Sekhar

Thanks Mercer. Believe it or not, the zoom you're seeing with the NX500 shots is at the wide end (@70 on the Canon 70-200 L lens)! And even that I scaled down to 50% in post because I wanted to cover everyone. Also, shooting wide (less need to pull focus) and placing both cameras close helps when shooting as a one-man crew. And yeah, a documentary would be good; I need to find an interesting topic.

Also consider NX500. IMO it produces great 4K video that's pretty close to that of NX1. I just did a two-camera shoot with it and the two videos were virtually indistinguishable with a few tweaks. It's currently on a big Black Friday sale from Samsung off $300 from $799.99 to $499.99. One aspect with NX500 you need to know is that it shoots in crop mode that makes wide shots a bit hard, but it can be huge advantage when shooting tight because you get free ultra zoom. I made multiple posts on this (e.g., see NX500 as teleconverter), search these forums and you'll find these and a lot of other posts on the camera.

Folks, I had a chance to cover a stage event last Sat and used NX1 and NX500 for a two-camera shoot. Both were at DCI 24p, with NX1/Samsung 16-50 covering the whole stage and NX500/Canon 70-200 the center. Thought you might be interested in how these two gems capture the image and how much flexibility 4K gives in reframing when outputting in 1080p. Comments/critiques welcome.

I'm sure there are folks who resort to various tricks/gimmicks like fancy emulations to make up for not knowing how to tell a story. But those who do know use looks to serve their creative intent. E.g., I'd think a science fiction like The Martian or war and desert films will want to get the gritty look with ultra sharp (and possibly low shutter angle) imagery that might not work for say a feel-good romance. So, it's not all bogus.

Yes, it's the sleep that's doing it, thanks. I tested it at the event yesterday and confirmed that to be the case. Looks like it resets focus to infinity. Just to be sure I ended up manually focusing every time I restarted the record. Pretty big gotcha folks if you do a lot of off/on at events.

Thanks Tupp, my issue is not with achieving focus: what I get with the NX1 assists (zoom and peaking) is excellent and tack sharp. The problem is that if I stop the recording and resume later, the focus is off even though I didn't touch anything else. It doesn't happen every time, so I'm baffled. I believe this has something to do with the lens being focus-by-wire and not true MF, so somehow the camera is resetting on occasion. Sadly, NX1 is like an eccentric genius, and it does have its bizarre moments.

Folks, I've been having random (and extremely costly) focus issues with NX1. Basically, it happens when I focus manually with my 16-50 S (manual switch set on the lens), stop, and turn recording on again later. Usually the focus remains where I set, but once in a while - and this is what I'm trying to understand - everything turns fuzzy. I have an important shoot this evening, where I need to keep turning the recording on/off, so I'd appreciate if you could help on this. I'm so scared of this that I'm thinking of giving up manual focus completely and using auto-focus in single shot mode.

Ah, OK. We all have our favorites. My experience with Bogen/Manfrotto hasn't been as good, unfortunately: my Manfrotto 755B (MDeVe) broke after relatively light usage with one of its leg locks suddenly cracking. Really bizarre. I can only hope it is rare. Anyway, good luck in your search, and do post your findings back here.

I don't see why you need Bogen legs, I regularly use the Manfrotto 128RC with my Sirui 025X without problems. Anyway, I put together a small comparison some time back when I was shopping for a travel tripod, you might find that and the thread in general (several folks made some good suggestions too) useful.

Apologies, what I have is 128RC, not 700RC2, which I believe is what you wanted. In any case, there is no way you're going to get as smooth a pan on a monopod as you'd get with good tripod legs, so I would go with nothing or a head that's really light. Did you also look at the tripods that can also double as a monopod? BTW, there are ultra light tripods out there if your concern is weight. I have the Sirui 025X carbon travel tripod, and it is surprisingly steady in spite of having ultra-thin legs and a 5-section design. It's 1.7 lb (with the head) and they claim it supports 13.2 lb, which I don't think any other tripod can match.

Wait, when you said the fluid pan was butter smooth, you were referring to this Manfrotto head? I have the 700RC, it's pretty good, probably a decent trade-off in terms of weight and quality. I never used a monopod, but why do you even need a head? Can't you just turn it on the foot (especially on hard/flat surfaces) to do a pan?

Thanks! If anyone else has used these LUTs, please post results. I'm trying to shortlist a few to use regularly, and I'm sure it'll help others as well. For some reason, I'm not getting the look predicted by the preview images Benjamin provided for the different LUTs, so the only way to assess them seems to be through actual usage.

