BTM_Pix

Had to laugh when I saw the LCD when he was shooting from 6:40 ish He does love a bit of face detect auto focus Max, doesn't he

I absolutely agree. I exposed it as that purely to get it up that high so people wouldn't say "but..but...you didn't use the whole range" But also as a test to check that if I was going to go that high that the meters on the Ninja Inferno had a basis in reality when the footage was brought into FCPX. Incidentally, I wish it had a different name as I have to type 'Ninja Inferno' very slowly and deliberately as it just morphs into Disco Inferno in my head! As for the original post, yes, its FLOG then ProNegStd (-2,-2) so people could compare FLOG against a vanilla OOC look. And to see if they could then make it look better obviously. Spoiler alert, I could make it look the same and different but not sure if 'better' would describe it necessarily.

I'm reading a lot about this being a pro sports camera so just my thoughts as a working pro sports photographer... In terms of speed, this thing obviously ticks a lot of boxes. But its not just speed we need in terms of fps, af and evf refresh etc but its speed of the glass and the throughput of images. Like any other manufacturer trying to usurp Nikon and Canon, the response to this in my particular field (no pun intended) - and it may will be different for non-sports dedicated photojournalist - is "Yep, thats very nice but where is your 400mm f2.8 ?" and "How fast can I review, select and get an image out of it?" For the lens issue, honestly if they turn up trying to turn anyone's head with that 100-400 they launched today and offering it as the answer they'll literally get laughed at. I've shot with an f5.6 lens of course but its the very specialised constant aperture 300-800mm "Sigmonster" that only sees the light of day (quite literally) for very particular circumstances like Cricket or motor racing when there are range issues. For low light football, even in Category A stadiums holding major finals, its a major risk unless you are absolutely sure that you can guarantee the light. For slow shutter speed stuff like profile shots its fair enough but not when you need to push the shutter speed for action shots. Even with bodies that do a gazillion ISO the end result can look rough. But its not just the light gathering thats the issue, its the subject isolation that a 2.8 gives you that you just can't replicate with a 5.6 So I'm baffled why they haven't brought out a 400mm 2.8 at the same time. The image throughput is another issue and it remains to be seen how intuitive their image review process is but already one alarm bell is that I can't see an image lock button on the back of it. I've droned on at length about this on another thread but its a massively important function for ingesting only the relevant images out of a few hundred when you're in a hurry. And we're always in a hurry! If they haven't made that mappable to a function button then, like Fuji, its such a fundamental feature that you wonder who they've actually been doing any research with. With regard to the ethernet port. Well, yes, its a decent feature to have but if we've got an ethernet port at our pitch position (a bit of a luxury actually) then we have it connected to our laptops for two reasons. 1 - Its the laptop that is needed as a central comms point (it may be taking images from several cameras, its FTPing edited images, its receiving emails from agencies etc) and 2- We can't be tethered to the camera when shooting as its as dangerous as it is restrictive when you're working in these environments. I've attached a picture of my shooting position from a Champions League final (yes, the gap between the two larger gentlemen). When you are in such a restricted space and juggling two long lens cameras, while simultaneously editing images on a laptop that is literally perched on your lap, the last thing you can be is physically attached to it. The cameras get totally abused in these circumstance with being dropped (intentionally sometimes) so cables are a no no. And, of course, we're never shooting with just one camera so there's no way we're going to be adding a router into this equation, hence we need a wireless module. Even if they are the ludicrously expensive ones like Nikon and Canon do. The bottom line I suppose is if we can't capture what we can capture now and work the way we all work now then there is no compulsion to change, especially when there isn't a massively compelling price differential and the lenses that they do make that would be worthwhile (the 300 f2.8 and the 500 f4) are a lot more expensive than the equivalent offerings from Nikon and Canon. And thats before we get on to the fact that those lenses from the other two are battle hardened, proven pieces. Has anyone ever even seen one of those Sony long primes outside of a trade show? In their defence - and seemingly unlike Fuji - they seem to be taking a serious approach with regard to service levels that pros would need and I'm sure we'll see their presence at events with mobile workshops and equipment loans like Nikon and Canon do. This is a good sign but, again, they face an uphill battle here because even at regular events where there is no official support, you'll always be able to borrow something in an emergency off another photographer. So, if I need to use an ultra wide for an exterior stadium shot, for example, I can probably walk about 20 feet in the photographers room and cadge one for 20 minutes off another Nikon shooter. Not quite as easy when you're the only Sony shooter in the room! So, if they're to do this (at least in my field and it could be very different for non sport shooting photojournalists etc) its going to take a lot of persuasion to get people to change. Just producing the body is the tip of the iceberg. I often compare this to what happened to RED when they thought producing the original RED ONE would let them take over Hollywood. Its everything else around the capture device that needs working on too and thats why they're many generations down the line and still on the coattails of the established dominant player. There is definitely a market for a mirrorless camera to take over in my field but I still believe it will have a Nikon and/or a Canon badge on it. The market for the goods we supply as sports photographers is shrinking financially and people tend to get even more conservative and will only switch when there is a major financial incentive. I just don't think Sony tick that financial box and its where Fuji might have an advantage. The resistance to change is what they need to get over and for every sports photographer like me that wants to make a change there are probably at least a hundred that don't. This isn't a number I'm plucking out of thin air either. Next week, will be the first Premier League game that I've shot on a mirrorless system (the X-T2) and I would hazard a guess that its the first Premier League game that anyone has shot with it. Am I nervous about it if it will perform ? No, not really as I've run enough tests to know IQ wise its up to but I do have reservations about how much it will get in my way in terms of getting those images out. What I'm more nervous about is having to field all the "What the fuck is that?" reactions from the other snappers and the sneering about using a 'toy' camera. Overcoming peer pressure is going to be a bigger task for Sony than overcoming EFV blanking to be honest. I bet you its a fine camera though.

