Emanuel

The Z8 as an APS-C video camera.
You can shoot RAW in DX mode, which crops the sensor and gives you 5405x3040 clips, better than 5K and much better than 4K. You can shoot RAW at the highest quality (HIGH), with the bitrates 1/4th those for 8K - so you can shoot 48 minutes at HIGH RAW on a 1TB card, as opposed to 12 minutes for 8K!
You can of course us DX (APS-C) lenses in those mode. For this video I used the FF Nikon Z 24-70 f4 lens. An advantage of the crop is that mostly one is using the center of the lens, so corner drop-off is irrelevant - most lenses from Nikon are really good in the center.
So, how does it look:
Think meerkats - habitat and inhabitants in their activities.
5K (5120x2880) frame grabs:
 

Was this color graded? Yes, heavily (and no LUTs) like all of my videos, to create the "illusion of reality."
Think National Geographic video of meerkats - no film-like color tints or distortions; rather see the habitat and watch the activities of its inhabitants as if you were there. But with humans, unlike with animals and birds, one cannot hide or wear a disguise or shoot with an enormous lens.
Some good stills too:

Do I want it? Yes.
Do I need it? Actually also yes.
Yes if I am to take my work to the next level which is to go from 3 to 2 cameras with true hybrid capability.
‘True hybrid capability’ for me = being able to shoot video and stills with the same unit but also pull stills from the video that could have been shot as stills as the latter deletes the need for that 3rd body for me.
The Z9 however is really the only current body that offers me that with 8k 60p internal raw so as things stand, the benchmark.
Paired with a Z8 and a pair of zoom lenses (28-75 and 70-180) and that’s it for me, all my needs met.
L Mount really is going to have to have the equivalent available early 2024 or I can’t see any other option to go back to Nikon after a 12 year hiatus.
I would not shoot 8k 60p all the time however, just at certain specific times. I’m not totally bonkers! 

Sound check. Internal mics protected by attached wind muffs recording jazz:
with activities: feeding, chess, boxing, typing, posing.
And an 8K frame grab:
And the rig:
 
 

For my use, it seems the Sony ZV E1 is the better option. I tried out the Z8 shooting my mode type of video, in a public place, and it was clear the Z8's size, and the Z lenses, make the camera and thus me way more conspicuous than when I use the ZV E1 with the same specced lens (24-70 f4). Now, for an event videographer, this is completely irrelevant- people expect to be included in video, and the camera person can carry an IMAX camera and it would not make a difference. But, I do not want people stopping what they are doing to pose.
The ZV E1 can also go from 4K 60P to 4K 120P with zero change in quality or framing, so going to slow motion and retaining 60p (which I now insist) is easy. And, with dynamic active stabilization it is possible to move with the camera without a gimbal, and that is not possible with the Z8. Finally, the Sony's built-in wind muff makes obtaining audio outdoors possible without worrying about wind, the enemy of audio.
BUT. There is 8K RAW. Compression is the big enemy of video. And removing one compression step is a big deal. Moreover, as computer algorithms and compression techniques improve over time, the transformation from the RAW video clips in post can only get better. With HEVC or even ALL-I clips (and those partially-debayered fake RAW's), you are stuck with today's technology, and it is far from perfect. The 30+ megapixel frame grabs from 8K video, shot in 60 fps so there is minimal blur yet smooth video, are magnificent. I can handle the Z8 fine; its AF and tracking do not seem much different from the Sony. And I have stuck on the camera my own wind muffs, so I think I can deal with wind too using the built-in mics (which seem very good). Again, I cannot rig a camera for the video I like to shoot with an external mic with wind muff, and most of those mics that mount on a camera are no better than the internal mics - cheaper, small omnidirectional mics can be very high quality while directional mics usually have limited frequency range at the bottom, among other issues.
My Z8 8K 60p RAW video "test":
This can be viewed in 8K with Chrome (not Edge or safari).
And two 8K frame grabs:

@markr041 What are your overall thoughts on the camera vs the Sony's you've been using heavily for the last few months?

Testing NRAW HIGH Zlog 8K 60P at Night using ISO4000 (the alleged second base ISO):
HDR 8K. Nikon Z 40mm f2 lens.

@markr041 I struggle to understand how and why we have to fight hard to buy or get access to some new releases but you invariably come here to post stuff from every single piece of most recent gear we've all been dreaming/salivating about! LOL : ) Are you used to buy them all? :- )
 

Speaking of cropping. The Z8 has a massive crop to 4K UHD for 120P NRAW. No pixel binning, no "subsampling," no line skipping. But, a 2.3X crop.
This was shot in 12bit N-RAW HIGH, ZLog cropped 4K 120P to see what we get:
There is audio too; it is not an S&Q mode.

