BTM_Pix

I've been asked by Private Message regarding using the higher ISO's in recording.

Ordinarily, the extended ISOs are for stills only but there is a way round it for G7 owners at least.

On the GX80 it is always clamped at 6400 irrespective, so when you go into video mode it will always revert to this setting if you have an ISO set above that.

On the G7 however, if I instigate the recording with my controller then I can then change it beyond 6400 and it will accept it.

I have a trick with the hardware controller so that when you put it in record it re-sends the currently set ISO so if you have it on 12800 on the controller it will record a tiny fragment at 6400 but then switch to the 12800

If you want to try this manually you can by just putting your G7 in record at 6400 and sending the higher ISO command form a browser.

My feeling is that this will probably work for other cameras too (except the GX80 where it definitely doesn't) so if you can test it and let people know that would be great.

 

 

With regard to asking questions by Private Message - and please do not take this the wrong way as I'm really pleased this has sparked so much interest - but can I just ask that people put them in here instead, as to me this should very much be a community project so everyone will benefit from the shared information and there is a much broader range of model variants represented here that people can share the testing on as well.

Ta

If you get one of these you can then use Sony NP batteries for both.

It has a tripod thread, a bracket and a velcro strap so it has a few different mounting options.

Cheapest way to do both I think 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01EFSUK98?psc=1

Its versatile enough to be used to power a B4 zoom if, like I was here, you are ever curious enough to put one on an MFT mount camera

 

I won't know for sure until I've seen the files but for what its worth this is my current stretch rating for this

Still better chance than the bit rate stuff though

51 minutes ago, Anaconda_ said:

Over on this topic, there's been some matching to RED going on, but no settings/'hacks' have been revealed just yet: 

 

It will just be settings rather than a hack (unless you have the GX80 where it will use the current one to get Cinelike on to it)

Needs a lot more testing yet (some of which will have to be automated so there's more code to be written today to do that) so its a bit away from being revealed just yet.

 

13 minutes ago, mercer said:

 

Either way it's really freaking cool and could work in my film. How would one go about digitizing it?

Its got a composite out so any old usb capture device like this will do it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ex-Pro-Grabber-Editor-capture-Windows/dp/B001HB9C1O/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1497815270&sr=8-2-spons&keywords=video+capture&psc=1

1 minute ago, tupp said:

I love the look of the Fisher-Price Pixelvision!:

 

@BTM_Pix:   If they are selling at 99 cents, I'll take a dozen!

I reckon NASA have bought them all to fake another landing somewhere

9 minutes ago, mercer said:

Btw speaking of fashion @BTM_Pix I was working in NYC while the NY Fashion Show was running and I was talking to a photographer at my hotel who was there covering the show.

So of course I asked him "Canon or Nikon?" Being a video hobbyist and unfamiliar with the professional photography world, I was initially surprised by his reply... "Who cares about the camera, they're all good enough and cheap enough, it's the lens investments that dictate your body choice."

I know I droned on about it regard the Sony A9 but its a classic example of what he's talking about.

They just don't have the lenses for the task they're trying to push it at so it could do a gazillion frames a second at a trillion ISO and they're still going to get the reaction of "That's nice...now where is your 400 f2.8 then?". Same for Fuji as well, even though I enthuse about it. I mean, I am actually using them for pro sport work but only within certain limits and I've still got to be hawking a 400 f2.8 with a Nikon on the end of it around with me.

Funny thing, actually, is that I was shooting what could be described as quite a big football match a couple of weeks ago (TV audience of 350 million people) and thought for sure that someone amongst us would have been shooting with the A9 as Sony would've handed a few out to get it into this particular game but there wasn't a single one. In fact, out of the 140ish of us covering it, the only one not exclusively Nikon or Canon for the game was me! A few people use mirrorless cameras for build up pictures and shots of the crowd and so on but not for the actual match because there just isn't the lenses.

During the warm up session, I handed the X-T2 with the 50-140 f2.8 on it to one of my old mates who was shooting the game as well for him to have a go.

"Fucking hell...this is actually a contender isn't it?" he said and then enthused for a few minutes about how fast it was and the image quality.

And then......

"Where's the 400 f2.8?"

Oh.

4 minutes ago, mercer said:

A couple Arri Classics are selling on eBay for $10 grand... they may make a more suitable stills camera for this year's Tour or French Open.

There are a couple of Fisher Price ones on there for 99 cents that would be more suitable than the RED was.

45 minutes ago, mercer said:

I assume the bottom grab is from the GX85? Even still it's pretty darn close. Can you turn my iPhone into an Alexa Mini?

It is indeed.

