KarimNassar

Hello Andrew, I've always appreciated these boards and your articles. I have not been active on here lately because I've been solely working on stills. But I've been checking your articles and I value your work. So much negativity online sometimes, we never think to simply say we appreciate things. Read your latest article and dropped by to say that you are the kind of qualified unbiased professional we need at those events. Hope you will be acknowledged next time.

thanks D800 with 105mm f2.8G lens. I first graded in Lightroom then retouched in PS. The D800 is utterly amazing and I am still very happy with it. I strictly bought the crazy priced discounted NX1 because I wanted a light 4k video camera to have some fun with. So I haven't taken a single photograph with it yet. I can't inform you regarding the comparison.

The popular youtube channel phlearn made a video about this ;-) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DU0Sim_BJ4 Although I used premiere instead of photoshop but the technique is the same. There is also a dedicated app for this called Flixel if you are on a mac. I'm on pc didn't use it. Here is a retouched 4k screen grab, sharpness is set to minimum and yet feels a little over sharpened already (didn't sharpen on top in post): right click open image in new tab:

thanks, those settings got mentioned a couple time in this thread I believe. I own the 20mm and the 50mm 1.8 (cheap plastic version). both small, lightweight and convenient. I am a nikon d800 shooter so those are the only 2 I used and cannot compare them with other brands. Happy with them though. Gifs were too heavy and the quality was too bad so I had do opt for a looping youtube video instead. I uploaded the cinemagraphs here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/36514809/Cinemagraphs-Flavie-Lea Would appreciate your support by clicking the blue like button if you like them! here is a hd vs 4k screen grab (retouched)

I shot a couple of cinemagraphs with the NX1. Sadly gifs crush the quality of the files and it looks like behance compresses them even more. Any tips on that? Here is a retouched fullHD frame: DCI 4k vivid picture profile standard gamma sharpness minimum, black level maximum, contrast -5 nikon 20mm f2.8

the camera's technical limitations aside, the shot is well done. Nicely framed, nicely edited, nicely lit and graded. good job all around.

same here. it is simply because everybody is throwing the exact same LUT on every single piece of footage. Especially redundant on blackmagic cameras footage. Youtube and vimeo are over flooded with them. Since it's an easy go to "it looks cool" solution, it is often poorly done and people look like walking oranges. All these type of heavily stylized luts you can find online have done quite a disservice to many people imo. Sure it's easy and fast, but what happened is all videos now look the same. The grade should first and foremost support your story anyways, then be visually pleasing. read his book on color correction, very interesting. Now I need to put the knowledge into practice...

thanks for taking the time to do this and upload. could you have possibly mislabeled the video sections? because the bottom one looks cleaner in the shadows to me and is labeled nx1

if you could upload any short clips (5sec is enough) of a high contrast scene with shadow areas and some light fall off on wall, internal + BMVA so we could check the difference in macroblocking and banding in premiere would be awesome.

*edit need to check

thanks for taking the time to do this, much appreciated. And what a difference in the example you posted! very cool. If you have the time to post some more I would be very interested. I'm seriously considering the VA even strictly for monitoring and the added cleaner 1080p out of the nx1 is quite an interesting plus. I asked for a white wall next to a window because it would have been easy to spot differences in banding in the light gradient. I would assume there would be none, since the nx1 output is 8bit, but you never know. However your test does seem to demonstrate that the VA internal compression is significantly better than the one of the NX1 regarding macro blocking. It is easy to test as well, anything you record in the shadows with no detail and flat colors should introduce some.

I've been thinking about adjusting the black and contrast levels on a per scene basis. That would make the most sense, no need to squeeze the DR when not needed, and the same numbers will not be ideal for different DR situations anyways. yes definitively. with a little noise and an 1080p delivery it is a non issue though. I personally plan to deliver everything in full HD with this cam anyways.

I really like the dr though. But I will definitely do it and compare. Appreciate the advice

It's graded. Here is the YouTube link, should be in uhd not sure I'm posting from my phone :https://youtu.be/a7CRyB_N5aE

took the nx1 on a first test run this afternoon, not confortable with video grading yet and I noticed too much red and magenta in the skintones highlights so far. colors "feel very thin" to me already when grading so I will not lower the saturation in camera, happy with the DR and details. All available light, should receive some led panels soon that will make things more interesting. All the same lens, Nikon 20mm f 2.8D 4kdci, gamma C, maximum black level, minimum contrast, minimum sharpness. I will try to upload to youtube in 4k.

