RANT: Features cameras SHOULD have but DON’T
Feb 23, 2020Why are all these
features
missing from high-endcameras
? The technology already exists in our hands in thesecameras
. Why doesn't it appear on professional cameras? Tinfoil hat time! It's the year 2020, there's no better time to be alive if you're an independent filmmaker, but you know what? Professional cameras are still severely lacking in certainfeatures
that they reallyshould
have
right now. Because right here in these cheap cameras, the features that these cameras are missing, this camera right here is a twenty thousand dollar camera. And if it had some of the features that If I had this GoPro, it would change my life, but it doesn't right now, it's more of a hindrance than a help and the tools here are supposed to help us create art and not get in the way. way, so let's find out what these problems are that I expect.Karen's makers will figure it out in 2020. Right now, both the GoPros and your phone
have
little gyroscopes and accelerometers built in so they can tell how they're moving, what their orientation is, and what kind of g-forces they're experiencing, that information can then be analyzed by a program to give opposite motion to your footage to cancel out any bumps or vibrations in your footage. That's why GoPro shots are so smooth these days if you want to stabilize your footage and you're not dealing with something like a phone. or a GoPro, you have to do it optically; In other words, a program has to follow the points in your image, track them, and then try to undo that movement.So, for example, if we're taking a photo of me right now talking and the cameras. all shaky But I'm in the foreground and I'm moving towards it's going to follow me It's not going to get the right motion to eliminate the motion This problem has been solved and consumer devices like your phones, consumer devices like your GoPro and However , here's a twenty thousand dollar camera that doesn't have the same solution. In fact, you can go out. You can buy a small package that you put on a camera that has a small gyroscope and an accelerometer. It will follow the movement of that camera and allow you to stabilize your footage in post.
It's called SteadXP. Now, the thing is, there are some caveats; One. You have to calibrate this for your lens every time. The second thing is that you need to be able to sync the data from this little accelerometer device with your footage, but if this was built into, say, black magic, that would be awesome. You know, I'm already using black magic resolution to edit and manage all my black magic images, so if you could incorporate that into the camera, just a little bit of accelerometer and gyroscope and some kind of way to sharpen your lenses. you can have all this synchronized.
You can just check a box and your editing program and suddenly your footage will be stable. Man, when you go, you are spending as much on a camera as you are on a Tesla Model 3. I hope something these things a Tesla can drive itself, the red one can't even achieve good autofocus. One thing that burns my cookies is the lack of good autofocus on modern cameras here in the studio. What we shot on our Canon DSLRs which have amazing responsive dual pixel autofocus. very fast and effective, they also have touch autofocus, which allows you to select a part of your screen here and focus on that particular area.
It's really cool, really effective. I use an a7 three at home for photos and videos and it has very good Face Detection by highlighting the eyes and knowing the exact focal plane within which a face is located. Now both the Blackmagic and the red have autofocus capabilities. The Reds are practically unusable. They are very, very slow and very difficult to access quickly. We are talking about touch screens. We have this huge touch screen chungus here in red. Just considering how much processing power there is in this beast and the size of the touch screen. It seems silly that creating a good autofocus system is the The last thing on my mind in red is that this thing could pretty much run Crysis, but it still can't focus the Blackmagic, while a little better only lets you do sort of of widespread center-point autofocus and gets you halfway there.
But when the day comes Today, shooting doesn't do quite the same thing. It does not work in the same way and it is technology that exists. It's in the cheapest cameras. It's everywhere. Target and Best Buy, a corner market, you'll find all cameras with decent autofocus, but not here, that's something these cameras could really benefit from. Well, it's 2020, right? I'm talking about cameras and all these expensive cameras and the things these cameras
should
be able to do and I have to say... I completely agree. It's 20/20. You pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a camera. Why can't a camera give you a premium wireless headphone audio experience like current sponsor Raycon can offer?For a hundred years people have been trying to figure out, oh wow, what's the next upgrade we can do with a camera? What is the best thing he can give you? Well guess what? None of them can give you the audio experience that the Raycon E25 headphones offer. They come in a stylish charging case that you can simply put in your pocket. Can a red camera or a black magic camera give you the audio experience of a premium wireless earbuds available at about half the price of other premium wireless earbuds? Can't they come in fun colors and patterns like these headphones?
I mean, come on, think about it? It's 2020. They spend all this money on the camera and can't even get it in the color they want. So if you're interested in getting one of Raycom's top models, the e25 here has over six hours of playback. It has perfect Bluetooth pairing and comes in your favorite colors. So click the link in the description below to get 15% off your purchase. If you ask me, this type of technology seems like it should be happening now in 2020. Very good. It's a quick wait time. Why are all these features missing from high-end cameras?
One of the main ones here is, for example, the canon. They make a huge line of cameras. They make video cameras. They make DSLRs. They make movie cameras. They manufacture a wide variety of cameras. And if they took all the good video features and put them in the DSLR Well, you'd have no reason to buy their line of camcorders anymore. So there is a bit of internal politics that prevents this. Companies simply make the best camera that can do everything. Now, to be fair, a singular tool that does everything may not be something that exists, but it says the processing power should be there, but it's not, so there's a whole internal politics there, as well as the fact that if you also make a camera, fine.
Well, no one will buy the next one. You know, I know this is the tinfoil hat moment we're getting into, but it's true that if you put all the features into your current line, you won't have another line to sell. clients So you want to make sure you keep a couple of imperfections here that you can easily resolve in the future. Another feature, I desperately need wireless monitoring. Hello! How are you? I'm using it right now. So, once again in the realm of problems that have already been solved but for some reason do not exist in professional hardware, we have wireless monitoring.
