Any thought? 10 Cameras Compared | Canon 1DC | C100 Mk2 | EVA1 | GH6 | NX1 | BMCC 2.5k | GH4 | GH2 | GH1 | Z6

[IronFilm]

5 hours ago, FHDcrew said:

Native Z lenses give the absolute best AF performance so you should be set. 

How are the Viltrox, Tamron, or TTArtisan lenses on the Nikon Z6 for video, anybody tried them?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/ci/17912/N/4196380428?sort=PRICE_LOW_TO_HIGH&filters=fct_a_focus-type_5738%3Aautofocus%2Cfct_brand_name%3Akipon|tamron|ttartisan|viltrox|yongnuo%2Cfct_lens-mount_3442%3Anikon-z-mount

[FHDcrew]

2 hours ago, IronFilm said:

How are the Viltrox, Tamron, or TTArtisan lenses on the Nikon Z6 for video, anybody tried them?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/ci/17912/N/4196380428?sort=PRICE_LOW_TO_HIGH&filters=fct_a_focus-type_5738%3Aautofocus%2Cfct_brand_name%3Akipon|tamron|ttartisan|viltrox|yongnuo%2Cfct_lens-mount_3442%3Anikon-z-mount

Well one of the viltrox lenses might just be next on my purchase list. From online reviews both the viltrox and yongnuo perform quite solid. 

[Ty Harper]

8 hours ago, deezid said:

the codec is something I never want to deal with in my live again. 😭

While I agree that those 1DC files are next level frustrating - it's a night and day experience on something like a Mac Mini M1, which is pretty affordable nowadays. All that to say now more than ever cams like the 1DC and all the RAW ML enabled Canon dslrs are hassle free treasures imo.

[kye]

On 9/9/2022 at 3:17 PM, John Matthews said:

I'm interested in knowing what people's thoughts are on this camera comparison.

 

I watched this some time ago and unfortunately can't find my notes (I did it blind and made notes before I got the answers).  I've done a number of these tests before and normally they compare a number of cameras at a similar quality level and of a similar vintage, and in those cases I rank things mostly in order of ascending price!  This test was different though and tended to correlate with the cost of the camera but also how good the codec was, with the low bit-rate bit-depth codecs not looking as good.

On 9/15/2022 at 12:26 PM, John Matthews said:

For me, I was amazed by the performance of the AI upscaling. It makes me think about something Rodney Charters said a long while back. Is it still relevant today?

 

This is great advice but no-one wants to hear it.

We've gone through three phases that I can see:

1. At first non-Hollywood wanted higher resolution and higher quality digital because digital was inferior to film.  During this phase Hollywood just shot film.
2. Then Hollywood went to high quality 2K (Alexa etc) and the consumer market was justifiably dissatisfied with their low quality 4K cameras with poor codecs and colour science.  The manufacturers were pushing higher resolution to try and sell more TVs and the consumer market bought into the hype, demanding more low-quality pixels rather than understanding that they needed better pixels rather than more of them.
3. Unfortunately, Hollywood has now succumbed to this resolution hype as well (largely kick-started by RED and Netflix purely for business purposes with nothing to do with image quality itself).

Normally I'd say "to each their own", but unfortunately it means that those that want to buy a new camera have to pay for all the BS resolution that the gullible market has demanded.  
To get a great looking 2K timeline you have to either:

• Use a low-resolution high-quality camera from 2010-2015 with their support issues, crap battery life, poor pre-amps, and lack of modern features
• Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to record ridiculous file sizes like 4K uncompressed RAW, 8K uncompressed RAW and then put those on a 2K timeline, costing you a heap in storage and computation
• Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to send ridiculous resolution images to an external recorder that downsamples to something sensible and then uses a high-quality codec (like 2K compressed RAW, 2K Prores 4444, or maybe ~2.5K Prores)
• The missing combination here is for the camera to downsample in-camera and to write a high-quality but sensible-resolution file onto the card, but this option is very rare

You can post about image quality until you're blue in the face, but people either can't (or don't want to) see past the marketing BS from TV companies that tells them that they need to quadruple the resolution of their camera every 5 years, even though it has almost zero effect on image quality.

