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Meanwhile, back in the real world...... 1) I care about both IQ and editing performance 2) The Atomos Ninja Star cost roughly 10% the cost of an R5, and if you take into account the total cost of selling everything I own, buying an R5, re-buying all my lenses, batteries, accessories, well, your "but the R5 has a nice codec" argument is really "why bother with a recorder when you can pay 20x for a completely new camera setup..... just to get a better codec" Once again, you suggest that instead of buying an accessory that I re-buy my entire setup. That is a very interesting set of features from ZCam, but it proves my point, which is that there are cameras that take image quality seriously but lack features, and cameras with great features that don't take image quality as seriously. The ZCam is in the former camp, considering they're modular, lack IBIS, and are generally designed for high-end use on official shoots. Cameras that are designed to be small and convenient to use typically don't have the better codecs.

Maybe RAW is the wrong word, but with all the compressed-RAW variants out there, it's tough to come up with a phrase that means the right thing. Perhaps the way to understand it is this.. there are two groups of codecs. (all bitrates below are for DCI4K 30p) The first group are unsharpened (for RAW or uncompressed formats) or perceptually unsharpened (Prores is sharpened to match the perceptual sharpness of RAW but not more, and requires this because the compression softens it a little bit). The goal of these formats is to provide high-quality capture / DI formats that are perceptually as neutral as possible and where image quality was robust enough for further processing prior to distribution (eg, colour space transforms) These have high bitrates: Uncompressed is 8492Mbps Blackmagic RAW 3:1 1088Mbps Apple ProRes 422 HQ 943Mbps The second group are sharpened (which obviously emphasises edges) and are compressed with an algorithm that also emphasises edges (also perceptually sharpening the footage). These have much lower bitrates: GH5 max h264 bitrate 400Mbps Sony A7S3 max bitrate h264 300Mbps Sony A7S2 max bitrate h264 100Mbps The goal of the h264/5/6 codec development was to provide a high-quality image at low bitrates for video distribution at the end of an imaging pipeline, where image artefacts would not be emphasised by further processing (eg, by adding large amounts of contrast via LOG to 709 conversions etc). Manufacturers of consumer cameras choose h264/5 formats because they provide good-enough image quality when combined with in-camera colour profiles that are properly exposed, and provide file sizes that are manageable by non-professionals. This is why the GH5, in combination with its 400Mbps modes, also include many 100Mbps 8-bit modes, whereas the lowest Prores flavour (not explicitly for proxy use) Prores LT, is 437Mbps. Essentially I'm interested in the first group. The first group is superior because the bitrates are significantly higher, but also because the sharpening is not ridiculously overblown. Mathematically sharpening is the opposite of blurring, so you should be able to un-do sharpening with blurring, provided that the strength, radius, and distribution are matched. However, the h264 footage is sharpened and then compressed, which means that the sharp edges create 'ripples' in the footage, for example the band of lighter coloured sky below is a compression artefact: by the time you apply enough blur to the image to have that bright spot darkened by the blur of the nearby darker object, the image is blurry as all hell and not suitable for use. Prores exhibits very little of these types of artefacts. Interestingly, in my comparisons of codec quality, h264 is more mathematically accurate (using the mathematical model that approximates visual similarity) than Prores at a given bitrate, but I find that the perceptual difference is significant. A parallel might be in cooking. If I made a custard recipe perfectly, separated it into two halves, and in one I added 100g of cooked apples and in the other 25g of raw garlic, you could say that the one with 100g of apples is 4x less 'accurate' and therefore should taste 4x worse, however the fact that apples are a relatively benign flavour and garlic is much stronger flavour would mean the garlic one would likely be inedible. This is the challenge with Prores vs h264 - the artefacts from Prores are relatively benign (and aesthetically are similar to film) but h264 the artefacts are very 'digital' and aesthetically are the opposite of filmic. I suspect this is one reason that people making films (where image sharpness is kept to minimal levels) are interested in RAW/Prores and those making video (where sharpness = quality for most clients) are just fine with h264/5. If we're going to play hypotheticals, then sure. But why stop there? Why not just wish for a camera that flies around automatically taking the footage you want, edits it in-camera, and just writes the final render to an SD-card when it flies back to its charger? Back in the real world we have cameras with good features and poor codecs or good codecs and poor features, but external recorders is a way to get the best of both worlds. You're confusing capture codecs with DI codecs with delivery codecs. Your argument suggests that there's no point shooting with anything above 8Mbps because YT and streaming platforms distribute in that format. I'd suggest you watch some comparisons where people compare capture codecs and the differences are clearly visible, despite the low bitrate you're watching them in. One of the reasons is that the capture codec gets heavily manipulated after it's captured and before distribution, and another is that a poor quality copy of a good source will always look better than a poor quality copy of a poor quality source. That's why a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a document was almost unreadable. Why would I care if some mythical bride I don't know likes my home videos? Unless you're talking about my wife? If so, she can tell footage from Alexa/RED vs h264 cameras while watching Netflix far better than I can!