Its a bit unfair on the GX85 to be honest because, as I suspected might happen with this prodder, there are some presumptions we make over its settings that might not be doing it any favours if all we're doing is correcting them with the exact inverse settings in post. And from the tweaks I was making in FCPX, I think thats exactly the case here as I was putting things in that I'd taken out in the profile so I think it can be done better.

Which obviously I'll be trying to do.

Iphone to Alexa is easy. Just wait about five years !

Obviously once you have it with roughly the same signature as the RED Film it will follow this through when you add FilmConvert etc and pick the RED Film preset. 

 

EDIT - 

 

1 minute ago, mercer said:

@BTM_Pix that is a pretty cool test. So just to be clear, you found footage online from posh camera, or you have said posh camera?

If it's the former, wouldn't possible parameters cloud your test? If it's the latter, why are you mucking about with a GX85?

Yes, I do have said camera (a RED Epic MX to be precise) so it was a completely flat test of the Film profile.

Long story about why I've got one of these but as soon as it became apparent it was useless for stills extraction they were pushing it for I did a sub-lease deal for it with a mate of mine and I've only just recently been reunited with it. I shot one event with it (mind you it was the Tour de France so it counts as 27 events I suppose) but after three or four stages it ended up being used the most expensive wide angle remote stills camera in the world as it was just way too cumbersome to use. OK for fashion I suppose but useless for sports.

 

So I've been playing with my new prodding device and....

Its interesting.

What I did was record a clip of a colour chart from lets call it a well known brand of camera that is named after a primary colour and then put the same lens that was on that camera on to a GX85 and shot it again.

Both clips were recorded onto a Ninja Inferno.

What I was doing though was monitoring the recorded clip of the posh camera on the Ninja Inferno with the scope overlay on and then switching to the input to look at the GX85 and using the prodder to manipulate the parameters live and try and replicate the signature of the recording of the posh camera. I then tweaked a few things in FCPX to match a  bit closer with the purpose of then taking those changes back to put them in the profile of the GX85 to match it better straight out of the camera.

One of these images is the film log setting from the posh camera and the other one is the GX85.

There are definitely challenges regarding noise with doing this on the cheaper camera so its obvious which is which but I've got some ideas about that.

Tweaking the values and getting instant feedback was very productive and I think this may be the start of an interesting journey.

10 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I have upgraded your forum profile to a Super Member so you can edit your original post and generally have mod-like access to the forum.

Thanks for all your efforts so far on the project.

Cheers. 

If you see someone wandering around Saturn or MediMarkt next week with wires coming out of his sleeve seemingly idly demoing Panasonic and Sony cameras make sure you come and say hi

And just to stress that the purpose of this particular prodder is to help develop colour profiles rather than being an end thing in itself, in case you thought I was advocating twiddling around like Kraftwerk while you're recording video.

Though having said that, I think that there is a place for a similar type of control surface (one with faders as well as pots and a few switches) to operate the cameras in terms of the rest of its functionality like shutter, iris and focus. In that way, the colour profile function could just be switched into a second layer and be permanently available.

Should also mention that you will be able to save a lot more than the one custom profile that Panasonic offers you with this system so once you have all of these parameters as you like them then you can save the whole snapshot for instant recall via buttons on the controller.

If this gets any traction you'll also be able to easily share them with each other too to load on to your own cameras.

A quick video demo of the new prodder in action.

All controls are real time with feedback of the parameters on the LCD screen.

The video shows a recording of the G7 being controlled (and of it being controlled as the changes are live when its recording) but will obviously work with the other Lumix cameras.

Parameters controlled are :

 

Profile type (Standard, cinelike D etc)

Contrast

Noise Reduction

Sharpness

Saturation Hue

and ISO so you can see any effect changes that may or may not occur with your current settings at different ISOs

 

Now there may be no bugs in the software but there certainly was in the video. A real life bug crawling across the Colour Checker!

 

47 minutes ago, LippyLee said:

I actually use the property of equality between tele-normal and wide-normal to determine the current focusing distance. I have not tried to deliberately switch between normal and fast modes, though I believe that their focus steps do not share a common denominator so we can definitely get between the cracks that way. Another way is for a user to turn the focusing ring so this generates a non squared-off value, for example he could reach 101,102,103....119,120 depending on luck. Requesting a tele or wide normal after that point will mean that all focus steps will not be similar to their squared-off values.

Certainly, I guess that panasonic gave lesser focus steps at the wide end because its much easier to focus/ the DOF would more than cover up for it. And even the coarse steps in some lenses would be more than sufficient for the focus pulling portion of your camera controller.

As for focus breathing on lenses, the 25mm panasonic lens has a ridiculous 20% scale from near to infinity (non scientific test, a guesstimation when playing with premiere footage).

 

And if you think the focus is a crap shoot, wait til you try and add the zoom control into the equation.

