BasiliskFilm

If the A6400 has ninja focussing skills then it could be a niche product for wildlife and action stills photography. More reach than the A9 too. A big upgrade at the price point, but presumably there will be a (more expensive) video-focussed release with stabilisation and less rolling shutter, which would presumably require a next generation sensor.

Sony is still selling the original A7 with kit lens for £879. They can do this by reducing the price of legacy models, which obviously Nikon can't in the mirrorless market. Nikon wants to compete in that segment, makes perfect sense. They may have to cut some corners to do it, but the A7 is a perfectly respectable stills camera (with less than brilliant AF), and the full frame stills market is probably still larger than those looking for 4K video shooting.

Sorry I probably meant the a5100. My comment on Nikon was a flippant one about animal eye autofocus. Seriously I want animal eye autofocus before our next pup arrives, and as half the videos on youtube are of cute dogs and cats, I am not the only one...

Sony still sells shedloads of the A6000, so I think that is the target market for this. From a serious video point of view, I would look on this only for pointers to where the next prosumer models may be going. It is aimed at the sub $1000 market, and at this level all the kit zooms have stabilisation anyway. Sony often starts their upgrade rollouts with the cheapest, best selling models - remember when the A5000 had better quality 1080p video than the more expensive models? The higher end version will be along soon. Animal eye-AF - I would love that! Come on Nikon, keep up...

As above, and I guess you have discovered that with a very wide angle lens you get an additional effect of the oblique rays from the edges of the image having to pass through two layers of filter at an angle producing extra vignetting.

I'm all in favour of retro fun; I even put a roll of Ilford FP4 through my Pentax Spotmatic recently. Sadly I don't have the time or money to buy multiple expensive bodies, and the Z6 seems to be the Swiss Army Knife sweet spot at the moment, especially with my existing Nikon modern and vintage glass.

You can keep a model on the shelf longer if you keep improving it through its lifetime. Sony have been a bit cursed by releasing so many different models of camera, some with major, some with minor improvements, but with no upgrade path - beyond the fact you could keep you lenses and accessories. To some extent it makes sense to "build in" the cost of software upgrades, as later purchasers will get them included in the price of the camera. Like Apple now does with OSX and iOS updates. There is an argument that not many users use Log output, so perhaps only the few should pay, but there are quite a lot of folk who buy for the flagship features who never use them, so it is probably worth including all possible software improvements to boost sales. This is the same company who produced the retro Df, which deliberately removed video to keep all the photo purists happy! Nice to see they have moved on.

Slightly off-topic, but the "Film Maker's Kit" doesn't actually look like a bad selection of stuff, if you don't have any of the items already. Any thoughts?

Perhaps we are seeing some truth in the theory that Nikon, as the main company without a professional line of video cameras to protect, is free to go where it wants without undermining high end models. We are also seeing a change in philosophy with the mirrorless range towards continuous upgrade with firmware updates (more in line with an electronics company like Apple, than a traditional camera company where you have to buy a new body to get the new features). At least while the Z6 is young, and with no plans to replace it, then squeezing extra juice out of it can only be good for sales.

Well at the very least it looks like they are still working on updates which is good news. Maybe there will be improvements to AF beyond the addition of EyeAF.

So the light levels and aperture were identical between the shots?

Surely the amount of light received by the PDAF pixels is down to the lens aperture, regardless of image ISO sensitivity. It looks to me like he keeps the same aperture/DOF between his two test sessions. Sure it is dark, but the AF looks pretty good in the first half with otherwise identical settings.

Has anyone else had this experience of shooting NLog to a recorder having a hit on AF performance?

If you add in some of the best sensor stabilisation on a full frame camera, the ill effects of rolling shutter are much minimised in hand held footage. I have not seen much of it in footage online, even when using non-stabilised lenses.

10 bit log output - looks like Sony's handicapping may not be very effective

Autofocus is not just down to the focus points on the sensor - most the heavy lifting is done by the CPU, in calculating when and where and how fast the lens needs to move. This involves ever more sophisticated software and I imagine AI and machine learning algorithms (such as face detection). Nikon is newer to the game of using both sensor PDAF and CDAF together than Sony (though perhaps it had a trial run with the N1 series?), so it doesn't seem unlikely that some firmware update might give improved performance in this area, like Panasonic did with the GH5.

Yes - it's not the first time it has been suggested. Maybe AFC prioritises smoothness, which is great for video, but not great for stills if you are always a fraction of a second behind the action. I would like a Nikon that lets me ditch the DSLR for all stills photography as well as video. Let's hope they are still working on the firmware.

Most of the quirks you list are possibly software issues rather than hardware limitations, so let's hope that this is the programmers running out of time, as you might expect with a first model, and that a firmware update might sort some of it out.

Interpret footage is a change you can do to a whole clip when you import it, so that it is automatically playing in slow-mo when you put it in the timeline. Retiming is more useful when you chop a clip up and play some bits at different speeds. So it is a matter of working practice - you can produce an identical looking result either way.

40% is the correct slowdown from 60 on a 24 fps timeline, otherwise you will get a mis-match in frames which will certainly appear jittery. In Premiere if you choose to slow down by a number that is not a perfect multiple, you can set Time Interpolation to "Optical Flow" in the Clip Speed dialogue. This will intelligently generate frames in between your actual frames to create smooth movement. It takes longer to render, and can occasionally create visual glitches, but is a handy option; it can even let you take your original footage down to maybe half speed again

If you know in advance that you are going to slow down to 24p then 180 degree will give you the "correct" amount of blur for whatever your original frame rate. The problem comes if you decide to use your footage at actual speed say 60p footage on a 30p timeline by dropping half the frames. It will look a bit choppy as your 1/120 shutter is now the equivalent of a 90 degree shutter. After Effects has slightly more sophisticated tools for retiming footage, if you want to ramp it up and down, and recreate "correct" motion blur in post (see Pixel Motion Blur) In Premiere you can just send a single clip to After Effects, retime it, apply effects and still render it within your Premiere timeline. If you are just editing in Premiere and getting creative with retiming, you will probably have to put up with some choppiness.

That's one of the attractions of the Swiss Army Knife approach of the Nikon. You can stick the same camera in small bag for spontaneous moments at unprecedented quality, but the same body can also be used in the studio for shooting 10 bit log for green screen, with a recorder and audio extras.

I think it would be unwise to rely on third party lenses to be up to the performance of recent Nikon G series lenses when adapted, as they were reverse engineered to work with Nikon DSLRs in the first place, and there have certainly been some problems. Older lenses may not even have updatable firmware.

It may not just be the speed but whether the focus snaps or eases in - imagine pulling focus over a distance - you don't turn at constant speed, you start slow, turn fast in the middle then, slow to a stop. The Nikon moves look to me like they have that "natural" ease-in, which is probably more difficult to achieve than snapping in. It is also less prone to over-shooting, which is another visual annoyance.

Focus seems to hold reasonably well - given unpredictable movements and shallow DOF. Stabilisation OK, considering - was this just hand held? Enough stabilisation to hide any rolling shutter wierdness which is the main thing. Which lens? A nice image. Kipon are supposed to be producing AF adaptors for EF lenses and a motorised AF adaptor for MF lenses. Whether either of these are relevant to video shooting remains to be seen.