kye
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Posts posted by kye
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Yes @Emanuel, but look at how you're talking about them... these words from you explain it well:
- they actually shine for what they are
- I usually divide between usable and unusable
- only for internal consumption aka no professional use at all
- these toys must be seen as complementary tools
- They don't replace anything
etc.
But let's look at these comments more deeply.
Theme 1: They're toys
If they had a serious codec then would they still be toys? I mean, in good light a small sensor camera is more than capable of creating professional images - lots of ENG cameras had VERY small sensors!
Even if they released a PRO version with a CFExpress or SD UHS-III slot and could record 8K at 1,000Mbps... what would be left that would make it a toy and not a professional tool?Theme 2: They are just to add to the existing tools
Let's imagine you're recording out in the real world and don't know where to point the camera because you don't know what will happen - what is the alternative to one of these?Option 1: Insta360 Pro 2
You can't realistically ask someone to carry a 1.5kg / 3.3lbs camera on a stick while they're actually doing things. So that's out.Option 2: Ask the person to carry a "normal" camera
You can't realistically ask someone to be a cinematographer and aim a camera at what they're doing while they're actually doing something - plus you can't record the world and also their reaction to it at the same time. So that's out.Option 3: Use multiple camera-operators to walk in-front of the person
This completely ruins any spontaneity of someone actually doing something out in the world, your fly-on-the-wall reality content just turned into a film set. So that's out.What else?????
There aren't any other options to record content in the way that you can when you get someone to carry a 360 camera in one hand or strap it to their backpack or to their bike/scooter/etc and then just tell them to ignore it.
By getting someone to hold the camera on a stick about eye level and a few feet in front of them, we can capture the situation the person is in, and also the person reacting to that situation, simultaneously. It's the perfect way to have a "fly-on-the-wall" perspective, only it's floating in-between the subject and the world, all in the form of a sausage on a stick which few people pay much attention to. If we had an invisible camera that could fly it wouldn't do a much better job than these things do.
I genuinely believe these things are just a better codec away from being the main camera to record in some situations. They are an entirely new product category, and yet they're turned into toys because of a stupid design decision that limits any decent use in order to make them more usable for morons.
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9 hours ago, SRV1981 said:
so my next question is, has anyone found a way to shape Sony images to resemble the skintones that clog2 provides in the c70? I find those to be the most pleasing images I’ve seen in awhile.
Can you provide an example of each?
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10 hours ago, ac6000cw said:
If you want useable SOOC video that looks reasonable when played directly, but which has high DR for grading if you want to, you could try shooting in 10-bit HLG?
It's a compromise format that is designed to provide decent looking video on non-HDR displays, and full HDR on HDR-capable displays - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_log–gamma . Note it uses Rec. 2020 colour space/gamut, so the colours will be distorted to some extent on a Rec. 709 display.
KnightsFan said:
...and I've also tried grading HLG (from my OM-1) and found it OK.
I think Log is better for grading (than HLG), but Log is not very usable as SOOC video (unless you really like watching low-contrast/saturation video!).
I actually prefer HLG to a standard LOG profile.
The reason is that HLG has rec709 levels of saturation and the main part of the image (everything below about 50%) and so when turning the image back into a 709 image from HLG you're not stretching out tiny differences in a flat LOG profile.
The disadvantage of HLG in this sense would be the clipping of colours, but HLG retains the full DR of the camera so it will only clip on very very saturated colours and those will mostly be clipped due to being too hot (e.g. tail-lights) which would be clipped either way.
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8 hours ago, Emanuel said:
Anyway @kye remember this time it's H.265...
Without mention there are some inspiring/promising shots out there which looks to put it at the Ace Pro level, at least under sun light...
Let alone some specific usage for certain purpose such as frame rate (4K100fps) this time under usable output coupled to different reframe possible options along the capability of introducing a few camera movements within the framing itself. Now at acceptable outcome?
Many times we need some device doing it by itself 'cause you're simply operating something else.
I guess overheating concerns are prone to be more of an issue (when you'll want to buy the new toy only for 8K or 4K 100fps) you can overcome though, with the purchase of two units anyway and yet try to play with 3D acquisition when that's not a trouble, isn't it? ;- )
Don't get me wrong, I WANT these things to be good.
