Hi Boris!

This pocket camera is my baby ;) I love it, but you have to be able to put up with a real short battery life. You'll be constantly worried when you have it on that you're wasting batteries. If you get a metabones speed booster, the battery life will be even shorter (I'm talking about around 30 minutes shooting prores HQ without the speed booster, and maybe much less with the speed booster). If you use IS in a lens, that will probably shorten the battery life a bunch too.

I still love the camera, though, because I'm one of those who enjoy color grading, and the 10-bit is pretty dang cool. You can go 12-bit, of course, but that might be overkill for most things. Also, you'll get very little record time if you use only RAW (about 10 minutes, I think, on a 64 GB card).

I've decided to protect the small form factor of the camera as much as possible, so I use a non IS lens (15 mm Lumix) and no speed booster, and I don't use one of those battery solutions that involve connecting a battery externally. This has served me well for all my little non-professional fun projects that I like doing all the time. I'm one of those people who love the great gear and all the pro techniques, but use them for nothing but "home movies" ;)

Bottom line, if you like color grading, then this is the few cameras out there that will give you the goods to work with without having to spend an arm and a leg.

P.S. Try to put some time into grading the log with any of the color grading softwares out there (I use the free Davinci Resolve). In my opinion, it provides the most satisfaction, while increasing your skills. There's a learning curve, but you'll get it pretty quickly, and the rewards are worth it.

Here's me on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user9770839

Never skip Leg Day.

The way I understand it is that grading in higher bit allows you more freedom to manipulate the color, contrast, luminance, etc. of your footage for a final result that you desire. When you export it to a lower bit, that final result will still look like what you want; you just no longer have the freedom to manipulate that final result anymore, as you did with a higher bit.

If, on the other hand, you start out with a lower bit, say 8-bit, in your grade, then you will not have the freedom to get to that final result to begin with, at least not as much freedom as if you were grading in 10-bit (or higher).

Then again, if you capture in camera the footage as close to what you want your final result to look like, you'll not need those extra bits to grade with to achieve that final result. I've worked with 8-bit almost all of the time I've spent shooting (I just upgraded to 10-bit in the BMPCC), and I've always had very good results because I captured in camera the colors, contrast, etc. near to what I had in mind for my final result.

But, you're right, grading that higher bit is SO satisfying ;)

Other than this gentleman's Kickstarter idea, does anybody know of any other options for learning how to do VFX (like in those recent videos posted on NFS, i.e. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, etc.)? The VFX for practical uses is very impressive to me and looks like an excellent (and obtainable) way to gain more control over lighting and sound and setting/environment. Unfortunately, I don't know the first thing about how to go about doing any of it, and the VFX "breakdown" videos never touch on even the basics. Any recommendations would be highly appreciated. Thank you from a film making noob!

Can anyone direct a complete noob like me to where I can go to get the basics in learning how to do these practical visual effects?

The visual effects breakdown reels--where they're dropping all these pieces of footage in and taking others out of a scene--are very fascinating to me! But none of the reels go into helpful detail about how this is done. Are the people and places, which are added in, created in 3D programs, practical green green screen shots, a mixture of the two, or what? How do they get the camera angles and distances to match up so well (i.e. like in the reel from Wolf of Wallstreet)?

If someone could give me a lead on a place to start with the basics I would be greatly appreciative. Thank you!

Does anybody know if Davinci Resolve can convert XAVC files to Prores/Prores Proxy for editing in FCPX? Kind of like how one would use the round-tripping work flow for the BMPCC raw files?

Thanks!