Shirozina

10 minutes ago, Anaconda_ said:

I can’t get tap to focus or any kind of AF to work on any of my lenses, 18-35 included. 

Im using the Viltrox EF adapter and assume this is stopping it from working, maybe it needs an firmware update? 

Maybe there’s a setting I’ve missed in the menu? I don’t have native AF MFT lenses to try it with. 

Tap to focus works on native M43 lenses but AF doesn't work with the Viltrox adapters. 

58 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

1. Battery door is faulty, flops open
2. Battery gets stuck
3. Lens mount has a worrying amount of play.
4. Battery life is rubbish
5. Massive barrel distortion on native M43 lenses
6. Screen unusable outside
7. 1TB USB C drive "is a must" (add £600 because it needs to be Samsung T5 or equally fast / approved)
8. Add cage
9. Add power base or v-lock battery
10. Add monitor

Not so Pocket now and not so £1000 camera now is it?

Solutions for Blackmagic when the do the next camera

• Use multiple batteries in a vertical grip style form factor and allow USB C power while camera is running
• Do better Q/A on the lens mount. No more reports of infinity focus being off. No more reports of play and wobble.
• Support digital correction of native M43 for ProRes recordings
• Put a built in EVF in it
• Put a screen on it that is bright enough or daylight use
• Put an articulated joint on said screen
• Raise price to £1500, to save us the hassle of having to double the camera price to make it usable and bulk it up.
• Keep the body as light as possible.

1 - battery door does not flop open. I just removed it as it serves no purpose.

2 - Not had any battery sticking issues and was just pointing out a possible reason for it with other users.

3 - Maybe just my body as it's not been reported by others

4 - Battery life is not rubbish and It's just as expected.

5 - Barrel distortion on M43 lenses - that's a Panasonic and Olympus fault.

6 - All screens are unusable outside without a shade unless they are very high nit 

7 - Don't need to add a 1tb drive as I already have one and it was less than £200  and BTW a 1TB T5 is about £250 which is cheap, cheap storage compared to V90 SDXC or Cfast.

8  Cage - nah

9 - Add on power - already have it with an Atomos Powerstation.

10 - Monitor - already have one

So yes it is a £1000 cinema camera (FFS) as I haven't spent a penny more on it an it's ready to go. (once I make a screen shade)

Now how about your suggestions for a £1500 camera.....

More batteries - yes if you have a higher nit screen you will need them. 

No idea what others are saying about infinity issues but that's not a design feature you need to pay for is it?

In camera lens distortion correction means substandard resampling as it's speed over quality so I'd rather do it afterwards. Not a feature I'd pay for in a 'cinema camera.'

EVF - articulated I suppose well that would be nice but the cost will be significant.

Articulated screen - yes. Bright = more battery drain and heat

Raise the price to £1500 - i.e give them away. I reckon £3000 easy for that spec and 2-3 years away. 

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

Bit worried about the screen really.

As it's a touch screen, a loupe is going to disable a lot of the menus and controls. There is no d-pad or joystick. Is it possible to navigate the menus without the touch screen?

I've heard people describe the screen as "good"... For me a "good screen" is one you can actually see. If it goes invisible outdoors and you can't tilt it, it's not a good screen

Blackmagic have the guts of a great cinema camera here - and the good workflow to go with it (Resolve). Why could they not have spent more than 5 minutes on the body design? Just basic common sense stuff...

1. With such a large body and high power requirements, why only have room for one battery? Why not have a vertical grip? With it being a Canon fit, I wonder if any of the Canon DSLR vertical battery grips fit? Why not use a 1D X size battery under the base?

2. Screen should have been articulated... surely

3. The hotshoe should have had contacts for a slot-in EVF - pretty sure Olympus has one they could have made it compatible with, powered by the cam.

4. Not talking about adding too much cost or complexity here, just the basics... Like if you have a battery door, make sure it stays shut properly?!

5. They are on their 4th generation of camera now... So no excuses for badly thought out half baked solutions

6. Do a $2500 version next. Use the classic slim Sony NEX 7 form factor - twin dials, corner EVF, tilting screen, slim body, IBIS, power efficient processor, XQD card slot, lighter, that would be a major winner.