I would encourage you to think about this as independent of the sensor. Every camera does the following: read RAW data off the sensor de-bayer that data rescale the image (optional) process that data with colour profiles and other processing (eg, sharpening) encode into a file format (compressed or not) and write that to the card Any camera can be built to rescale the image and write it to the card using a low/zero compression file type. Most cameras simply take the sensor readout and pipe it to the card or to a hardware chip for resizing and encoding to h264, but rescaling the image and compressing/encoding can be independently controlled. You have to also realise that cameras are already doing this internally, by taking the sensor data, rescaling it, adding an OSD overlay, and piping that to the LCD/viewfinder/HDMI/SDI port. The data stream used for monitoring is often rescaled and would not be compressed. Ironically, that's the stream I'd like to grab using a small Prores recorder.

I agree with you - I'd love to see all the camera manufacturers implement better internal codecs. and by better, I mean: Scalable compressed internal RAW (best) Prores internal Scalable uncompressed internal RAW Unscalable uncompressed internal RAW High-bitrate low-processed high-quality h264/5 High-bitrate low-processed typical-quality h264/5 Whatever h264/5 implementation the marketing department thought was good What I mean by "scalable" RAW is the ability to read the whole sensor, downscale in-camera, and write that in a RAW format to the card. I believe the P6K can do this? It's how you can get different resolution RAW files with the same crop factor. Unfortunately, most cameras are "7" on the above scale, with only a few exceptions here and there, and those are often very compromised in other ways. Effectively, an external Prores recorder upgrades all the "7" cameras into "2" cameras. Cameras are always a compromise, some have this function but not that function, others are the other way around, etc. I'm looking to eliminate one of those variables.

I think you might be underestimating the power that we have here.... This thread has 15.7K views at time of writing, the GH5 thread has 840K views, and there are many other threads where the "MFT is DEAD - AF is the only thing that matters with any camera ever OMFG!!!!!" sentiment is posted over and over again. Yes, the internet is a big place, but to Andrews credit, there are a number of threads here that have no parallel anywhere else on the internet (I've dived down enough rabbit holes to have found quite a few). Besides, no-one can correctly say that they know what "everyone else" is saying about something, and no-one can say that their input has zero impact on the world, so given those things I don't know why you would argue against yourself trying to convince the world that the system you have heavily invested in is dead. It's like posting "<your real name> isn't very good - don't hire him" over and over again! Either someone will believe you and you lose, or they won't believe you, and so they think lesser of you for what you wrote, and you lose again.

I might or might not be able to. The challenge with such a test would be that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You'd never get something that was RAW->Prores->h264, so the Prores step may obscure the comparison. If you were to encode the h264 using a computer I'd suggest that the h264 would likely be very high quality (although Resolves h264/5 is notably poor compared to ffmpeg for example). However..... none of this matters. I care about the real world. In the real world, I'd like to be able to choose my camera independently of the codec and processing pipeline. There are cameras like the A7S2 which had a lot going for them but topped out at 100Mbps 4K, which is (quite frankly) pathetic. Then there are cameras with internal Prores like the P4K that lack IBIS and are huge. If I was taking the HDMI out then I would also bypass all the horrible sharpening and NR and awfulness that cameras typically apply to their h264 captures, including even the GH5 and it's high-bitrate ALL-I modes. If there was a Atomos Ninja Star 2, which was relatively compact, I could add it to any camera that had a clean HDMI output and get the codec/bitrate I want, regardless of the paltry codecs they decided to cripple-hammer the camera with. Unless you know of some way for me to automatically beam the output from my cameras sensor to your computer to be compressed in h264 in realtime and then written back to the SD card in the camera? That would be pretty spectacular and I'd be keen to see the h264 files where we get to decide the entire imaging pipeline....

No, I absolutely do not, under any circumstances, think this is even remotely true. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. I'd suggest if you're not seeing it then I wouldn't go looking... I am the owner of a GH5, which does 200Mbps 1080p, which is one of the very few cameras that give a bitrate MORE than the ~176Mbps bitrate of Prores HQ, and yet, I am still interested in something that can record Prores externally that isn't a large screen.

