Andrew Reid

Occasionally I like to pretend video doesn't exist on EOSHD and I'm preparing a review of the Leica Q! I really liked Mattias Burling's review And this guy's, with some stunning shots in both... I bought mine used for £3000. The prices new have gone up due to lack of stock. But if you think of it as a £1500 lens and a £1500 body, in Leica terms that's cheap and with this you get very fast AF unlike on the 28mm F1.4 M It is quite simply the best small full frame camera I've ever used And what I find very interesting technologically about it is how much of a Panasonic trace there is in the camera, a clear collaboration and I think we'll be seeing more from Panasonic in the full frame market in due course (just a personal opinion). I had the Sony RX1R II but I prefer the Q, which is saying a lot because the RX1R II is an amazing camera and has better specs on paper. The look of the 28mm F1.7 is drool-worthy wide open on the full frame Panasonic... I mean Leica... sensor. The 24MP sensor in the Q has amazing colour, the lens is crazy sharp... You have a 35mm and 50mm crop mode, which works in video mode too. I really wish it had 4K, 3K and 2K high quality video, as the cropping ability from the full frame sensor at 28mm gives you practically a 28-50mm F1.7 OIS zoom. Firmware update please Leica!

No it wouldn't It's a 5K 4:3 sensor It's not a 16:9 sensor. I don't know why you are going on about 5.2K anyway. 6K photo mode? No point using that in V2.0 firmware.

I really like the satirical style of the test... something different and filmic, yet still useful and a conversation starter. Well done dude.

Well, getting back onto the subject of the 10bit and 12bit lossless 3.5K raw on the 5D Mark III, I can safely say it's the best QUALITY dynamic range I've ever used in post. I can correct for huge exposure differences and there's no crushing of the shadows / blacks at all. So I agree in that I'd rather have a high quality 10 stops or 12 rather than a compressed to hell 14 stops that's for sure (*cough cough* S-LOG 3 *cough*)

Another good suggestion. In the meantime it would be interesting to see how slow the shutter goes in open gate 5K H.265, because then you have timelapse in video mode already for long exposures, 1 frame per second stuff. It's trivial to do in post, you just create a 16:9 timeline and put the clip on it. It's still 5K, and you have the added bonus of being able to shift the frame up and down to compose the shot better. Also the crop marks for 16:9 assist with shooting it in the first place. If you read the post you see it's not just for anamorphic users, you don't need an anamorphic lens and can instead shoot 16:9 with crop marks and crop in post really easily.

All the choices in camera as long as it's Arri! How long as he been shooting film for? Since he was kidnapped?

Yes there is an IBIS mode for anamorphic to account for the change in focal length of the 2x or 1.33x stretch. Panasonic really did think of everything.

Choose 10bit or 12bit then This isn't North Korea.

Premiere is extremely poor at the moment. The Resolve 14 BETA is more stable than Premiere in 2017. And free... blows my mind. Downloading the latest Resolve 14 now, and I am sure the performance and reliability is even better. Adobe should apologise for being so poor, and give everyone an opt-out of the subscription service for a one off fee. Otherwise, the sub service is going to whither and die, people will move back to Apple and Blackmagic. It really is that bad. You can't have such a mission critical piece of software with such poor reliability for months on end.

Yes that's possible, the desqueeze automatically changes to 1.33x in 16:9 video mode, Panasonic expect you to use a 1.33x anamorphic in this mode. In future, I expect them to add options for choosing our own desqueeze ratio of 1.33x, 1.5x, 1.78x or 2x... we are all grown up and everything

The thing is Magic Lantern's option for 8bit RAW at ISO 6400 makes perfect sense as the sensor isn't delivering more than 8 stops dynamic range at that ISO any way So to cut the data rate and save some card space in low light it is a good option.

Leica Q does say Made in Germany on it! They do the chassis and assemble the pieces. The lens, sensor, image processor, firmware, EVF and screen are from the Panasonic side. I dare say the entire lens is constructed in Japan too. I like this, as I like Panasonic... Does not take away from the Leica badge. It is a unique camera, not available for cheaper from anyone else. Nobody else does the same thing. The original Sony RX1R is closest... But nowhere near the same ergonomically, feels more cramped, no built in EVF and not a 28mm. The RX1R II feels very different too, both in the look and in terms of the ergonomics. The eye to the popup viewfinder hurts after a bit. Q is much more comfortable. I badly want a interchangeable lens version of it.

Yes but that DR is at the expense of something else.... Which is what I am telling you guys all along!

