imagesfromobjects

[edited - for some reason my phone didn't display the more recent replies] 

2 hours ago, bjohn said:

Yikes, this does look like a deal-breaker. There's an informative article about this issue in Sony A7-series cameras here: https://phillipreeve.net/blog/limitations-of-the-electronic-shutter-function/

The Sonys at least have a mechanical shutter with electronic as an option. The Sigma only gives you electronic and this confirms my fears that this won't work for me. Bummer.

Fair points, but I think the only time that you'll see rolling shutter effects is with vehicles and things like tennis balls in flight and so on. I've used the fp for a few toddler events and kittens and whatnot and haven't seen any rolling shutter, so I doubt you'd see it in shots of a fiddler.

The banding issue can be mitigated by using shutter speeds that are multiples of 60 (1/30, 1/60, 1/125 etc) in the States or multiples of 50 in Europe. Gets tricky when you are working with mixed lighting or stage lighting, so it would be wise to test out different settings on site to see how it fares.

On 6/28/2020 at 9:57 AM, Andrew Reid said:

Which camera is the framegrab from?

In my experience it isn't usually the lack of OLPF causing the moire in video mode, but sensor readout and sampling method.

Like a downsample from 6K to 4K.

If this frame was from a full res 6K RAW photo, I doubt the moire would be there, even with lack of OLPF.

I know everyone here only shoots raw, but MOV files from the fp have a lot of potential, if not for the moire issues. It is *bad* in real-world usage, especially with foliage or any fine pattern. It disappears COMPLETELY when shooting MOV with the new Color Off mode, so I really believe it is mostly an issue with sharpening being applied in-camera. I thought it may also have been the lack of OLPF, but I can't seem to provoke any artifacts whatsoever when using Color Off, so I'm almost positive it's a sharpening issue.

3 hours ago, rawshooter said:

The fp has neither WiFi nor Bluetooth... So there's really no way for a mobile app to talk to the camera.

You can connect fp to Android mobile phone with a usb-c to usb-c data cable. Not sure about iPhone.

7 minutes ago, Lars Steenhoff said:

Just checked it, and bad news, it's JPG only.

Which brings us to another v2.1 request: capture raw stills while in Cine mode. Not necessarily while shooting video (that would certainly be resource heavy) but just while switched to Cine.

1 minute ago, Lars Steenhoff said:

Since it's possible to take a picture in cine mode, you could put the camera on cine and make the shot without the focus box

Ahh, already thought of that, but only 16:9 in Cine, no 3:2. Also, I'm not sure that it captures a raw of just a JPEG? I'm on a trip and didn't bring my laptop - can someone confirm?

3 hours ago, Chris Whitten said:

 

Yeah, I'm seeing the white box on all screens. I'm only using legacy lenses (Pentax and Leica M).

Ditto, I'm 99% using M lenses on dumb adapter. Focus box always there in Stills. Disappears in Cine.

1. Lose the white focus box.

2. Focus magnify while recording video.

3. Tweaks to Color Off mode: black levels, hues, saturation, curves. "Sharpening Off" mode for all profiles.

4. Fn or rear wheel assign for ISO

9 hours ago, Lars Steenhoff said:

Its not a log profile, if it was why would sigma apologise for not making a log profile?

but its a good option to use nonetheless.

Why do you feel that it is a log profile?

 

Gotcha. It looks and grades very similarly to SLOG2 out of the a7S I used to have. I may be mistaken, but I think I remember reading that Sigma was putting out a quasi-log because they were having issues with licensing an official one.

I'm definitely not here to argue, but I feel that the article is misleading by omitting this. Color Off wasn't here before v2 firmware, so if I had to guess, I would say it's probably what they came up with due to the demand, the deadline and the difficulty in obtaining a license to use an official LOG in the fp.

Without digging into the data, I'll just say that offhand, it looks EXACTLY like SLOG-2, minus the yellow tinge. I think it could be very useful for reading the histogram and approximating exposure based off of the LCD alone. Whether or not it's useful to others, or can tide folks over until a real LOG shows up, who knows.

What I wish, is that there were more ways to tweak the black levels, curves, hues etc, so that it could be customized more, but hey.

Guys, there *is* a LOG profile added. It's called Color Mode = OFF.

May want to add that to the article, a few people have reiterated the misinformation in this thread.

Ok, so can we start a consolidated wish list for firmware v2.1? They're obviously listening to feedback, but maybe it would be helpful for them. I don't know the best way to reach them, but maybe someone else does? 

