As someone who works in video and features for a living, I can tell you that most of those cheaper cameras that you’re seeing are not as capable or can deliver the quality that you get from some of these modern stills cameras.

With a hybrid camera that most of us use for photography, they do still require a good amount of work to get that “cinematic” feeling. And many stills cameras and nearly all phones can’t shoot with constant frame rates, or they are 8bit 4:2:0, or have poor readout speeds, bad rolling shutter, etc.

We use stills cameras for vfx work and then sometimes c-cameras when the space is too small for one of our cinema cameras, or you need to shoot some quick plates, or pickups. The three smallest cameras that I own are the Sony a1, Sony a7rv, and FX30. All are Great cameras capable of producing professional looking content. But You don’t have the video features that you get with cinema cameras in 2 of those. My main cameras are RED’s which can handle long shoot times, and have other features that work better for video and heavy post production.

And the other reason is price to get the foot in. The a1 is my most expensive photo or hybrid camera at $6500 and you can get a Panasonic S5ii, or a Sony a7iv for a fraction of that price. Get a lens, and a shotgun mic, and you’re kind of good to start playing. For my 3 RED Raptors which are in no way the best of the best, those (not including any of the ancillary components or lenses that you need to start using it) were $24,000 each just for the body. So actual cinema cameras are VERY expensive and can run you well over $100k. For most video needs, a solid hybrid camera combined with good working knowledge of audio, light, and post-processing you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference to be honest.

There have been people winning awards and making full features with cell phones, so those cheap cameras that you’re seeing are more than capable of making a movie, but you won’t have the best looking image quality.

One of the big things in deciding is based on what you are delivering. Frame rates, but depths, color Chanel’s, and video size all are impacted by that. Cheaper cameras are limited in what they can deliver from a specs side. Just right tools for the right jobs that’s all. They all do the same thing and most people if you put them side by side wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. As a compositor I see prof of that every day! Lol!

If you've drawn a selection around the area that you want to work with and it’s not coming up, you should report that as a bug to Adobe. I’m not having that issue on my end. So it might be a software issue.

So that’s a feature that will transform your video and create a faux slow-mo. But the problem with that is it creates VFR which can be difficult to work with as you don’t have a consistent frame rate. We’ve played with it for a little while when it was release, and it does ok if you don’t have to do anything with it after that, but there are odd artifacts and other issues that randomly crop up due to the fact that you’re adding frames that never existed into the video so your at the mercy of the interpolation to be correct.

But the OP doesn’t need any of this as his camera natively shoots 60p at full HD.

I’ve used their 15mm zero distortion lens and loved it. I have a set of their upcoming cinema primes being sent to me now for testing. But I’ve had nothing but great glass from them.

That doesn’t transform video into slow motion it just changes the videos rendered frame rate. That can actually cause steppy footage or missed frames.

In that price range, I’ve use the Lowe Pro Protactic 450 which should fit all that gear and maybe your extra body as well.

The Whistler is great and big as well. For the bigger bags, I’m not a fan of Think Tank if you plan on carrying it on your back for long periods of time.

Others to look at would be Mindshift bags, Wandrd bags, and maybe the Peter McKinnon Nomatic large bag. I believe you can get a small cube attachment for the Nomatic that transforms into a smaller backpack when you don’t have to bring everything.

On that camera, the best slow motion feature is in HD the d500 will shoot HD 60p. I would imaging if you go into your video menu settings you would probably be looking for the aspect ratio or the size of the video, then frames per second. So you would choose 1920x1080 60.

I have VERY recently gone down to a single personal camera. I now only use a Sony a1 with 2 lenses (Tamron 20-40 f2.8, Tamron 35-150 f2-2.8) and a flash when I go anywhere and that’s it.

I had a test unit at onetime. It was interesting and compact. But I feel it was ahead of its time in a bad way. The software wasn’t quite there, and the form factor didn’t help win people over as it looked like a bit of a bulky cellphone. I also remember there being some odd issues with some of the photos but it’s been a while

Funny enough, while Lytro failed as a photo camera, they actually made a fairly successful ultra high end cinema camera, which unlike its photo counterpart allowed you to use third party compositing and editing software to work (quite effectively) in a 3D space.

The only thing to keep in mind is that it may not take advantage of the 40 map sensor but it should work.

This is how I got a VERY nice hard bound manual for my Fuji X-H2. The manufacturer has a limited supply that they sell for what might have been $20 including shipping

Totally get that! I wonder if the video features in Photoshop could do it? It can export gifs from a video, so I’d assume that it could export a jpeg image sequence fairly easily. And you could probably write a batch command for it if it doesn’t already exist.

For those that do have access to after effects, you drop the video in a new comp, add it to the render cue and select image sequence for export format.

After Effects can do that (render each frame as jpeg, png, or tiff sequence) fairly easily.

Very true! I’m currently beta testing a few up and coming programs for 2023-2024 that will do the same for VFX, 3D, and video.