Your Favorite Creators' Favorite Cameras!

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0:43With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. There was a camera called the Canon... I cannot believe I can't remember the name of this camera. What? The small point and shoot? No. Okay. I'm going to describe it to you. I have two. I have two of them in my office. It's the most beautiful camera.

1:15What is going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm David. And if you're watching the video version, you've already noticed that David is next to me, which means on the other side, we've got two new hosts for this bonus episode. That's right. You're not seeing things. It's not Friday. You can still do dishes, but we have some extra fun stuff to talk about in the world of YouTube creators and their camera choices. So without any further ado, Eric and Rich, take it away. Hello. Oh, that was pretty great. Yes. So so I'm Eric.

1:51I'm one half of the studio channel. Rich and I are regularly confused in the studio. Yeah. Pretty much everyone thinks that we are the same person. that is a good thing. So, hello, I'm Eric. Many people refer to me as Rich. That is okay. Hello, I'm Rich, and no one refers to me as Eric. That is not true. That happened 10 minutes ago. Adam called you Eric. That's true, yeah. Thanks. Rich, what do we do for a living? Yeah, me and Eric, we're the studio producers, and we make our behind-the-scenes videos here at MKBHD. So our last big behind the scenes video, we got a lot of feedback that it just didn't feel super attainable, that there's only so much about behind the scenes at MKBHD that can be actionable for people.

2:42So we had an idea to do pretty much the biggest behind the scenes video in history. Yeah, so we decided to talk to some of our favorite creators, ranging from 20 ,000 subscribers all the way up to 20 million. And well, you know, almost 20 million any day now. subscribe to the mkbhd channel marquez needs more subs um and our goal is to not just understand what cameras these creators really like but really to answer the question does gear even really matter in youtube in 2025 the answer is a lot more nuanced than i think we were expecting yeah yeah okay yeah i feel like in the world of what camera do you use on youtube there are some trends there are some historical trends there are some current modern day popular options but there isn't really like any one standout number one that I can think of as far as a single model.

3:33I don't know if I agree with that. But I do think there are standout brands that are dominating. Okay, well, there's evidence for and against that. Okay, so the first camera brand that we wanted to start with is a camera brand we're very familiar with here and a lot of people aren't very familiar with. Mr. Red Marquez Brownlee. Red. A lot of creators see red as this sort of aspirational brand. And, oh, maybe one day I could shoot on a RED camera. So we wanted to bring in one creator who actually shoots all their videos on RED and another who bought a couple of RED cameras but isn't really using them anymore.

4:09Why do you shoot your videos on RED? Let's start there. We talked to other creators. Wait, you mean Nikon? They got bought by Nikon. But I do shoot RED. I do shoot RED. That was a deep cut. I can really give you, I can break it down to basically two main reasons why I shoot RED. I was shooting Canon for a very long time up until around 2015, I think. Wow, it's been a decade. Old. Yeah, I know. But the two reasons that I switched to my first ever RED camera, which was an Epic W, I believe, at the time. Really? That was called? Oh, yeah. It was called the RED Epic W. Oh, man. Or maybe it was a Scarlett W before the Epic W.

4:42But one, resolution. Two, color science. Yeah. So one resolution was I was shooting 1080i on a C100. Internally, baby. And I was looking for my first 4K camera and I skipped right to the the red raw 4K camera and it was plenty sharp. And that was like one of my criteria for a new camera. The other was it had this amazing color science and I could change the white balance after I shot, which was this this neat little thing called raw video. And the colors looked amazing. I could really make videos look the way I wanted them to. So for people that don't know, when your camera, when you take video, generally your camera is compressing that video.

5:22It's applying basically a LUT or lookup table effectively to it by compressing it into an MP4 or something like that. And it's making a bunch of decisions about color. Raw video is just a lot of the information. Most of the information is taking in. It's not completely real raw, raw, you know, video. That sounds like a compressed raw. Google Gaga. Google Gaga. Lady Gaga. Sorry. Lady Gaga. lyric um but yeah it's compressed raw yeah because it takes it in and but because of that it's not applying or it's allowing you to still adjust those values like white balance so i feel like the working here working with red is relatively easy in large part because rich does most of the shooting but also we have like great computers for like a good healthy post workflow yeah um But we called with Austin Evans, who actually accidentally bought two RED cameras.