Allow me to explain further rimpamposh, because that video is explaining the situation in my opinion in a twisted and counter intuitive way IMO. Lets look at the RGB waveform of this NX1 file: If you look at the top of the waveform it seems the highlights are clipped. However pay attention to the bottom right Clamp Signal checkbox that is checked on and that I circled in green. That clamp signal checkbox, clamps the display of the highlight. It does not DISPLAY in the waveform scope the highlights above the 100 line. However the information is in the video file, it is simply not displayed because that checkbox is checked. Lets have a look at what our waveform looks like once we uncheck it: As you can see we have more highlight information visible in the waveform scope than what was previously displayed. And that is all that has changed, the clamped highlight information above 100 is now displayed in the waveform monitor only. In our video it is still out of range because it is above the 100 line, so in our video those highlights are still clipped. How do we recover that information and unclip the highlights in the video? This is where in the video he says to set the 235 number. You do not need to do specifically do that, and you can do it with a variety of tools. And that specific amount will not be adapted to every situation. All you want to do is bring the highlights down. That is all. In this instance I did it as following: You can do it in different ways. Hope it helps.

save file on computer and open in photoshop. That has only to do with the color shift and different color management of the different web browers. As long as the file has an attached color profile by opening it with photoshop you are ensuring it is displayed correctly. it's not a conversion, all he is doing in that video is bringing the highlights down. If you want to understand what is going on, look at the bottom right of the video ( the red green and blue waveform) as he sets the output level to 235 the highlights shift down. The fact that he calls it "an error" and always sets the number 235 makes it unnecessarily confusing. All he is doing is bringing the highlights down to recover highlight information, you can do that with a variety of other tools as well. And always setting to 235 as if it is a magic number fix to that "error" is also unnecessary. Depending on the amount of highlight information that is above the displayed range it can be more or less.

same. I'm not telling anyone what to do. Just my observations and I would be happy for some input as well.

Yes and that is exactly why I think we should not use 16-235. Note that I did not stretch the waveform to move the black point to the 0 line so they are comparable. I offset the entire waveform without stretching nor modifying the captured information and simply moved it down. To match the 16-235 to the 0-255 you need to stretch the captured tonality. You are modifying what the sensor captured and stretching the exposure to match. And with an 8bit codec there is not much room to work with without degrading the file quality. Here is what the respective waveforms look like with no modifications: I see no clipping neither in the highlights nor in the blacks in the 0-255 and I see a thicker waveform. All I see from the 16-235 file is that I will need an extra step of grading every time to expand the tonality and that it might result in IQ loss. It seems to me that the native h265 support in Premiere changes the 16-235 recommendation but I'm all ears if I'm missing something here :-)

I don't get it either so I looked at the waveform. What I did in the picture below is shoot a high contrast scene, trying to get the fullest histogram possible without clipping the highlights nor the blacks. I then simply offset the waveform so both their respective black points sit on the 0 line. As you can see the 0-255 file covers a wider tonality. Of course I can up the gain of the 16-235 to match, but it is my understanding that with an 8bit codec stretching the information degrades the image quality. Now regardless if it does, that is an unnecessary extra step for every single clip. Now this is in premiere with native h265 support, I assume the 16-235 recommendation had to do with the transcoding of the files at the time. So now with the native h265 support that recommendation is no longer valid? Regarding the banding on the wall with the light, I purposely underexposed the shot to highlight the issue in my earlier post. If you expose properly the banding is almost unnoticeable:

I just tested and 16-235 appears to have more banding than the full range. I've read some people say it captures the same amount of shades than the full range and is just a read information for premiere or your editing software but it appears it is not accurate or there is some other issue. Anyways don't see the point of using 16-235 in first place? Nothing wrong with the full range to begin with. save file and open in Photoshop, some color shift with internet browsers.

if you could setup a shot on a tripod that introduces banding and macroblocking issues, such as for example a white wall next to a window that is a little underexposed with gradual fall off of the light on the wall, to compare the internal vs 10-Bit 4:2:2 shogun that would be great. I would assume it makes no difference since the output of the nx1 is not 10bit 4:2:2 but would be interesting to check and compare.

Would you mind shooting a white wall next to a window, with the wall being slightly underexposed? Once internal and once with the blackmagic video assist. Just to see if the external recorder format makes a difference with banding or macroblocking. I assume it won't but would be interesting to compare in premiere.

I don't have it backwards. I'm talking about field of view not resolution. They both result in a 2160 pixel high image like you said, however that image is created from a different portion of the sensor. Try for yourself. Put the nx1 on a tripod shoot once 4kdci and then uhd, the field of view is the same horizontally, you do not see more of the scene in the 4k dci mode despite the bigger horizontal file size, but the field of view is bigger vertically in uhd mode (you see more of the scene vertically in uhd mode). did the same thing.

For some reason the price dropped a lot in online stores here. It has been talked about in this thread before. There are less and less stores with the nx1 available though and the most ridiculously priced ones are all sold out and discontinued. I guess it will soon be completely discontinued here. For instance it is already almost impossible to find batteries. The sub 600usd stores are sadly all gone now, and the best deal left at the moment is 668usd. Only 6 stores left now that still sell it, most don't have it in stock so I'm not sure they will be capable to order. I guess it's over now... see here : http://www.toppreise.ch/prod_388442.html