paulinventome

So i just got an EVF-11 for the sigma fp and it's a really nice small lightweight EVF.
It uses the HDMI out, USB C and there are two prongs that i believe connect to the flash output on the side of the sigma fp
I want to see if i can use this for my Komodo, which is crying out for a small EVF (The Zacuto stuff is too large, i have an Eye already and would happily get rid of it)
So first experiment was to get some cables to plug the Komodo into the HDMI (via an SDI convertor) and then plug the USB C from the camera to the EVF - thinking that maybe that would be enough to start with. But no go. Then i saw the two prongs of the flash and wondering whether they were power and the USB C connection was control.
So anyone got any details on the pins for the flash on the side, or has anyone experimented? I'm just trying a proof of concept to see if it's possible, the EVF might be relying on control from the camera over that USB C in which case all bets are off...
cheers
Paul

Some small compensation for the lock down. I've been taking mine out on our daily exercise outside. It's pretty quiet around here outside as expected. Dogs are getting more walks then they've ever had in their life and must be wondering what's going on...
I am probably heading towards the 11672, the latest summicron version. I like the bokeh of it. As you say, getting a used one with a lens this new is difficult.
Have fun though - avoid checking for flicker in the shadows and enjoy the cam first!!
cheers
Paul
 

Got them, thanks
Can confirm all of that but you do have green shadows at the very bottom. The scene still has quite a bit of light even at 125 ISO but i can see from the enclosed screenshot where you have a green/magenta at very lower shadow step. You can see it on the left edge in the shadow under the object and also on the darker reflective horn thingy.
In 10 bit if you shoot with something that is genuinely black in the scene and then shoot the same scene in 12 bit you can sometimes see by eye but if you raise the whole thing you can see very clearly (like my lenses one which was very very little light and high contrast). This shows the major difference between 12bit and the other modes - the shadow detail.
Now you've been using BlackMagic Film and actually that is reducing it a little which is perhaps why you're not seeing it. I'm not using BMDFilm but using the matrixes in the DNG via the normal DNG setting. I don't believe you get the best out of the camera with that setting but i suppose i need to look it that in greater detail. Maybe it does make sense. BMD Film seems to drop the exposure and take some of that tint off but BMD Film is expecting the colorimetry from a BMD camera, not a Sony sensor.
cheers
Paul

I wouldn't touch MOV with a bargepole. There are many better cameras which shoot MOV out there - this beauty is all about the RAW and no compression.
cheers
Paul

Do you agree that the fp was not in focus? (like camera 9)?
If we make the assumption that the fp is using the IMX410 sensor, as is the A7III, Nikon and perhaps the Panasonic then we can see that there is no way that sensor can deliver more than 12 bits in motion. Although there is a crop mode at 14 bits. If you look at the specs for all these other cameras then you can see that 12 bits in motion is pretty much a universal given - Canon say the same for their sensors too.
So the container from the sensor to the camera is a fixed 12 bit bucket.
If we also assume that all sensors are linear (physics and hardware wise this is the case) so the native signal off the sensor is going to be linear for all of these.
Now: either the sensor response in some cases is non-linear (it's possible but i don't think it is the case) or each of these companies is doing something to get these claimed stops beyond 12. In the case of this Sony sensor, is it logarithmically compressing 14 bits down to 12? I think not, there may be a bit of non linearity in the results (there are) but i think that's a function of the sensor itself. In my testing the difference between stills and cine shows that. But i think that goes for any of these sensors.
The latest BMD don't output DNGs anymore? But the old ones compressed 12 bit linear into a 10 bit container with a 1D LUT lookup table (great approach) but the source was no more than 12 bit)
What other cameras currently output DNG? Because it is very easy to look inside those at the RAW data.
And IMHO some of these companies are using techniques like highlight reconstruction to deliver > 12 stops. If you understand that each of the RGB filters has a different sensitivity then you can see how you can take advantage of that and extend the overall range beyond that 12 bit fixed linear container.
With the fp, and being RAW, it is up to you to do that reconstruction work. With other systems that are outputting their own RAW then that work can happen automagically internally. It is true that the reconstruction work is as simple as checking a box in resolve, or as complicated as doing the math yourself. Applications like Lightroom do it whether you want it to or not - it's fundamentally part of the lightroom debayer for stills as well. So the irony is a lot of skies done through lightroom are reconstructed highlights... (ever noticed that the blues can be somewhat off?)
The only time this doesn't count is when you have a cinema camera style sensor which is designed for greater bandwidth inside the sensor itself, 14, 16+ bits are common.
So IMHO i think the fp has a similar range as the other (prosumer) cameras but the data you get off the sensor is 'RAWer' and it's up to you to make the best of it.
This is my assumption. I have no insight into what the manufacturers are doing. I know i sound like a fanboy, i'm not really, my fp is a stop gap until Komodo ships. But i do think it's a wonderful little camera! I like what sigma are doing and they don't have any cinema camera lines to protect. I think they're really well positioned to do something quite special in this market segment and i'd hate for anyone thinking about getting an fp to not do it because of these kinds of conversations!
cheers
Paul
 
