Sony HDMI output and the case of the waxy skin

[dishe]

Axel with LOG footage the grade has much more impact on colour than the camera does.

Most grades are weird looking and prioritise dynamic range. It takes real artistic skill to do a good one.

So judge the grade not the camera.

The skin bug is interesting... does it only affect HDMI?

Yes, it seems like the settings are respected when capturing in the camera. The "idle" hdmi out does not. If you have access to a 5100 or 6000, plug it into a TV and frame your face. You'll see it within a few seconds. Heck, even an original firmware a7s will work for testing. 

If you cover one eye so the cam doesn't recognize a face, it stops! 

Axel, coloring and grading is something else entirely. This is a firmware bug. 

[Axel]

Axel, coloring and grading is something else entirely. This is a firmware bug. 

In this case, yes. Glad it was fixed.

[dishe]

In this case, yes. Glad it was fixed.

Well, only in the case of the A7s. It seems the A6k and 5100 still have this, and who knows which other models. I haven't seen or heard anything from the A7Sii or A7rii, but I'm hoping anything that came out after these models have been resolved already.

Andrew, worth a blog post on the subject? Would love to make people (especially if it will get the notice of Sony) more aware. Personally, I wish I had known this before I bought the camera, as it would have very much effected my decision. I knew the A5100 overheated often, so folks on the interweb said just use an external recorder and it will never overheat. No one said I'd get waxy skin! 

[dishe]

Another interesting update on this topic: 

Someone on another forum mentioned that the bug doesn't happen on his a6000 when the camera is set to "M" instead of movie mode. I tried it out with my A5100, and sure enough, it does not smooth my skin. HOWEVER, the output quality on anything other than movie mode stinks!
First of all, it doesn't output audio over HDMI in any other mode, and the aspect ratio is wrong (3:2). But even if I run my own mic into an Atomos and manually set the aspect to 16:9 in M, the picture quality is terrible! It looks like a very low quality re-sample of the sensor, insane amounts of moire and aliasing. Eyebrows have rainbow patterns everywhere, and mostly straight smooth lines become jaggedly sharp edged. Not useful output AT ALL. But it *is* interesting to see that the bug only exists in movie mode. Flip the mode over to movie, the image cleans up and sensor resamples really nicely... but, then the skin thing starts up again within a few seconds.

Trying to find a way to use this information to my advantage, but can't seem to make odds or ends of it. All I can say is, this is such an obvious bug I can't believe Sony has ignored it so long.

[elgabogomez]

This is a Little off topic, but i am curious as to what recorder are you using, if you record in 24, 25, 30 or 60 frames. I have an a5100 and whenever i use an external monitor, it shows a 60hz signal (i or p, depending on if i select 1080i or 1080p), so are you using pulldown in the recorder or just recording the 60 or 50hz signal?

[dishe]

This is a Little off topic, but i am curious as to what recorder are you using, if you record in 24, 25, 30 or 60 frames. I have an a5100 and whenever i use an external monitor, it shows a 60hz signal (i or p, depending on if i select 1080i or 1080p), so are you using pulldown in the recorder or just recording the 60 or 50hz signal?

I use an Atomos Ninja 2. I think the output is standardized to be 60hz but there is a pulldown applied that the recorder seems to know how to deal with. Recorder and camera were set to 1080/24p, and the footage when viewed on my desktop in post accurately shows 23.97fps (and looks great). I don't think the camera or recorder supports 60p over HDMI. 24 and 30 seem to work fine (NTSC user).

 

[The Chris]

Sony A5100 still suffers from this problem, even with latest V1.10 update. Glad they at least addressed it in the A7S update. Don't know anything about the A6000 or others unless someone here who has one can confirm? 

Would really love to see Sony address this. 

I'm not seeing this with my a5100 or A7rII, face detection on and camera in movie mode.

[dishe]

I'm not seeing this with my a5100 or A7rII, face detection on and camera in movie mode.