If they could make a 360 camera that was high-quality enough then it would be useful for filming in very busy situations and you could crop out the interesting moments in post. The issue is that even if they had 27K resolution, the fact they only have 200Mbps means that any crop that isn't an extreme wide angle just isn't good enough.
I mean, 12Mbps of h265 is similar to 24Mbps of h264, but seriously... imagine that someone released a camera in 2024 that was 24Mbps!
....and if you want a camera angle tighter than that? You're practically pixel-peeping.
I'm not even asking for much - V90 SD cards are common these days and they can write at 720Mbps. Having an EXTREME PRO mode in the camera that has a maxed out bitrate wouldn't be that hard - these things are premium products.
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The first thing I checked?
QuoteMAX. VIDEO BITRATE. 200Mbps
....and the last thing I checked.
I've posted practically the same thing on every one of these releases, but the principle remains. If you crop in to the image, like 99.99% of shots will be, then the resolution doesn't matter, the bitrate does.
8K at 200Mbps cropped to a 90 degree FOV (about a 24mm lens) is 2K at around 12Mbps.
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52 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:
Very detailed and cool to be honest. That said I have zero clue how this relates to anything I asked I’m beyond lost in the weeds here man.
im just curious about skintones SOOC and how they’re achieved easily. No clue what makeup has to do with anything for the situation I asked.
You asked "what brands are you usually happy with color wise?"
Good colour in an image is basically skin-tones - get them right and the image is good and get them wrong and nothing else matters.
The way to get good skin tones is to film someone with the best skin tones you can find, use makeup to improve the skin-tones in your images, and to colour grade the skin-tones in post.
Great skin-tones (and great coloured images) aren't created by cameras - they're created on-set and in post.
Trying to choose the right camera to get good colour is like trying to choose the right paint and paint brushes that will make your paintings into masterpieces. You're looking in the wrong place.
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Vistek just dropped a pretty comprehensive video about how to test lenses, but it includes a bunch of really interesting stuff, ranging from what the various aberrations are, how to test for them, how to see them in the test images, and a range of other factors.
He drew heavily from the incredible book The Cine Lens Manual: The Definitive Filmmaker's Guide to Cinema Lenses which is basically the new reference for lenses and has a whopping 836 pages and seems to have come down in price to only $175 or so (it was a lot more previously!)
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Cam likes the PYXIS...
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2 hours ago, EduPortas said:
Yes, that's true.
However RED has been a minor player in the high-stakes Hollywood cinema production for some time.
ARRI and Sony seem have an iron fist on that market.
If were a Nikon exec I'd forget the Hollywood market altogether and focus 100% on the influencer kids with some new devices to make the brand cool again and throw a bone to the diehard photogs with new and improved video features in their MILCs.
I agree on the focus on the influencer kids.
In terms of if Nikon should let RED die, that's a tough call. They could retain the R&D benefits of the RED team (which is likely to have a very very different internal culture to the rest of Nikon and would be best kept separated) but without the RED guys talking directly to folks in Hollywood their ability to do R&D would be drastically reduced.
RED definitely are a minor player, but they're not without any contacts.
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Getting great skin-tones was also a huge focus of film development.
Here's a pretty strong example I saw recently (linked to timestamp):
In case anyone is allergic to clicking and watching things, if you take this image:
and then apply green under her eyes and magenta on her nose it essentially ruins her skin-tones:
but guess what - if we apply a film look then those variations in her skin tones that looked awful are mostly eliminated:
This is because the film look compresses the green/magenta axis in the image..
before:
after:
This is a pretty simple colour grading trick. Any half-decent colourist can do this without thinking about it too much, and most LUTs already have this kind of thing built in.
Notice that this was all done in post, and didn't rely on the camera at all?
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1 hour ago, EduPortas said:
Yep, but there's some precedent.
Canon made a serious attempt at these pros with the C-Line. It's trying to do so and seems profitable.
But the REAL market is the digital crowd using pro-equipment but posting their content exclusively on social media. Nikon wants a piece of that delicious pie.
Their new products could be very un-camera like and cater to this new video market and maybe they'll even catch one or two pros in the process.