 
 

Okay, i downloaded the 'source' file and looked through it.
IMHO the sigma stuff is a touch out of focus. If you compare to the under test you'll see the chart is sharper there. The normal studio test feels the focus is forward (his watch is in better focus)
Even at f2.8 on full frame the DOF is pretty shallow.
If you're not running the camera out to an external monitor critical focus is difficult.
Number 9 is well out of focus as well on the chart and the suggestion is that's 8K red. 
Im not saying for a moment that the fp is in the same league as the others (my red is 10 times the cost) or that the scaling couldn't be better. But it isn't that bad. I've shot full frame UHD and can be obsessive about things and i have no issue with the footage in real life. Yes, the scaling could be better and hopefully it will be. But if you want pixel for pixel sharpness then use DC mode. You have the choice.
I'd rather people petition sigma to push this forward - more crop choices, better scaling and so on. The sensor is there, the camera is capable but i feel sigma need to know this is what we want...
Cheers
Paul

That's very kind of you, thank you.
Post is minimal at the moment however i think one 'trick' is that i have this as a Resolve project which is YRGB Color Managed, my timeline is 709, output colourspace is 709 but my Timeline to Output Gamut Mapping is RED IPP2, with medium and medium. (Input colourspace is RedWideGamut but AFAIK when dealing with RAW and DNGs this is ignored)
This is because most of the project is Red based. BUT the sigma fp footage is debayering into 709 (So in Camera RAW for DNG is it Colourspace 709 and Gamma 709 with highlight recovery by default).
What happens is that the DNGs are debayered correctly, with full data. But that IPP2 mapping is handling the contrast and highlight rolloff for my project as a whole, including the DNGs. IMHO i do this all the time with various footage, not least because it's easier to match different cameras but mostly because that IPP2 mapping is really nice.
Whilst i'm sure you can massage your highlights to roll off softly, it makes more sense for me to push footage through the same pipeline.
Take some footage and try. When you push the exposure underneath IPP2 mapping the results look natural and the colours and saturation exposes 'properly' Turn it off and then you're in the land of saturated highlights and all sorts of oddness that you have to deal with manually. This is not a fault of the footage but the workflow. Running any baked codec makes this more difficult - the success of this approach is based on the source being linear and natural.
As i say the fp is like an old cine camera, the bells and whistles are minimal but if you're happy manual everything i think it can produce lovely images and it's so quick to pull out of a bag.
If the above doesn't make sense let me know and i'll try to put together a sample.
Cheers
Paul
insta: paul.inventome

So i said i'd post some stills, these are basically ungraded.
This frame is in a sequence with car lights, i like the tonality of this very subdued moment. Shot 12bit to manage shadow tonality.

From a different point above. All shot on a 50mm M Summicron probably wide open.