If you're talking about the strange patterns on the walls each time the clip changes, they're from YouTube not being able to handle the dissolves (I used dissolve at each shot change). There's no issue on the original uploaded video. Yeah, and a lot of color/eye candy in most Indian events, especially weddings...probably why Indian weddings make good demo reel material, whether for videographers or camera makers. I struggled to pick an LUT that doesn't mute the colors too much because that's the coolest aspect in these events. BTW, I am required by California law to shoot everything my wife is in (that is the law in all cultures!). She's in this video as well as the fashion show I posted earlier (she's on the thumbnails on both videos, on the left here). But organizers in one event liked my work so much they gave me a paid gig to cover the event this year, so you never know.

Folks, thanks to EOSHD, I discovered Benjamin's awesome LUT pack. Today I tried one of his LUTs (this is the first time I'm using an LUT for grading) and thought I'd share the result in case you're interested in getting/using his pack. I shot this with NX1 in 4K 24p with DR gamma, -10 sharpness, and -5 contrast; edited as 4K; and resized to 1080p using some scaling/zooming to get the framing I wanted. After some basic color correcting, mostly to match the colors, I applied Benjamin's LUT 9090 to prep for LUT and then used 9240. All this was in SpeedGrade, and while the process was pretty straightforward, for some reason it was dog slow on SpeedGrade to see the results (anyone has an idea why?), so could only experiment with a few LUTs (that really is the hard part IMO, finding the right LUT).

Looks great, love the colors. I also liked the way you did the voice-over and focus. The music didn't quite work for me though. Also, I'm not sure about your goal, but if you wanted to use this as a bio/promo video, perhaps you should add (even begin with) your best pictures, we don't see much of your work. Overall, great job.

Sandro, Rocky Mountains is just a wrapper, it doesn't convert anything: it simply presents a convenient interface to gather what to needs to be done and then calls FFmpeg under the covers. Since it's FFmpeg doing the conversion, the time will be the same whether you call FFmpeg through Rocky Mountains or directly call it as I do. I see little benefit to using Rocky Mountains (or other wrappers) and find it much more convenient to directly use FFmpeg since it's a single step: drag all the files onto the FFmpeg icon, done.

Yes, what we need is something that survives a supernova, which as we know film does.

Sure, whatever.

Come on, you know what I mean. A 90 minute film has 129,600 frames at 24fps, and this is not counting the footage that's discarded from the final cut. Even if you scan 12 frames in shot, we're talking 10,800 scans. Certainly not an option to do in-house, meaning extra effort and potential $$$ for engaging high end scanners. Even if you can find some other counter examples to what I'm saying, the point remains that this is a huge burden for indie filmmakers and bears absolutely no comparison to any digital format, including the much maligned H.265. You aren't opposed to digital or H.265 per se, so my address is more to the film enthusiasts and NX1/H.265 detractors.

Right, messing with baths/tanks developing film and then painstakingly scanning one frame at a time is no problem. But letting a tool automatically convert H.265 to ProRes, now that's unacceptable! Not saying you feel that way, Mattias, but I've seen countless whining about H.265 as a deal-breaker "weakness" of NX1, and I had to say it.

You can use FFmpeg, it's free and works great. It has a simple command line, like to convert H.265 to ProRes, you just say: ffmpeg -i foo.mp4 -vcodec prores foo.mov. I wrote a simple batch file on Windows 10 that I drag all the files onto, and it converts them in one shot. Real easy. If you prefer a UI, you can use wrappers like Rocky Mountains, but it's still FFmpeg underneath.

Looks great, has a nice stylized feel.

IMO a lot of the color issues we see with Sony footage is due to indiscriminate and improper use of log. Folks seem to use log like it's a badge of honor, for every single situation and as a substitute for proper lighting, and as we know log and 8 bit is not a happy combination. A good way to assess and compare say an a7sII color would be to shoot without log, and I think it will also behave well in post shot that way.

Wait, I thought MatthewP pretty much debunked the "1Dc sees better color than NX1" conclusion in the shootout thread with his grade comparisons (see Page 3)? That would discredit the premise of this new article about technical vs. artistic view of color and 1Dc being better than NX1 that way. I.e., if you have good color info (technically speaking), you should always be able to tweak the image to fit your artistic preferences.

Never saw this before on any video I shot with 0-255 at 24p (both 4096 and 3840). I'm guessing your issue is due to the combination of 16-235 (limiting space for the fine level variations) and 30p (stressing the codec). I agree, the result is quite hideous, definitely needs fixing.