- What, why'd you put it up there?
- Well, I thought that it'd be a cool angle.
- This wide angle lens with my head
makes me look like a hot air balloon.
I don't like to wear pants when I record these videos,
and now everyone's gonna see I'm just wearing boxers.
Like this is embarrassing.
(whistles)
- Your viewers might enjoy you not wearing,
oh wait no they're all guys.
- They're all guys, yeah.
- Well maybe you can ask Lefty to do it for you next time.
- Lefty only has one arm.
How is he gonna set up a camera?
- He's a tripod.
- Welcome to my channel,
now you can clearly see I'm not wearing pants, this is ...
Can you bring the camera down a little bit?
What's going on guys, Potato Jet here.
I'm wearing pants now, you can trust me.
I wouldn't lie to you, ugh I need to tighten this thing.
So this is the OnePlus 6 phone.
It's about 530 US dollars,
which is actually less than half of this iPhone x.
As a filmmaker and YouTuber,
the only thing I really care out of this thing is
the video quality out of this.
I just want this to be as good as this
so that I can make bomb cat videos.
But I'm allergic to cats so dog videos.
Look slightly to your left, slightly to your left,
perfect, right there.
As one of the cheaper value options on the market,
I thought it'd be fair to compare
this thing to an Arri Alexa.
These have been used to shoot low budget student films.
You might recognize some of the stuff that's shot.
How do you think the OnePlus is gonna compete?
Ah.
Alright you guys know the drill by now.
The OnePlus is mounted right next to the Arri Alexa.
Which camera do you think this one is?
Here's Camera A, and here's Camera B.
They actually don't look as
different as I would've expected.
Back to Camera A, and this time around
I'm gonna turn on the head lights and light bar,
which might give you a better hint at which ones which.
So did you pick out your final answer yet?
You don't really get anything if you get the right answer,
but you know you get to feel
incrementally better about yourself.
So yeah, that's pretty cool.
Okay, you guys ready for the answer?
Camera A was the Arri Alexa.
Camera B was the OnePlus 6.
I think the easiest way to tell is from the sharpness.
It looks very digital on the OnePlus 6,
but the Arri Alexa looks very natural.
Little bit trickier, what's this?
Is this the $500 phone or the cinema camera
that costs over a hundred times more?
And here's how the other camera looks.
Now to me, it's pretty obvious,
maybe because I was there shooting it,
and all also probably because I spent all day,
every day playing with cameras.
But I wanna know what you guys think.
Let me know in the comments.
And here's the answer, the first one was the OnePlus 6,
the Arri Alexa was the second.
Now let's just all admit it, that was surprisingly close.
So is this $500 phone just as good as a cinema camera?
Not quite, I think we all spent enough time
looking at my dumb face, let's move on to something cool.
And there you guys have it,
the difference is pretty obvious.
This is slow motion, in low light,
lot of dynamic range needed to capture fire.
So this is when we really need that high performance camera.
I love how you can see every little
particle flying through the air.
And here's what the raw looks like.
Tons of detail in there making it
a dream for colorists to work with.
Uhg, but man, all that flickering, lame.
In case you're not familiar, most modern lights flicker,
but it's usually too fast for our eyes to see it,
but when you take a camera and shoot it in slow motion,
it becomes a whole lot more visible.
So if you need to light a scene for slow motion,
you need flicker free lights.
So far everything's been shot on a wide angle lens to
make the phone look as good as possible,
but the beauty of cinema cameras are the lenses.
So if you pop on a tighter lens on the Arri Alexa,
and zoom in the phone, there's zero comparison.
Why would they name phone OnePlus 6?
That's weird.
Whenever you look it up on Google, it just says seven.
So clearly phone's are still a long ways away
from being able to compete with cinema cameras.
But the OnePlus wasn't necessarily
designed to be a premium product.
OnePlus is going after value.
This phone costs less than one memory card for this camera.