At that price, at least you'll probably lose zero money selling it when you get home so that mitigates the risk/nerves massively.

Scratch that, the new camera isn't in the ballpark for what you're after.

Looks like a very, very capable camera but..... Why were they whooping that lens? If it is for sport, they're going to have the same issues as Fuji by having a body capable of getting them into the D5 and 1dXII level IQ wise but not having the lenses to go with it. The 300 and 500 primes they have are actually way more expensive than the Nikon and Canon equivalents and without a 400 at all they've got a major gap.

Very concerning about the dust issues you've had. Did they seem surprised at the extent of it or was it just like business as usual for them to see them with that much dust? You might want to hop onto this Sony live stream announcement as something seems imminent http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/follow-the-sony-live-announcement-stream-now/

Short comp of the other 3 clips including the wide dynamic range restaurant one. 4K ProRes 422LT as per the originals. https://mega.nz/#!57Q3RAIZ!XJ6vaaX6FizxjPlbn8lJhhYgtP8pg0o1fbCBql-2N5g

They are both from the FLOG. OK, so here is one of the source FLOG files. Its 21 seconds complete with random people walking across frame and off camera audio from the internal mics of two ladies having a conversation that may have been fuelled by afternoon cocktails. 4K ProRes 422LT* https://mega.nz/#!RqxBkTbD!dqmFFG4fFjC792nc1Y9yj2EQNIYSm3hpAQRyjHJDG7w *Yes,yes I know.

I was expecting that if it did stay in focus it would've started endless "GH5 auto focus is WORSE than G7" flaming. I was wondering why he makes such a big deal of starting and stopping the G7 with a remote cord, strains to see the image on flip out to expose correctly, struggles to focus for the same reason and leans forward to fiddle with controls and yet he's filming the whole thing on his iPhone which would have solved all of those issues if he'd just put the excellent ImageApp on it to control the G7.

Yeah, they have a decent 3rd party dual one on their site but don't have it in stock in any of their stores. I found one in a drawer before I left home this morning so put a 970 on it but its a USB powered one that I have for topping up a bit in the car etc so it takes a while to fully charge one. 11 hours in this case!