I agree that this is a huge market and definitely where Nikon should focus their attention, and an N-line of cameras would be a good way to do that, especially if it took advantage of the tech that RED has.
This doesn't really have much to do with RED making products for Hollywood though - that's a different brand making different products for a different market.
Mass-market car companies do this all the time. They use their tonnes of cash to buy an unprofitable sports-car company and get their techs to work on making hot hatchback versions of their cars, and perhaps a new premium line of sports cars under the mass-market brand, but they also help the sports-car brand to improve quality control and keep on making new models. They don't just close down the sports-car brand.
Virtually all sports-car brands are owned by another manufacturer that makes family cars. -
3 hours ago, SRV1981 said:
For some posts and comments I notice many respond not to the original post or thread but their own concerns or issues. I’m not sure how to course correct this.
This is true. However, people are also trying to share their experience with you.
For example, if you said that you were hammering in nails with your camera and it was really damaging the camera and you asked how to make the camera tougher, people would reply telling you to buy a hammer.
Is this answering the question? No. Are people trying to help you? Absolutely.
You have asked a series of questions over the last month or so about technical aspects of cameras that don't have any relevance to real-world shooting except in very very specific scenarios, and when people reply you haven't given any information suggesting that you actually face these scenarios in your own work, you just seem to want to discuss things like these real-world considerations don't actually exist.
For example - do you know what the best ways are to get great skin tones?
- Shoot someone with great skin tones
- Shoot someone with good skin tones and good makeup
- Shoot someone with not terrible skin tones and really good makeup
- Shoot someone with great makeup
- Shoot someone with good skin tones and ok makeup and do digital retouching in post
- Shoot someone with not terrible skin tones and good makeup and do good digital retouching in post
- Shoot someone with ok makeup and do really great digital retouching in post
Notice that the camera didn't factor into that equation?
I'm sure that you understand that make-up is a pretty big deal on a movie set, but you might not be aware of how much work goes into skin tones and retouching in post. They say that getting the skin tones right is about half of all colour grading effort.
Here's a video showing the state-of-the-art tools that are dedicated to this - these tools wouldn't exist if there wasn't demand for it...... this is the tools in Baselight which is the main Resolve competitor.
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3 hours ago, Al Dolega said:
The new Micro Panel looks nice.
It does, although as an owner of the current Micro panel I won't be rushing out to buy it.
TBH, the panels have a bit of a controversy around them because BM seems to stop short of making them fully-featured. The feedback I hear from colourists is that the Mini is the best one because it has the buttons for controlling OFX plugins etc that the Micro doesn't, but users of both the Mini and Advanced panels frequently say that there are little things that aren't on the panels and BM refuses to make them customisable, so users have to keep a keyboard or mouse or tablet handy on the desk for just one or two frequent operations.
In this sense, BM are like Apple - you do things their way and it's take-it-or-leave-it.
To a certain degree the lack of customisation on the panels reflects the lack of more advanced features being built into Resolve, which means that people have to put together custom workflows with nodes in strange configurations etc, which of course aren't easily usable from the panels because the panels aren't customisable - even the Advanced panel at ~$28,000.
I see quite a number of grading suite setups with a tablet as the main item directly in front of the user, then a panel behind that. Personally, I've tried to colour directly from the panel but the limitations in terms of what Resolve comes with has lead me away from it and to even develop my own custom tools.
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1 minute ago, SRV1981 said:
No, sorry for confusing - I’m making the statement that even if one tries to match a color profile - cameras will retain differences that affect how pleasing we find it and therefore I was curious, with that given, your view on the original questions.
thanks for clarifying confusion
Are you referring to a specific situation where you shot in 709 and then in LOG but couldn't match the 709 profile when grading the LOG image?
I have done quite extensive side-by-side testing and colour matching of my GH5, GX85 and iPhone 12, and I was quite surprised when trying to match the GH5 to the GX85 because I put a CST on the GH5 and the image was almost identical in terms of the colours etc. The GH5 has significantly more DR, and the GX85 isn't even showing all of its DR in its 709 profile, so that was a difference of course, but even matching between two vastly different cameras was very easy.