As a matter of fact, this viewfinder alone,
this little thing right here that let's you
see what you're filming and control the camera,
this thing alone costs as much as a camera like this.
This is a dope camera,
and we use it for a lot of documentary work,
but even this can't compare with the Arri.
So unless you have one of these laying around
let's talk about to get the most out of your $500 phone.
The video camera uses this lens
and even if you zoom in on the camera,
it doesn't switch to a telephoto lens or anything like that.
So don't touch that zoom.
That's definitely a restriction because
it's hard to get those tight shots with
shallow depth of feel, but just stay wide.
Focus on getting a good composition.
There's a time and place to keep the camera up here,
just shoot everything eye level,
but you can get some super dramatic shots sometimes
by just bringing the camera down to waist level.
Matti knows a little something about cameras, right?
I think you have a YouTube channel or something?
- Yeah, I started one last year.
I'm gonna give you the real one, it's Matti Haapoja.
- Really?
- Yeah, but Matti Haapoja's fine.
- Okay, so Michael, what do you think about?
He doesn't need any introduction.
- We were talking about like shoulder rigs
versus I like to use an easy rig
because I like to shoot down here
like from the hip almost.
A, because it's like better for random people
when they're not used to being in front of a camera
instead of, "Hey, how's it going?
Can you answer my question?"
That's super awkward, but if I shoot from down here,
and then I'm like I'm talking to them,
they barely even notice the camera,
but also I like the angle from down here.
One, because it makes them look larger than life,
and then two, because usually it's cleaner.
There's usually leading lines in the ceiling or wherever.
If you shoot down, point it down.
Look at all this garbage down there.
Shoot up, look how clean we are.
I actually learned how to compose wide shots
through the iPhone, like through Instagram
because you don't have a shallow depth of field to rely on
and so that's how I really started like
kinda play around with like composition,
and figuring out okay not just the person
or thing that you're shooting,
but everything else around it too.
- I find myself using like a 85mm all the time
and using super shallow depth of field all the time
when I was starting out.
- Yeah.
- But a lot of good films and videos,
they stay on a wide shot, and you said you usually
shoot on a wide lens anyways, right?
- Yeah, I don't remember the last time
I put on anything past 35mm.
I just love the wide range and I used to like always,
my go to was a 50mm back in the day,
and then maybe an 85, and now like I never touch those.
I like how it makes the audience feel like
they're right here with us.
I don't know, what are you shooting on right now?
- Yeah this is a 11, but it's on an APS-C sensor
so it's similar to 16.
- So it feels like you're hanging out with us.
Whereas if it were on a zooms lens over there,
it would feel like you're kinda like spying on us
like a peeping Tom and that's weird.
- There's a time and place for a tight lens.
- Yeah.
- Like 50mm, 85, I shoot on those all the time.
- 100 percent.
- Blur out the background.
- Yeah.
- But a really valuable skill to have is being
on that wide angle lens when you have
pretty even lighting and a wide angle shot.
If you compose it carefully,
you'll get pretty good results so.
- That's a great way to get started
and learn and get really familiar with the camera
because even if you get a better camera,
that doesn't necessarily lead to better work right away
just because of the fact that you have better equipment.
- If you wanna get better, limit yourself to an iPhone
for a little bit and then you're really gonna learn
the whole like composition thing.
You don't have all the extra gadgets
and stuff on a real camera to rely on.
- And aside from what Michael Haapoja says,
here is the biggest piece of advice I can give you guys.
Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as
important as knowing what to do.
So you should never ever peel the skin off an apple.
Oxygen is great, right?
Like we all love to breath it.
Mm that's some delicious oxygen.
But it's not always great,
oxidation is a very powerful and damaging effect.
For example, something as strong as steel can oxidize
and start to rust, so something that powerful
and strong can become very soft and brittle and weak.
Same exact thing happens to our body,
our bodies can oxidize.
Everything inside basically becomes old, rusty, ages us.