With Magic Lantern They chop the bits off at certain ISOs, giving 8bit RAW Go and test that and compare to the 14bit raw Then you will see a direct example of the advantage of higher bit-depths like 8bit vs 10bit. 14bit capture from the sensor is on nearly all cameras (some are 12bit)... I am talking about the recording format and image processing pipeline.

Look at this Nikon patent and weep... https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=en&sp=nmt4&tl=it&u=https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/web/PU/JPA_H29156432/198ADF829BBE9F46ADF2289DCA570D34 If they go ahead with this product, they could really wipe Sony off the mirrorless map. Also there's a 36mm F1.2! https://nikonrumors.com/2017/09/07/new-nikon-patents-nikkor-52mm-f0-9-and-36mm-f1-2-full-frame-mirrorless-lenses.aspx/ But with lenses like these what price are they aiming at with the new mirrorless system?! $6000?!

I suppose the X-E3 is to the X-Pro 2 what the X-T20 is to the X-T2. And soon we will be forced to upgrade to an X-T2S due to G.A.S and in-body stabilisation. I think Fuji should have a bit of a rethink... Re-target X-series as a photographer friendly alternative to Leica M, just keep the X-Pro line and make it as small and light as possible with the nice small APS-C lenses. Make the X-T3 full frame, with new range of lenses and Canon EF adapters with proper AF. And Dual Pixel AF. And IBIS. Thank yo. Re-name the cheaper cameras so to not take aware the luxury of the X brand... Call them C or something else, for Crap-series

December is a strange one, don't know why they are so slow! Maybe the other stuff is holding up 4K, like getting the autofocus tracking to finally work properly But thank you Fuji for giving us this rare gift. It is the first time in the camera industry that 4K has been added with a firmware update. Such a dramatic leap in quality from just firmware Just shows they are playing us for idiots most of the time... as the 5D Mk III shows also! The X-Pro 2 is my favourite fuji camera... So I will be selling my X-T2 and X-T20. This firmware update has saved me a lot of money

But 8bit IS itself lossy data compression. Look at the difference between 8bit raw and 14bit raw in terms of dynamic range. 10bit is very important as an acquisition format If your capture format is 8bit from the sensor to the card then you are losing dynamic range. The only reason an 8bit JPEG works is because all the image processing is done in 14bit and the sensor is 14bit As a delivery format on our screens, 8bit works ok (although there is a reason HDR displays need 10bit)... but the capture can benefit from 10bit and higher... for more dynamic range, less compression and better colour. The reason so many people can't tell the difference between 8bit and 10bit is they are both so heavily compressed or hacked down on cameras like the FS5.

Haha this is so true. Even in raw stills, compared to the CCD in the Leica M9, I have the same knife-edge too much green / too much magenta problem with Sony cameras. Maybe it is a CMOS thing.

What 10bit from what camera is not giving you the expected dynamic range improvement? What have you been testing? Name names!

Your white balance is crazy off in that shot. WAAAY off. Make the white objects look white... Use auto white balance if you find it easier.

Perfect isn't an option all the time... Nature doesn't always give you perfect lighting. If a controlled interior scene is lit for the narrower dynamic range of a Rec.709 8bit image you can get it looking good, as the guys with the GH2 showed in the famous Zacuto shootout that had Francis Ford Coppola fooled. If you try to pack too much dynamic range into the frame then colour is going to suffer with 8bit. That is why the 1D C has good colour but not 14 stops DR And it is why 14 stops DR in S-LOG doesn't have good colour And it is also why Canon LOG on the 1D C never quite regains the punch of the standard picture profiles if you want to keep your extra highlights and shadows intact. It is all the fault of 8bit. I foresee BIG gains for Sony colour if they do the entire imaging pipeline 14bit -> 10bit on a future A7S3, along with the improvements to the colour science evident from the A9's JPEGs. Isn't that what I am saying? Well there's lossless compression which means you don't lose any visual information, the structure of the file changes, but the end result is the same. Compression can be lossy... meaning you throw stuff away in the image. LOG is lossy in 8bit, you are throwing away fine gradation and colour information to make room for more dynamic range. Honestly it's easy to see When you tweak the shadows and highlights in 10bit RAW on the 5D Mark III it maintains the natural, realistic still-life look of the shot, smooth roll off between two subtle tones in the shadows like a dusk sky and the street... whereas in 8bit on a lossy camera it turns to Digital Sick™

Ok I take on the challenge. I'll shoot 10bit GH5 and compare it to 8bit GH4 And I'll shoot some more 10bit RAW on the 5D Mark III and compare it to 8bit 4K on the Sony cameras. I thought Blackmagic already showed that 10bit was superior... Problem was maybe their sensors were a bit behind, so shadows were a bit noisier and so on, compared to an A7S or the like.

