All video related questions and discussion is intended for this thread. Here we discuss techniques, gear and anything else related to capturing video footage. Please don't pretend to be an expert if you don't know what you're talking about. Kindly leave your ego at the door. Posting short films/scripts or other work you've done is encouraged. We tend to use and recommend DSLRs/mirrorless cameras because they provide phenomenal picture quality for their price, have large sensors (ie the same size used in high-end cinema cameras, and larger) and have interchangeable lenses. In contrast, consumer camcorders often have much smaller sensors and a fixed lens.
>STICKY - https://text.is/QZ1J >Helpful guide, additional books and more in-depth FAQs - https://web.archive.org/web/20200926115310/https://pastebin.com/kG0gRmTZ
>NO ONE CARES WHAT AN EXPERT YOU THINK YOU ARE. IF YOU’RE ASKING BASIC-AS-SHIT QUESTIONS, YOU CAN’T BE ALL THAT GREAT. SEE ABOVE
Previous thread >>4493514
Quick FAQS >what’s the best camera available on a “budget”? The blackmagic pocket cinema camera 4k, or the Panasonic gh5 (can pick one up for like 500 bucks atm) >what’s a good beginner video camera? Anything that works, shoots at least 1080p and preferably has interchangeable lenses. Any recommendation beyond that will cause arguments so read the fucking sticky if that isn't satisfactory. >What's a good sound solution that won't break the bank? Zoom h1 >Can I use a zoom lens for video? Yes >Do I need cine lenses? No >Do I need 4k? No. 1080 looks great on a cinema screen. 4k looks better. >Can someone tell me if my video is any good? Yes, but be prepared to receive harsh criticism. If you're going to waste 5 minutes of our time with a shitty out-of-focus montage of nothing then we'll tell you that it's crap >Is it okay to dox myself? ...Personally I wouldn't but what do I know?
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Zach!ozOtJW9BFA03/03/26(Tue)23:15:55
You all, there is no perfect anamorphic solution. Every anamorphic solution has flaws.
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Anonymous03/04/26(Wed)00:29:57
Nikon ZR, Panasonic S9 or Sony ZVE1?
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Zach!ozOtJW9BFA03/04/26(Wed)00:54:35
>>4499512 Literally any camera now is good. Like if it can do 1080p and above and look decent, you're good to go. I got a duct-taped partially broken Canon T2i I use with vintage lenses, and still have managed to get good images out of it. Any camera is useful now.
>>4499504 Anamorphic is way too expensive to buy. They are so many options now. Renting for anamorphic makes much more sense than buying.
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Anonymous03/04/26(Wed)13:33:37
>>4499512 >ZR Impractical joke camera. The irony is that anyone it appeals to due its cheap price probably can't afford to utilise its actual qualities (needing a decent computer, expensive software etc). >S9 Decent but basically a toy. At least it has 6k opengate. >ZVE1 Decent but limited by the sony cripple hammer. Also prone to overheating. >tldr; just shell out an extra couple of hundred for a non-meme camera
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Anonymous03/04/26(Wed)14:38:03
So since arri's phone camera will inevitably flop, how long until they start licensing "official" arri log luts for every major camera brand (ie, an official phantom luts release)?
>>4499592 The Arri camera phone collab will probably be better than the shitty phone red tried to pass off years ago. Just saying.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)15:57:24
>>4499594 >>4499640 lol, the light change on her face was nice though. Perspective is off, is that the main offender here?
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)16:07:50
>>4499697 focus and perspective are the biggest offenders
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)16:10:42
>>4499697 The actor isn't moving with the car or the "environment". There's camera shake towards the end but zero movement in her head or neck. It's less about the greenscreen feed itself but more that the real prop (the car interior) is completely motionless and doesn't match the movements the feed is imitating. Also the perspective doesn't match, no. And you'd never be able to rig a camera so stiff in a moving car that it shows literally zero camera shake. Even in race cars you'd have the suspension weight transfer and the chassis roll impact how the camera's framing.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)16:23:35
>>4499700 What if the car’s shocks are so extremely good and the car is such a premium luxury car that it’s the smoothest fucking rise of all time?
>>4499701 Add fucking shake in post to make it look legit to viewers. Video ain’t about showing the truth it’s showing people what they think is the truth.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)17:41:23
>>4499701 >>4499704 This is actually true. There's a pretty good interview for One Battle After Another where they explain that the first time they shot the POV car shots from that ending chase, they stabilised the footage too well and it looked fake because of it. So they went back and refilmed it with more camera shake, essentially making it 'worse' to make it look better.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)18:28:44
>>4499640 dp at least isn't to blame here, i've seen a bunch of their work. there are stinkers like this in bigger productions too >>4499700 yeah, no one sits that still in a car and everything in the shot interior runs too smoothly. real truth, she'd be looking down at her phone the whole time lol.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)18:32:54
>>4499640 also the irony here is this guy made night on earth, a total standard for car interior stuff
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)19:39:44
>>4499716 Rear projection still looks fucking incredible
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)19:57:39
>>4499716 You need a good director and a good cinematographer to make a good film. A good cinematographer working with a bad director just makes good looking garbage.