Thanks to the morse code speed of my internet here it will be file in the singular. And even then, the X-T3 might be released before it finishes uploading it.

All credit to PhotoJospeh for trying to move on from getting bogged down in the whole face detect auto focus thing with his new video about how to set up an in car vlogging rig. Complete with the camera having difficulty focusing on his stationary face....

I wouldn't say that easily as they were already looking suspicious at the apparently randomly placed camera on the table pointing in their general direction without me pointing lights at them

I've got it as a way to upgrade all of my cameras to have ProRes and better monitoring and metering and to be able to record 4K60P from the JVC LS300. Being able to monitor in bright light is also a boon where I'm based in Spain. The ability to record FLOG was always only going to be a bonus. So, for me, its going to see action in a lot of different capacities and environments where the size isn't going to be a major factor as it'll be mainly in slower paced and more contained environments. The screen size will actually be a positive advantage in some applications. But, yeah, if I had to use it as an everyday run and gun solution with the X-T2 then it would be a pain in the arse because it ends up being a bit like this.

I will actually get round to uploading the prores file if I've got some time tonight.

Yeah, I'm in the Murcia region and its slim pickings here too but I have to go to Alicante tomorrow so thought I might have some luck. Mind you, I could stay around for the other stuff you mentioned there!

For what its worth - and your mileage may vary considerably - my own view of this is that considering how much fiddling it takes for me to get the FLOG to a base point of the ProNegStd and the diminishing returns thereafter that aside from situations like the deliberate extremes of DR of the couple eating dinner I'm not convinced its a game changer for me really. Certainly not significant enough to put down the extra cash for the Ninja Inferno or similar. Fortunately, the FLOG was only going to be a bonus for me with this as its the edit ready ProRes and superb monitoring and metering that it gives to ALL of my cameras that is the big story here for me with the Ninja Inferno.

No, I think that you're pretty much spot on and its a conclusion I've been coming to myself recently. I've just done a side by side comparison with log on the Fuji X-T2 and one of their inbuilt colour profiles and with a lot of fiddling I can get the log to look, erm, exactly like the inbuilt profile. Which shows that Fuji know far more about this stuff than I do and that I should just stick with considering their sensor to be a film stock and working with it instead of around it. Its a damn sight quicker and less render intensive too. As a complete aside, you don't by any chance know where I could source a charger for Sony NP970 type batteries in Alicante do you?

So.....FLOG then. I've done a very brief, not exactly creative test recording FLOG to the Atomos Ninja Inferno. First things first, the Ninja Inferno is a fine piece of kit but it isn't all plain sailing when its paired to the X-T2. One glaring issue is that it can't lock to the 1080/24p coming from the X-T2 and just blanks the screen every half a second. All other sizes and frame rates are fine and the issue definitely appears to be coming from the X-T2 side as a quick test with a BMPCC showed no issue at all. Another issue which caused me some head scratching until I worked it out was that if you have the eye sensor on then it blanks the HDMI output when it switches over. This looked like another blanking issue or dodgy cable until I realised what was happening. Surely no one at Fuji thought that was a good idea? Switching it off and leaving it on rear or EVF solved the issue so I'll have to remember that when switching to video recording as the eye sensor ON is of course my default for stills use. The final thing was that the Fuji FLOG monitoring LUT on the Ninja Inferno actually shows less detail when active than just leaving it in REC709 so they both need to do some work on that. Or maybe I do and download the LUT that Fuji have on their website for editing with to see if that makes a difference. I'll do a separate report for the Ninja Inferno when I've used it with a few more cameras but for now, lets crack on with this FLOG thing. Activating FLOG switches the ISO of the X-T2 to 800. So if you have the ISO on the dial set to less than 800 then it will ignore it and you won't see any changes until you move the dial beyond 800. This explains the couple of stops difference on the meter when switching to FLOG when I was just looking at it on the monitor as the even though the ISO dial was on 200. To keep the test consistent then, I've set the ISO to 800 for both FLOG and non FLOG shots. The comparison is to show the difference between FLOG and using what has become the defacto setting for flattish recording on the X-T2 which is ProNegStd with -2 highlights and -2 shadows. The shots were exposed using the (excellent) luma parade function of the Ninja Inferno so that the brightest part of the image was just kissing 100. Apologies for the not exactly inspiring nature of the shots but hopefully the nature of them means you can get a feel for what sort of DR you can expect when using FLOG. These frames are completely untouched out of FCPX (no FLOG>709 LUT) so that you can shape them yourselves to make your own judgement. If you want to use the official Fuji LUT it is available here http://www.fujifilm.com/support/digital_cameras/software/lut/