I was saying your proposed methodology was flawed, even outside of camera-to-camera variations. I've never seen a prores encoder I didn't like, but many h264 encoders that produce quite thin and brittle images. My guess is that either Prores is to encode, and/or the hardware encoders that are implemented are designed for professional use and are therefore tuned for optimal image quality. Certainly the professional attitude towards h264 is that it's a delivery standard being abused for consumer use and nothing more. It's also worth noting the bitrates that are involved - good luck trying to find a camera that gives h264 bitrates anywhere near the standard Prores bitrates. Aesthetically, Prores looks soft compared to RAW but retains the subtleties in the image with the artefacts being relatively benign, but h264 looks over-sharpened and without subtlety compared to RAW and the artefacts are perhaps as far from organic as you can get.

That's encouraging about the S1. The C100 was notably good as well. I also think it varies significantly from camera to camera. I believe it goes beyond that, and low-bitrate Prores is much less offensive than low-bitrate h264. However, we digress. I still want a small external recorder.

No. That method is fundamentally flawed.

I care about size and weight, but size more because size is what gets unwanted attention when out filming. If you don't think the P4K is large then this conversation isn't really for you! If it didn't have to drive the screen perhaps it would be smaller? I do realise that 4K60 support would be 8x the processing of 1080p30 though, so the processing requirements are definitely a factor. I looked at the differences between Prores and h264, and found large differences, measurably, practically and aesthetically. If h264 works for you then great stuff! My advice is that if you don't care about the differences then don't look for them in future - what is seen cannot be unseen. The battery grip is a great idea, and would suit the M.2 form factor: I would assume Prores RAW is great, but Prores from any camera with a clean HDMI (or SDI) output would be the most flexible. I actually think that the look of Prores is about half-way between the equivalent h264 and RAW - prores just looks so much less like the over sharpened cheap and nasty images that come out of cheap cameras these days. I wonder how much of that cheap look is due to h264 rather than the cameras themselves. I also really like downsampled images. Trying to find a small setup that has IBIS and downsamples to Prores seems to be impossible.

If I were you, and cared about the health of the system, then I wouldn't be posting endlessly about how AF will be the death of it. I mean, what if everyone started saying that because everyone else was saying it, and the system died because it didn't have a feature that no-one really wanted, but everyone thought everyone else wanted? The cryptocurrency people have no evidence of the future and are all posting "to the moon" because they want confidence to be high, but in the same lack of evidence everyone is posting "dead without PDAF". I think you're all just shooting yourselves in the foot for no reason....

Is anyone else interested in an external RAW recorder that isn't a screen? Atomos used to make a screen-less recorder called the Ninja Star which was tiny but is limited to 1080p30: However, now the smallest recorder they make is absolutely huge: Considering that getting a decent codec (Prores or RAW) now either requires a hugely expensive camera (eg R5), a huge camera (P4K, P6K), or an external recorder, there is no way to get a small camera with nice codec.... and if you add in IBIS as a requirement, the list goes to zero. Is anyone else interested in a screen-less compact external recorder?

All the talk about the Alexa Mini LF that I saw they realised that the image from the mini was good enough to use for the whole film and so just used the same camera throughout instead of using the mini for drone/mounted shots and the larger bodies for the normal stuff. I think that even ARRI might have underestimated how much camera size matters, even on larger productions. That's true, although we are beginning to get into a grey area when comparing a changeable mount from an adapter if the adapter can be securely mounted to the camera and start to have the same kind of weight capacities etc. I'm not an expert, and maybe an interchangeable mount is still very strong compared to a locking adapter, but a locking adapter has got to be a completely different proposition than a non-locking one. If it was me using the camera for my own personal work, a locking adapter would be enough for me to just mount it to the camera and just keep it there permanently, but each to their own of course. I've read most of the "<<XYZ>> Lens Survival Guide" threads on reduser and my impression was that a lot of people were building a set of primes that they could convert to EF, could rent out (and pay for themselves), and they could use on their own long-term projects like documentaries (where it would be impractical to rent lenses every time they got a phone call and had to jump in the car and go). These people talked about the second set, normally USSR / FD / Minolta / Pentax / Nikon primes, as more vintage, and that they'd rent CP2's or whatever for projects that needed a "modern" or "high-end" look, and use their own set when a more organic or vintage look was more desirable. In a sense, the RF mount is offering a third option. We know RF can convert to EF, and thus support all the vintage primes that people are typically converting to EF, but it would also support the new RF primes that Canon are making for their 8K stills cameras like the R5, which might be a modern look to rival (or surpass) the resolution of a CP3 (for example). In a way this would be a modern high-end look for less money than hiring / buying PL glass.

