tellure

Yeah this is definitely the future of stabilization, it's been working great on the GoPro's (Hypersmooth) for a couple years now. I'd also love if we could shoot in slightly higher resolution so the stabilized & cropped image was still 4K. 5K anyone?

The A7S3 has lots to like but I'm not sure if I'll be upgrading just yet. Personally I'm hoping we get a 24MP A74 that does 4K 60 (with 6K downsampling for more sharpness) and allows for the 1.5x APSC crop at full 4K. I use that APSC punch-in a lot on my A9 and would easily give up 120fps for it (60fps is still 2.5x slow-mo at 24fps playback which is pretty good for most purposes). Kind of bummed the color is not sorted yet.. but maybe EOS HD Pro Color can improve things.

Jeeze, still no 4k60p. Anyone know if they at least added picture profiles this time?

I just subscribed to HBO through Amazon to see what the quality difference was like. I went back and watched a bit of the much-maligned Episode 3 and it looked way, way better. HBO through Amazon looks like true 1080p at a good bitrate (for streaming). HBO Go / Now still looks like upscaled 720p with terrible compression artifacts. This is watching from Los Angeles, BTW.

@BasiliskFilm That would be true if we were only using the center 50% of the sensor here. But in this proposed feature we are still capturing an 8K image from the entire sensor, and cropping it during the encoding process. So the image circle projected on the sensor and sensor size remain the same. It's literally the same as taking a full-frame 8K photo and then cropping it in post, which I'm guessing you'd agree wouldn't require any multiplication of aperture because the depth of field is already baked into the original full-frame 8K photo.

I shot a few tests last weekend on the A9 to test object tracking in video with the new firmware and it was really impressive. I was shooting my wife at ~35mm f/2.8 from a few feet away up to less than half a foot, so fairly shallow DOF. She was moving forward and back, left and right, and the tracking was keeping her almost perfectly in focus the whole time. Only when she moved almost out of the frame did it start to lose her, but regained focus in less than a second. I'm excited to try using this in some more real-world situations like on a gimbal, but so far it looks to be what I've always wanted - awesomely accurate tracking AF with touch-focus. Huge kudos to Sony for adding this in a firmware update. Now if they would only add picture profiles so we could get an EOS HD color profile on the A9...

@Mokara I agree digital zoom always compromises image quality, but we're not talking about a digital zoom here, which takes a fixed sensor readout and up-res's the image via interpolation. We're talking about cropping an 8K sensor at variable sizes until you get down to 4K at the maximum crop (2x zoom). So the final readout at maximum zoom would still be native 4K. It's possible that downsampling at all the varying sizes in between 8K and 4K could introduce artifacts though.. just like downsampling an image in photoshop by 46%, for example, is never as clean as 50% or any multiples of 2. @BasiliskFilm I had that same thought and I'm happy to be proven wrong here since I sat out the aperture equivalence wars but I don't think it applies here. As I understand it, aperture equivalence should be calculated when comparing sensors of different sizes with equivalent framing. But here we're talking about one sensor size - 8K - just cropped down to varying sizes and downsampled to 4K for the final output. Think of it this way - imagine you took a series of 8K photos of a fencepost at 50mm f/1.4 and stitched them together into a time-lapse video. There's lots of creamy bokeh in the background since you're shooting at f/1.4. Because the final output of your video is 4K you have lots of room to crop in post. So you add some zooms in your thrilling fencepost video to get more detail by cropping the image. In the final seconds of the video you end at a 2x zoom, and now the *framing* (and only the framing) of the fencepost photo is the same as it would have looked like with a 100mm lens. All that creamy f/1.4 bokeh in the original shot is completely unchanged since the contents of the original 8K photo are unchanged, it's just been cropped. Unlike regular aperture equivalence calculations where the image being compared is being projected on different sensor sizes, in this (wishlist) feature the image projection is always over the whole 8K sensor. Internally the camera would be cropping and downsampling the image before encoding it into the 4K video stream. Hope that makese sense, but again happy to be proven wrong, I'm not an expert on the hotly debated topic of equivalence.

Cool, thanks for the info! That JVC feature is exactly what I'm after. Now they just need to get it in an 8K sensor outputting to 4K, as opposed to a 4K sensor outputting to 1080p :). Still really promising that it's been done. Makes me hopeful it'll eventually make its way to the 8K cams. And they call it "prime zoom" no less. The appeal of zooming with a prime seems pretty strong.