Are you recording in the camera? 

Is there a face being recognized?

The A7rii hopefully was shipped without the bug, since it seems they fixed the A7s already. The A5100 definitely does still have it.

[The Chris]

Are you recording in the camera? 

Is there a face being recognized?

The A7rii hopefully was shipped without the bug, since it seems they fixed the A7s already. The A5100 definitely does still have it.

I'll double check this weekend. In both cases I looked hideous because there was too much detail. 

[dishe]

I'll double check this weekend. In both cases I looked hideous because there was too much detail. 

ROFL!

Do it like this guy in his example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6GVm1Ke2dQ

Make sure the camera can see the edges of your face- if you are too close up, it won't recognize a face. I think it needs to see forhead, eyes, nose and chin. If I wear sunglasses or a sunviser, it is less likely to happen. Make sure you are on movie mode, and make sure you are not recording internally. To see the difference, cover one eye and it will turn off, then watch your forehead as you uncover your eye and wait about 3-5 seconds. It does it to me everytime, without fail. 

I think I forgot to mention this here, but Sony has a community site with a forum that also takes suggestions. This site is read by Sony employees and problems are often forwarded to engineers there. I see the RX100 used to have skin smoothing in video mode, and was mentioned on the forum there. Looks like a firmware update came out shortly after the discussion that fixed it. 

So, maybe if enough of us go over there and post someting, or at least just click "me too", they'll take notice? Andrew, I hope its OK if I post a link to an external site, considering the situation:
http://community.sony.com/t5/Join-the-Inspiration/Please-let-us-disable-skin-smoothing-so-it-doesn-t-show-up-in/idi-p/538535

[mercer]

Does it happen with manual lenses too?

[elgabogomez]

It happened to me on a short shoot. With fd lenses, recording internally, i think i placed the kit lens on it and disable all focus aids, all auto focus and face recognition, and it went away. The face/smile recognition and the smooth skin effect were off when it happened. i turned everything on, then off again to make it dissapear.

[dishe]

Does it happen with manual lenses too?

Yep. Has nothing to do with AF. 

It happened to me on a short shoot. With fd lenses, recording internally, i think i placed the kit lens on it and disable all focus aids, all auto focus and face recognition, and it went away. The face/smile recognition and the smooth skin effect were off when it happened. i turned everything on, then off again to make it dissapear.

So, setting face detection to "off" seems to get around it for people who intend to record internally- but only if you press record. If the camera doesn't think it is seeing a face, there's nothing to apply smoothing to. The problem is, this "workaround" only applies as soon as you hit the record button. When it isn't actively capturing, that face detection and skin smoothing come back in the live view. That means if you are feeding a live HDMI signal out to an external recorder or to a monitor or internet streamer, the faces will be all waxy. Pressing record will help for only 30 min increments, since the internal recording stops. Or, in the case of the A5100, it will overheat before even that. 
The biggest reason this bug irks me is that these little cameras are actually excellent for sending APS-C live hdmi out for hours on a single battery. If you aren't recording internally, the A5100 not only never overheats, but also can feed an Atomos Ninja for over well an hour with battery left to spare. With Ninja's being under $300 these days, this is a great B-cam to shoot events and concerts alongside something like an A7s. But this bug makes external recording or streaming nearly pointless. Pressing record every 30 minutes isn't practical if the purpose is just to get a clean signal, and will run down the battery and heat up faster for no good reason. Not to mention the unnecessary wear and tear on a memory card doing write cycles when we don't need to. 

Something interesting that just occurred to me- We mentioned above that the bug only exists in video mode. Not on M or any other photography mode. Unfortunately, the only way to get a properly resampled clean HDMI video signal is by being in video mode. But interestingly, when in video mode, skin smoothing is greyed out in the menu. You can't toggle it on or off, as I think it was supposed to always be off. This bug, however, makes it default to ON even though the menu is greyed out and says "disabled" in video mode. 
I'm wondering, maybe the reason it doesn't do it in photo modes is because you have the ability to toggle it off? Maybe if Sony actually let us turn it on and off in video mode, the camera would respect our choice to turn it off?

