and what it looks like to be part of the media covering the events.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs4NG_C3I-Q

Early is early. You want people there 15min early, then thats the real call time and you are on the clock at that time. Sorry but that first ine is nonsense.

If you are not the director, dp, art director, producer or client nobody cares about your opinon unless its about something about to fall over

Having worked on shoots with lots of people, or not enough and killing yourself with long days and too much work... me personally, I would of added 2 grips and 2 PA's. One of the things I like to do is while shooting one setup, have the "extra" crew either taking down the previous setup, or setting up the next shot. I agree that with higher ISOs the new good cameras can considerably reduce lighting setups. A couple LED lights - panel, lensed arrays, fresnel can easily run on a single 20A circuit, a vehicle 2kw inverter or even battery power. very liberating to be able to put a couple battery power lights up with a decent hr of run time per battery. I also like using passive lighting control - bounce cards even in the dark can kick just that little bit of light you need to get a face to pop in the shot, or sometimes hanging solids to gets some modeling out of flat light. to do that though, you do need a couple people to work efficiently.

that said I shot this short with 3 person crew of me as dir / dp, a grip / sound person, and set decorator / prop master over a weekend. Got lucky in getting amazing fall colors and real rain that fit the mood perfectly. In fact in the end scene I started to set up a silk & some lights, and had an ephinay : just turn up the ISO on my at the time C100mk1 and found I had the look I wanted with just a little bit of fill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngY7iGbVI-A

$7K is myth and legend. thats about what he spent on 16mm film stock and processing. it took $200K in post to get the film into standard for release - edit conform, mix, grade, output prints. thats $500/day. you might feed a small crew and pay them gas money for that... but what about post ?

C300 mk2 is totally fair comarison, same price range, similar specs... but C300 is MUCH nicer camera to shoot with in terms of ergonomics, quick power up, you don't reboot it for frame rate changes...

Having shot with the camera, the long reboot times are deadly PITA. we change frame rates on some jobs all the time.

Nobody talked about audio on this camera :
No actual audio level controls with knobs, switches. Just bizarre considering Panasonic makes great ENG cameras that do have these controls
No dedicated level meters / display
5 Pin XLR's for ins require yet another adapter... and if you don't have one you are SOL
MicroP2 - really ????? no really ????? why not CFast 2 which is a standard ? and way faster than P2/ P2micro
Did anyone mention how bad the reboots are ?????