[John Matthews]

26 minutes ago, kye said:

I watched this some time ago and unfortunately can't find my notes (I did it blind and made notes before I got the answers).  I've done a number of these tests before and normally they compare a number of cameras at a similar quality level and of a similar vintage, and in those cases I rank things mostly in order of ascending price!  This test was different though and tended to correlate with the cost of the camera but also how good the codec was, with the low bit-rate bit-depth codecs not looking as good.

This is great advice but no-one wants to hear it.

We've gone through three phases that I can see:

1. At first non-Hollywood wanted higher resolution and higher quality digital because digital was inferior to film.  During this phase Hollywood just shot film.
2. Then Hollywood went to high quality 2K (Alexa etc) and the consumer market was justifiably dissatisfied with their low quality 4K cameras with poor codecs and colour science.  The manufacturers were pushing higher resolution to try and sell more TVs and the consumer market bought into the hype, demanding more low-quality pixels rather than understanding that they needed better pixels rather than more of them.
3. Unfortunately, Hollywood has now succumbed to this resolution hype as well (largely kick-started by RED and Netflix purely for business purposes with nothing to do with image quality itself).

Normally I'd say "to each their own", but unfortunately it means that those that want to buy a new camera have to pay for all the BS resolution that the gullible market has demanded.  
To get a great looking 2K timeline you have to either:

• Use a low-resolution high-quality camera from 2010-2015 with their support issues, crap battery life, poor pre-amps, and lack of modern features
• Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to record ridiculous file sizes like 4K uncompressed RAW, 8K uncompressed RAW and then put those on a 2K timeline, costing you a heap in storage and computation
• Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to send ridiculous resolution images to an external recorder that downsamples to something sensible and then uses a high-quality codec (like 2K compressed RAW, 2K Prores 4444, or maybe ~2.5K Prores)
• The missing combination here is for the camera to downsample in-camera and to write a high-quality but sensible-resolution file onto the card, but this option is very rare

You can post about image quality until you're blue in the face, but people either can't (or don't want to) see past the marketing BS from TV companies that tells them that they need to quadruple the resolution of their camera every 5 years, even though it has almost zero effect on image quality.

@kye, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the situation. I wonder if there will be a fourth phase coming full circle where content creators go back to film. The more I think about it, I think the consumer push for 4k has been a direct response to the low res VHS and mini DV home videos, solving the "problem" of resolution that no one really had with 1080p- just insecurity. I also believe the same can be said for the amount of shallow DOF photography and video- something that was inaccessible in the past is now a cliché part in almost every production. Now that the iPhone can do it, I suppose there will be a resurgence of higher quality deep DOF content to differentiate.

The part of this initial comparison that had me scratching my head was the "AI upresing". I've purchased and used Topaz's solution with amazing results with my DV footage from 2001-2011. I look at these comparisons and I can't help but think how we've seemingly only made baby steps from one iteration to the next with 2010 cameras giving 95% of the image of 2022 cameras when accounting for AI. Are we in a new phase where you're better off investing in primarily a better computer and software than a "next gen" camera? For that matter, investing in almost anything (lights, tripods, stands, etc.) makes more sense.

[kye]

2 hours ago, John Matthews said:

@kye, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the situation. I wonder if there will be a fourth phase coming full circle where content creators go back to film. The more I think about it, I think the consumer push for 4k has been a direct response to the low res VHS and mini DV home videos, solving the "problem" of resolution that no one really had with 1080p- just insecurity. I also believe the same can be said for the amount of shallow DOF photography and video- something that was inaccessible in the past is now a cliché part in almost every production. Now that the iPhone can do it, I suppose there will be a resurgence of higher quality deep DOF content to differentiate.

The part of this initial comparison that had me scratching my head was the "AI upresing". I've purchased and used Topaz's solution with amazing results with my DV footage from 2001-2011. I look at these comparisons and I can't help but think how we've seemingly only made baby steps from one iteration to the next with 2010 cameras giving 95% of the image of 2022 cameras when accounting for AI. Are we in a new phase where you're better off investing in primarily a better computer and software than a "next gen" camera? For that matter, investing in almost anything (lights, tripods, stands, etc.) makes more sense.

