KarimNassar

Hello Andrew,
I've always appreciated these boards and your articles. I have not been active on here lately because I've been solely working on stills. But I've been checking your articles and I value your work. So much negativity online sometimes, we never think to simply say we appreciate things. Read your latest article and dropped by to say that you are the kind of qualified unbiased professional we need at those events. Hope you will be acknowledged next time.

Hello Andrew,
I've always appreciated these boards and your articles. I have not been active on here lately because I've been solely working on stills. But I've been checking your articles and I value your work. So much negativity online sometimes, we never think to simply say we appreciate things. Read your latest article and dropped by to say that you are the kind of qualified unbiased professional we need at those events. Hope you will be acknowledged next time.

Once a month I come here update with new shoots and stuff, everytime I get here, im disapointed to see this thread so dead, cmon people! Lets share those incredible NX1 shots!

Allow me to explain further rimpamposh, because that video is explaining the situation in my opinion in a twisted and counter intuitive way IMO.
Lets look at the RGB waveform of this NX1 file:

If you look at the top of the waveform it seems the highlights are clipped. However pay attention to the bottom right Clamp Signal checkbox that is checked on and that I circled in green. That clamp signal checkbox, clamps the display of the highlight. It does not DISPLAY in the waveform scope the highlights above the 100 line. However the information is in the video file, it is simply not displayed because that checkbox is checked.
 
Lets have a look at what our waveform looks like once we uncheck it:

As you can see we have more highlight information visible in the waveform scope than what was previously displayed. 
And that is all that has changed, the clamped highlight information above 100 is now displayed in the waveform monitor only. In our video it is still out of range because it is above the 100 line, so in our video those highlights are still clipped. How do we recover that information and unclip the highlights in the video? 
This is where in the video he says to set the 235 number. You do not need to do specifically do that, and you can do it with a variety of tools. And that specific amount will not be adapted to every situation. All you want to do is bring the highlights down. That is all. In this instance I did it as following:

You can do it in different ways. Hope it helps.

Went to Porto on vacations this past week, what a wonderfull city ! Will be doing a video of it soon (trying to go for a watchtower of turkey feel). Anyway, I found a new 16-50S for 499€ and couldnt afford it, still bummed about it, but I might be able to get it, but its a shame I just got the 18-35mm...I dont really know what to do...
Also, tested some new in-cam settings, here are the graded results !













 
 

thanks, those settings got mentioned a couple time in this thread I believe.
I own the 20mm and the 50mm 1.8 (cheap plastic version). both small, lightweight and convenient. I am a nikon d800 shooter so those are the only 2 I used and cannot compare them with other brands. Happy with them though.
Gifs were too heavy and the quality was too bad so I had do opt for a looping youtube video instead.
I uploaded the cinemagraphs here:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/36514809/Cinemagraphs-Flavie-Lea
Would appreciate your support by clicking the blue like button if you like them!
here is a hd vs 4k screen grab (retouched)

 

thanks, those settings got mentioned a couple time in this thread I believe.
I own the 20mm and the 50mm 1.8 (cheap plastic version). both small, lightweight and convenient. I am a nikon d800 shooter so those are the only 2 I used and cannot compare them with other brands. Happy with them though.
Gifs were too heavy and the quality was too bad so I had do opt for a looping youtube video instead.
I uploaded the cinemagraphs here:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/36514809/Cinemagraphs-Flavie-Lea
Would appreciate your support by clicking the blue like button if you like them!
here is a hd vs 4k screen grab (retouched)

 

The popular youtube channel phlearn made a video about this ;-) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DU0Sim_BJ4
Although I used premiere instead of photoshop but the technique is the same. There is also a dedicated app for this called Flixel if you are on a mac. I'm on pc didn't use it.
Here is a retouched 4k screen grab, sharpness is set to minimum and yet feels a little over sharpened already (didn't sharpen on top in post):
right click open image in new tab:

I shot a couple of cinemagraphs with the NX1.
Sadly gifs crush the quality of the files and it looks like behance compresses them even more.
Any tips on that?
 
Here is a retouched fullHD frame:
DCI 4k
vivid picture profile
standard gamma
sharpness minimum, black level maximum, contrast -5
nikon 20mm f2.8

thanks, those settings got mentioned a couple time in this thread I believe.
I own the 20mm and the 50mm 1.8 (cheap plastic version). both small, lightweight and convenient. I am a nikon d800 shooter so those are the only 2 I used and cannot compare them with other brands. Happy with them though.
Gifs were too heavy and the quality was too bad so I had do opt for a looping youtube video instead.
I uploaded the cinemagraphs here:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/36514809/Cinemagraphs-Flavie-Lea
Would appreciate your support by clicking the blue like button if you like them!
here is a hd vs 4k screen grab (retouched)

 

thanks, those settings got mentioned a couple time in this thread I believe.
I own the 20mm and the 50mm 1.8 (cheap plastic version). both small, lightweight and convenient. I am a nikon d800 shooter so those are the only 2 I used and cannot compare them with other brands. Happy with them though.
Gifs were too heavy and the quality was too bad so I had do opt for a looping youtube video instead.
I uploaded the cinemagraphs here:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/36514809/Cinemagraphs-Flavie-Lea
Would appreciate your support by clicking the blue like button if you like them!
here is a hd vs 4k screen grab (retouched)

 

I shot a couple of cinemagraphs with the NX1.
Sadly gifs crush the quality of the files and it looks like behance compresses them even more.
Any tips on that?
 