I think i hit the saturation slider here in Resolve. But this had car rolling over camera. It's a 21mm CV lens and i see some CA aberrations from the lens that i would deal with in post. But i'd never let a car run over a Red!

shot on an 85mm APO off a monopod. Nice tonality again and it's day light from windows with some small panel lights bouncing and filling in

A reverse of the above.

Some fun shots.
I think the true benefit of something like the fp is the speed at which you can see something and grab it. Using it just with an SSD plugged in and manual M lenses gives a more spontaneous feel. Now most of the film will be shot on Red, in controlled conditions with a crew and that's the right approach for multiple dialogue scenes and careful blocking. But the fp has it's place and i may hand it too someone and just say grab stuff.

 
cheers
Paul

I succumbed and bought one. 
I will test more fully over the next week. Ergonomically from a stills view it's very much a urgh. No EVF makes life very difficult for me but i do have the VF on order so maybe that will change things.
Cine mode. DNG. It's heaven. This is all you need from a camera. I've side by sided UHD 8bit onto SDXC vs A7sII UHD Slog2/Sgamut and there's no joke. It's almost comical. The low end and the highlights are literally playing in different ballparks. What crushes the A7sII footage is the compression. Simple as that. So that 8 bit UHD is remarkably good. I'm pushing and pulling it and comparing to the same thing shot  FHD in 12 bit and it's incredibly robust - so much more than it should be.
Over the next week i'll push and pull properly. I got it as I needed a lightweight B cam to my Red for a shoot - so i need to intercut and i'll be finding it's comfort zones side by side with everything.
So far the best resolve post in in ACES. My fear with going into any 709 space is that the camera native spectral response will be outside of 709. All Sony sensors push red way out and it's easy to see with bright red subjects. If you don't debayer into a larger colourspace then those reds get clipped or mushed into gamut. I don't know enough about DNG support in Resolve but visually into ACES appears much better. The only other valid option i think is Linear in, certainly none of the BMD Presets as they're for very different sensors.
 
Cheers
Paul

Oh that's awesome. I didn't know that.
The small rig cage has a hotshot on it so i was thinking of something that could slide in and fix in there. Needs thinking about.
I would need to use a service for 3D Printing here in the UK, there's no point in buying a printer really. 
I use Houdini and Modo for 3D, what are the normal formats these places accept - can you or anyone recommend any?

Cheers
Paul

Hi Devon, i missed this sorry.
Unbound RGB is a floating point version of the colours where they have no upper and lower limits (well infinity or max(float) really). If a colour is described in a finite set of numbers 0...255 then it is bound between those values but you also need the concept of being able to say, what Red is 255? That's where a colourspace comes in, each colourspace defines a different 'Redness'. So P3 has a more saturated Red than 709. There are many mathematical operations that need bounds otherwise the math fails - Divide for example, whereas addition can work on unbound. There's a more in-depth explanation here with pictures too!
https://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/unbounded-srgb-divide-blend-mode.html
Hope that helps?
cheers
Paul

First just to say how much i appreciate you taking the time to answer these esoteric questions!
So i have a DNG which is a macbeth shot with a reference P3 display behind showing full saturation RG and B. So in these scene i hope i have pushed the sensor beyond 709 as a test.
Resolve is set to Davinci YRGB and not colour managed so i am now able to change the Camera RAW settings.
I set the color space to Black Magic Design and Gamma is Black Magic Design Film.
To start with my timeline is set to P3 and i am using the CIE scopes and the first image i enclosed shows what i see. Firstly i can see the response of the camera going beyond a primary triangle. So this is good. As you say the spectral response is not a well defined gamut and i think this display shows that. 
But my choice of timeline is P3. And it looks like that is working with the colours as they're hovering around 709 but this could be luck.
Changing time line to 709 gives a reduced gamut and like wise setting timeline to BMD Film gives an exploded gamut view.
So BMD Film is not clipping any colours.
The 4th is when i set everything to 709 so those original colours beyond Green and Red appear to be clamp or gamut mapped into 709.
So i *think* i am seeing a native gamut beyond 709 in the DNG. But applying the normal DNG route seems to clamp the colours. But i could just be reading these diagrams wrong.
Also with a BMDFilm in Camera RAW what should the timeline be set to and should i be converting BMD Film manually into a space?
I hope this makes sense, i've a feeling i might have lost the plot on the way...
cheers
Paul
 