6:18Accidentally? Yeah. You want to? Sure. I believe Austin had Scarlett W on pre-order and then Epic W came out. So he bought that. And then they sent it. I can't believe they called it that. You didn't like the W for a weapon? Epic W. The W sent for a weapon, right? Really hard to fly with these cameras. Yeah. So before working here, I was a cinematographer and I got to work with our good friend Austin Evans and he had a much different experience shooting RED. very different but the problem was it was a bad camera like yes if you have a whole film crew and a technical department and a whole lot of patients it was lovely but the problem was you know like there was one shoot where we were in austin so we were doing a shoot with audi we were on circuit of the americas you know an actual proper f1 track and it is texas in summer and it was like 100 degrees outside the red completely gave out on us 15 minutes in the shoot like just wouldn't power on it wasn't like overheated necessarily it just just gave up right um so luckily we had like an a6500 as a b cam which we had to shoot the rest of the video on that was one of those moments i'm like this is not it red had its moments but even when we shot red we shot it in pro res like we didn't we never ever ever used the ak because who needs ak right especially back you know six seven years ago so uh we still technically have our red and it is a lovely paperweight.

7:34I mean, we got to make something clear. Like, red cameras are studio cameras. They are shot, they're used for movies in very controlled environments. It was a weird thing when Marquez and Austin and Jonathan Morrison and Lou went and decided to buy red cameras for YouTube videos. That was extremely novel. It's still novel. It's still novel because the newest models are still extremely expensive. You can get Scarlett W for like$3 ,000 now, but back then that was like nobody was doing that. But even if you bought the Scarlett W for$3 ,000, that's the thing about red cameras is like people will think that a red camera is something that's like maybe something to consider as a creator.

8:17Like, oh, I'm going to work my way up and build out a red ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably not a good idea. It's a locked off kind of situation. Probably not a good idea. I would say a red camera is the equivalent of, It's a sensor in a little box, and that box is a computer with fans and memory and all this other compute. And you can attach as much or as little to this box as you want to build it out for whatever you're shooting. So if you've ever seen a Hollywood movie set, it's built out to the size of a dog. Oh, that's pretty accurate. I'm trying to think of a size reference. It's got multiple monitors and a ton of cables coming out of it.

8:56And it's got, obviously the memory isn't plugged into the side, but it's got all accessories for shooting external memory and all this other stuff. It's the brain. It's not ergonomic at all. You might have two or three handles on it for maybe that one time they're going to do that one handheld shot for that thing they planned for that thing that next day. But it is very much not like the C100 I came from, which is built for one person to shoot everything. So the single shooter camera experience is very different. that said i've been able to build out my version of a single camera shooter red right uh i found just the right set of handles top handle record button monitor accessories that for me it's just just light enough and just ergonomic enough that i can make it work and it's worth it because the footage that comes out of that box is second to none i have not seen anything come close to touching the quality of a red image off that sensor we're gonna notice a pattern where if you're a tech youtuber or like a knowledge youtuber you end up seeing like pretty weird camera choices because the environments that you're shooting in are relatively controlled and the more that creators move into niches or spaces where the environments are less controlled yeah i think the more they all congregated around like two brands okay um but let's wait until we hit those brands because red was recently bought by nikon and we were not really thinking about bringing nikon in to this video nikon hasn't really had a rep especially in like video for creators but when we hopped on the phone with becca versace who's like como se dice the goat um she said like um i think this will come as a surprise to most that i actually use predominantly nikon systems now we asked like what do you like about it and she described the image as like describing color is weird but there's something about it that feels like homier and cozier whereas sony i feel like is very sharp a little bit punchy and yeah nikon just naturally right out of camera i can have something that i'm really pleased with yeah nikon has had a bit of a renaissance in the last like two or so years uh primarily because they were pretty late to move to mirrorless.

