BTM_Pix

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

Yes, all simultaneously. I'll sort a video of it in operation later on. Curves are still under development....

It lives !

Yes 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

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. 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...

No, the post can't be edited unfortunately. This is the current (and very likely last in this incarnation) version of the html file. The hue control is undocumented in terms of absolute values so you will have to experiment to push it in the different directions by amending the following line and change the last value to effect the change http://192.168.54.1/cam.cgi?mode=setsetting&type=colormode&value=cinelike_d&value2=0/0/0/0/5 Positive values will change it further towards Violet/Magenta and negative values will change it further towards Yellow/Green. The preset ones in the html file are 5 and -5 respectively but they are just meant as a starting point for your own experimentation. With regards to a release log, its probably a bit too low tech to need one to be honest ! As I say, this incarnation of it (barring something unexpected with VLOG) is as far as it goes from my making any new versions of it but I think other people are making their own versions of it now so perhaps they'll do some more with it. It was purely from my point of view a way to begin prototyping wifi control of the cameras rather than an end product in itself so all my efforts now will be towards the hardware controller. The ongoing thread for that development is here And there is also likely to be something else that will be side developed regarding a more hands on approach to picture profile control that is coming out of this thread here When I say likely, I mean I'm probably going to have it working by Monday DEPLOY CINELIKE D V HUE EXTENDED ISO V2.html

There's nothing I can't overcomplicate though Jon, its how I roll I'm very curious about the interaction between the parameters though so with things like sharpening, for example, there may be an interaction with the NR that changes things that we haven't explored. Who knows really the order in which NR and Sharpen controls come in the processing chain for example so we there may be some combination that makes the NR really viable rather than the automatically "right, lets switch that off completely for a start" setting that its perceived as. Or maybe there isn't ! And we'll probably have to throw ISO into this mix as well as that will bring another variable to the party. +3 NR at ISO640 on Cinelike D might be a whole load of different than +2 at ISO6400 on Natural and maybe not in the way that we'd anticipate it being as who knows whats going on under the hood really between the parameter value we see on screen and what is actually being affected. And the spike is actually clipping according to Aperture. Whats interesting is when I put the mouse over the blue square of the colour checker and you can see the RGB values (ignore the L value) under the histogram as in these screenshots. You can see the relative difference in terms of the blue value between the profiles and yet when you do the same over the grey area of the checker they are all in the same relative balance. Order is Standard, Natural, Cinelike D

Haha. Where am I going with it? I think you and I are in accord over how much received wisdom there is with much of this stuff. And truth be told I'm as guilty as anyone else for perpetuating much of it! When you consider the image controls available in a G7 etc you have the following : 8 Base colour profiles 4 Individual modifying parameters to those 8 (Saturation, Sharpness, Contrast, Noise Reduction) each of which have 11 possible settings (+5 to -5 and 0) 2 Global parameters (Highlight and Shadow) both of which have 11 possible settings (+5 to -5 and 0) That means that there are over 1.7 million different combinations. And thats without the additional Hue control that some Lumix cameras have. Oh and thats 1.7 million different combinations per profile. Can anyone honestly say they've tested all 14 million combinations to determine their definitive setup for these cameras? Obviously no one has, even though I know sometimes it feels like we have And on the basis that all of these parameters do actually make a difference, there could be some really interesting combinations of them that no one tries because the received wisdom (and lets be honest with 14 million combinations its no bad thing to use that) tells us that we should use a smallish core base and then tweak from there. Do we actually know, for example, if you have the noise reduction at +5 and the shadows at -5 and the highlights at +4 on a Natural profile with the saturation at 3 and the contrast at 2 and sharpness at -3 that these cameras don't suddenly look like you've got Kodachrome 64 in them? No, because we'd guess that those settings would make it look like it horrendous and not go near them. Does anyone even really know what happens if you have the noise reduction at +5? Does anyone even really know if it actually works at all as I can't imagine most people have ever tried it at that setting. And the reason we don't know, in my opinion, is that not only are there so many combinations but that its just too fiddly to be diving in and out of menus to change them and have the immediate feedback of what the interaction of those parameters actually looks like. So, where I'm going is to make that a lot easier and hopefully people can come across some happy accidents and make profiles that they don't have to spend hours tweaking later.....

I wondered which one of us would blink first!

I'll do a few tests with a couple of different ones I've got around if I get a chance over the weekend. They're all varying degrees of cheapo so I expect it'll be all over the place !

Nice one. Just to manage expectations, though, we'll be able to absolutely confirm what the command is thats sent but its by no means a guarantee that it will work on the other cameras. On the upside, it does likely mean free V-LOG if you've still got the old firmware on your GH4

Its highly likely that it will be purely dependent on what controller people want to use. Its fundamentally in there but just mapped to a thumbstick at the moment. A controller with a fader in (or many faders) is easily supported. Watch this space, I suppose.

Ah, I see the distinction between them now. Cheers

Could you talk me through this behaviour with the AF-ON button Jase and whether you know if it is the same on the 45 1.8? I have the 45 1.8 and when I'm testing it with my hardware controller in MF mode I can focus manually by wire with the joystick and activate an instant AF by pushing the stick in and I can also activate a joystick steerable mode where I can move the focus point around the screen and then press the stick in to activate an instant AF on that point. I'm curious to know if this would solve the issue for you if it did the same with the 17 as I don't have one of those to test with?

Doing the same thing with 400% crops from my test earlier day (which was daylight obviously) you do see differing things going on in the blue channel. Not just the overall level (which you can see is higher and in a different range as are the other colours which are more bunched in the mid area) but you can see it gets rolled off at the top. So there are differences but its certainly looking like the studio lights shift it a lot more noticeably. Natural profile on top, Cinelike D below it.

It might make a comeback....

This is going to be in sections so bear with me, but loading them into Aperture, you can immediately see the distribution difference with Cinelike D and the Natural profile and this tallies with my test earlier on today. Everything is condensed more with the Cinelike D but its interesting to see how high the blue channel is and how it is almost clipping. *** NEXT PART *** So I can get them to somewhat match visually and using the starting point of Aperture's Auto Exposure function (which is actually reasonably accurate based on if you underexpose in the camera then the correction it puts on more or less always corresponds to the amount of underexposure) From that, it could be see that there was more to go with both of them but quite a bit more with the Cinelike D version. Using the Auto Enhance function (which attempts to give a half decent balance in terms of it usually lifting the shadows) there was a bit more to be had from both and both could be pushed a bit further if needed. But what was apparent was still this narrower band for the Cinelike D version which I had to tweak by adjusting the Green level and rolling off the top of the Blue channel. You can see most of the individual parameter changes for each image in the screenshots for each one. In answer to whether its better to ETTR with the other profile, I'm not sure but there was certainly a smaller margin for error as it was closer to the edge than the Cinelike D one. Is there something in the colour of the lights that was causing the raised levels in the blue channel with Cinelike D perhaps?