You all like frame grabs...

Amendment to the above:
120P 4K is NOT an S&Q setting. It is a normal option for XAVC HS, along with 60P and 24P. Thus, audio is recorded.
There are two bitrate options: 200 Mbps and 280 Mbps.
Both 10bit 422.

The 4K 120P license is now available (as promised for June).
There is a slight crop.
No active or dynamic active stabilization (which also had a crop). 120P crop is about the same as shooting with active stabilization.
No Clear Image Zoom.
No All-I. Can use HEVC (XAVC HS), at 280 Mbps.
No added cost, at least in the US.

New teaser to replace the previous one on Kickstarter:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1if6N08m5xBfgUMILeG3KSEvmnbGPPFHg

 

 

New teaser to replace the previous one on Kickstarter:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1if6N08m5xBfgUMILeG3KSEvmnbGPPFHg

 

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/make-believers/mystery-romance-short-the-orange-of-daydreams
 
From the director of MAKE-BELIEVERS:
 
Any helpful hand is welcome, thanks for watching! :- )

New teaser to replace the previous one on Kickstarter:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1if6N08m5xBfgUMILeG3KSEvmnbGPPFHg

 

 

Greetings Creative Souls,

This week's new free music track is on my (relatively) new Rock page:

"CHILLIN’ WITH MY FRIENDS "
https://soundimage.org/rock/

As always, it's 100% free to use with attribution, just like my 2500+ other tracks.

VIDEO EDITING

Need help editing your trailers (or other things?) I love video editing and can help. Give me a shout!  🙂

Straight from the set this weekend:

 

 

 

No Marty, actually not, only Mike's irony here. I had been not so creative! : D

@kye Great addition! : ) Now try to find the same elsewhere! Priceless community we have here. @Andrew Reidthis place of yours should have its recognition as of public interest body.
EAG :- )

One of the (potentially numerous) differences when swapping from 4K to 6K (on a 4K timeline) is that the downsampling goes from being before the compression to afterwards.  Compression is one of the significant contributors to the digital look IMHO (just compare RAW vs compressed images side by side), and if you can downsample from 6K to 4K in post then you're downsampling and also interpolating (blurring) the compression artefacts that happen on edges.  
I would favour a workflow where the image is debayered, downscaled, then recorded to SD with very low or even no compression.  It would effectively have the benefits of downsampling and the benefits of RAW, but without the huge file sizes of RAW at the native resolution of the sensor.  Of course, no-one else thinks this is a good idea, so....

Lots of them are, but as you brought it up, here are my impressions on the above:
It's still far too sharp to be convincing - I noticed this in the first few seconds of the video - TBH my first impression was "is this the before or after footage?"..  of course, once you see the before footage then it's obvious, but it didn't immediately look like film either The motion is still choppy with very short shutter speeds - this would require an VND which isn't so easy to attach to your phone I think that people have some sort of hangup about resolution these days and as such don't blur things enough.  For example, here are three closeups from the above video.
The original footage from the iPhone:

Their processed version:

A couple of examples from Catch Me If You Can, which was their reference film:



As you can see, their processed version is far better, but they didn't go far enough.
I've developed my own power grade to "de-awesome" the footage from my iPhone 12 Mini and detailed that process here, but here's a few example frames:





I'm not trying to emulate film, I'm just trying to make it match my GX85.  Here are a couple of GX85 shots SOOC/ungraded for comparison:


I haven't got the footage handy for the above shots, but here are a few before/afters on the iPhone from my latest project from South Korea.
iPhone SOOC:

iPhone Graded:

iPhone SOOC:

iPhone Graded:

iPhone SOOC:

iPhone Graded:

I'm happy with the results - they're somewhere in between the native iPhone look (which I've named "MAXIMUM AWESOME BRO BANGER FOR THE 'GRAM") and a vintage cinema look.  My goal was to make the camera neutral and disappear so that you don't think about it - neither great nor terrible.
Going back to Dehancer / Filmbox / Filmconvert / etc..  these are great plugins actually and I would recommend them to people if they want the look.  I didn't go with them because I wanted to build the skills myself, so essentially I'm doing it the hard way lol.
The only thing I'd really recommend is for people to actually look at real film in detail, rather than just playing with the knobs until it looks kind of what they think that film might have looked like the last time they looked which wasn't recently...  I keep banging on about it because it's obvious people have forgotten what it really looks like, or never knew in the first place.
And while they're actually looking at real examples of film, they should look at real examples of digital from Hollywood too - even those are far less sharp than people think.  The "cinematic" videos on YT are all so much sharper than anything being screened in cinemas that it's practically a joke, except the YT people aren't in on it.

The answer is motioncam.

More pictures and less talk, good example.

Straight from the set this weekend: