Slow-mo shootout - which camera gives the most detail at 120fps?

[Andrew Reid 7,166]

I recently decided to find out which of the current 1080/120fps capable cameras does it the best.

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[thecouchguy 2]

Very good test, thank you for doing this mate. A valuable resource for anyone shopping for these cameras.

[Eno 27]

Thank you very much for the slow motion comparison test @Andrew Reid!

[Oliver Daniel 1,267]

There's a plugin that gives some kind of resolution voodoo which I use for 120fps clips. 

It's called Finisher. (also known as Crumplepop Finisher). 

The plugin dramatically increases the perceived resolution with clever sharpening. 

I've found it doesn't work too well on Canon DSLR's, but is awesome for Panasonic and Sony.  

[BTM_Pix 3,424]

I'll second that about Finisher.

I like the simplicity of CrumplePop's stuff

[rdouthit 74]

Note that you can conform 120p to 24/30p internally with the A7SII and the A99II. 

[gt3rs 115]

Thx for the test and after using quite a bit the 1Dx II in 120 fps I agree with you that is definitely not the strong point of the camera... usable but not great. The difference in quality between 4k 60p and 1080p 120fps is huge.

[anax276 5]

Thanks for the great overview. By the way, how do I set the 120 fps VFR on the GH5? I can only select 100, 125, 150, 175, 180 fps.

[Deadcode 126]

Thank you for the test, very informative.

Did any of you noticed that the 1Dx Mark II's motion "candence" seem like it's much more fluid than the others? It's like 30p.

[jcs 915]

4 hours ago, Oliver Daniel said:

There's a plugin that gives some kind of resolution voodoo which I use for 120fps clips. 

It's called Finisher. (also known as Crumplepop Finisher). 

The plugin dramatically increases the perceived resolution with clever sharpening. 

I've found it doesn't work too well on Canon DSLR's, but is awesome for Panasonic and Sony.  

Looks like a combination of unsharp mask with a normal radius (somewhat small) and LCE (local contrast enhancement), which uses unsharp mask with a very large radius (e.g. 300). It's too bad PP CC doesn't GPU accelerate unsharp masking, however it is possible to achieve the effect with GPU acceleration by copying the video track, blurring it (Gaussian blur: 300), scaling the original (ProcAmp: Contrast & Saturation: 200) and subtracting the Gaussian blurred copy (Blend: Subtract).

I've been using 1DX II 1080p24 to get full frame shallow DOF and smaller files with nice results (sharpen around 50 in Lumetri/Creative in PP CC). Along with a little bit of fine noise grain, sharpening 1DX II along with LCE can look very filmic, even with the initially soft 120fps 1DX II 1080p.

Regarding Andrew's tests: every one of those 120fps cameras produce acceptable results. Was surprised to see the Alexa and Phantom missing though  

[jcs 915]

This will work with all cameras, especially the soft-ish Canon 1080p  

To fix aliasing we need Super Resolution , which uses aliasing information to create new, real detail (not trivial, but perhaps will be available someday).

[OliKMIA 426]

3 hours ago, anax276 said:

By the way, how do I set the 120 fps VFR on the GH5? I can only select 100, 125, 150, 175, 180 fps.

Check your FPS settings: PAL, NTSC, Cine. For 120 I believe you must set it to 24p

[anax276 5]

8 hours ago, OliKMIA said:

Check your FPS settings: PAL, NTSC, Cine. For 120 I believe you must set it to 24p

OK, thanks! That must be the reason, I had 25 fps...

[Michael Rivers 0]

I assume you are testing the Leica SL with firmware 3.0? I find that L log seems to work a bit better in camera (although I really save it for an external recorder).

[Andrew Reid 7,166]

Yes Leica SL is running V3.0 firmware. I think the 4K is excellent (not yet tried 10bit 4K via HDMI) but the compressed 8bit 1080p combined with the flatness and high black level of L-LOG = banding hell!

[OliKMIA 426]

9 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Yes Leica SL is running V3.0 firmware. I think the 4K is excellent (not yet tried 10bit 4K via HDMI) but the compressed 8bit 1080p combined with the flatness and high black level of L-LOG = banding hell!

Hi Andrew. Did you receive my email with a publication request for this article ? Let me know. Thanks

[Eric Calabros 189]

Another proof that binning is not the problem, processing is. 

[Trek of Joy 472]

Nice test Andrew, thanks for putting this together!

[funkyou86 163]

This was my very first time shooting 180fps with the GH5. I was too affraid that the image will be soft, but now, I'm good with it. It is soft, but for youtube, still above average :D

Please do not laugh loudly, we did our best to do something stupid (PS: there are english lyrics, just wait for it).

[Laser Blue 12]

Andrew, Thank you for the test! It's my understanding that aliasing or softened detail can be made worse by smaller bitrates. Would the 120 fps image improve on the NX1 with a bitrate increase to say 160mbps from the standard 80? 96 fps on the GH4 lost detail relative to 60 fps at the same bitrate. Thoughts?