In terms of how different they were from each other, in grading a normal project where I have shots taken outside in uncontrolled conditions the shot-to-shot variance of shots from the same camera was more than the difference between the GH5 LOG and the GX85 709 image.
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9 minutes ago, JulioD said:
I’m talking about to offload.
a CFe card would go into a USB-C reader right?
not the card. Not in the camera. In the reader.
That's what I'm talking about too.
My post compared the speed of CFExpress over USB with the speeds of 10G Ethernet.
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5 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:
What does that have to do with the original questions?
You seem to care about matching cameras....
49 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:Sure, even still there seems to be differences between cameras even when trying to match color
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4 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:
If the goal is to match many cameras yes - I was commenting that even if you matched color to your best ability the images will still look different and some will prefer skin tones and the overall look differently.
If you're cutting between two cameras that were used to shoot the same scene but from different angles then you'd be surprised at how different they can be without the viewer noticing.
This is because:
- The lighting will be different from the different camera angles
- The contents of the frame will be different, either subtly or significantly
- The viewer might (and hold onto your hat here....) be watching the film and not comparing skintones
Besides, I said to learn colour grading. If you can't edit two cameras together with skin-tones that are similar enough not to bother viewers, then you haven't learned it enough yet.
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1 hour ago, ac6000cw said:
A film-making version of the 'No-one ever got fired for buying IBM' (computers) situation 🙂
Absolutely.
Of course, ARRI is like the old IBM where you got what you paid for, unlike the modern IBM which is charging for a premium service and just delivering the lowest-cost service they can get away with!
1 hour ago, ac6000cw said:I do wonder if some of that is driven by fear of jobs disappearing (despite the availability of much lower cost tools - e.g. cameras and editing software - having hugely expanded the overall 'moving image' production market).
I agree. I've seen it in many different industries time and time again from the people who are already successful saying that new people shouldn't be allowed in and that equipment should be expensive and hard to get etc.
In the case of the colourist I was referring to, I suspect they got sick of new people coming into the scene wanting to get great images and not wanting to get a job fetching coffee and then spend the next 30 years working their way up through the ranks to get to being a well-regarded colourist.
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2 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:
Sure, even still there seems to be differences between cameras even when trying to match color
The answer is either putting in the time to learn colour grading, or putting in the time to earn money to buy multiples of the same camera so the image is identical.
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51 minutes ago, JulioD said:
10Ge surely is faster than a CFe card over usb-c ?
10G ethernet is only 10Gbit / 1.2GB/s but CFExpress cards can exceed this.
This test from Petapixel shows speeds up to 2.8GB/s and most of the models tested exceeded 1.2GB/s.
If BM put dual CFExpress cards in the camera then in theory this could double that throughput too.
The ethernet standard is designed for maximum throughput with cables up to 100 meters/yards long and the 10G standard for copper was announced in 2006 so it's hardly a new standard, and stuffing data through long cables is an entirely different challenge to transmitting it an inch or two!
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5 hours ago, SRV1981 said:
Is it fair to say some cameras produce normative or more pleasing color to most but if using log, you can get similar color/image from most cameras equally?
1. if you wanted a personal camera with fast turn around what brands are you usually happy with color wise?
2. when deciding for more professional or bigger projects, how do you decide what system/log system to get?
seems canon and then Fuji reign when SOOC is discussed and it’s more nuanced for the latter.
In my experience, the internet has a very skewed view of which brands offer the best colour science.
Millions of folks on the internet will tell you that Canon has the best colour, and recently Fuji is in the game with their film emulation presets, but I think this is just confirmation bias in action.
All manufacturers have very high quality colour.
Even Sony, who used to have the most "accurate" colour and looked very unappealing, have turned it around and now have pretty nice colour.
The other great myth is that great colour comes from the camera, it doesn't.
Great colour comes from production design, lighting, and colour grading.
Here is a thread where I show that it's the work in post that makes the images pop.
After reading your recent posts and threads about one aspect of cameras or other, I have some bad news for you... you can't buy good images.
Good images come from skill, not equipment. Great images come from skill and large amounts of hard work.
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11 hours ago, IronFilm said:
Well I guess Sony is already doing that with Sony RX10, RX100 and even the RX0 have slog!!