It's a £1000 cinema camera FFS - you get to add the rest yourself if you want or need it. They put a good sensor and codec options inc RAW in a body with connectors to power it and get data out and did it for an absolute steal of a price. No excuses for badly thought out half baked solutions.......?

Hang on - this list of gripes is a wind up right. I mean you can't actually be serious can you?

36 minutes ago, JordanWright said:

The first 0.64x metabones I had was very loose camera side but when I bought a replacement one, it had a gasket on the back and was much tighter. no issues so far on my Gh5 or Pocket 4k. It's disappointing how hit-or-miss metabones tolerances seem to be, especially for the price of the adapter. I also had to adjust infinity focus on all 3 metabones adapters I've had previously.

Same here with metabones - all 4 of mine needed adjusting. The culprit seems to be the rear mount's inner surface which is roughly machined and either needs shimming or further machining/grinding to get the correct thickness and flatness. The body itself is very well made as is the lens flange.

3 minutes ago, Anaconda_ said:

This doesn’t happen for me with the Viltrox. There’s a little play, but less than there is on my GX80, and I don’t foresee it being a problem. 

Maybe it’s because I’m using adapter lenses , but I’m having no problems with CA or distortion. 

I do have the cheap as chips MFT Meike 28mm f2.8 and that also works perfectly. Maybe wider, native lenses present a problem though

Viltrox QC seems to be quite variable on their mounts. I have both the speed booster and non speed booster versions and one is tighter than the other. My first non speedbooster version was so tight I couldn't mount some lenses on it ( it went in the bin). All native M43 lenses rely on in camera correction for distortion and CA so this shouldn't be a problem for non native lenses. Again the term 'cinema camera' tends to mean it's not going to do much other than give you whats on the sensor and nothing else. 

19 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

These are the comments I am expecting to see here. Really helpful, thanks.

The non-in camera corrections is a significant issue, as the camera seems less and less appropriate for run n gun. If you have to correct everything in post, this increases the post time significantly.

I am wondering if it is going to be fixed by a firmware update (supporting at least a few popular zoom lenses, like the Olympus 12-100mm I was considering), but it may not be possible at all (noone will give them the rights to do so).

Speedboosting a FF or APS-C lens should yield better results I guess.

Does IS/OIS works with this camera?

Why the monitor is unworkable outside? Is it too dim? I can only work with my Focus anyway, so it won't surprise me.

I'd worry about the amount of native distortion on a high range lens like the 12-100. Also the distortion gets less away from the wide setting so it's not a big problem in all situations. For a 'cinema' camera I'd rather do all corrections in post to be honest and I can't see why BM can't adopt the same idea as a lot of RAW apps like Adobe RAW and C1 and have their own lens correction profiles that you can apply in post or have a feature where you can calibrate your own lenses and save these for use.

I've tested the Viltrox .71 and 18-35 and it's OK unless you are shooting architecture.

Lens IOS on my 12-35 and 35-100 lumix lenses works but it's not massivley effective and I don't consider this a handheld camera - it will be on a tripod for my use.

The monitor is just not bright enough and also the screen is highly reflective so outside use is problematic without a hood or Loupe.

As of yesterday I'm a P4k owner! Here are a couple of initial observations;

The battery door is not a problem once it's removed   The battery is recessed quite a way in so is unlikely to be dislodged by accident.

The battery compartment has rails like the ones on the charger which is unlike any camera I have owned before so this may well be the cause of batteries getting stuck.

The menu system and controls are first rate as an intuitive user interface. 

The lens mount has worrying amounts of play in it compared to my GH5 and BMPCC and with heavy lenses like the 18-35 a gap opens up at the top of the mount between the lens and body flange. If you hold the lens with one hand and the body with the other you can easily rock the lens on it's mount with very little force. I think the spring tabs on the rear of the mount are not strong enough. For heavy lenses I'd want a lens support on the rails. ( anybody else confirm this?)