11:11So a mirrorless camera is a camera where it takes in the image, it goes straight to the sensor, and then you see what the sensor sees. Whereas a normal camera, DSLR, has a mirror that you see what the mirror sees, which is not the actual image or exposure. While everybody else, well, not everybody else, but most of the other brands were on these like second, third generation mirrorless cameras. Nikon was just releasing their first camera, their first mirrorless camera. Yeah, no, we were all the kids in like the YouTube cook groups I was in back in the day. That's what we called them instead of group chats.

11:45We would pretty much everyone switch to the Sony ecosystem around this time and like never looked back because Sony was really the first manufacturer. Cheap mirrorless. Like I guess Panasonic kind of beat them, but. Micro four thirds. Yeah. We'll get into it. Do you have context, David, on why Nikon was so slow to switch? I think that it's not too dissimilar to why Kodak was so, even though they invented the digital camera, they just were like, no. They were just having so much success. And like Canon and Nikon are the two biggest camera brands, right? They were making all of the money and they're making all the money on SLRs and DSLRs.

12:27And so they were like, I don't really think there's a huge benefit to this technology. Our photographers are super used to using DSLRs. Yeah, I don't know. I think people had just gotten really in their way about it. Also, the Nikon crowd tended to be either older people who were shooting like bird photography or like wildlife photography. Nikon is famous for bird photography. You will very rarely meet any other brand that shoots bird photography. They're the one with the cheetah on the box, right? Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. And then they also are very popular for concert photography. so because their low light used to be well it still is very good but yeah for that reason as well so i was talking to becca about like where nikon goes in the future like are we going to see a nikon comeback especially with like the red kind of acquisition acquisition yeah i guess acquisition i have no knowledge of what's going to happen but i think reds are very expensive systems.

13:25Not only is the camera expensive, but the amount of footage that you're going to shoot is going to take up a lot of hard drive space. Hard drives are expensive. And I wonder if Nikon, who is, you know, really affordable cameras, they price their cameras very competitively. Coming together with red means that we're going to get something that's more affordable with the red logo on it or in a red camera. I wonder. I don't know. I can only hope. Do you guys think that the future of this acquisition is like more and more people could buy red camera? Like maybe because it sounds like Nikon is relatively accessible now, but no one's just thinking about it.

14:02Maybe people are going to start thinking about red cameras. I think there is some level of cachet attached to the red name from the red epic and the red Mysterium Dragon. And back in the day, they were very big in the cinema world. And the directors that shot with red, like they have that cachet. so weirdly i feel like it could be nikon or as they actually said it to me when i talked to them recently nikon it could be their way of going up into that cinema world yeah nikon i believe that's the correct pronunciation yeah right really yeah no i know none of us have said it like that that's apparently how it's said but yeah it could be the other way around as well it could be some of red and bringing their technologies down in price and more accessible into Nikon cameras if they get there.