I just watched a video where Kraig Adams (who is a professional travel film-maker on YT) sold his A7S3 to swap to using the iPhone 14 as his main travel camera (except for his drone).  He's got 700K+ subs and used to be a professional wedding film-maker, and really knows how to edit footage with music etc.  He's shot with 5D/ML etc so does know what good images look like.

You could say that phones have gotten so close to prosumer cameras that they're replacing proper cameras, but I'd say it a different way - that prosumer cameras have become so shit and everyone has gotten so used to it that you may as well go to a phone because there's so little difference in image quality.

I don't think that there will be a fourth phase.

There are huge parallels here between audio and cameras.

In audio, there were three phases.
At first, everyone used analog because digital didn't exist or was awful.
Then high-end pros used high-end analog and everyone else used mediocre transistors / digital but weren't happy about it (unless they were spec-heads who claimed to be happy because the specs said it must be good).
Now, solid-state and digital has gone up enough, and expectations gone down enough, that everyone except the true high-end uses digital and solid-state electronics.  The parallel doesn't end there either, as not only does the majority think that the 'old stuff' is worse because the specs on paper are worse (which happens if you measure the wrong things) but also people aren't aware of how good the high-end really is.

Aesthetically, the vintage stuff was 'musical' but not 'impressive', and the modern stuff was 'impressive' but only moderately 'musical'.  The super-high end is both and has to be heard to be believed.  To give you a sense of it, I'm talking RRP of $400K and up.  
I think of it as emotion vs brain - which translates directly to cameras - emotions translate to motion and colour science and the right amount of sharpness and brain translates to resolution.

I think that the mediocre spec-driven market will get better and better to the point that everyone will settle.  I don't know what will happen once 8K is ubiquitous, as pushing 12K or 16K seems like it is completely pointless, but having said that, if blind tests show that most can't tell the difference between 4K and 2K then 8K is beyond pointless already.  

But the two things you should never make the mistake of underestimating are: the creativity of marketing departments to come up with new things you should care about, and 2) the gullibility of consumers to adopt these things, even in direct contradiction of their senses.

[j_one]

14 hours ago, John Matthews said:

@kye, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the situation. I wonder if there will be a fourth phase coming full circle where content creators go back to film. The more I think about it, I think the consumer push for 4k has been a direct response to the low res VHS and mini DV home videos, solving the "problem" of resolution that no one really had with 1080p- just insecurity. I also believe the same can be said for the amount of shallow DOF photography and video- something that was inaccessible in the past is now a cliché part in almost every production. Now that the iPhone can do it, I suppose there will be a resurgence of higher quality deep DOF content to differentiate.

The part of this initial comparison that had me scratching my head was the "AI upresing". I've purchased and used Topaz's solution with amazing results with my DV footage from 2001-2011. I look at these comparisons and I can't help but think how we've seemingly only made baby steps from one iteration to the next with 2010 cameras giving 95% of the image of 2022 cameras when accounting for AI. Are we in a new phase where you're better off investing in primarily a better computer and software than a "next gen" camera? For that matter, investing in almost anything (lights, tripods, stands, etc.) makes more sense.

If you're a DP/Camera op bringing in enough monthly to more than justify the cost of a modern high-end production camera then cool. But it seems the general consensus is that the diminishing returns of camera bodies has most smaller production companies and freelancers own their lower-value base kit (your Komodos, R5c, lumix cams, sony alpha cams etc) and rent the higher end models of the same system for the demanding projects that warrant them.

I invested in Topaz too, and am a believer in the concept of older cameras being good enough. But, how often are you going to add AI upscaling as a viable process to your workflow/pipeline? It helps in a pinch when you want your C-cam Blackmagic Micro to match your big boy units for a couple shots, but upscaling doesn't sound fun to do all the time. Unless you are only upresing the final render, it doesn't sound efficient adding possible hours of overnight upscaling your clips in your home render farm.

