Prolost

are there specific products you would point me at, community film groups - are they any good? Just basic 'mistakes not to make' list would be very appreciated - top of the list is which camera to (not) get and whether OSS can handle non linear editing

I personally like Canon DSLRs. The current Digital Rebel series produce nice images in combination with a tool like Magic Lantern for well under $100. If you can afford a 7D or %d the image quality is marginally better, the ergonomics significantly so. But products from Nikon are also good, as are the Micro 4:3 units from Panasonic. Sony's I'm not familiar with, but have heard others speak highly of them.

Certainly check out film production courses at commnity colleges in your area - you may be able to learn a great deal for relatively few $, not to mention making food contacts. Online, good resources are http://prolost.com/ and http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/ are two of the best resources, but also check http://rebelsguide.com/forum/. Stu Maschwitz's 'Rebel's Guide' is a really excellent starting point in book form, I wish I'd had it when I got started: http://astore.amazon.com/prolost-20/detail/0321413644 The Guerilla Filmmaker's handbook is also excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Guerilla-Makers-Handbook-American-Edition/dp/0826414648 Join a film library or filmmaker society if you are a decent sized city, as you'll save a fortune on seeking out and buying books on technique, financing, contracts, etc.

I personally don't rate…

Here's the best practical demonstration I've found; it's about as well as can be accomplished considering we're talking about looking at pictures of HDR on non-HDR displays.

https://prolost.com/blog/edr

It's decidedly not a gimmick. However, it not exactly magic either, and to extent it really relies on the effectiveness of your display's local dimming and maximum brightness.

If you're running your display at 50% brightness, then yeah... it's got "more brightness to spare" when it's time to render those extra brighter-than-bright areas.

If you're running your display at max 100% brightness already then... well, there's nowhere to go from there.

I briefly played around with my 2018 iPad Pro, which has an EDR display. I watched the Apple TV movie "Greyhound" with Tom Hanks. That movie appears to have been shot as something of a demo for HDR rendering. Lots of shots inside the dark, cramped ships, with INTENSELY bright light coming in thru the windows.

Watching it on the iPad, the windows were WAY brighter than the rest of the ship interior. But, I could still see everything in the ship interior. It wasn't lost in the shadows. Watching it on my nice Dell IPS monitor, it looked totally different. The portholes were brighter than the ship interior, but not by much. It just looked like a normal movie.

It was a very convincing demo. However, perhaps hilariously, I thought it looked better in non-HDR on my Dell. Nonetheless, it was an impressive tech demo.

What you're seeing here is Apple's EDR implementation [1], which, on non-local dimming displays (every Mac display except the M1/M2 14" and 16" MacBook Pros and the Pro Display XDR), works by bumping up the whole display brightness (and adjusting brightness of all non-HDR content downwards) to display colors brighter than standard SRGB white.

So, yeah, both QR codes probably are brighter on your old Pro, if its display brightness is set higher. And, if you adjust display brightness on the Air, you'll see them converge to the same brightness there, too (on my M2 Air, it seems that Apple leaves a little headroom for the HDR "white" to appear a bit brighter than UI white at full brightness; not sure if the M1 Air behaves the same or not as it has an older display).

Displays with local dimming (and OLEDs) can display, in small areas, colors that are brighter than the maximum full-screen brightness. That's where HDR content gets really compelling-- if all you can do is dim the whole screen, you're unlikely to see much of anything that you couldn't do just by bumping up the brightness with SDR content.

[1] https://prolost.com/blog/edr

As excited I am for The Hobbit, I'm also leery of the 48fps. If you've ever noticed the difference between watching movies on a 120Hz/240Hz, it's definitely extremely noticeable and distracting. It makes movies look like reality TV.

Why this is, I don't fully know. The fact that this is filmed at 48 fps (rather than simple interpolating the extra frames) might make it better, but I'll just have to see for myself.

What I do know, is that if watching a film at 48 fps is like watching a typical bluray at 120Hz, I'm going to find it distracting. It really does mess with the "feel" of the movie. Whether it's simply cognitive dissonance or not will take time to determine.

Here's a relevant article from last year that really hits home for me: http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.html

I previously had a rudimentary understanding of log, but the author's other recent piece devoted to it in the context of the iPhone 15 pro (https://prolost.com/blog/applelog) gave me a much better appreciation of its importance to professional-looking video. From that article:

> But with this iPhone 15 Pro Max footage shot in Apple Log, I can recover all the detail — or just let it overexpose gracefully into this ACES output transform, for a smooth, film-like look. This soft highlight rolloff in the log-to-video conversion is called a “shoulder” in film, describing the upper part of the classic s-curve. A nice shoulder for your highlights is a big part of what makes footage look “pro” — especially when your grading happens underneath it.

I am assuming the studio display will support EDR with its 600 nits of peak brightness, so while it may not be hdr, it is not quite sdr either.

For those who don’t know, EDR works like this: when the built-in display of a supported mac is not at full brightness when playing HDR content it will ramp up the brightness to max to make use of the full range of the display for the HDR content while also dimming all non-HDR content to keep it at the same apparent brightness. The effect can be quite dramatic if you’re using the display at a low brightness setting, even on a 500 nit 5K iMac. The hdr content looks much brighter than a white finder window.

https://prolost.com/blog/edr