>>4499500(OP) Today I'm doing the math on the total cost of digital capture vs 6mm Ektachrome, assuming both will be edited in DR. Yes the film is an upfront cost, but the cost of the cameras and subsequent lens options + downstream costs storage, subscriptions of a new modern digital camera is high compared to nonexistent in film gear.
The ektachrome image has more than sufficient picture quality & can be rescanned in the future as digital tech improves, whereas in 2 decades, 2 decade old digital images always seem annoyingly poor. In fact there's a quantifiable cost in time and expense to color grade each scene to look as good as the last century of work chemists did to get Ekta to look that good, the cost of which is built into the film.
Time to go get some numbers.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)20:09:01
>>4499723 Man wtf you talking about, you can get any fuckin warm body to be a director. Plenty of great work has been made by actors with zero fucking education or training who wanted to try being a director for a day and viola, shit works bc most people already know how to do their fucking jobs.
Fuck up the DP though, and you'll regret your life choices, you'll have one person pulling this way and one person shoving that way and there's just a lot of screaming and crying & violent kneejerk reactions until everyone just wants to pull out at once and then shit goes flying everywhere and it's all a big stinky mess, until in the end you've got nothing you can make a sellable film out of, except maybe in germany, where they're into that sort of thing.
Butt fuck directors.
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)21:00:36
>>4499724 >subsequent lens options + downstream costs storage, subscriptions of a new modern digital camera is high compared to nonexistent in film gear. This is a straight up lie and I don't quite know why you've written it. It depends on the length I guess, but the film stock itself alone will almost definitely cost more than a half decent digital camera for any feature film. And that's without the cost of developing/scanning it factored in (which will increase its price substantially). The lens choices are the same, give or take a couple of hundred for a lens adapter. And then saying you can keep the film stock to rescan later, but the costs of storage for digital are too high? Is this b8?
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Anonymous03/05/26(Thu)21:05:18
>>4499724 Yes but if you use 35mm or 65mm unless you are a trust fund brat or a Nolan digital is a hell of a lot cheaper. If you are a hipster it’s film all the way and Leica lenses.
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Anonymous03/06/26(Fri)20:46:43
>edit half my short >looks ok to me, no grade or Foley yet >go on a business trip >two weeks later >time to edit more as I've taken more footage as well >fucking hate it nothing feels connected I wrote such a pos where you don't find out the main characters goal till the end so it's basically all filler but it's just a few minutes of filler but ugh
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Anonymous03/06/26(Fri)21:23:26
>>4499910 Don't sweat it, no one watches short films anyway except for filmmakers and actors. 99% of short films are incredibly boring so you're more likely to be judged on the quality of the technical aspects. As long as your opening is semi-interesting and your ending is enjoyable, you've probably succeeded as far as the story is concerned.
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Anonymous03/07/26(Sat)00:02:32
>>4499915 >no one watches short films anyway except for filmmakers and actors ah yes I think I'll just finish this one up hastily so I can move onto the next one
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Anonymous03/07/26(Sat)05:33:34
>>4499910 >time to edit more as I've taken more footage as well Then maybe it doesn’t need the extra footage you shot?
>nothing feels connected Who cares?
>you don't find out the main characters goal till the end Who cares?
>it's basically all filler Who cares?
Some of my favorite movies have all of these elements.
>>4499935 >I think I'll just finish this one up hastily so I can move onto the next one This is where I’m at too. Got the music done, just doing mixing (forgot how much of a slog syncing foley and EQ can be) and then color correction (the fun as fuck part for me), then finally done.
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Anonymous03/07/26(Sat)17:52:33
>>4499915 i like watching shorts, they can be a highlight of a festival, and they will probably become more important as fewer and fewer normalfags watch long form content anyway. i understand that my opinion may be a minority here as i enjoy watching film
>>4499725 I was talking about good directors like Kubrick or Scorsese not pieces of shit who think the garage they make is great and call themselves directors.
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Anonymous03/07/26(Sat)18:45:46
>>4499975 >>4499976 I mean define shorts I guess, but not really no. As shortform content becomes more common, people aren't watching 10-minute dramas about a depressed college kid grapple with thoughts of suicide. They're watching a 20 second skit of a big-boobed thot pretend to be Ashley while calling out Leon's name to parody Resident Evil. Even vertical dramas are split into 1 or 2 minute 'bites', and are offensively over the top when it comes to melodrama. Most short films fall in the awkward position of being too long for people with short attention spans, and too short to feel satisfactory for anyone who wants to sit down and watch a film. If you like them though, that's great. Maybe you can be the one to finally figure out the impossible challenge of how to monetise them that I keep seeing naive filmmakers ask about.
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Anonymous03/07/26(Sat)20:13:44
>>4499979 >impossible challenge of how to monetise them that I keep seeing naive filmmakers ask about. R. Kelly already perfected this format. In all serious imho the only serious way to monetize is if you are pitching for tv or feature length.