I've just got the Atomos Ninja Inferno as the first part of the equation before I got the LS300 to go with it but I was holding out until after NAB to be certain. I suspect with the recently announced updates for the LS300 that it will very much remain a current camera and that this new one will sit above it in the range so might not be for me anyway. If it creates enough buzz though it might give the LS300 a shot in the arm as well to create awareness that JVC is a viable alternative to the usual suspects if you need something flexible.

Option to write IBIS data into the video file (or one channel of the audio file) a la SteadXP to enable shooting without it and doing it in post with more control using a Panasonic plug in that they also don't make yet. They should all do this to be honest.

I did say 'studiously' to be fair. I was acknowledging that the kids with the dslrs are being a lot more thoughtful but I'm doubting over the longer term (which is a very short term in modern terms) whether the way in which the images are consumed and how those images are now so closely aligned with people's 'brand' and often sense of worth will see ordinary cameras largely disappear if it can't hit that functionality. Consumer's photographic workflows with smartphones mimic a live editorial press photographer's workflow (and actually surpass it in both speed of delivery and distribution) and I think that speaks volumes about where photography is in people's lives. Its a bit of a chicken and egg as to which one drove the other but whichever way round it was, its the new reality and its tough to fit 'normal' cameras into that. And thats not necessarily a bad thing of course but it does mean that photography is heading back to the tinkering in the shed and borderline trainspotting hobby it had become before the digital boom Within their market - and they do know their market - it will do well because it will be a fine camera. How long that market is there and how big it is compared to what it was and what the potential is to bring new people in to it is another matter I think. How many dollars of market research Nikon need to spend on incremental upgrades that are largely preaching to the choir is an interesting issue I suppose. It might well be that that market research has told them to stick with what they know, reduce costs and increase margins on a shrinking sector. I dunno, I use their stuff and have for nearly 40 years. We've grown old together. And thats probably a problem for both of us.