It makes it easier for us to get all kinds of diseases
like cancer, diabetes, you name it.
So to prevent our bodies from getting oxidized
and basically aging and rusting,
we need something called antioxidants.
It's essentially like anti-rust coating for your body,
and a lot of those antioxidants
live in the skin of the apple.
How do we know it's all in the skin?
Well it's easy, if you peel an apple
and leave it for a few days, it looks like this.
I do not want to eat that, this is smelling really bad
and it's pretty close to my nose, I wanna throw up.
These apples are the same age
the only difference is I skinned this one a few days ago,
and all the oxidation occurred in this one
because it didn't have that skin, antioxidant layer.
So this is what your organs are gonna look like
if you don't have the antioxidants.
And this is what it should look like, like that.
This is a much sexier organ, don't you think?
The skin is loaded with fibers,
and they found if you eat a whole apple,
it'll actually help you lose weight
opposed to eating an peeled apple,
which will make you gain weight over time
because you don't have the fibers
and all the nutrition that lives in the skin
to balance out the yummy goodness that's inside.
Is this completely off topic?
Yeah, but what do you expect from a Potato Jet video?
Something articulate or properly constructed?
And always remember that the sun is bigger and brighter
than any light that money can buy.
So always be cautious of where the sun is
at whatever time of day
and obviously we all know golden hour,
right before sunsets, the sky is very nice, and gold
and everything just looks beautiful
no matter where you point the camera
but every location is different.
For example here, I'm in the shade right now
so everything's pretty even
but at different times of the day it's gonna look different
so that's why location scouting's really important to have.
There's apps out there on your phone like sun seeker
that can tell you where the sun's gonna be at what hour.
I'm getting chewed up by mosquitoes.
This is not cool, I'm miserable.
The same location can look completely different
just a couple hours a part.
For example this place is a tree right here
so we're all in the shade right now.
But if we skip to a later hour where the sun's
directly above us, here's what it looks like.
So right now this is one of the worst possible times
to be filming, it's midday,
the sun's coming straight down,
it's causing all these raccoon eye shadows on my face.
I'm sitting on kind of a dark green grass,
which isn't causing any bounce on my face.
The person you're trying to film is a total diva,
and they think they're hot stuff
because they have 75,000 subscribers.
Just all around bad news, try to avoid
this kind of lighting situation
no matter what kind of camera you have.
And also I wasn't a huge fan of the super contrasty
and saturated color profile out of this.
So if you learn the basics of color correction,
it'll go a long way.
From what I can see, I'd wanna probably lower that
saturation just a little bit,
shift the colors a little bit around,
and maybe lower that digital sharpening a little bit,
make it look a little bit more organic and smooth.
But remember to never go overboard
with color grading this kind of stuff.
Usually you just wanna have a little settle touch,
just to even things out a little bit,
and balance things the way you want.
One of the things you could do is
get some of these clamps that hold down on your phone
and this one has a quarter inch thread
so you can throw this on any tripod like this
and never ever underestimate a locked off shot.
A shot from a tripod is awesome.
You don't need all your shots to be moving all the time.
You can just really do a lot just by this
once you get lighting and composition down.
Especially if you drink as much coffee as me,
then this handheld jitter is gonna make everything you film
look like the Blair Witch Project.
By the way, my good friend Chris Rollins came to town
the other day and we had a jolly good time
but please don't make a big deal out of it.
We put a super wide angle lens on the Arri Alexa
and compared it side by side with the GoPro
so if you're curious to see the results of that,
go check out his channel, and also huge thanks to
Angel and all her super rad friends for coming out
and helping us with that fire breathing sequence.
And I know you want some firey explosions on
your Instagram feed so make sure you give them all a follow.
Handles in the description.
And yeah hanging out with Matti in Santa Cruz,
was so much fun.
Keep an eye out for my cameo in his channel.
You won't regret it I pinky promise.
And last but not least, don't you dare ever peel that apple.