So yes, it would be good if Nikon does this too, make it very easy to mix and match together the full range of cameras in a professional workflow.
Yep. I think it's a matter of friction across an entire lineup, and if you start with a fixed-lens camera and want to "upgrade" then going to a MILC might seem a huge jump up but if your fixed-lens camera also has LOG then there's an "upgrade" right in front of you. You switch to it, learn about LUTs and colour grading and having flexibility of the image in post. Then when you want to upgrade your home setup (where size doesn't matter) the fact that you're already shooting N-LOG would be a factor in keeping you in the Nikon ecosystem.
6 hours ago, EduPortas said:Guess only time will tell, friend.
I agree that Red has brand recognition, but only with a very specific subset of the imaging crowd.
Nikon has A LOT more recognition from almost everybody, from the absolure noob to the hard-core pro.
And, let's be honest, Nikon was already hitting home runs with their new lenses and video features with pro-photogs. Now they WILL go full-hog with the video guys. That's the new slice of the imaging pie.
Integrate, fortify the brand (Nikon) and capitalize on a new growing market.
Hence, my original snarky comment about Red's Dead with no sight of Redemption.
Yes, we'll see what happens (or doesn't) in time.
I guess my thinking was this:
- RED is a huge amount more than just a patent, therefore
- When they bought it, they were buying something valuable that they didn't have
- RED has a bunch of knowledgeable people, a bunch of IP, and recognition and a track record in Hollywood
If Nikon keep the RED brand active then they could do a "best-of" situation, where the RED engineers and technology gets implemented across Nikons existing product lines, and the RED brand gets the benefit of Nikons extensive support network and R&D and manufacturing capabilities. This would grow the RED brand in Hollywood and in the cinema camera market, which Nikon has zero market penetration of currently, and would help the Nikon brand in it's more premium products.
If Nikon let the RED brand die, then the Nikon line of products can still get the benefits of the RED tech, but any new Nikon products that target the cinema market will essentially untrusted / untested / unknown and apart from "it's got REDRAW in it" they will be a completely new player in this market.
One thing I think that might not be well known is that a lot of folks in the "industry" have complete contempt and even hatred of the consumer brands and the entire DSLR revolution. There's a very famous colourist who openly says that putting video into stills cameras was a mistake and they should take it out (yes, he maintains that the manufacturers should all REMOVE the video functions of all these consumer cameras!).
There's a thing where at the first production meeting of a movie there's a moment when someone asks what they're shooting on, and if the answer is ARRI / Alexa then everyone in the room relaxes. Yes, this means that if they say RED then people don't relax, but if they say RED then at least someone can say "X, Y, Z were all shot on RED". If someone said "Nikon" at that moment, the reaction might be "the photo people????".
When you have industry people actively hating the fact that people are shooting music videos on GH5s, someone like Nikon are likely viewed as being from a parallel universe!
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2 hours ago, John Matthews said:
If I need to, I'd like to adjust just a little in post. I think the most important is to get the first shot right.
Thinking about this more, I think there are three different approaches.
The first is to shoot manually and get it perfect every time. Not even the pros do this with completely controlled sets. Colourists say that they're always making small changes to WB on a shot-by-shot basis, even on big budget productions, so this is only mentioned to make sure we understand that we will be dealing with small changes in post.
The second is to shoot on a manual WB.
This will mean that you're going to get errors in the WB, potentially being quite noticeable, but they're likely to mostly be in the warm/cool Temp direction.The third is to shoot on auto-WB.
I've found that, on my Panasonic cameras at least, the WB errors are pretty minor, and the WB is pretty close - even if the lighting is quite variable and I'm taking shots from different angles and in different locations etc.
This means that you'll be making only very small corrections, but they could be in the magenta/green Tint axis as well as the warm/cool Temp direction. We're quite sensitive to Tint errors, so this means that adjusting these is a bit more fiddly, and can take some practice, but is perfectly possible.I know that when I shoot I am very likely to completely forget a manually set WB, and will end up shooting a whole evening at 6500K and it'll be so warm it'll look like I shot it through a jar of honey, so I shoot auto-WB and therefore inevitably have to make minor corrections in post but never have to make large ones.