Battery life is as expected - i.e not great but workable with enough batteries. I have 5 genuine Canon LP-E6's which display % or volts but the BM one has just a crude bar. 

My native M43 lenses - 12-35 2.8, 12-40 2.8 and 12-60 2.8-4 show massive barrel distortion at the widest settings due to the lack of in camera correction but as it has a bigger sensor than standard M43 you do get a significantly wider FOV as a result. I can correct distortion in Resolve fairly easily so it's not a deal breaker but it's quite distracting when shooting to see this amount of distortion. CA is also present on some lenses which can be fixed in post but is more fiddly to do so I'll be choosing my M43 lenses for this carefully.

Tap to focus works well enough but focus assist ( peaking) is very good and much more accurate than on the GH5.

WB function is great as you can just point at a grey card and push to set without digging down into a menu. ( a proper video camera feature)

I've got 128gb Cfast and V90 cards but they don't hold much footage so I reckon a 1TB ext USB-C drive is a must for serious use and a lot cheaper!

The screen is good but pretty unusable outside - it's just crying out for a hood or loupe. I'll probably bodge up a cardboard hood for now until Zacuto or Kinotehnik start making them.

I've only done a few image tests but so far compared to the GH5 it looks like it has colour aliasing on fine edges and is slightly softer. This was to be expected from a non downsampled sensor with no in-camera sharpening or NR but I'm not expecting these issues to be a problem. DR looks to be noticeably but not dramatically better but more testing needed although I don't doubt the tests I've seen already showing a couple of stops advantage. 

It's pretty much as I expected and will be an addition to my GH5 but not a replacement - yet.

Coming tests will be ProRes vs RAW and what lenses work best. 

Oh and for the price it's an absolute steal esp when you get a free copy of Resolve Studio - it's just insane at this price point.

Sorry yes it's 256 levels but in Y'CbCr most of the bitrate is used for the Luma (Y) channel so for any situation where the bitrate is limited it's better than RGB as our eyes are least sensitive to missing color information vs missing tonal information. 8 bit is not 'that' bad as long as it's stored in a low compression codec. 

8bit RGB can support 16million colours but 8bit Y'CbCr can't as explained above - the colour info is dramatically cut esp with 4.2.0 codecs so even though it may have a large gamut ( the size of the colour space) there are missing or interpolated areas within it. Likley why we have so much bother with skin tones which our eyes are very sensitive to. With RAW which is RGB you do get the full colour data from the sensor and this is one advantage over 4.2.2 and 4.2.0 Y'CbCr codecs which should be evident in any P4k ProRes vs RAW tests.

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

What’s with the RGB Luma range in the menus of the NX1 then? That’s 0-255

I think YCbCr is just an HDMI thing and it’s really an RGB image at the core

Also betting some so called 10bit cameras do an 8bit sensor readout like with the GH4 10bit HDMI, there was no advantage to be had.

It's RGB from the sensor but then it's processed into YCbCr for the codec but don't take my word for it -  do some research on video camera output formats  

I'd say cam A is the GH5s based on the sharpening in the fine details.

Already the EU has plans to force the big OS platforms ( Windows, Apple, Android etc) to design software to be built into the OS that will scan your drives for images containing people, buildings and commercial products that will delete any images which  don't have the necessary rights attached to them. Even camera manufacturers have been advised that 'pre - auth' tech will be needed in all new cameras so that when you frame up a shot  it does an image analysis and if it finds unauthorised or unlicensed content the record button will be disabled. The end goal the EU has in mind will make it illegal not just to record these things but to actually simply look at them either in reproductions or in real life! Everyone will have to wear special VR goggles which can scan their environment and selectively block any subjects that we don't have licences or agreements to view. 

There seems to be a lot of hysteria surrounding ultra wide lens edge performance but in real world shooting is this really a problem. Shooting moving images with an ultrawide lens is problematic for many reasons including weird perspective effects like excessive motion at the edges of the frame when combined with camera movements, unnatural perspectives and simply people looking fatter at the edges of the frame. In the cinema it may be used to convey a sense of distorted reality in a scene but in general use that 'ultra wide shot' has few uses. 