 

38 minutes ago, LippyLee said:

Meticulous is too little to describe the detail in which you explored this. I feel silly that I did not look at the get-info page for lenses yet.

Yes, by focus steps I am trying to describe the amount of focus positions there are within the 0-1024 range after "squaring-off" the focal distance against closest focusing distance or farthest focusing distance.

For example in the 14-42mm kit lens the focus steps at 14mm (wide-normal) are separated by 11-15 focus bits and at 42mm the focus steps are separated by 6 focus bits. In the 25mm f1.7 the focus steps are separated by 3-4 bits. I realize that focus bits are just virtual figures and probably do have a direct correspondence with true focal distance.

While trying to design a focus ramping time lapse script, I realized that I wanted the true number of focus steps between two points so that I could decide how often to shift focus a step back or forth (or whether to shift focus for more than a step per shot).

I agree that we cannot reach the precise focusing step/bit using the four functions due to the limitations of the wifi requests and that degree of correspondence between a move on a physical control and the rate of transition is important.  

(I am going back to try out more scripts, because I have lots more to learn about this wifi system and posting anything else here would be talking out of my ass!)

What I think might be interesting is if you deliberately drive it to the boundary of where there are cracks between the positions, so between 101 and 120 for example on the 14-42 there is a nice bit of space to work in.

If you drive it to 120 and then give it one more tele_slow command and see if it goes to 119 or does it go directly down to its next boundary point of 101.

Similarly if you drive it deliberately into the cracks with a tele_fast or tele_slow will it sit at that point or round itself up or down.

For stills I can see an issue with falling into the cracks depending on your interval but I think in terms of motion for a fader that a user wants to go from position A at the top of the throw to position B at the bottom under manual control then there might be more latitude to get away with it. 

I think that the lenses themselves optically might be a bigger hurdle to a really nice pull (especially with the breathing and the unknown sneaky correctional stuff that often foes on under the hood with these cameras) than the process.

Well, that'll be my excuse anyway

17 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

T You're not making this stuff for old farts like me!

 

Its being made by old farts like me

Its largely philosophical though for these MFT lenses as even when they're in manual mode they're still fly by wire but I get your point entirely.

7 minutes ago, robbino said:

Do you mind me asking what you using to interface the controller to the camera BTM_Pix?  I have a midi controller which I was going to get rid off, but this looks like fun.

I'm currently running everything on a Pi so thats what runs my software that actually communicates by wifi to the camera.

By doing it this way I'm then able to utilise different off the shelf hardware to be the user interface.

In this instance the midi controller is plugged into the USB port of the Pi and I then catch and scale its messages as the input to my software.

It also means I can use different hardware for different purposes, so the gamepad controller for camera control etc.and then map different ones quickly to use those instead.

Such as the really neat bluetooth controller that I'll show you next week that will probably become the definitive one for camera control.

But also means that if someone wanted a different way of controlling it - such as this bluetooth keypad for example - where they can put functions on different keys because they preferred it to using a gamepad then its easy to incorporate.

 

6 hours ago, LippyLee said:

Hi BTM_Pix, love your work with the focus controller!

Would you be doing lens profiling/setup for lenses for this focus racking system? I've done some minor research into how many possible focus steps there are per lens and I found that it varies between lenses and even among different focal lengths on the same zoom lens.

I would believe this will affect the duration of a focus pull depending on how the focus racking code is done.

If you've already considered this, perhaps we could request fellow forumers to share their lens focus step data so that there is a more complete picture as to how focus step varies.

Here is the python file that I wrote for finding lens data: https://github.com/lippyt/lumixlib/blob/master/lensdata.py

Thanks

To be honest, the accuracy of the lens control and what you can do with it is always going to be varying degrees of fudge without the command to directly return it to one of the 0-1024 positions.

I presume by profiling for focus steps you're referring to how many actual focus positions there are hiding within the 0-1024 range?

With some of the lenses it feels like there are only about 6!

I don't have a big range of native MFT lenses (and all of them are the cheap ones!) but I was wondering if requesting a dump from them using http://192.168.54.1/cam.cgi?mode=getinfo&type=lens might offer up an automated answer to what you're after.

This is the output for what its worth

 

Olympus 45 1.8

ok,2304/256,434/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,45,45,on,128/1024,on

 

Panasonic 20 1.7

ok,2048/256,392/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,20,20,on,128/1024,on

 

Panasonic 12-32 3.5 5.6

12 

ok,2304/256,925/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,32,12,on,128/1024,on

18

ok,2304/256,1062/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,32,12,on,128/1024,on

32

ok,2304/256,1273/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,32,12,on,128/1024,on

 

Panasonic 14 2.5

ok,2304/256,677/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,14,14,on,128/1024,on

 

Panasonic 45-200 4.5 5.6

@45

ok,2304/256,1024/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,200,45,on,128/1024,on

@100

ok,2304/256,1138/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,200,45,on,128/1024,on

@200

ok,2304/256,1273/256,3584/256,1195/256,0,off,200,45,on,128/1024,on

I can make a guesstimate of what each of those parameters are (and you can see that the third one x/256 is current focal length as it varies within the zoom etc) and unfortunately the answer you're after isn't in there. 