[John Matthews]

19 hours ago, j_one said:

I invested in Topaz too, and am a believer in the concept of older cameras being good enough. But, how often are you going to add AI upscaling as a viable process to your workflow/pipeline? It helps in a pinch when you want your C-cam Blackmagic Micro to match your big boy units for a couple shots, but upscaling doesn't sound fun to do all the time. Unless you are only upresing the final render, it doesn't sound efficient adding possible hours of overnight upscaling your clips in your home render farm.

I agree that the old stuff is just fine.

Part of using old stuff for me is to use AI upscaling after the edit is done(again, not a pro and never get paid for this)... it can be a legitimate workflow, but the added step can be time-consuming. However, rendering an edited 1080p timeline goes relatively fast; so, you might save there too. One can also save about 4x on storage too. Given most people can't see the difference, why not? It's just he Topaz final upscale that takes forever (16 hours for 1 hour of footage on a M1 Mac). On shorter projects, it's more doable and the savings would be real.

[EduPortas]

On 9/17/2022 at 2:09 AM, kye said:

But the two things you should never make the mistake of underestimating are: the creativity of marketing departments to come up with new things you should care about, and 2) the gullibility of consumers to adopt these things, even in direct contradiction of their senses.

And also the fact that most of digital media today is being consumed on 6 inch screens at 480p or 720p where a higher resolution is almost impossible to differentiate. That goes for movies and YouTube "content". 

We lot are doing this camera stuff for the pleasure of actually holding the damn camera or videocamera (not talking about the high-end production professionals, of course)

[MrSMW]

2 hours ago, EduPortas said:

And also the fact that most of digital media today is being consumed on 6 inch screens at 480p or 720p

Sometimes, not even that.

Met one of my former wedding clients at another wedding last weekend and 3 years after theirs, they have not even watched their wedding film a single time.

So in some cases, we could present just a thumbnail and 10 minutes of blank content… 🤔🤨😂

[Kisaha]

3 hours ago, MrSMW said:

Sometimes, not even that.

Met one of my former wedding clients at another wedding last weekend and 3 years after theirs, they have not even watched their wedding film a single time.

So in some cases, we could present just a thumbnail and 10 minutes of blank content… 🤔🤨😂

So true! When I did some weddings in the past, the feedback was that they were watching only the trailer! And mostly because they were destination weddings (beautiful Greek Islands) and like the drone shots and the likes..

Funny thing, once I did second camera to the beautiful island of Antiparos (Tom Hanks's favourite holiday house). The A camera (and editor) didn't let me shoot a lot of footage, because he wanted a fast turnaround.

So, one morning, I took my NX500 (personal mini camera) with the 12-24mm 4-5.6f and a Manfrotto 70€ tripod and went down to the port. Later on I saw that he used ALL these "hobbyist" shots on the video!

[kye]

@John Matthews @EduPortas @MrSMW @Kisaha

This conversation reminds of a couple of pretty important aspects of film-making that are often not discussed as often as they should be, audience and longevity.  I feel these have a fundamental role in considerations of specs and outright image quality.

The audience, in the context of this discussion, seems to be predominantly people who know the people in the film.  I think this is important because trying to make a film that engages and entertains people who don't have a personal connection to the subject is, I think, many many times harder.  For wedding / engagement work, and for the personal work that I do, the intended audience is people who know the subjects in the video, and for that, the outright technical quality isn't so much of a defining factor.

Longevity is the other major factor that I believe is at play here - this content has almost an infinite shelf-life.  Most content becomes less and less relevant the older that it gets, but not this.  

Corporate work is fundamentally different in this sense, and is mostly about looking modern and fresh and new, to which the aesthetic quality of the images (clean, modern, professional, etc) can be vitally important, at least in the clients eyes.

When you're filming a wedding (or other key family events - not sure if you guys do other family related work like mitzvahs, etc) or the "family videos" that I make, you're acting as a historian.  Older rich families have entire departments of people who keep the family archives, and this is the creation of that material.  In a sense the value of this content goes up over time rather than down.  If I had a choice to send videographers back in time to film a key event of my ancestors, earlier would be of more interest than later.

I've tried to maintain a clear distinction in my technical efforts: capture and preservation first, aesthetics second.  