Here is a retouched fullHD frame:
DCI 4k
vivid picture profile
standard gamma
sharpness minimum, black level maximum, contrast -5
nikon 20mm f2.8

I shot a couple of cinemagraphs with the NX1.
Sadly gifs crush the quality of the files and it looks like behance compresses them even more.
Any tips on that?
 
Here is a retouched fullHD frame:
DCI 4k
vivid picture profile
standard gamma
sharpness minimum, black level maximum, contrast -5
nikon 20mm f2.8

I shot a couple of cinemagraphs with the NX1.
Sadly gifs crush the quality of the files and it looks like behance compresses them even more.
Any tips on that?
 
Here is a retouched fullHD frame:
DCI 4k
vivid picture profile
standard gamma
sharpness minimum, black level maximum, contrast -5
nikon 20mm f2.8

I shot a couple of cinemagraphs with the NX1.
Sadly gifs crush the quality of the files and it looks like behance compresses them even more.
Any tips on that?
 
Here is a retouched fullHD frame:
DCI 4k
vivid picture profile
standard gamma
sharpness minimum, black level maximum, contrast -5
nikon 20mm f2.8

took the nx1 on a first test run this afternoon, not confortable with video grading yet and I noticed too much red and magenta in the skintones highlights so far.
colors "feel very thin" to me already when grading so I will not lower the saturation in camera, happy with the DR and details.
All available light, should receive some led panels soon that will make things more interesting. All the same lens, Nikon 20mm f 2.8D
4kdci, gamma C, maximum black level, minimum contrast, minimum sharpness. I will try to upload to youtube in 4k.

the camera's technical limitations aside, the shot is well done. Nicely framed, nicely edited, nicely lit and graded. good job all around.

Some new stuff im working on :
 



All videoframes, im thinking of probably starting that stock footage thing sometime near.

Just did a small video on some shots I had lying around, still testing rendering, but rendering in 4k def. makes it a lot better, still highly compressed though. Anyway hope you guys like it, not much love was put into grading on this one, unfortunately.
 