My requests:

1. Ability to focus magnify while recording video. Essential. 

2. Ability to assign ISO to rear dial. As it stands, shooting full Manual with adapted lenses, there's no reason to have electronic control over the aperture and you need to dive into the menu to change ISO. Silly. 

3. The white focusing square doesn't disappear in stills mode ever. Distracting and intrusive for composing. 

4. Ability to disable sharpening *completely* in all color modes. The "Color Mode = OFF" addition is wonderful, but it is essential to disable sharpening for video, especially when there's no AA filter, and some of the color modes are REALLY NICE otherwise. Any sharpening causes horrible artifacts. 

And, before anyone says "just shoot CinemaDNG" - I do, but 80% of my stuff is just home movies, and MOV files are *almost* good enough out-of-camera for that purpose, minus the above mentioned artifacts. 

Anyone figure out how to use the Dual Gain feature? I'm not seeing anything in the menu... 

11 minutes ago, RawZion said:

I am now seriously considering buying the Sigma FP, which looks amazing, to complement my Sony a7iii.  On specs, the Sigma FP looks amazing, but I have the following concerns:

1.  Battery life - how long can you use it?  Obviously I could stick a USB power bank on it, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a small camera right?

2.  Will anyone make an affordable variable-ND mount adapter for it?  On my Sony a7iii I mostly use Nikon primes, and have an amazing (and cheap) mount adapter where I just turn the ring to seamlessly control the exposure.  It's beautiful and there's definitely space for it with the L-Mount's short flange distance, but as far as I can tell this product doesn't exist yet.  I could use my Matte-Box which has been gathering dust for years now, but really I cannot stress just how incredible having a variable ND filter in the lens mount is.

3.  Will cropping/lossless digital zoom be useful and easy?  The Sony a7iii excels in this, and makes it easy to use one prime lens at multiple focal lengths with no loss of quality.  The Sigma's sensor is big enough, just need to know if it has that functionality.

4.  Can you see the screen in bright sunlight?  I like to shoot outdoors.  I could buy a separate EVF, but that's pushing the price up more, as well as probably putting more stress on the battery.

So those are my concerns, does anyone have any experience to share with this very promising camera?  With Canon and Sony both coming out with new cameras soon the field is very competitive, but the Sigma FP does look like a strong contender.

I'm coming from an a7S, so here ya go. Battery life is on par, meaning that you need to bring extras if you are heading out for the day, especially shooting video. 

There's no "ClearImage" zoom, which is something I miss. Very handy when using primes. There is a "DC Crop Mode" which can be assigned in the Q menu. If you switch it on, it gives you a 1.5x zoom, so similar effect. Quality is excellent. You also can't focus magnify while recording video, which is annoying and I was hoping would be fixed in v2.0, but nope. 

If I could afford to maintain 2 systems, I'd probably pick up an a73 (I shoot 75/25 stills and video) and I've thought about swapping my fp out, but the IQ and the size are what keeps me going. It's truly astonishing. There are a few tradeoffs, so everyone would need to decide for themselves, but it's perfect for me. I'd suggest renting one for a week or so to get some hands-on experience, if you have the option. Lensrentals in the States is rad. 

Viewfinder in bright sunlight is rough. 

4 hours ago, rawshooter said:

Just installed and tested the firmware, with the following results:

- CinemaDNG recordings now have proper synchronized audio in Resolve, but Resolve still doesn't recognize them as CinemaDNG sequences, only as DNG stills sequences with attached audio. I.e. it does see them as clips, but only as folders containing DNGs, and you need to recursively import them ("Import folders and subfolders").

This also means that you cannot use Sigma fp's CinemaDNG in the Cut module.

- In stills mode, the 0.1s shutter delay is unchanged. (Which also means the image you see frozen on the display after pressing the shutter is not the image that gets recorded/stored - you can test that by shooting a digital stopwatch.) So I guess this is a hardware issue and unfixable. 😞 

Yes!!! The audio syncing was driving me crazy in Resolve. Sooooo appreciated. 

Also, the main article on this site doesn't mention it, but the fp mov has a Color Mode = OFF option, which is ostensibly a LOG. Check it out! 

This may be a nitpick (given that they delivered SO MUCH) with this update, but I'd like to see something in between a completely flat profile and one with crazy sharpening artifacts - which are unfortunately evident even when sharpening is set to zero - for the times I wanna be lazy with PP and just shoot MOV. 

Also need to get rid of focusing square in Stills and map ISO to rear dial. 

Beyond that, nailed it. 

Also, is there anywhere we could start a comprehensive list of current quirks? Something that could easily be referenced by Sigma to hopefully be addressed in future firmware updates. I feel like a lot of stuff has been mentioned here, but it's spread out over 50+ pages...