I agree with this, wholeheartedly. For most people, cameras are beginning to get in the way. This is the journey of an image that I take for work from it happening to a member of the public seeing it CLICK >Pick the best image from the burst >Lock the image to initiate the wireless transfer into the laptop >Ingest the image into the editor automatically adding basic caption data about event. >Edit the image >Complete caption data listing the names of everyone that is in the picture and what is happening. >Export the image >FTP it to the agency server >Agency server distributes to publications based on embedded caption data (i.e. different territories, sports etc) >Publication picture desk receives images, picks the ones for usage, scales and re-captions and pushes to website or print >Consumer then has to actively seek out that content (visit the newspaper website or newsagents) Now, all of that happens at the fastest speed that all of the parties involved can manage (me, the agency and the media outlet) and compared to the days of film and even five years ago it is like science fiction magic but consider the journey of a picture that a kid sat behind me in the stand has to take to reach his audience. CLICK >Write ‘Goal!!!’ >Hit send. >His consumers get it instantly and automatically because its straight in their feeds. It’s a strange contradiction that a professional workflow is so much more cumbersome, slow and - as modern as it is compared to relatively recent times - feels so much more antiquated than the consumer one. Is this kid’s image ‘better’ than mine? Of course not (well, hopefully anyway!) but in terms of how people now consume media then it is arguably far more fit for purpose. Its a very transient world now for content. Very, very few images have any sort of longevity now so unless an image is unique (difficult these days when everyone has a camera of sorts in their pocket) or destined to be utterly iconic it is going to be swimming in such a sea of other content then just getting it out there faster trumps most other considerations sadly. This is why newspapers are sending out junior reporters with iPhones to cover stories. It means they can keep costs down, the quality is adequate based on the criteria above and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to the reporter because they’ve grown up with instant publishing. For video, all of the factors above are multiplied a hundred fold and the end to end process of getting a moving image from the lens to your audience using a professional workflow are almost laughable to a generation that need to get their content out while its still warm. Even just capturing video and then pushing it onto a social media site is too slow a lot of the time and they’re now broadcasting it on there live. If you are in a tourist heavy area like London for example, and you see a party of teenagers on a school trip or whatever, you’ll see maybe one in ten of them have a small dslr. You might also notice that it is generally girls that have the dslrs rather than boys oddly enough. The ones with the dslrs will be studiously taking the odd shot that you just know will be ‘arty’ but it is of objects and general scenery but not of people . Meanwhile the rest of them are snapping away taking pics of themselves, their friends and the general stuff too but you can see that they look at the back of the phone, make a quick few taps and boom its on its way and already published before the dslr girl has took her lens cap off. And the story will be the same for her as it is for the professional photographer in that her stuff will have more value in one currency which is creative and technical but nowhere near the same value in the most valuable currency of the day which is speed. With people measuring themselves and what they do based on the number of likes something gets then if the dslr girl is getting fewer of those because the ’news cycle’ of these kids trip has moved on by the time she gets her images processed and out there then she’ll end up ditching the dslr as its getting in the way of that. The old adage of the only technique you needed to master for documentary photography was ‘f8 and be there’ has now been replaced with ‘4G and be there’. Nikon and the other manufacturers needed to rethink the interface to get the camera out of the way and they had the opportunity to do that a few years ago when photography began a real resurgence but I think that ship has sailed and the smartphone is now too ubiquitous. The iPhone etc can and have improved their photographic offering to the point where the extra quality difference is utterly trumped by the convenience and ‘real’ cameras will be back to where they were pre-DSLR as an enthusiast product. Its difficult to think now with the boom in photography all around us that even 10 or 15 years ago it was largely a dying hobby kept alive by gentlemen and ladies of a certain age. I think its heading back there too. As for the D7500 itself…. I use the D500 professionally on a daily basis. Its a fine camera and if you can get that performance for £600 less or whatever it is then you’ll be getting a bargain. I wouldn’t be too sure about people not using this professionally either. 8fps is more than adequate and the dual card slot thing is a bit of a red herring as speed dictates in what I do at least that whilst RAW on one card and JPEG on another might be a way of working, its JPEG all the way anyway. Dual slots were useful as overflow when card capacity was measured in meg rather than gig but we're way beyond that now. And the cards themselves are plenty fast enough to be writing RAW+JPEG if you have that need. The buffer is more than adequate as well to be honest and wouldn’t put me off. At 8fps, it amounts to a 12 second burst or something. If you need more than that to get the shot then its probably a video camera you need rather than a stills one. It does seem to have weather sealing as well and in terms of its robustness, my experience with Nikon over many years now is that its the lens mount that is the achilles heel rather than the rest of the body and that problem goes from the flagships down so it wouldn’t worry me too much. Would you use it as your A camera as a pro sports or journalistic photographer? No because you’ll already have one of the flagships if you’re working at that level. Could you use it as your A camera if you needed to? Based on the IQ of the D500 then absolutely yes. And as a lightweight supplementary or backup camera, its ideal. I still see a lot of D7xxx cameras being used by pros which were bought in that post D300 period when Nikon didn’t have a new pro APS-C body. For those that haven’t subsequently moved on to the D500 (and with shrinking budgets not everyone could), I can see them buying these. It’ll do OK.

I wouldn't say this is anywhere near a definitive test (there seems to be a lot in the comments about how the FS5 could have been pushed further for example) but in and of itself the result from the LS300 is certainly very interesting here.