Going back to the minor curves that are part of the Look, and how we can't un-do in post because we don't have a complete profile of that camera/look combination, shooting on auto-WB will mean that these get applied to the footage in a place that will likely only be a very small distance from where they should have been if the shot had perfect WB.
Obviously this still depends on your camera, the profile, your colour management pipeline, the tools in your software, your skill in applying them, and the weather and position of the stars etc... so this is also something that you would be best testing for yourself too.
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1 hour ago, John Matthews said:
Yes. The question I've asked myself many times has been: "If I make a mistake in WB, is it better to error on warm side or the cool side when considering skin tones in 8 bit?" From your results, I think it's more on the warm side. Do you concur?
When I shoot, I'd really prefer to just choose ONE WB for the entire time. If I need to, I'd like to adjust just a little in post. I think the most important is to get the first shot right.
Good question.
I think the fundamental challenge of making corrections in post is having the tool operate in a colour space that matches the footage as closely as possible.
For example, if your footage is in Linear, and you have a node in Linear, and you adjust the Gain wheel (which literally applies gain by doing a simple multiplication) then they match exactly and the result will be a perfect exposure or WB change, just like it was done in camera. If you get your colour management pipeline correct then you can get this practically perfect adjustment for LOG footage too.
The challenge comes when the camera records in 709. This is mostly because cameras don't just do a CST from Linear to 709, they apply all sorts of "make it look lovely" sort of small tweaks. When we record in the wrong exposure or WB then these tweaks get applied wrongly. For example, the profile might compress the skintones, and do so by expanding the reds and yellows on either side. If you shoot a clip where the skintones are too yellow then your skintones might get expanded rather than compressed. No CST will un-do all these small tweaks, so you're left with an image that's curved in all the wrong places rather than all the right ones.
So, what happens in practice is it comes down to the individual profile you choose (which will have its own unique set of tiny curves that make that look) and your own ability to manipulate it using the right combination of tools to get the most pleasing result. My results vary mostly based on the luck that I had when correcting each individual test image - your results will likely suffer the same variance unless you're a far better colourist than I am.
I'd suggest you do your own tests. Either find a spot in the shade on a sunny day, or even better is to do it on a cloudy day. Do a manual WB against a grey card (or piece of white copy paper if you don't have a grey card), then just shoot a clip of yourself (or a volunteer model if you can get one 🙂 ). Then shoot a range of test clips setting the Colour Temp manually. Then just pull them all into post and see which tools seem to work the best for you, and which gives you the more pleasing looks.
One thing I did notice was that I had trouble getting the blacks and shadows to be right when the skintones were dialled in, with them tending to be the opposite of the original tint on the image (ie, if the image was warm then the correction ended up with cooler shadows) so with everything else being equal that might be a reason to go warmer so you get a bit of colour separation in the final images.
Upcoming Insta360 X4 8K, in less than one hour, here?
In: Cameras
Posted
Interesting comparisons and definitely a step up in quality. When used zoomed-out like this the image is quite good I think - it's very "action camera" but has nice clean colours etc. The DR wasn't bad either I didn't think.
Maybe they'll be able to apply whatever improvements they've made to the X4 to the 1" model and it will be better again!
It was interesting looking at the stats for the Insta360 Pro 2, which uses "6 x MicroSD cards + 1 x Full SD card" so rather than have an expensive media setup they just went for lots in parallel.
The "Bitrate per lens: Up to 120Mbps" so is practically around the 600-700Mbps (there would be some overlap between lenses so not all bitrate would go straight to the final image).
Maybe a "Pro" model could be a compromise and have dual media slots, with 200-300Mbps being written to each card. That would be a good compromise. The fact that the image would be across multiple files shouldn't be too difficult to manage considering that these files need specific support to process the image anyway.
You might be right about a renewed push to 360 VR and 3D 180 VR, and I have a vague recollection of camera models that could fold one camera around, so it could be a 360 VR or a 3D 180 VR camera depending on how you configured the lenses. Having two card slots with one per camera makes sense in that way too. The fact that the ONE RS was modular also indicates they might be open to such a thing.