Obviously, if you manually put the lens at infinity and try and nudge it one more place with http://192.168.54.1/cam.cgi?mode=camctrl&type=focus&value=tele-normal

It will return

ok,0,1024

So you know that its correctly hit 0 and similarly if you put it at minimum distance and tell it go one step wider it will return

ok,1024,1024

And that obviously doesn't change per lens so at least thats consistent!

In terms of creating something functional from what we have to play with, whilst it would be desirable to hit exact points, the four focus functions that we have at our disposal can be massaged into doing something useful using methods like your comparison routine to return to a specific point.

The key to making it a useful practical function though is being in control of the entire process.

If we are driving the focus ourselves using a stick or fader then we have constant feedback of which of the 0-1024 values it is currently at so this can make the profiling unnecessary as we always know this is a 'legal' value because the user has chosen it based on the image being in focus therefore it must be an actual focus point the lens is capable of. And if we now that then, of course, we should be able to make it return to it.

The transition between two such points is something that, again, if we are in charge of the whole process - i.e. the user has focused using our focus controller and will be doing a physical pull from A to B with our controller (particularly a fader with fixed end points) - then we can scale it to at least make it a consistent experience. By consistent I mean, the rate at which they move the fader from one end to the other is controlling the rate of transition irrespective of how many or few actual focus points the lens is capable of resolving. Don't get me wrong, it will always be a fudge of sorts but if we are up against the limitations of the lens in terms of how coarse the transition is then it would be like that anyway if they did it manually. 

The proof is in the testing I suppose to see how smooth or not it is with each lens (and I'm not ignoring some inherent glitchiness caused by the way we're communicating with the camera either) and then the challenge is to try and mitigate it and smooth it out with different scaling techniques.

Did you get the SD Q or H version @Mattias Burling ?

I'm curious about what lenses you're using with it.

And whether you bought it open box as well obviously

6 hours ago, jonpais said:

So you can change several parameters simultaneously and view the results live... In camera, you'd have to stop recording, dive into the menu, and you are only able to change one at a time. Could it also adjust curves? 

Yes, all simultaneously. 

I'll sort a video of it in operation later on.

Curves are still under development....

13 hours ago, jonpais said:

I like where you're going with this! i don't think it's as complicated as all that though. For picture profile, I'd choose the one with the greatest dynamic range, for sharpening, as sharp as possible in camera without ringing or haloing, and so on. But I still think everyone should do their own testing to see what works best for them, and if you've got an idea to make that easier...

It lives !

 

2 hours ago, Grimor said:

Knobs!!!!

Yes

21 minutes ago, robbino said:

Novation midi controller to alter settings

And yes again.

Its for live interactive control of the profile, sharpness, noise reduction, saturation, hue and ISO to create new custom profiles.

Amazingly enough, it actually work as well!

Even more surprising is that it allows this while you are recording.

Anyone guess what might be going on here then?

 

I can't give you the definitive answer regarding the exact combination you're after but I've got an 8mm Samyang that I've put on a Nikon D800 to do a quick test for you.

The D800 is obviously full frame but does auto crop at 1.2 and 1.5 so these examples show you exactly what it covers at full frame, 1.2 and 1.5

Judging by that, I'd say you'll probably get away with it.

Maybe

 

19 minutes ago, jonpais said:

And everyone says it's the red channel you've got to watch out for with the Panasonics. Interesting. So, maybe I should be lowering saturation in camera? Also, I've read that reducing sharpening will help reduce noise, there's most certainly a correlation between the two as you say. But I haven't tested that for myself either. And in addition to the millions of possible combinations in camera, there's also the question of whether it's better to deal with noise in post with a plug in like Neat Video, or adding sharpening in post rather than in camera. So many variables!

This is how some future archeologist will find me, with the loop of incremental parameter changes still merrily being fired at a Panasonic G7 in the background.

 

34 minutes ago, jonpais said:

Edit: What's unusual, for me at least, is that the Cinelike D screen shot looks the flattest, the highlights (except for my t-shirt, which is blown out in all three) appear to be the most controlled, yet the histogram is showing that it's clipping the worst. Why is that, I wonder? BTW, I'm not standing at exactly the same distance from the light in each shot...

One of those where we don't like what we see on a histogram but we do like what we see in the actual image.

There's a moral in there somewhere...