 

If you want "all the colour" with no transform, then with DNG's you can select "Blackmagic Design Film" for gamut/colour space (Colour Science Version/Gen 1) and as mentioned that is sensor space with no transform, only what you select for gamma. So it's the colour as the camera has captured it (I say camera rather than sensor since there are no doubt corrections applied before encoding the raw data). As I also mentioned though, this is not suitable for display and the expectation is you will transform it/grade it for monitoring purposes. I believe Digital Bolex recommended this workflow and then provided a LUT to transform from sensor to 709 for their camera back when they were still around. You will still be able to "view" the colour unmodified from the camera though. I'm just stressing (for the benefit of others) that the colour from a digital camera in it's native sensor space is not intended to be displayed this way, so you can't (shouldn't) really judge "hues, saturation", etc.

Some manufacturers like us (and many others) design a "working space" that is generally larger than 709/P3 and ideally a better starting place to manually grade from than sensor space but also not intended for final display. AFAIK Sigma has not done that so your options are either native sensor space or another documented colour space.
I probably wouldn't say "scaling" myself, but yes Resolve will do a standard transform from (sensor to) XYZ to Rec.709 or P3. It's not clipped on the output of this step though so you can still recover data. This is what you would expect to happen if selecting 709 or P3 in the RAW tab.
I'm assuming you are compensating for the change in 709/P3 on the display side here, but whether or not you'll see the differences you're expecting will be influenced all the way from the sensor response and what they do in camera, to right at the end on the display side and how well you can display P3 versus 709.
I work in the camera team (different country to where the Resolve team are based) so my knowledge of the inner workings have come via discussions with them so I don't know 100% either as the code isn't visible to me, but we do develop Blackmagic RAW and the SDK in the camera team (Resolve uses the SDK almost the same as any 3rd party app does) and we share with them the camera colour science information we develop so that they can implement it into their pipelines (DNG and CST/RCM/etc). They don't need to do as much of that now though for our cameras since it's handled in the Blackmagic RAW SDK which we handle from the camera team side.

As for DNG processing, they for the most part follow the Adobe DNG spec when it comes to processing AFAIK https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/photoshop/pdfs/dng_spec_1.4.0.0.pdf

You may also be interested in looking at the DNG SDK if you can understand code as that will give you an even more clearer idea of how DNG's are/should be interpreted.
https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/dng/dng_sdk.html

Some small compensation for the lock down. I've been taking mine out on our daily exercise outside. It's pretty quiet around here outside as expected. Dogs are getting more walks then they've ever had in their life and must be wondering what's going on...
I am probably heading towards the 11672, the latest summicron version. I like the bokeh of it. As you say, getting a used one with a lens this new is difficult.
Have fun though - avoid checking for flicker in the shadows and enjoy the cam first!!
cheers
Paul
 

Some small compensation for the lock down. I've been taking mine out on our daily exercise outside. It's pretty quiet around here outside as expected. Dogs are getting more walks then they've ever had in their life and must be wondering what's going on...
I am probably heading towards the 11672, the latest summicron version. I like the bokeh of it. As you say, getting a used one with a lens this new is difficult.
Have fun though - avoid checking for flicker in the shadows and enjoy the cam first!!
cheers
Paul
 