14:48So just about two weeks ago, so Red makes a camera called the Komodo, which is, by the way, their most affordable camera. They actually made that camera in response to all of these mirrorless cameras being more and more affordable for creators. They wanted to offer this in-between spot where it's more expensive than a mirrorless camera, but it's still a cinema camera. Sure, yeah. So just about two weeks ago, they started selling one with a Nikon Z mount which is the lens mount that the z series nikon mirrorless cameras have so now they sell both on the komodo as well as i believe on the newest one um that what is the one that you have raptor v raptor yeah i think they also have a mount for the v raptor now that uh nikon z lenses can go on to so it is very early by the way in the acquisition it only officially went through like quite recently and it's quite surprising that they're doing this they did that the other thing that they have done in the last month or so is nikon can shoot z-raw internally and there's all of this or n-raw sorry n-raw not z-raw there's all of this lore as to nikon and red suing each other over internal raw video compressed raw compressed raw video eventually nikon just bought red and they dropped the lawsuit uh but convenient convenient i wonder if these two unrelated factors are connected but the n-rod that the nikon z6 series and z9 and whatever can shoot uh red they just announced a bunch of luts with red that try to give it the red sensor look on these nikon cameras yeah so it's clearly not going to be exactly the same it is a lot is a lookup table it's not the same as the sensor technology but they are working together in ways to bring the red cachet to Nikon and to bring the Nikon accessibility to red yeah okay so speaking of accessibility we dove into black magic with two creators who are cinematographers by day Michael Tobin and Brittany Genet and also have their own YouTube channels about cinematography Rich could you give us like context on black magic how do people think about black magic i feel like people think about black magic as the accessible alexa in the sense that the color science is beautiful easy to work with great menu system yeah the only thing they're lacking autofocus which is a big thing it is well but like it's it's deeper than that okay so when we talked to michael tobin he gave this great analogy he said i think the easiest way to put it is they're very similar to apple that they have their own kind of walled garden right they make the camera they make the codec they make the software they have the best color grading software on the planet and so you just have this beautiful like workflow throughout the whole way you can actually get davinci resolve studio when you buy a black magic camera this is the only camera brand you buy where you also get like a full stack professional grade video editing software thrown in there yeah um in his you count red cine x most people don't are like no one no one yeah that's crazy but so his whole thing is like you can build like a full workflow with black magic when we talked to britney she was just like wow the image quality is so beautiful it's such a beautiful sensor that comes out the black magic and i think you know a lot of times like with social media it's really hard to explain characteristics of a camera and the differences of why you would go for different cameras but for me when i had the black magic 6k it was when i wanted to get into actual filmmaking And so shooting short films and I think that really the image quality really set it apart because you were getting this beautiful cinematic image for like such a low price.

18:33And it's one of those things where like I know we all talk about like what cinematic is. But to me, owning both cameras, the FX3 and the Blackmagic, I don't have to put diffusion on the Blackmagic glass. It's automatically a softer look coming out of the camera itself. It pairs really nicely with a lot of lenses because of like the image quality that it has It has false color so it has certain aspects that you would use in filmmaking That makes it easier for you on set and if you want to grow from just you know Like doing like the everyday content to being a filmmaker. It's just a good transitional camera She was using her black magic for YouTube and then she stopped using it for another camera brand They're like some pretty clear downsides to shooting black magic that we were able to get into with them have either of you guys shot black magic yeah yeah i've gotten very close multiple times but always got scared away at the last second yeah whether it was because of the workflow i don't want to have to use davinci resolve or if it was because of you know i've seen a lot of so you say the sensor is beautiful and the color science is great i've watched maybe this is from the beginning early days i've watched a lot of test footage that I didn't like from the Blackmagic cameras.

19:46And so if I were ever to switch cameras, I would want it to at least match what I thought I was getting out of my current camera. And I never thought that Blackmagic was doing that. Maybe it's much closer now. And I know there's an URSA 8K and all sorts of other stuff, but I haven't seen test footage that tempted me. So, well, ironically, so Blackmagic is like the generally like the cheaper version of a RED in that it allows you to shoot raw video. This was like, it was one of the alternatives that gave you that raw capability. And generally, when you're shooting raw, we are different because we have extremely controlled lighting where you just want the highest quality image at a normal look.

20:22But most of the time when you're shooting raw, you're actually shooting raw because you want to stylize your image. Or correct for it. We just shot the Pixel 9a hands-on in New York City. The worst lighting. And Rich and I were, yeah, weird lighting, like spotlights with these orange lights and then go outside for a few minutes and shoot out there and then shoot in the hallway. and then come back inside. It's like, I don't want to have to do some sort of manual white balancing every time. In post, we can nail every single shot with perfect white balance. Which, by the way, when I worked at Android Authority was the most annoying freaking thing.

