blackrat

I still don't get why they didn't give it 2x2 block read crop modes and even larger crop modes. Or how they mangle the DR so badly when it seems well mapped in these DNGs or why they hit the crispness so badly before feeding it to the h.264 compressor (since the external compressor doesn't really make static stuff much any sharper we know it's not the h.264 compressor making the big hit).   If only we had full and detailed documentation we might be able to send the frame to the h.264 system before whatever weird stuff gets done to them and at least retain the full detail even if not the 11+ bits. Same for the HDMI out, just send each frame straight out ot the HDMI (with proper offsets to get it to 1920x1080), although again it might have to be clipped to 8bits (unless it is an HDMI 1.2 or better interface).   Even look at stills stuff, it's been more than a decade since the first EOS DSLR and we still don't have a fully usable AutoISO for stills on any Rebel/xxD/7/5 series body. They dribble such a little thing out year by year it's so absurdly picayune. The 5D3 is so close, but they lock out EC when in M mode AutoISO and in AV AutoISO they put an absurd limit, with no basis in anything other than marketing making it only work at the shutter speeds where AutoISO would be LEAST used, on the setting for minimum allowed shutter speed, 1/250th?? for action stuff which is when you need AutoISO since you don't have time to set things for each shot in real time?? Why? It takes until maybe the 5D4 or longer to get such a basic, trivial feature? DOesn't every other brand have working autoiso for stills even on Rebel-level stuff for years? Does anyone buy a 1 series just for a better AutoISO, it's absurd.   It is what happens when you have conservative leaders and marketing droids ruling over the engineers (who they probably have locked up in closets and cowering in corners) while the marketing MBAs lord over them or something.   But back to video, how does conservative, and react when others move, get you to dominate in the cinema world??

Is it true that the beta 1.2.0 had audio over HDMI? If so, where did that go? Marketing? (OTOH someone else claimed the HDMI interface hardware isn't capable of supporting audio on the 5D3. Don't know which story to believe.)

Although it's hard to see a difference comparing external vs internal with 1.2.1 which is what most of us naturally focused on first, I noticed that comparing internal 1.2.1 vs internal with the previous firmware does look different. It seems that 1.2.1 is a touch crisper and doesn't make 100% of the detail go to mush in less contrasty areas now (although it still doesn't seem like C300-level detail) and it seems like you need to back of sharpening a bit in post.

I wonder if they can feed it to the jpg compression engine in the camera? Proably lots of this stuff is not possible without complete documentation and ability to program digic fully though. The jpg processor probably has 8bit limit too.

  I'm no longer so sure because of the DNG stuff, but my original speculation was that the 5D3 has a hardware AA filter scaled to match stills shooting and thus not nearly rough enough for video (2MP vs 22MP) so while reading it in 3x3 blocks and binning those to one pixel they have some residual aliasing and they did some blurring and AA to try to get rid of it and that made it go soft.   Now if you look at the C300 and so on, they read chips in 2x2 blocks off of 8MP sensors. If you read 2x2 off of the 1DX you'd get crop mode video and 2x2 blocks are closer to the AA filter's scale so maybe they don't have to mess with it as much as they for 3x3 blocks and thus maybe it looks much sharper (while a touch more aliased since maybe they don't even bother to mess with it at all).   I'm not quite sure that explains it anymore. It is also possible that the 1DX with dual-digic and a fast sensor is able to simply read an entire APS-C/H-ish sized chunk all at once with block binning and then simply downscale it to 1920x1080 and maybe that is why that mode looks so good. For FF mode it's too many pixels for them to read all at one off the sensor. ?   I kept writing Canon to ask for a cropped 2x2 binned mode for the 5D3 for these reasons. Maybe the hardware wasn't designed to do 2x2 though? A shame if nobody though of that. Crop modes are also much better for wildlife shooting.

  That was my other thought. If they can't hook into HDMI can they hook into the h.264 encoder and clip the DNG stream to 1920x1080 and feed it to tht for compression without all the wonky stuff going on? I guess the one problem is that probably won't accept 14bits and if they can't program Digic how would they tone map it to 8bits that the encoder could handle quickly enough?

It may be hard to get around buffer limitations, impossible likely. But do they have access to feed the HDMI out port? If they could do that then they could clip the DNG frame to 1920x1080 and clip it down to 10bits (or maybe 8bits if the HDMI interface used can't handle 8) and then as each frame gets sent out they delete it from the buffer and the buffer never overloads? If they have to clip to 8bits that might be tricky since without tone mapping that would be bad, if they could get 10bits out that is close to the 11 stop DR range and a bit tossed wouldn't be so bad I don't think. We get the sharpness at least.