that every n-th pixel has its colour values rounded to the n-th prime number, or simply made to be all black because it's easier to store.  The idea they would simulate a wider aperture in an optical system in a 3D environment is far more alien to them than the other examples I mention because they don't have these things, or if they did, then they'd optimise them to have a deep depth-of-field because that's better for object recognition algorithms and accurate recording and cataloging of the world is more valuable than walking around half-blind or recording huge amounts of data to then throw away a lot of it afterwards.

[webrunner5]

Yeah but the big trouble is down the road there is not going to be a really big need for humans at all. That is when the shit hits the fan as they say. We, unfortunately, are a threat to this planet, the whole Universe! We, as Spock said, are not logical. We do some stupid ass stuff over and over again. Sort of like Einsteins definition of Insanity. Robots will learn from mistakes, unlike us. We are definitely on the short list down the road one way or the other.

[kye]

You underestimate our desire for self-preservation!!

[webrunner5]

15 minutes ago, kye said:

You underestimate our desire for self-preservation!!

Either Nuclear Fallout or global warning is going to kills us, or Robots LoL. We have advanced too far too fast for our Peanut brains to keep up with the pace. I think the end is nearer than you think one way or another.  Humans are just too damn cruel to last forever. We kill for the fun or money of it. That is a recipe for disaster. Racism alone through history has been, and will be, our undoing.?

[BTM_Pix]

6 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Once Robots can build Robots as they say, Robots may come up with designs that we are not able to ever imagine on our own.

The first thing these robots need to do is to build a robot that can walk properly.

Otherwise, in the upcoming war against the rise of the cyborgs, we'll prevail just by virtue of knowing that we have to shoot the ones that look like they've shit their pants