20:54There would be like 50 of us reporters in one room and all of our videos look horrible because the lighting was terrible, super yellow. And then we'd all watch Marquez's video and it would be perfect. Yeah, you'd be like, ah! That's the advantage of red, right? That's the red. That's why she read. Dude, it's so funny talking to you guys about this because I think like when we talk to creators, their take on why they didn't like black magic had like nothing to do with color or - Yeah. Like the big reason is like - Up until the Pyxis, the body style on the Pocket series is a reason a lot of people hated it because it was like this DSLR vibe, but also cinema camera components that just didn't make a lot of sense.

21:34Battery life is rough. That's definitely, you need a lot of those. I'd say the biggest downfall is people like autofocus and there's no black magic cameras that have any auto focus to it it's just more to the workflow than just being able to put a card in shoot it take it out and put it in in your in your computer so it's just the fact that i still have to use v mounts get all my cords out all of those things it's just like all right chill and because it's not auto focus i have to use a monitor on it so i can see myself and make sure that i can try to manually focus to make sure i'm in focus so there's no autofocus yeah if you and like on the more affordable ones especially if you're a single person shooting like you just want to have autofocus to know that you're in focus it's i get it yeah it makes sense if you're like a prosumer i think and if you're like making a lot of youtube videos i think if you're a dp or you're saying like the solo shooter if if you're like a young dp right yeah i think a pocket 6k could be in your universe especially if you have a crew and you're in controlled environments for lighting yeah like a relatively small camera crew it's there are certainly better cinema cameras well maybe not certainly i guess it depends on how much you really like resolve yeah there's so much of this is like can you dial in the right post workflow with resolve to feel really confident that you know everything you shoot with black magic you can get a unique yeah image yeah the thing about black magic especially a number of years ago was that they were like the cheaper red and that the bodies were made of like a light plastic so they were also sort of just a camera brain computer yeah but in a much cheaper body they didn't have any sort of like flip out screen or anything that you where you could see yourself they were very much like we took the parts that you need and we put some stuff around it and here just like shoot the raw video, do it all in post.

23:30And because of that, they didn't include the things like autofocus and like these other capabilities. They were also adapting to like everyone else's lenses. So they didn't really have the control that like a native camera brand that has their own lenses can do either. So one last, I guess, kind of quote on Blackmagic. We talked to Brandon Lee, who was the head of cinematography for Linus Tech Tips, and they briefly shot every video on Short Circuit. which our boy Jono was responsible for at one point. Thank you, Jono, for providing the money for my employment. Anyways, so Short Circuit on LTT was all Blackmagic for a little while.

24:13And Brandon said they ran into some pretty frustrating technical issues just in terms of how they managed. I think it was mostly codec management. And there were a lot of things that because Blackmagic is proprietary, you have to build out these workflows that in theory could be better but you almost need to be like a black magic domain expert in order to get these cameras to be like excellent excellent cameras i think it takes time for mastery over these you could say that about a lot of cameras but black magic especially because of its relationship with software yeah and the hard so yeah black magic has this software called da vinci resolve that they acquired uh quite a long ago in 2009 or so and it used to mostly be a color a color editor you would just you would bring your footage into that software just to do the color but over the last like four or five years they've updated it over and over again and now it's like a quite strong non-linear editor so a lot of people have left both uh premiere and final cut over to here especially if they have a black magic camera because it is a lot different it's a lot better for that footage and it also uses these things like nodes and whatever.

25:25But yeah, I think if you invest in the Blackmagic system and you commit to it, but it's probably a little bit tough to do that in like a studio like Linus Tech Tips where you got to teach everyone a bunch of new things and like teach everyone a specific workflow. Especially if you have an old workflow. If you build from the ground up with Blackmagic in mind, it could actually probably be a very efficient stack. But you need to like take the time to understand the tech. Sure. All right, David, I would take a quick sip of Red Bull if I were you because we're about to talk about Fuji cameras. And Mr.

26:01Amel, you in many ways, to much of the internet, to much of the world, you're an introduction to a lot of the science and sort of an understanding for how Fuji cameras work and what makes them special. Oh, yeah. That's perfect. bring the fuji sure i bring the fuji so i guess i guess to start here in terms of a fuji image why are so many people gravitating to it why are fuji cameras becoming this sort of like viral phenomena what is it about these cameras has enabled them to kind of like leak into the social fabric tiktok no not just tiktok that's why i bought mine no and you oh it was trendy i think I know.