I don't think I currently have the experience or time to successfully modify the NX1/NX500 firmware. I don't even have one of those cameras. However it would be a shame to let the interest in this die, so I guess I'll post some of my notes/thoughts about the firmware in hopes that it might help keep the ball rolling.
Note: if you aren't into technical minutiae, the only interesting part of this wall of text is the bulleted list at the end detailing what is and is not possible in my opinion.
Here are the files listed in the header of nx1.bin (version 1.4.0):
version.info:    offset=0x0          size=0x3F   (same as found in /etc/version.info)
linux image:    offset=0x0130       size=0x00624748
idk:                   offset=0x624878     size=0xD8E9
linux image:    offset=0x632161     size=0x3192E8
linux image:    offset=0x94B449     size=0x638518
idk:            offset=0xF83961     size=0x01FF10
idk:            offset=0xFA3871     size=0xB35140
rootfs:         offset=0x1AD89B1    size=0x117A89FF     (lzo compressed ext4 filesystem image)
opt:            offset=0x132813B0   size=0x58E91C   (lzo compressed ext4 filesystem image)
pcachelist:     offset=0x1380FCCC   size=0x7000 (PAGECACHELIST, preceded by a header, I think)
idk:            offset=0x13816CCC   size=0x35BCC44  (lzo compressed. header indicates swap image?)
Anyone with the skills to reverse engineer a camera could figure this out pretty easily, but it was fairly tedious so maybe this will save someone 20 minutes of poking around in a hex editor. If anyone knows what's up with the files I've labeled "idk," I would love to hear about it.
The checksum algorithm is fortunately unchanged from the NX300 as far as I can tell.
As documented at sites.google.com/site/nxcryptophotography/diy-firmware
"width=32 poly=0x04c11db7 init=0xffffffff refin=true refout=true xorout=0x00000000 check=0x340bc6d9 name="JAMCRC""
"jacksum -x -a crc:32,04c11db7,ffffffff,true,true,00000000 [file]"
The main camera app binary is (I'm pretty sure) located at /usr/apps/com.samsung.di-camera-app/bin/di-camera-app in the rootfs. It seems to access the hardware through a relatively high-level API with the /usr/lib/libmm* libraries. libmmf-camcorder.so is particularly interesting. The function I've focused my attention on is mmf_camcorder_set_attributes(), which comes from libffm-camcorder and is used repeatedly in di-camera-app. It conveniently (and strangely IMO) takes strings as identifiers for the attributes that are apparently being set (why not just an enum? I suppose I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth...). Some of those attributes include "target-time-limit," "audio-encoder-bitrate," and "video-encoder-bitrate." The guy who successfully removed the recording time limit on the NX300 did it by modifying the instructions that set the variable being passed along with "targe-time-limit." I found the control flow instructions he mentioned in that thread, so it should't be hard to get rid of the time limit on the NX1, provided the camera accepts the modified firmware. The NX500 is probably similar. The "video-encoder-bitrate" attribute also looks promising, though it would take some more advanced reverse engineering to figure out where the values are being set.
So from what I've seen and read, here is what I think is and is not possible to modify on the NX1 and NX500:
Remove time limit: Highly likely. Seems to be the same as the NX300. Pretty easy too, if there aren't any new security measures in place. Increased bitrate: Possible. Needs some real reverse engineering to find where the rates are set for each resolution and quality. Noise reduction and sharpening: Possible. Haven't seen anything that looks like it's controlling these, but if setting the bitrate works, this should be possible too. FWIW I think that increasing the bitrate would help with the noise reduction issues. H.265 tends to smooth things out a lot to achieve low bitrates. Re-enable 2.5k on NX500: Plausible but difficult. It depends on whether they just removed it from di-camera-app, or if they removed it from the underlying libraries as well. Either way it would likely require actually adding control flow to the binary, which opens a whole new can of worms. Beyond my current ability, for sure. Focus peaking for NX500 4k: Maybe? I have no idea, really. There might be a good reason they didn't include it, there might not. 4k crop on NX1: Plausible but even more difficult. We know the hardware can do it, but it was probably never implemented on the NX1, even in pre-production. Gamma profile on NX500: Plausible. Similar to porting the NX500's 4k crop to the NX1, I think. 6k 24fps H.265: Highly unlikely. The H.265 encoder would have to support frame sizes larger than DCI 4k and be able to handle twice the pixel rate (clock speed) of 4k. Furthermore it would require implementing a brand-new video mode at a very low level. I can't say for sure it's categorically impossible, but don't get your hopes up. 10bit H.265: Nope. The H.265 standard does indeed allow for 10bit encoding, but I highly doubt Samsung would include the significantly larger (wider busses, more complex encoding) hardware necessary to do it. It would be a miracle if Samsung had really decided to go to all that effort and not use it. 6k or full sensor 4k at more than 30fps or 1080p at (significantly) more than 120fps: Impossible. The image sensor simply isn't fast enough. If you hope for this you will just be disappointed! RAW Video: Not really. It might be theoretically possible to dump the live-view feed as in Magic Lantern. Who knows how fast the SD card interface is, though. Certainly no more than 1080p. I can imagine tricking the GPU into packing 12bit 4k RAW into 1080p 444 HDMI like Apertus, but consider that a pipe dream. Don't get your hopes up. Anyway, that was longer than I expected, but I enjoyed poking around in the firmware, so I don't regret it even if it comes to nothing. It's a shame Samsung appears to be dropping the NX line; they are cool little cameras.
p.s. If you know anything I've said is wrong, please correct me; I'm learning this as I go along.

same here. it is simply because everybody is throwing the exact same LUT on every single piece of footage.
Especially redundant on blackmagic cameras footage. Youtube and vimeo are over flooded with them. 
Since it's an easy go to "it looks cool" solution,  it is often poorly done and people look like walking oranges.
All these type of heavily stylized luts you can find online have done quite a disservice to many people imo. Sure it's easy and fast, but what happened is all videos now look the same. The grade should first and foremost support your story anyways, then be visually pleasing.
read his book on color correction, very interesting. Now I need to put the knowledge into practice...
 

Lowering contrast breaks the colors. Leave contrast at 0 and you will be much happier with the camera. I too tried contrast -10 when I got the camera and the results were unusable.
 

thanks for taking the time to do this and upload. could you have possibly mislabeled the video sections?
because the bottom one looks cleaner in the shadows to me and is labeled nx1 

Here's a test clip: NX1 UHD converted to 422 vs the VA recording in 422 (not converted). The video here is 1080p h.264, so it might be kinda hard to tell the difference, but it looks like the NX1 had less banding. If you can't tell what you needed from the clip, I can upload full-sized stills from each device.
LIghting test.mov

I've been thinking about adjusting the black and contrast levels on a per scene basis. That would make the most sense, no need to squeeze the DR when not needed, and the same numbers will not be ideal for different DR situations anyways.
yes definitively. with a little noise and an 1080p delivery it is a non issue though. I personally plan to deliver everything in full HD with this cam anyways.