I’m going to IBC, mostly for professional reasons, because of my company’s Kyno launch but I am still a filmmaker and always love going to IBC or NAB with the filmmaker hat and simply have fun looking out for new stuff but I can’t really find anything to look forward to and the reason for this is actually a pretty nice one and that is the fact that for low-budget filmmaking, everything is already available right now. All things that are happening to me are not changing the creative limits a low-budget filmmaker has at the moment. The image has been good enough for the big screen at least since the hacked GH2, there’s plenty of proof for that, light, a big thing, has become less of a problem with the Sony A7S. Slow motion is okish with the GH4, anything else, green screen has become much easier to do with better keyers and the quality of cameras like the GH4, especially with external recorders like the Atomos, maybe rolling shutter, is something that could be better. The new single hand stabilizers are good enough for spectacular action shots. Anything else to me is rather convenience and thus a bit boring for non-pro filmmakers, because I actually like the MacGyver approach to filmmaking, i.e. the feeling to achieve great results with super simple and cheap equipment.

So, will there be anything at IBC that will drive up my filmmaker heart rate? Let’s see.

Just a quick comment on the current rumours regarding the GH5.

For me this could give us a camera that is almost 100% of what I have been waiting for since I started playing around with filmmaking:

• Small/light
• Affordable
• 10bit 4:2:2 H.264, i.e. not so monstrous files as with Prores but still great quality (more than good enough for anything I come up with when grading)
• Decent slowmotion (120 FPS at 1080p is great and making 120 FPS a 240 FPS in post is typically not too much of a problem because things move so slowly and interpolation works much better than when making 48 FPS out of 24 FPS)
• Works with all my m 4/3 and Canon FD glass
• Decent low light performance (I hope soo much that it’s at least good quality up to 12800 or even higher)

I’m no expecting any miracles regarding rolling shutter, which is about the last thing on my list which I would love to have in that one camera from a creative point of view, which I’ll probably have to wait for some more.

For more details, read the excellent article at EOSHD