26:48It's true. It was kind of trendy. Yeah, it was popping off on TikTok. Okay, but it was trending not necessarily because... Okay, there's a lot of things. A lot of the answers to a lot of the questions you were asking me, the answer is the democratization of something. You know? When we're like, creators are picking up this brand because this brand has finally brought this feature that used to be on these inaccessible thing to inaccessible. Okay. Right. So Fujifilm democratized color because it is it takes a very long time to get really good at doing good color. Yeah. Yeah. In 2016 or 2017 or so, I bought my first Fujifilm X-T2.

27:32It was my first camera at all. I didn't know nothing about what I was doing at all. I started making videos and everyone on YouTube was like, oh, what's your color workflow? and there's all these videos talking about like how I grade, how I grade. And I was just like, Astia. By the way, Astia is a film stock. Fujifilm, if you do not know, they have all these film stocks that you can choose to shoot with. They are color profiles on the camera. You do not only have to shoot with them in JPEG, you can also apply them to video. And so I literally was not color grading at all. I was just choosing the one that fit what I was shooting the best.

28:12Yeah, we so we talked with this creator named Colt Kirwan, who is like, I don't know if you guys have seen his videos are just like so charming and fun. And we asked him about Fuji. And he said, like, But yeah, instead of competing with the big camera brands, Fuji has had a different experience where your JPEGs magically look really good and you can kind of customize within camera versus throwing it into Lightroom and having to do that already. um so i feel like fuji has really gotten a cult following in the past couple years because of their specific film emulations and that oh you don't have to shoot raw anymore i just shoot jpeg blah blah blah um and it's it's nice i think it's uh a breath of fresh air when everything is like competing on the technicalities it's like okay we don't have to be perfect let's just make something fun to use yeah and that keyword fun yeah came up over and over and over again when we talked to people so fuji's the the nothing phone of of uh i think i think nothing is more utilitarian really i because i would buy my mom it's like the mono razor i think so okay that's fair yeah i guess the fun aspect of like we're not going to have the craziest specs right but when you use it you will feel you will feel things yeah yeah so so brandon who is like the chief cinematographer at ltd i'm keep resume um he said like fuji is probably the most fun in terms of all the brands because if you've never owned a camera before and you're just starting out i think that they allow it that the tactile feeling of the lens is the way that the cameras are built the button placement the shutter angle the way that dials are used on the cameras it's all very well thought out and And especially if I think back to myself as a beginner, like that used to be kind of the appeal of Canon is Canon was very approachable and it wasn't super like difficult.

30:13You don't have to think about a lot of stuff. You just start learning. And that's the thing too, is I find that what Fuji picked up that idea from Canon is that they pushed it further by saying, well, let's not just make it easy and accessible. Let's make it like an experience that feels good. So fun and colors popped up over and over again in our interviews. But if you want to buy a Fuji camera specifically to make videos. We talked to a creator named Joshua De La Victoria, who does, he's a touring guitar player. And he'll shoot like guitar videos, either teaching people guitar or just like doing cool covers.

30:50And he needed like a compact, simple, easy camera to shoot. And then using the Fuji, I kind of fell in love with the photography side of it. Because I mainly bought it for video. And then I was like, oh, this thing also shoots awesome photos, of course. It made photography really fun in a way that I think other cameras don't. I think that these are probably still still cameras. There's a whole era of this happening. This may be around the same time. So I remember also getting into still cameras getting good at video. Like Canon 5D kind of was the beginning of a lot of these trends where, oh, snap, big sensor, shallow depth of field.