On 3/25/2020 at 11:34 AM, paulinventome said:

As far as i understand the 1st version of both the Elmarit and the Summicron had huge issues on non M cameras because the filter stacks are too thick and the rear of the lens produced very shallow ray angles. Jono Slack did a comparison with the V1 and V2 summicron on a Sony a7 and the results were very different. The performance of it on the a7 was abysmal before. Again, infinity focused.

But the fp has no OLPF and there's no data as to how thick that stack is. I've been after a 28 cron for a while, but the V2 is expensive and elusive whereas there are plenty of V1 around - but there are no tests on an fp.

The 50 and 90 are incredible on the fp but i need a wide to go with them. 

So would be super interested to see how that fairs when you do get your fp.

This is less FC and more smearing. More an issue with the camera than the lens.

thanks
Paul

I shot some landscape-type stuff with the Elmarit-M 28/2.8 Asph and Sigma fp the other day.  My personal verdict on the combo is that, at f/8 and a hair back from the infinity hard stop, it could be described as "unnecessarily sharp" across the frame, but I'd be happy to upload the DNGs for you to check out if you're interested.

23 minutes ago, Scott_Warren said:

@imagesfromobjects
One exercise that helped me get started with Resolve was opening an image in Lightroom and tweaking it to taste, and then opening that same image in Resolve & using the same controls (exposure, contrast, saturation, Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Lum curves, etc.) to try to recreate the same result that I saw in Lightroom. I know that video adjustments tend to exist in their own universe when you dig in to try to make things more technically sound for video compared to a still, but it might be worthwhile to do something similar. 

With that approach, I could still think in terms of editing a still but developed more of a video mindset to how the controls translate differently between stills and video. Curves still largely function the same, though they tend to be more sensitive in Resolve than Lightroom, and instead of using one master stack for operations, you apply them to nodes which can then be re-wired to create different results depending on the flow of the math. I also had experience with the Unreal Engine material editor for years, so node-based editing and order of operations wasn't a huge leap. 

I think @paulinventome 's approach with injecting a DNG into the RED IPP2 workflow is one of the faster ways to get to a solid image that I've seen recently.

Awesome, yes that sounds reasonable. The LUTs I made for Premiere were based on LR presets I tweaked and created CUBE using LUTGenerator. That process is easy enough for me to do, and sounds similar to what you are suggesting.

Only issue is- I don't even know how to load a DNG clip into Resolve to even begin hahaha. So, mostly I'm just asking how to do that for now, or if you have any suggestions on decent basic tutorials for a Resolve DNG worflow, I'd love to hear. Thanks again!

Ok, slightly o/t, but anyone have any decent "starter" type tutorials for working with DNG in Resolve? The results y'all are posting have piqued my interest. REALLY nice. As far as experience, I've shot stills for much longer than I've shpt video, so I'd rate myself *so-so* with Premiere, and quasi-expert with Lightroom, but I've only messed with Resolve a little bit and that was a long time ago.

I've created my own LUTs for Premiere, and would probably still do timeline editing there, but I'd like to to use Resolve just to import and do basic grading / corrections, then export to Premiere- which can't currently deal with DNG, unless I'm mistaken.

Thanks in advance...

On 3/25/2020 at 11:34 AM, paulinventome said:

May be a while before I can provide any infinity shots, because we're all basically on house-arrest here in Philadelphia for a while. Without any other info, I'd say go for the newest (11677) version of the Elmarit 28/2.8, because it was allegedly tailored to perform better on [Leica] digital than the 11606. It may be tricky to find a good deal on a used one, because most Leica people baby the s*** out of their gear, and try to sell it LNIB, but if you're really particular about edge-to-edge sharpness at f/8 + infinity, it's probably your best bet. The 11606 does well enough for me, but if you need edge-to-edge, it's probably best at f/8-11, and one may need to pull back just a hair from the infinity hard stop to mask FC.

My fp arrived today (sweeeet!!) so I'll have some time to do testing, but I can't promise infinity.

12 hours ago, paulinventome said:

As far as i understand the 1st version of both the Elmarit and the Summicron had huge issues on non M cameras because the filter stacks are too thick and the rear of the lens produced very shallow ray angles. Jono Slack did a comparison with the V1 and V2 summicron on a Sony a7 and the results were very different. The performance of it on the a7 was abysmal before. Again, infinity focused.

But the fp has no OLPF and there's no data as to how thick that stack is. I've been after a 28 cron for a while, but the V2 is expensive and elusive whereas there are plenty of V1 around - but there are no tests on an fp.

The 50 and 90 are incredible on the fp but i need a wide to go with them. 