Even when it comes to aesthetics, what is the aesthetic of a wedding or historic family event?  It's nostalgia.  Sure, you absolutely want to try and capture who the people are, with their own styles and character, but even if your client is demanding 12K video because it's the latest and they always have the best, in 50 years time the 2D linear sequence of images will look antiquated regardless of what you do.  I would also suggest that the sharper you make it (as distinct from resolution - they're independent aspects) the more quickly it will age, rather than appearing more modern.

Aesthetics, even when I concentrate on them, push me towards a less 'trendy' look.  The modern look is high-resolution, clean and noise-free, colours so pure they seem electric, and sharpened to the point you could fillet a fish with it.

This is the exact opposite of nostalgia.  The aesthetic of nostalgia, especially of positive events which is what we are trying to achieve with weddings and family content, is the aesthetic of the dream, the warmth of remembering people you loved, especially people who are gone - either because they have grown and aged and who are not who they were or because they have passed.  
The aesthetic of warm remembering is fuzzy, which requires very low sharpening and often diffusion, it is noisy and organic, the colours are of an older time, a time when colours were less 'pure' and more likely to have come from nature somehow rather than single NM LED lights.  It's also lower resolution just because the tech of the past had lower resolution.  

The more I learn about film-making, the more I prioritise content and then colour.  From a practical point of view, in my own work documenting family trips and moments, my priorities are (starting with the outcome):

• To create a great final edit that is deeply sensitive to the subject matter (people and places)
• In order to do this, I must have a great editing experience with footage that is easy to edit and makes me feel inspired in the editing process
• What inspires me in the editing process is getting great shots of the people, having great colour, and having enough content to allow freedom and options in the edit

If you think about those things in reverse order, for me who shoots without permission and without re-dos or direction, it means I have to have a small camera that doesn't get barred by security and doesn't influence the people I'm shooting too much, it means it has to operate well hand-held, and must be a workhorse that is always ready and doesn't get in the way.  Once I have narrowed my options to those that can do that, it means I want the best quality colour I can get from that camera, and it means I should shoot a lot.

I find that most camera talk exists in absence, or without discussing explicitly, the end goal of the entire endeavour.  

Contrary to what people might think, I think that more resolution is actually a good thing, all else being equal.  The problem is that all else isn't equal, and any extra resolution actively hurts the things I value that are more important to the end product than the resolution itself.

[IronFilm]

10 hours ago, MrSMW said:

So in some cases, we could present just a thumbnail and 10 minutes of blank content… 🤔🤨😂

Shhhh.... don't give away my secrets!

[MrSMW]

5 hours ago, kye said:

The aesthetic of nostalgia

This is a very interesting topic in itself…

We tend to ‘forgive’ crappy photography, printing and preservation when it comes to family as in the value to us in a dog-eared old print is the subject rather than the actual thing.

My most cherished picture was taken in a railway station in 1941 wartime England.

It’s of my grandparents straight after their wedding from which only one single dreadfully captured, exposed and printed pic remains.

I have always looked at this whole ‘nostalgia’ thing as being pretty much as you described Kye but it would be interesting to have this conversation in another 50 years from now based on our 2022 spec pics & videos.

Will they have that same ‘quality’ (or lack of) nostalgia compared with something from say 1972?

Maybe…

Maybe our 24-100mp camera stills and 1080-8k video will look equally as dated compared with whatever is current in 2072…

Probably some database implant connected to our brains or something by then!

[IronFilm]

44 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

Maybe our 24-100mp camera stills and 1080-8k video will look equally as dated compared with whatever is current in 2072…

The photos will look very dated simply because of the fashion / hairstyle / tech in it. 

[John Matthews]

15 hours ago, MrSMW said:

So in some cases, we could present just a thumbnail and 10 minutes of blank content… 🤔🤨😂

I shot my niece's wedding... it took me forever to edit (made a long version and a short version), but I learned a lot. Anyway, she doesn't want to even look at it for approval because her grandfather who passed away is in it. It's been collecting digital dust for about 3 years. Oh well...

[kye]

9 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Shhhh.... don't give away my secrets!

I don't think the rest of us have the calibre of facial hair to get away with it!