There is a basic error in the article regarding 8bit in video - it's not RGB it's YCbCr which means the tonal graduation is much more than 256 steps and the gamut is not 16million colours.  

2 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

You are probably right. But with the crop in this camera you have to go Wide as hell to get wide. And the wider you get the worse it is going to get. And with no corrections, I can sort of see why they did it, it might end up being it's Achilles Heal for what most people would like to use it for.

And most Anamorphic lenses REALLY suck at the edges to start with that are affordable. So it will be interesting. Some of it can add to the mood, but some of it can kill the mood also. Interesting camera for sure good or bad.

It's all relative - a 12mm lens for M43 is just a scaled down 24mm lens for full frame so it's not technically very special 

It's not passed into law yet. 

54 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

I would think it is from them not having any software corrections for Vignetting,  Barrel Distortion , Pincushion, on and on. Most lenses are crap on the wide end new or old. A lot of the old lens suck at having poor coatings ,or if they have it are half wore off, or have swirl marks from hell. Fungus in older lenses adds to it also.

Having a camera with No corrections is not very conducive to super great output, especially once you get below 18mm FF equivalent. Back in the day anything wider than that in FF was a Fisheye lens

In camera corrections do not fix edge softness and infact due to the correction warping of the image they often make it worse. This is simply a physical phenomenon of lens exit pupil position in relation to the sensor, a difference in sensor filter thickness and the larger sensor of the P4k. Also some lenses are very good at their widest setting and wide open - my OL12-40 2.8 is sharper at the edges and corners than my 12-35 2.8 and 12-60 2.8-4 even when these are stopped down to optimum apertures. I do however worry that these lenses when used on the P4k where they are not corrected for distortion and CA will not look great. I'll find out tomorrow when my camera arrives ( or Monday...)

Downsampling ( if properly implemented) will always result in better resolution than a 1:1 crop so I'm not surprised the P4k isn't as good in resolution terms. However Resolution is probably the least most important factor of cinematic image quality.

6 minutes ago, Nikkor said:

Probably every camera out there does it (except when they crop to 1:1 pixel or oversample).

AFAIK all RAW output is 1:1 pixel. Pixel binning, resampling, oversampling etc is for generating non RAW image data like Jpeg, ProRes , Tif etc. If RAW is resampled it's by definition not RAW IMO. 

45 minutes ago, Nikkor said:

The sensor can be binned or pixels can be combined in various manners without debayering.

I didn't know that - what cameras do this?

10 minutes ago, Anaconda_ said:

Stupid or genius?

 

Essential to get this thread to 300 pages!

The first essential accessory I'll be interested in will be a hood or loupe (preferably loupe for my old eyes) for the screen. 

So if it shoots RAW and the sensor is 47 mp this means it's cropped  - unless it's 8k raw.....

23 minutes ago, JordanWright said:

So the battery is held in by a seperate latch and im confident it won't fall out  but the door latch is poorly designed and opens on its own frequently. unless im missing something obvious with the latch mechanism.

Can the battery door be removed? 

13 minutes ago, JordanWright said:

So I received the Pocket 4k today. yet to do proper tests but I've had a quick play and the files look decent. What surprised me the most however is that I'm able to record 4k 50p Lossless raw to my Samsung T5 500gb drive. didn't expect that. The only downside so far is the battery door. It opens by itself waaayy to often. 

Does the battery door actually hold the battery or is there another tab inside as with most cameras? I generally remove the battery doors on my cameras anyway to aid quick battery changes

DR is always a controversial number as it depends on subjective ideas on as to what someone regards as acceptable shadow noise. I'm not that interested in absolute values in any test rather than the relative values between cameras. How many people actually measure the brightness range of a scene and then say thy need a camera with X amount of DR to shoot it? The figures look pretty realistic to me as I measured the GH5 at around 9 usable stops before I needed to start thinking about using NR for shadow areas and I got around another 2 stops from my A7R2 (APS-C mode) and A7S (in 4k) and BMPCC. It does show how far behind all these cameras are from the Alexa in this regard which again is not unexpected.