How do you know that it's pulling down their sales? In the GH5 groups I'm part of there is a steady stream of people joining who are incredibly excited to have gotten a camera that is so feature-packed as the GH5. The group is also full of lots of people going from GH5 to S5 to get "the FF look". Sure, the odd person goes from GH5 to Sony or some other manufacturer, but it's not common. I think people are very quick to ask their 4 friends opinions and then declare that this is how the whole world feels about something, when obviously this is not the basis for stating facts.

Thanks, interesting size comparison. It looks way bigger, but in reality it's only a bit in each dimension, and for a FF 8K is still very compact. I saw someone mention it is a locking mount, which if true might mean that ??-RF adapters could be used and locked to provide a secure mount, for example the EF-RF adapter with ND built-in? Taking the same form-factor as the Komodo makes me think it's a budget entry-level thing, but the specs and price definitely don't give that impression, at least to me! Maybe that's the rationale behind it. Certainly I was under the impression that the two mounts for professional use were EF and PL, but now RF has replaced EF and can be adapted that's the new direction? My impression of the RF lenses from Canon was that they were very expensive compared to the EF equivalents, but were also very high quality / resolution and so might be a similar "tier" to an 8K FF cine camera? While the 8K FF V-RAPTOR is the big brother of the 6K S35 KOMODO, I'd be very interested in a 4K MFT RED that was the little brother to the Komodo - and would potentially be the bigger brother to the 1080p S16 BMMCC.... that would be very interesting to me.

Does anyone know how big it is? I looked very similar to Komodo in the PR videos. As always, I am interested in the best image quality in the tiniest package, and although I doubt I will ever own a RED, the more that manufacturers go in this direction, the more they push other manufacturers to follow suit which is good for me!

Why does softer = worse?

You should give it a go...

No idea myself, but I'd imagine there are a bunch of comparisons made by stills photographers that might help. With lenses most things that film makers care about are shared by stills photographers, and they have been taking high-resolution RAW test images for a decade or more so the internet is well populated with that information. I'd suggest google image searches or searching Flickr?

Did you apply sharpening in post to match the two? I've found that you can do some pretty horrific things that make footage softer but sharpening in post can compensate to the point where you can't distinguish in a blind test. Not much point in paying hundreds / thousands more for "sharper" equipment if the same thing can be done in post with one slider....

The treatments in the above (IIRC) were through applying noise reduction (NR). It was a combination of spatial NR which essentially blurs the footage, and temporal NR which blurs between frames. NR is quite smart, but ultimately it's a fancy blur, and definitely softens the footage visibly, so needs to be used with sharpening / unsharp mask, and has very significant limitations in real use. In terms of 8-bit vs 10-bit and if it's "worth it", the test is really if you have problems with 8-bit footage. If you're shooting 8-bit and not having banding issues, or issues with colour blotches on skin tones, etc, then moving to 10-bit probably won't have much impact. My advice is to focus on the final results you're getting, work out what the biggest issues / limitations are for you, and then put your money towards those issues. Counter to what these (and many other) forums suggest, most of the time the biggest return on investment for the average film-maker is on something other than their camera, most likely audio equipment, lenses, filters, audio equipment, lighting and grip, haze / fog, production design, and, to save the best for last, the best money you can ever spend is to invest in your own education and skills. The skilled operator can get reasonable results in almost any situation with any equipment, whereas amateurs make Alexa footage look like a home video....

Just watching the below, and got to the part where they say it will have the highest resolution LED screen in the world at a whopping 19,000 x 13,500 pixel resolution. The UMP12K looks a bit anaemic about now right! I suspect that most content for it would either be rendered, composited, stitched, or time lapses, but they'd probably use at least some live video, so I think the question does apply. Makes me wonder - what else is happening above 12K?

I did find it odd that the DR only improved when it was downscaled in post rather than in-camera. I can't think of why that would be the case.. and ideas?

Seems to me that a killer app for a camera like this is that "it can do it all, when you need it" so you'd shoot whatever resolution / frame rate / bitrate that was appropriate for the shot. It's kind of a "just-in-case" camera. So if you were shooting a corporate then you'd shoot 4K, but if you needed a green screen you might shoot 12K just for those shots to be able to get a super-clean key in post. At that point, shooting 4K with it wouldn't require any better a lens than any other camera shooting 4K. Compared to something like the P4K which requires external everything (power, audio, etc) this camera wouldn't be that much more difficult or demanding to use, wouldn't it? Apart from the crazy demands of 12K files, what demands do you think this camera has that a R5 or P6K don't have?