So would be super interested to see how that fairs when you do get your fp.

This is less FC and more smearing. More an issue with the camera than the lens.

thanks
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

5 hours ago, paulinventome said:

which version of the Elmarit - the newest one? Can you do me a favour and let me know what the corners are like at infinity on the fp?

cheers!
Paul

When my new fp arrives, sure. I was using a rental, but the corners showed some cyan - about the same as on a7S. Its 11606, 1st Asph version, so not optimized for digital, though still great by most metrics. Are you asking about field curvature at infinity? I normally shoot at <3m but there's minor FC wide open, which is masked around f/5.6. No "smearing", though, but you one could easily conflate FC with the corners being soft. They're indeed sharp from wide open, assuming one is *focusing* on the corners.

9 hours ago, paulinventome said:

Just double checking but yeah, the green/magenta stuff is in the actual DNG itself. No question.

What's happening is perhaps a truncation issue converting between the 12 bit source and the 10 bit. The green values are rgb(0,1,1) so no red value. This is the very lowest stop of recorded light either 0 or 1

@Chris WhittenI think this is quite common because come to think of it he A7s always suffered green/magenta speckled noise - and that would make sense that the bottom two stops are truncating strongly and the with noise.

 

There was evidence that the a7S was doing something with the blue channel to "game the system" with regards to noise, because blue is the most problematic color in noise. If the Sigma uses a Sony sensor, it could be in its wiring to do this, or Sigma may be using a similar trick to reduce the appearance of noise.

Ps- I do plan on going the SSD route, or at least 8 bit in-camera DNG, but unfortunately the s*** kinda hit the fan here in the States while I was on holiday with my family, so I'm unsure of my employment situation. I'm thinking the fp will be my last gear purchase for a while, and I should probably buy food and such instead.

On the upside, I'll have plenty of free time to tinker and play with editing software - something full-time work + caring for a toddler didn't allow for, so hey. Making lemonade, as they say.

16 hours ago, Chris Whitten said:

MOV looks to be very poor compared to the UHD modes. My rig is very small using the Wise portable SSD attached to Sigma's included hot shoe attachment.

Fair enough, but I'm using a Leica Elmarit-M 28/2.8 Asph, Voigtlander 35/2.5 and 40/1.2 VM as my main lenses, so - all due respect - your setup looks comparatively huge next to mine.

As for MOV, it is very much usable if you expose well and tweak a few settings. I'm liking Vivid minus 1 / Saturation minus 0.4 and contrast minus 0.2 with sharpness dropped all the way down and a +1 to the low end tone curve, if called for. When it doesn't flicker, it looks very natural and "cinematic".

Could the flicker perhaps indicate something wonky with "dual gain" or similar? If the true base ISO is 400, it would attest to the overexposed first frame in ISOs below 400, because those would involve a different gain, or else some software juju to "underexpose" the sensor. It could also explain why ISOs over 400 give the flicker - if the software is struggling to "decide" which gain to use. Just a thought. 

You'd have to ask Jim Kasson or Bill Claff, or one of those guys. Jim had an exhaustive writeup on the Sony a7S where he mapped the specific ISOs where secondary gain kicked in, but tbh most of that stuff is way over my head and involves time, knowledge and equipment I do not possess. 

All I know is that the flickering is *visible* on the LCD when you are shooting low light in MOV. It's also visible in stills, shooting all-manual on a dumb adapter. The camera I was using was a rental, but I have purchased one (against my better judgment) which will be here shortly. Rental camera was on v1.02 and I'll be doing the same sort of shooting with the new one. Time permitting, I'll have a chance to dig deeper into what is going on, but as I already mentioned, my goal is to optimize my setup for run'n'gun, minimal grading type stuff, so I'll only be using SD cards - and likely MOV - to test. 

Other bugs/annoyances I noticed even after the firmware update were that:

*C1 / C2 / C3 - some settings were not being saved 

*Color shading was only storing the first entry 

*Cannot turn sharpening or noise reduction off completely, so MOV files show moire and artifacts. Could just be the lack of AA filter, but I wish there were more LOG-like profile adjustments one could make (eg Black Gamma level etc.) 

*Can we PLEASE gain the ability to assign ISO to the wheel in Manual mode. Shooting with manual lenses, you obviously don't need aperture control via camera, and the Q menu process of changing the ISO is annoying. 

*Can we also get rid of the white focusing square in stills mode? Also annoying that it's always there. 

Other than that, yeah. Camera is awesome and when it's on, it's ON. Keep it up, Sigma!! 

Ok, now back to your regularly scheduled crumbling of civilization as we know it. Happy shooting!