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Anonymous03/08/26(Sun)18:38:22
I've bought the Nikon ZR as my 50/50 video and photo camera. Most of the time it's just silly home movies of my two kids growing up and it's doing the job perfectly. I've tried tons of footage in R3D raw format as well as h265 with baked in red picture profile. While the R3D files obviously are very flexible, I can change the ISO, etc. it always involved lots of work to get the wb right and to make the colors look great. While in h265 I do a little bit of gradiation curve and I'm done. So now in most cases I just shoot that finished h265 mov. Not even in LOG. So now I'm wondering wether the cam is a bit overkill. I mean it is if I don't use red raw. And the only thing that really annoys me about this camera are the lenses. Not sure why Nikon just can't make smaller ones. Should have looked it up before but here I am. Now only shooting chink Viltrox lenses, but they are impressive sharp
Any other full frame cameras that are compact and shoot beautiful sooc videos? I think the Zf is a bit too big and clunky. Fuji might be nice, less so for photos because of the crop sensor.
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Anonymous03/08/26(Sun)18:55:18
>>4500086 >Any other full frame cameras that are compact and shoot beautiful sooc videos? Lumix s9, canon r8, sony a7cii
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Anonymous03/08/26(Sun)21:09:16
hybridfags are gay
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)01:23:16
>want to start a yewchewb channel so I can justify buying an expensive camera >still can't think of anything to film I need to paypig BAD, bros. Talk me into this.
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)04:21:56
>>4500096 Correct, but there's literally no reason to buy a cinema camera anymore outside of mid-level production shoots and higher. In that sense I guess the market told the manufacturers what they wanted and you and I are not that market. >>4500118 The youtoob market is so ungodly oversaturated that for you to get any more than double digit views on anything, you'll need to game the algorithim harder than the boomers doing predictions on slot machines. You'll also very likely need to partake in ragebait, clickbait, or NOODbait. You WILL buy the expensive gear and you WILL spend months trying to dial in the reason you aren't getting subs, but the honest truth is that you need tits or genuine talent.
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)05:07:32
>>4500118 >want to start a yewchewb channel so I can justify buying an expensive camera Yikes. …what camera?
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)12:19:58
>>4500124 I mean, like, I don't even have anything interesting to film. Don't care to film myself talking either. The only thing I can think of to put on yewchewb is ranting about philosophy, and that can be done over 480p unregistered hypercam tier screen recordings.
Anyways I'm not going to buy it. As much as I want to buy useless things sometimes, I've been burned enough to know that doing so retarded.
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)13:14:51
>>4500118 >>4500154 >I mean, like, I don't even have anything interesting to film Why do you want to spend thousands on a piece of gear that you have no use for? > that can be done over 480p unregistered hypercam tier screen recordings You can buy a gh5 second hand for less than 500 bucks and it will be more than good enough for any youtube shit. If you want to gearfag, you should have a goal of some variety to justify it. Like you watch something dumb like Is This Thing On and go "I want to recreate that tracking shot where he descends the stairs to the comedy club for the first time". Or you want to make an arthouse "indie" flick like Leviathon. And if you had a goal like that, you should be working on short scripts of that vein that you can produce with little money. If your only goal is *maybe* talking head youtube shit, then genuinely why do you want an expensive camera?
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)13:46:24
>>4500161 I want it because I want it. Will is an irrational thing, anon. Rationality can only operate after the will has motivated it to do something. You can analyze how best to satisfy a desire, the purpose or utility of a thing in satisfying a desire, or the origin or more basic form of said desire. But you cannot engender desire itself through pure rationality, nor destroy it. If you truly felt no desire, you would not even bother to think.
Hence, although I want the camera, I have decided not to purchase it without a good use for it as it would not fulfill my desires in a satisfying way, at least compared to other options available to me.
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)14:36:08
>>4500154 >black magic pcc 6k pro Damn, thought this was cheaper. Did they raise the price? Those philosophy vids would look pretty good though… I have the 6kFF and fucking love it, but I shoot indie shit
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)17:14:12
>>4500167 >I want to spend a large amount of money for no benefit other than to show myself that I spent the money. It would be less retarded to put $1000 on black and another $100 on drinks for a night out. OR Buy some physical item that retains or perhaps increases in value instead of the ewaste you want to buy, like a silver buillion bar or something. Then you can be autistic about "collecting" metals or some other shit but when you finally grow a couple more neurons in your brain you can sell them for a tidy profit.
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)17:54:37
>>4500184 Typically you read a post before responding to it. >Buy some physical item that retains or perhaps increases in value Leicafags… I kneel…
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)18:05:51
>>4500184 If you are dead set on buying some camera shit because of your autism, buy lenses not camera bodies because lenses tend to hold their value or go up in value.
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)18:07:58
Is the Sigma FP the best “do it all” daily carry camera?
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)18:47:58
>>4500190 Not even close. This is the video general. So any camera that can't do internal compressed 10bit 422 4k is definitely not the best. The 'best' is something like a canon r5ii or sony a1ii. The 'best' that won't break your bank account is contentious. For a daily carry camera, you probably want something small. Ie. sony a7cii or lumix s9
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Anonymous03/09/26(Mon)21:15:47
>>4500086 i still throw up in my mouth when i look at the jacks on that camera. mini hdmi out and 1/8in audio, fucking why. i wanna use my monitor