31:30looks like movie i can make movie with still camera and if you put the right lenses on a 5d and a 5d mark ii you can get this incredible beautiful video and then i think around gh2 or gh3 people started like hacking them and putting the the magic lantern software on them and getting higher bit rates out of them and doing the same sort of stuff with those cameras and there was this little mini era of this is actually a camera for photos but i can make videos that look pretty good with a big thing for me was i started doing more like work for clients like photo stuff or video stuff for other people because like i guess um i had somewhat of a distinct style that other people kind of wanted so then i was starting to do some freelance stuff and i was having a lot of trouble with the the fuji did not have any kind of image stabilization and i didn't want to invest in like a huge rig or like a i don't like using gimbals i find them really annoying to use and the autofocus in the fuji was horrible so at one period of time all of a sudden the processors got fast enough the sensors got good enough readout speed where every camera could be a hybrid camera so the person you talk to it is understandable that they would have switched off of fuji because fuji still is geared towards the photography workflow but i would argue but i would argue if you shoot manual for everything and you control everything you want that they're still very good for that I think that makes a lot of because I think the big things that we heard for why people maybe don't like Fuji for video are often times there's a 30 minute record limit that's not like a hard and fast rule but often times depending on which Fuji camera you're shooting on yeah that used to be an import it was an import tax rule because basically if it could record for over 30 minutes it was taxed as a video camera, which is a much higher tax.

33:23That is insane. And it would have jacked the price of the camera up by a ton. So most of the cameras... That's why a lot of cameras from that day had a 29 minute, 59 minute. Yes, exactly. It was very dumb. That's ridiculous. And then the other thing is like, that went away, by the way. Autofocus isn't fantastic for Fuji cameras. Like there's a lot of stuff where like, if you're run and gun, you just have to like figure out which settings would be good. But if you really like stylistic color and there's not a lot of like intense movement in your videos, it's like it's a real contender I would agree with that also just side note the Fuji X-T series cameras they use APS-C sensors which are smaller than full frame and then they also have this GFX series which is larger than full frame it's medium format they never wanted to compete in full frame because Canon Canon, Sony, Nikon are all in this space so they were like we can dominate the APS-C space and we can dominate the medium format space so they they never even competed with full frame which i think is another reason that people didn't start using them for video either because people wanted that full frame experience for video okay so speaking of sensor size yeah i want to talk about panasonic because i even though panasonic does have full frame cameras right now i largely associate panasonic and their brand with they do a lot before everyone else yes they oftentimes don't get good credit for it their color science is a little weird and they do and they have micro four-thirds sensors which have i would argue more downsides than upsides but what are your initial impressions on panasonic before we dive into some of the conversations we have i'm like making smartphone analogies in my head they're like the one plus like people who are really really into specific sets of specs and things they want to get out of a camera like the panasonic move yeah so understandable why some people gravitate towards it but why they might not become like a mainstream huge option i also a note uh because they were micro four-thirds the sensor size will dictate what you can do on the camera because you have to have so much data readout panasonic was the company that brought a lot of features to the camera industry because they had the smallest sensor so it was easier for them to optimize they could add the features because uh they didn't have to move as much data in order to allow things like log recording and things like that right so it the way it always went was it was like oh we got five axis stabilization in in micro four thirds and now it comes to apsc and now it comes to full frame yeah so yeah so i i guess for for those following along if you're still listening but you're also confused thank you so much thank you so much um no no but essentially like panasonic uses smaller sensors right and that that leads to on paper more advancements yes yeah but a lot of their i guess a lot of the reason that panasonic has historically been able to be ahead of the game because they use small sensors correct so a series with computational photography okay okay so we were only able to we were only able to find one creator who regularly shoots on panasonic his name is stewart hicks he's an architecture professor in chicago and he makes videos about architecture shout out chicago greatest city on earth and what is it new jersey jersey hoboken no top 10 san francisco la is the best san francisco okay all right well delusion aside it's right there guys um so we asked him like why do you shoot on panasonic your videos are gorgeous but why did you do that so i still use the very first camera that i ever purchased uh for doing this stuff and it's a panasonic gh5 from the year 2020 and he goes you know he still uses the first camera he ever bought he bought the gh5 in 2020 and he kind of immediately just went into things he didn't like about it i mean one question is um are you going to be in a studio or out in the world i think that that makes a big difference In the studio here, for instance, the autofocus doesn't matter.