A lot of us don't need more resolution at this point. The idea of 8K sensors seems appealing not for resolution but for other potential features, like even better low light performance, as Andrew recently wrote about. But what if your 8K sensor could zoom (by cropping) up to 2x, without any loss of quality, while outputting a 4K signal? Right now many of us love that we can punch into APS-C from full-frame for an extra 1.5x zoom while still getting native 4K. An 8K sensor could allow us to get to 2x while still getting full 4K resolution at the long end of the zoom. Your expensive 24mm 1.4 prime could become a 24-48mm 1.4 (a lens which doesn't exist in full frame). But to make this a really killer feature the zoom needs to be realtime. Right now we have to stop recording to switch between full-frame and APS-C. What if you could zoom while recording? What if you could zoom in small increments, and control that zoom using any re-mappable dial on your camera, or even use your manual focus ring if you were using AF-C? But wait, why not just shoot everything at 8K and then crop in post? Composition, of course. Being able to make those framing decisions in realtime and see it on the screen would be great, just like having a native zoom lens allows for more composition choices on the fly. And of course you wouldn't need to store those larger 8K files. Taking the functionality even further, if 8K sensors could do this cropping in realtime then it could even allow for a power-zoom feature - e.g. the ability to set a zoom rate and then do a slow crawl-in or even a smash-zoom in/out. Sony's Clear Image Zoom is the closest thing we have to this right now, but of course it's not cropping, it's doing interpolation to give us an up-res'ed image from the same sensor area. It's also sorely lacking in usability (can't assign it to any wheels or dials, and it only zooms in stepped 0.1x increments). Worse yet, all the focus functions are disabled when CIZ active, so you lose the ability to set a specific focus point, change the focus point, or use object tracking. Which is a shame because the quality is actually pretty decent, as shown below. I imagine the processing horsepower needed to do a realtime crop smoothly across an 8K sensor is probably pretty huge, and I don't expect this kind of feature in the first or maybe even the second generation of 8K sensors but it seems like something that could happen eventually. Given how much I use the 1.5x APS-C crop now I would use this feature a ton.

Since the environment seems like the biggest determining factor for getting great shots here (shooting a fast-moving subject in a natural environment) I would suggest focusing on cameras and gear that work best for those kinds of shoots, like Snowbro recommended. BTM_pix posted this info about the Wiral LITE wire rig that looks like it would be great for mountain biking: I recently bought a GoPro Hero 7 black and would definitely recommend it for the new hypersmooth stabilization (check out the many YouTube vids / comparisons) if you're doing any POV stuff or ride-along shots.

Just theorizing here since I don't know a ton about sensor design but if you have a per-pixel ADC then could you, for example, expose for the blown-out windows in an indoor shot and then boost the gain only on the darker pixels to get the equivalent of a bracketed HDR shot?

Ah, thanks. That does sound pretty awesome.

For us laypersons can you elaborate on what benefits this brings? Does this get us per-pixel HDR?

Uhh yeah but that's a Micro-4/3rds sensor. Big difference to doing 4K 120p in full frame, which is what I was predicting within 5 years. Sorry that wasn't clear. This is a pretty interesting concept.. a 360 cam on a stand / pole that you can throw up in a few locations to get lots of coverage does sound pretty good for events. What if you could mount it on a roomba-style robot base to get some motion in those shots? :). That Insta360 Titan already has WIFI video preview, seems like it would be pretty great for events to be able to control several of these remotely. With respect to cropping into the 360 cam footage, is there any issue cropping into the side of the frame, wish all that distortion from the fisheye lens?

Your description of the automatic exposure control using built-in variable ND is exactly how the Auto ND feature on the Sony FS5 works as far as I know (video). I would definitely love to have that feature in a smaller body. Fiddling with screw-on variable ND's to get the shutter speed where I want it is always a hassle and just takes time away from the creative aspects. I agree with you about the face tracking and shot analysis features to help mainstream consumers get into editing. In the same way that AI neural nets are taught what type of content to look for in image processing you could probably teach them what kind of shot types are attractive to the YouTube audience and then have it use that to rate a user's raw footage, then assemble a rough cut like you suggest.