No problem at all. There is a bit of conflicting info out there re: wide angle rangefinder lenses on mirrorless, with a few factors. You already know about the sensor glass (and obviously a lot else) so I don't need to go all "101" with this BUT, some of the Sony cameras seem to handle them better than others. The a7S is supposed to be one of the best, whether due to pixel pitch or just by virtue of being lower res, who knows. The 1st-gen a7R was supposed to be the worst, and the a7 somewhere in between. It also very much comes down to one's specific use case, whether the potential tradeoffs are worth it. I ended up with the 11606 after using a quite few other 28's - one of my favorite focal lengths - because of its size, handling, color and tone rendition. I used it happily on the a7S for a year or so, even after reading how "terrrible" it was supposed to be, even on the a7S. So, basically, YMMV, but here are a couple uncropped stills I shot, with no color shade corrections - click for larger versions:



The corners show some cyan, no doubt. Whether its' enough to bother you depends on you. It was pretty much the same on Sigma fp. As for more info, there's some really good stuff in this thread on Fredmiranda.com, relating to specific M lenses on the fp. so maybe peruse at your leisure:

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1619170/0
 
 
 
 
 

 

Here's two DNG (not FP jpegs), Elmarit 28mm f2.8 lens. First image shot at f8 ISO100, no processing or lens correction, no colour correction in Capture One except tiny exposure balancing. Second is f4 at ISO100, again no correction or processing. Both times focussing at infinity. The f4 looks soft in the corners.
I think my 35mm f2 Summicron is a better lens, and smaller.

We don't know if this sensor is dual gain but it could be. 
I'd assumed that in the UI you see exposure changing (there's a setting for it to in terms of how fast) and i think there is a persistent bug somewhere in that firmware. In one of my 320 tests i saw not a flicker but a pulse of exposure change. So i think it's something linked to electronic exposure in the firmware.
The screen flicker happened with the original firmware but i still saw it in low light. I don't record MOV so can't confirm that. With MOV you're loosing so much of what this camera can do that IMHO i think it's crazy to do that. And SSD is cheap, and you can use SlimRAW to compress the DNGs as you copy them off the SSD.
But you're most likely right about base iso and compensation, just haven't quite figured out why.
+1 for ISO Wheel in cine mode!
cheers
Paul

Your 640ISO doesn't flicker. That's correct right? I need to redo mine to double check that 320 was doing it all the time but 400 was the trigger factor on my camera.
I think there are ways you can get around purple/green and most of them, like BMD Film, involve crushing the shadows and possibly desaturating them,  so they're not so obvious. @Lars Steenhoff suggested incorrect black levels but it's not that. I suspect ACES is crushing a bit and an IR Cut filter may leech some colour out overall, you could desaturate the shadows in Resolve.
The blotchiness is a factor of 10 bit shadows, each one of those blotches is a single shadow value. In most codecs and compressed formats you would never see this because noise is breaking it all up! But uncompressed shows you what's really there and of course you can add noise to break up the blotches should you want too.
I don't want to keep repeating because i will sound like a broken record but if you take a 12 bit file and a 10 bit file that has the same grey point then what you will see in terms of actual finite values are:
Stop 0 : 1 value
Sopt 1 : 2 values
Stop 2 : 4 values
Stop 3 : 8 values
Stop 4 : 16 values
Okay, if 10 bit and 12 bit have the same 18% exposure brightness level (they do, in the DNG) what the 12 bit is giving you are 2 more stops of shadows. So a value in 10 bit which is at stop 2 is 4 values but that same stop in 12 is 16 values. This is why, when you compare 10 bit to 12 bit (look at my lens images) the shadows in the 12 bit are not blotchy, but a lot more tonality. Now if i pushed 12 bit a further two stops then i would see similar blotchiness but the colours are more accurate (not green/magenta)
I hope that makes sense to anyone still wrapping their head around things....
cheers
Paul
 

It looks worse in Rec709 than ACES, but ACES changes so much else in the frame that it's hard to do an exact comparison.
Just compared the same image with and without IR Cut filter and it didn't make any difference.