But Nico? Does professional hardware have wireless monitoring? You're right. The problem is that if you want to do wireless monitoring today, you have to get a module, put it on the side of your camera, find a way to power it, get another module, put it on the side of your monitor, find a way. to feed it and then join the two. and finally you have a system but that's a lot of extra hardware and you know what? GoPro, God bless his hearts. I can connect my phone to this little camera and I can see an image on my phone that I can monitor wirelessly from my GoPro using my phone.
Of course, there's a lot of latency and compression, but if this can do it for $400, you'd surely expect a twenty thousand dollar camera to be able to do it, right? It wasn't until recently that little HD had the brilliant idea of packing a tarot deck and a monitor together into the same thing to create a convenient little package, and this is one of the best tools I've ever used. It is simply assembled. your camera, this is a normal monitor, it has two little rabbit ears that come off the top and then magnify, your director, your lighting.
Anyone can have another monitor and can see what is happening through the camera. It's very, very convenient and still! Why aren't they incorporating it into these guys!? Or even these guys!? But the fact that they have a solution for wireless monitoring with a GoPro for $400 makes me wonder why camera manufacturers don't have a solution for five thousand, six thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand dollar cameras. I can do it with the small HT system. Why is it up to a third party to go out and put together all these solutions? My phone can do it and my GoPro can do it.
Why can't my high-end film camera do it? My personal complaint is that like no camera has wireless audio like natively on the camera and I'm talking about both like monitoring audio but also built in wireless microphone audio, almost everyone I know has some type of headset wireless, whether they are Airpods, Raycons or those "Bonephones" and they all connect to our phones via the Bluetooth standard. It's been standard for a while. All you need is Bluetooth 4.0, just a run-of-the-mill modern Bluetooth chip. Plug it into the audio and then I could use my Bluetooth headphones and monitor the audio.
I can know if I am or not. I'm getting it without wires hanging everywhere and with that connector plugged in. Don't know. It seems like such a simple thing and not a single camera that I know of includes this. If we're being real, it doesn't have to be studio quality. headphones to monitor your audio we're talking about indie movies We're talking about YouTube movies if you're running as a real indie project You probably have your own audio guy making his own wireless audio so you don't have to worry about But this isn't really about that. It's just about having the camera.
You can monitor the audio with wireless headphones, come on! Arghh So now I'm just demonstrating 3D tracking on my phone and how it can track where it is in 3D space and allow me to compose things into the shot. It's another great example of the fact that I like my phone. The combination of accelerometers. The gyroscopes and camera capabilities are able to maintain a three position awareness of your position in space now, again, none of the professional cameras can do that. Even on high end Alexa, Sony and Red they don't have any sense of 3D tracking and perhaps this is just a byproduct of the fact that this is a visual effects type and camera manufacturers may not be prioritizing that.
But Imagine, so to speak, that when you recorded for your camera, you also got another file that records the position of your camera in 3D space. So you can literally place an object in the scene anywhere. It would be really cool. It would be very useful, especially for us when doing our visual effects, to have real-time 3D tracking from your camera. First of all, we wouldn't have to do 3D camera tracking. Next, we're doing visual effects, which requires us to track points in the image. So if you have a very blurry image or it's dark, sometimes it's really impossible to get 3D tracking. that.
But it could be integrated into the footage from the beginning. The other thing is if you're shooting on a green screen, imagine being able to shoot on a green screen and then instantly go out of the background with an eyedropper and go in. a real-time 3D background that already tracks your performance. You could make any kind of movie. You could make all the avatars. And you wouldn't have done it long before James Cameron is making them. Virtual reality headsets can already do this. The $400 Rift-S has the ability to do inside-out 3D tracking. This is how you track yourself and yet the camera That's the price of a Tesla Model 3 can't do it Heck the camera is out of the price of 2 Tesla Model 3 can't do it the technology already exists in our hands on These Cameras So why isn't it showing up on the best cameras?
The thing is, all of these things we've been talking about already exist in one form or another, and yet they don't seem to exist in the actual tools we need them for, and there are probably some good reasons. No, I'm not wearing Nico's tinfoil hat, so there are probably good legitimate reasons why these things aren't included, but at the same time I feel like most people these days only focus on thedifficult specifications like What resolution does this camera shoot? What frame rate? How many stops of dynamic range? Do I care how easy it is to use this camera?
What are the features that will make it the best experience for me from recording something to uploading it? Okay, and obviously we're coming at this from the perspective of being like YouTube filmmakers. We don't have giant equipment on our film sets. You've got people operating cameras on a separate focuser and a separate audio manager, all kinds of different roles on set just to operate a camera, but the problem is if you're anyone who wants to use this as if it were a rig for a single person, you have some sacrifices and usability and that's a little unfortunate considering the technology exists to implement right now.
I hope you know that maybe these marketing teams on these cameras will start trying to drive a little less with resolution and more with eg. What is the best way to use this camera if I were the only person using it? And honestly, these are just some of the ideas we've thought of. But I'm actually very interested in hearing what you guys think you'd like to see on a camera in 2020. Leave a comment below with your ideas. If all of these things came together, that would be the camera I would expect to have in my hands in the year 2020.
That would be amazing. My phone can do all these things. Will my professional camera be able to do it next year? We'll find out!
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