There's a lot of misinformation out there because there's a lot of fake 10bit. The whole camera, colour processing, colour profiles, image pipeline and codec need to be built around 10bit for it to be an advantage, like on the GH5, or in raw on the 5D Mark III with Magic Lantern (where the colour profiles and image processing is done in POST, bypassing the camera's 8bit processing limitations). The 10bit GH5 Rec.709 image is night and day better than the GH4 10bit HDMI output. And don't get me started on 8bit "uncompressed" HDMI... It is compressed as hell! No point in recording it. Especially not as 10bit ProRes.

You're not quite understanding the way the hardware works Jimmy. The sensor delivers that 3840 pixel wide image under the normal Canon firmware, every time you hit the focus magnification button and it's capable of sensor windowing with any full pixel readout crop of the full frame sensor, like 3.5K, 3.3K, 2K, whatever you like. Magic Lantern are extracting the existing capability of the camera within the normal spec and clock speeds of the hardware, they are not running it at full capacity or increasing clock speeds. That 3.5K image goes into the buffer as normal and then Magic Lantern take it from there and put it onto the card. The only heat increases come from a harder working card and battery due to the data rates. The processor and sensor do not get 'worked at breakneck speed'. In fact the processor is relaxing if anything because it doesn't need to think about compression or H.264. The only reason the live-view isn't as nice as in the normal 1080p mode, is that Canon's code is designed to show the 5x punched in display for focus checking, so Magic Lantern had to hack it to give us accurate framing for the entire resolution, which is very difficult as they lack any kind of documentation from Canon or an SDK to tailor camera operation to their choosing. The hardware is 100% capable of 4K video and likely with the same MJPEG codec as the 5D Mk IV and 1D C. The reason it is not in there is due to marketing. They wanted to reserve the feature for the 1D C and target the 5D3 predominantly at a stills audience and consumer crowd for whom 4K would be somewhat overkill or wasted and result in more support costs, distracted focus in the marketing messages, confusion on the shop floor, etc. The 5D3 also wasn't allowed to compete against any of the pro Cinema EOS cameras which were fresh on the market at the time it was released, because the margins would be much greater on these cameras and video shooters should not have been tempted by something cheaper offering such a recording high spec... That's another reason the 1D C cost $15,000 on release. Plenty of compact flash cards in 2012 were fast enough for MJPEG 4K, otherwise they wouldn't have released the 1D C the same year doing MJPEG 4K to compact flash cards. You talk like the cards didn't even exist or would drop frames. Also in 3.5K there are no dropped frames or occasional messed up frames, it is continuous recording with perfect image quality, like you see in my video. Sometimes a clip may stop due to the data rate being on the limit of the card, but there are no corrupt frames...and we always did have these occasional stoppages with the original uncompressed 14bit 1080p as well... that didn't stop a ton of AMAZING work being shot with it. For many things, shorter takes are enough. And if you want longer ones just decrease the resolution slightly and shoot 10bit lossless instead of 12bit. 10bit has more advantages than just less banding my friend In rec.709 your dynamic range is limited in 8bit because you simply run out of room. We know the look that comes with trying to compress more dynamic range into a rec.709 8bit, colour suffers, it looks like HDR puke. That's because with 0-255 you have regions of large variation in brightness crammed into the last 5 or 10 shades, so things like a sky looks like crap, no accurate colours in it. LOG is a way around this to a certain extent but is also a form of compression The reason the rec.709 image looks so good on the GH5 is the entire image processing pipeline is 10bit this time round... things have room to breathe and when you do bring up the blacks or pull down the highlights there's 100x more information in there and they don't fall apart. So in short, 10bit = more dynamic range, especially on a 10bit HDR display using Hybrid Log Gamma. That's why the HDR standards all demand 10bit or more. Dynamic range! Also 10bit raw = more dynamic range, plus more control over colour and white balance as it isn't baked in. Also lossless compression = 50% smaller file sizes with no loss of visual quality, so it is almost like having uncompressed raw, rather than compressed H.264 10bit. In addition the bump to 12bit and 14bit on the 5D3 with Magic Lantern gets you a bit more dynamic range, but close to the ceiling of the sensor. I'd say the image quality at 10bit is very close to 14bit... 12bit even closer as to makes barely any difference. 14bit has a bit more accuracy in the highlights. Shadows still look AMAZING in 10bit, like the Blackmagic raw cinema cameras but less noisy.