[kye]

7 hours ago, MrSMW said:

This is a very interesting topic in itself…

We tend to ‘forgive’ crappy photography, printing and preservation when it comes to family as in the value to us in a dog-eared old print is the subject rather than the actual thing.

My most cherished picture was taken in a railway station in 1941 wartime England.

It’s of my grandparents straight after their wedding from which only one single dreadfully captured, exposed and printed pic remains.

I have always looked at this whole ‘nostalgia’ thing as being pretty much as you described Kye but it would be interesting to have this conversation in another 50 years from now based on our 2022 spec pics & videos.

Will they have that same ‘quality’ (or lack of) nostalgia compared with something from say 1972?

Maybe…

Maybe our 24-100mp camera stills and 1080-8k video will look equally as dated compared with whatever is current in 2072…

Probably some database implant connected to our brains or something by then!

I think it's a fascinating topic, and the way that I see it is that essentially I only make one style of film, the 'happy memory', and so while I try to learn a bit about all the genres, the one that I am really paying attention to is this one.

To expand slightly, my work is mostly about my friends and family visiting interesting places, so it's about the relationship between the people and the place.  This is the fundamental principle / singular vision behind all my creative choices.  

My thought process is:
1) to try and capture the people reacting to the place, with b-roll being general shots of the location
2) to edit it in such a way that I show the feeling rather than the facts about a place

Folks like Walter Murch are quick to say that we're still understanding the psychology of editing, but the parallel to dreams is quite a significant thing.  For example, in early editing they weren't sure if they could cut out travel sequences because they thought that we might not understand that a person had travelled if we didn't see it - after all we don't teleport ourselves.  However that proved to be false, and the theory is that we teleport in dreams all the time so it's something we understand.  
But we're quite adaptable, as early motor vehicle development wasn't sure if people could drive a car faster than a horse can gallop because no human had ever travelled that fast before.  Of course, this is something that humans are easily capable of.  In terms of editing, we're still learning new things.  Biologically, we're not that different from nomadic hunter-gatherers who couldn't read or write or understand math etc.  Now we understand there are different sizes in infinity.  The capacity of our biology isn't anywhere near understood, so the potential for visual communication is by no means reached, or even mapped.

However, having said all of that, we still dream the way we dream, so that's a pretty good yardstick for me and how I'm trying to film / edit.

[kye]

5 hours ago, John Matthews said:

I shot my niece's wedding... it took me forever to edit (made a long version and a short version), but I learned a lot. Anyway, she doesn't want to even look at it for approval because her grandfather who passed away is in it. It's been collecting digital dust for about 3 years. Oh well...

I read that wedding photos are often the last photos of the grandparents in a family - a wedding photographer commented this and said that in group photos their first priority is the bride/groom and the second are the grandparents.

I'd imagine that she'll get over it and in years to come will find it's a lovely momento.  Give it time 🙂

[MrSMW]

10 hours ago, IronFilm said:

The photos will look very dated simply because of the fashion / hairstyle / tech in it. 

Yes, this is one aspect we have zero control over.

I had a couple actually cancel me the other day because they decided in the end they wanted a more ‘fashionable look’ to the result; ‘light & airy’.

Will they regret that at some point in the future?

In Weddingland, light & airy replaced dark & moody which replaced vintage which replaced whatever came before that.

But I try to avoid fashions and fads and prefer to consistently stick to a more ‘timeless aesthetic with a nod to nostalgia’…if I had to try and describe it in words.

I am trying to ‘future proof’ the results as much as possible.

I have articles on the subject on my website. Not for photographers/vidiots, but for potential clients who might happen upon said articles and say, “yes, that is us. We value this stuff”.

And those (few) that do, no surprise, always turn out to be the best clients.

Perhaps different in the commercial world but with weddings and portraits, I have always adhered to pleasing myself first and foremost regarding ‘style’ and attract/book folks who specifically want what you do/are on the same page.

I find those clients also tend to be the least likely to follow the latest fashion in clothing or hairstyles etc so the results from their weddings will date far less than that of those trying too hard in that regard and with their choice of photo/video capture.