37:33I can set it and it doesn't become a problem. GH5 has notoriously awful autofocus. It is unusable. You know, I made videos of the... The way I learned that was I made a video where I used autofocus and I thought it'd be fine because I was just sitting there and a viewer commented about how it was unwatchable because of the focus breathing. He's like, the GH5 has kind of notoriously awful autofocus. He's frustrated with a lot of aspects of Micro Four Thirds. And then he's like, you know, he'd love things like shallow depth of field, stuff like that. And so in addition to like the actual sort of marketing advantage of Micro Four Thirds, we also asked Tyler Stallman, who's like this excellent camera creator.

38:16So he's like, there are three basic reasons. When we called him, his video was like gorgeous. And we're like, what are you shooting us on, bro? He's like, he's shooting on a GH7. He was shooting on Panasonic. Yeah. And he said, there are three use cases that I think micro four thirds is actually the best for. Because in many ways, you know, less depth of field, less dynamic range, noise isn't as good, but there are some things it does better at. One that we're looking into right now is we're quoting on a client that we currently do their vertical social media, but we might want to do the same campaigns in horizontal and a micro four thirds sensor is as close to square as you get.

38:51So if you need to shoot for both formats at the same time, there's really no better sensor. You get almost a square. So when you crop both, they both look good and are not compromised. And a new firmware update actually lets you move multiple markers around. So for me, I would say that I want to use the bottom 16x9 of the image for YouTube. And then I want to use the center 9x16 for Instagram. and you can see those markers as you're shooting, which I think is pretty amazing and you can only do on something like the GH7. This is usually like referred to as like open gate shooting. What's open gate?

39:31Generally, you have a sensor and you project the light over the sensor and generally you're not using the whole sensor because displays are usually 16 by nine, two by one, whatever. When you're recording on that sensor, you're only recording a certain amount of it. open gate recording just like the throughput thing that we were just talking about with micro four thirds where they advance faster than other companies is where you use the entire sensor and you read out the four sensor which is normally for a four by three aspect ratio reason number two that tyler said micro four thirds could be useful is as an overhead camera like like just like a simple top down because micro four thirds traditionally you're not going to get a super shallow depth of field so it's just clutch so you can get like everything in more in focus yeah exactly um and then the third reason he uh is because it's a smaller sensor so generally stabilization is better yeah totally smaller lighter body totally also really cool bonus that 99 of people wouldn't care about but people would yell at us if we didn't mention perfect tyler was using ari colors on his panasonic camera because panasonic has like i guess an agreement with ari to like optimize oh ari color science for panasonic so if you wanted to shoot ari and get a bit of an ari look i did not know that we could we just find like a really really really open wide aperture lens plus ari color science and and then and then we'll and then we rent an ari camera we get to do a photo shoot of you holding it interesting yeah i wonder how much of that is similar to the red color science on the nra because when i applied those luts they did not really look like red they're very nice tyler spoke pretty highly yeah i know ellis has mentioned like a production company as well that like loves shooting on panasonic and has shot like these excellent shorts stepping in here no they're a really cool youtube video called media division that does like uh like really really really intense camera stuff and their whole thing is if you want to buy a cinema camera just buy a gh6 or a gh7 or whatever the most sorry color yeah Yeah, they're just like, there's no, yeah.

41:39But that's them. Super interesting. Also, I mean, it can often be easier to adapt more lenses as well to smaller sensors because you can more easily cover the sensor. You can't adapt a micro four-thirds sensor to a full frame. Micro four-thirds lens to a full frame camera. Yeah. Yeah. All right, guys. We have one more brand before we get to our break. Yeah, I noticed the elephant in the room. With two more. Looming over your shoulder. We're missing two, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to do one more than do a break. That was the elephant for all the audio listeners. Okay. Um, okay. We technically didn't do Canon yet either.