No offense to Crimson Engine, but it's a strange suggestion for people to use an incorrect colorspace as a starting point with a camera that has pretty great color in its own right as Paul has mentioned! (Something can look good with weird settings, but you always want to strive for base technical accuracy + aesthetics in my opinion.)
You might also consider using the ACES pipeline since it has a film print like "look" built into the display chain already. It takes the color matrix built into the DNGs and scales them for output for your monitor without weird translations or conversions except to ACES' own massive color space.
You'd be free to add in a Colorspace Transform node and try out different camera color sciences to see if something else is more to your liking (Alexa, RED, Sony, etc), but I've found it's a quick and repeatable way to get excellent color out of the camera quickly. 
The attached shot was achieved just by dropping in the sequence and pushing exposure and saturation a bit to match to what I saw in person. (Metered the window light with an external incident meter as I tend to do.)

In the ACES colour space and Cinema DNG Default settings I am not getting anything like the same pronounced purple/green blotchy pattern in the blacks after shooting with the IR Cut Filter. This is the 10bit clip with the exposure increased a lot using the wheels, and pulling up the 'shadows' value.

My point is that the very lowest shadows going green/magenta shouldn't really be happening.
If we assume that the sensor is in 12 bit mode and the sensor data that the camera is getting is the same as we see with a 12 bit cDNG then we can assume that these 10bit shadows are a software bug because 12bit cDNG looks perfect. That's really my point. And i think if you have a night scene and you are on the bleeding edge of exposure and can't shoot 24p then you are going to hit this problem just trying to expose normally.
Now if sigma are unable to output 12bit at 25p then the solution that works for everyone is to do 10bit but to use a curve to redistribute values so that the last stop of recorded light does not take 2048 integer values to describe it and then use the saved values to ensure the shadows get every last drop of sensor data they can. Then we'd have 12 bit quality in a 10 bit container at all these frame rates and EVERYONE is happy. There is literally no downside to doing this. This is what 8 bit is doing and that can produce great images in a fraction of the space. The code is already in the camera!
If you see earlier on in this thread i even show what that curve looks like because each DNG file has a copy of it in 8bit so Resolve can debayer properly. It's standard practice in cDNG.
We need a wave of people to say this to sigma because sometimes i think it's only me....
cheers
Paul
 

Here is the ISO125 clip I shot underexposed. The first clip just has light exposure adjustment using the lift, gamma and gain wheels in Resolve. On the second clip I pushed the exposure to extremes, like 5 stops. The green, purple blotch is visible in both clips IMO, and dramatic in the pushed clip.

Got them, thanks
Can confirm all of that but you do have green shadows at the very bottom. The scene still has quite a bit of light even at 125 ISO but i can see from the enclosed screenshot where you have a green/magenta at very lower shadow step. You can see it on the left edge in the shadow under the object and also on the darker reflective horn thingy.
In 10 bit if you shoot with something that is genuinely black in the scene and then shoot the same scene in 12 bit you can sometimes see by eye but if you raise the whole thing you can see very clearly (like my lenses one which was very very little light and high contrast). This shows the major difference between 12bit and the other modes - the shadow detail.
Now you've been using BlackMagic Film and actually that is reducing it a little which is perhaps why you're not seeing it. I'm not using BMDFilm but using the matrixes in the DNG via the normal DNG setting. I don't believe you get the best out of the camera with that setting but i suppose i need to look it that in greater detail. Maybe it does make sense. BMD Film seems to drop the exposure and take some of that tint off but BMD Film is expecting the colorimetry from a BMD camera, not a Sony sensor.
cheers
Paul

I wouldn't touch MOV with a bargepole. There are many better cameras which shoot MOV out there - this beauty is all about the RAW and no compression.
cheers
Paul

I'm happy to do this as i've been emailing for quite a while now but also once we have them collated then we should reach out on twitter as well?
I will probably get a chance tomorrow to do all the tests.
Too busy fixing up bikes for a quick escape to the countryside for some fresh air!
Out of curiosity for those doing very low light 10 bit tests are you very bottom shadow stops quite green? I want to know if this is universal or whether it's just me. It's only 10 bit this happens to.
cheers
Paul