I don't know if I'm on to something. Hopefully someone at Sony can figure it out and give us a firmware update!

[elgabogomez]

I made a comment in your thread in the sony community forum, so at least is two of us now in their radar, if sony were to make clean hdmi out in M mode i think all would be solved (and it would give it something kinda like the 4:3 4k mode in the gh4... In the a5100 it would be 3:2 but it would still help in anamorphic capture as it would show more horizontal info from the lens, win, win.

[dishe]

I made a comment in your thread in the sony community forum, so at least is two of us now in their radar, if sony were to make clean hdmi out in M mode i think all would be solved (and it would give it something kinda like the 4:3 4k mode in the gh4... In the a5100 it would be 3:2 but it would still help in anamorphic capture as it would show more horizontal info from the lens, win, win.

No, you have to understand that what I'm talking about is a bug, and what you are talking about is using the camera in a different way than it was designed. I don't think the photography modes were ever intended to give a clean recorder-ready output from the hdmi. NONE of their other cameras do this. They are feeding a quick-and-dirty sample of the sensor for preview purposes. There is no audio, and it isn't using the binning/scaling/whatever resample they use to get smooth-ish looking frames unless you hit the record button. The regular hdmi out during those modes are simply not intended for video- that's why they have a video mode! The video mode resamples the way video frames should be sampled, outputs the sound over the hdmi, and generally acts the way they would think a video user expects it to act.
The only problem with that mode, is this bug. And I think it has to do with the fact that they greyed out skin smoothing in the menu, so the software is accidentally not respecting the toggle (whereas in other modes it is).

It sounds more to me like you are requesting that they add aspect ratio options to movie mode. It would be a whole lot more reasonable to ask for that than to ask them to treat all photography modes like video modes while idling in HDMI. Also, adding a new feature is a lot more time consuming than fixing a bug. I'll bet this is something as simple as a single line of code somewhere that needs to be tweaked.

 

...thank you for participating in the thread over there, btw. Every post counts! Did you click "me too"?

[dishe]

I'll double check this weekend. In both cases I looked hideous because there was too much detail. 

Chris, did you ever double check? I would LOVE to hear about someone who was immune, at least until Sony decides to chime in. I'm guessing since you didn't respond that it did, in fact, happen. :/

[The Chris]

Didn't have time, I'm renovating a house and ran into some issues. I've yet to see it in anything I've shot so far so it's not a priority. But I'll try to check it in the next few days. 

[dishe]

Quick update: May have found a viable workaround for now. 

Apparently skin smoothing stays off when using clear image zoom. So I set it to the bare minimum (1.1x) and everything looks normal. Only problem is this adds to the APSC crop slightly. Since Sonys are 1.5x in APSC, using clear image zoom makes it a 1.65x. 
Considering a Canon crop camera is really a 1.6x, this isn't too bad. It stinks because it shouldn't be. But,it might be something. I'm going to do some testing, was just really excited about it so I wanted to share here first.

[dishe]

Does anyone know specifically what happens to the camera's settings in Clear Image Zoom? I see some icons on the screen change (metering and focus modes seem to change, can't tell what else), so I'm wondering if the skin smoothing bug disappearing is a side effect of something else that happens. If so, maybe it can be replicated without adding additional crop to the view? 
 

[Jacob Nielsen]

Waiting for my A7s ii and a Shogun to arrive... This thread mentions several cameras. But does anyone know if this HDMI issue still includes the A7S ii after the latest FW update? One of my main purposes for getting the Shogun is to be able to shoot long interviews and concerts with the A7s ii just streaming the HDMI in "idle" mode to the Shogun. I hope I don't need to bother with internal recording -  in order just to prevent this "waxy skin" issue. 

Jacob