seanstiller

I've been hounding some XC15 users on Vimeo and also called a local shop here that has sold a bunch of XC15's and no one seems to have even heard of these issues, so that's a good sign.

Hi Tom

I recall some talk about the W58 actually producing more bokeh at the telephoto end of the XC15 lens? If so, are you able to confirm this? Any sample images?

Thanks so much! Really appreciate your input in other threads. Hoping to pick up an XC15 soon.

Sean

Hi guys

I've been following this thread with a lot of interest. I've got a C300mkii and hoping to use the XC15 as a b-cam. Some of the footage posted is quite stellar!

I'm not sure if it was fully determined to what extent the XC15 suffers the same problems as the XC10. Seems like people have chalked it up to a camera by camera situation.

Are there any other XC15 owners here who can attest, either way, to similar ghosting/noise reduction problems?

Thanks in advance!

Sean

1 hour ago, Don Kotlos said:

Most often video shot with high gain looks bad not because of the noise at the pixel level but because of the shitty noise reduction that is applied in camera. So while internal recording might have less noise because of heavy noise reduction, the RAW files will still look better because the noise is at the pixel level and "organic" (random) and not the ugly macroblocks that internal codecs with low bitrates produce. Moreover, the noise reduction that you can apply on the RAW file will be far far better than any internal noise reduction any video camera has. In short, external recording will indeed help make the footage look better. I don't know with FS5 but with the BMPCC there was at least 1 stop advantage relative to the prores footage. 

Now, if you want 1080p at the end you have 2 options:

shoot at 4K recorded externaly and downsample after you apply noise reduction in post.

shoot at 1080p and use a cheaper external recorder such as the atomos ninja star. 

Additionally, for if large DoF is not necessary, you can get a speedbooster to gain another stop right there. 

Also I don't know what footage you saw, but after the recent firmware update there are reports of better quality with high gain (https://vimeo.com/149383051)

I bet Andrew will soon have more information on the low light abilities of FS5 with the external recorder  

 

Thanks for the thoughts Don, that makes sense. I wonder if that might be the case in this situation. The culprit of all that terrible macro blocking was internal noise reduction I believe. Although it's clearly been improved I wonder if it could still be made better with external recording. I guess someone will need to test!

Thanks for the reply Noah! It's a real shame. The FS5 is pretty much everything I need, and I've seen a handful of good footage to know Sony colour can be handled well with enough patience. The low-light though, that's pretty well a deal breaker.

My apologies if this question has been addressed in another thread. I'm particularly curious about this in the context of Firmware 1.11 addressing macro blocking/tearing.

From what I've seen (to be fair most of the footage is probably pre 1.11) the FS5 struggles past ISO 3200 in darkly lit situations. There's one clip floating around filmed at night at a train station and even at ISO 3200 it looks quite terrible to my eye.

I'm wondering if an external recorder would help address the issue of low-light situations? I'm looking at the PIX-E5 because of its size, so I suppose thinking about ProRes specifically. I'm also not too interested in 4K at the moment, so 1080p footage in particular.

Has anyone had experience with this and noticed an improvement?

If this is the case I'm considering ditching the LCD and recording exclusively (or most of the time anyways) to the PIX-E5.

Thanks!

Sean