Petition for Samsung NX1 hack

[Marco Tecno]

The second image is incredible.

P.s. now think about what could be recovered if the bits were 10 instead of 8, with that high bit rate!

[sandro]

I wonder what happens with ISO higher than 1600 with this bitrate.

[lucabutera]

Take a look at this: http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/h265vsh264.html

[SMGJohn]

7 hours ago, levisdavis said:

Premiere doesn't like the default "data levels" of the H265 "fish tank" file. There is actually more dynamic range available in the shadows than what has been posted. In fact, DaVinci Resolve really brings the image to life if you input the file utilizing "data levels." Maybe I don't know Premiere well enough. Or, I'm just frustrated with Adobe?

Have never seen/graded NX1 footage before. Really excited to see this development take place and also frustrated to think how much tech is in the NX1 / NX500. Why is this tech being laid to rest by the manufacturer. Strange times, right!

From what I gather, this new bitrate is producing a natural response from the lens-sensor-processor-codec combination. It looks like it was shot at about 1600 ISO. Professionally speaking, this new bitrate may enable a new standard for accurately capturing an image without having to deal with random processing variations in the shadows/midtones/highlights. Hopefully, right.

Personally, I used to have quite a lot of issues with the GH4; specifically with regards to the lens-sensor-processing-codec algorithm. Eventually, I just went back to 1080 P DNG.

I'm impressed with render times with H265. First time for exporting an H265 image. Woohoo! DaVinci is exporting this 4k footage at nearly the same rate as the BMPCC 1080 DNG. It's possibly 1 - 2 frames faster with 1080 DNG pushed to the max 13 stops of DR and a light application of noise reduction. Then again, it's also only 1 - 2 frames behind 1080 DNG without the noise reduction. Kind of a nice balance, one with a serious bump in native image resolution. Does the footage need noise reduction? That's kind of what I'm thinking about here. It might actually need a fine layer of grain placed on top to reach a truly great image. But, who sees that stuff anyway?

Based on what others have written, over the past few pages, in regards to how h265 transcodes an image, I see the noise floor appear and also slightly disappear in this footage. It's nothing serious. IMO, I'm over analyzing the image. I feel that this was shot with contrasty glass set to a 5.6 in a room that reads somewhere closer to a T2.8 at ISO 800 on a LOG picture profile. Quite frankly, this combination is a challenge for any camera, especially when shooting with standard picture profiles, right?

Anyway, thanks for posting the "fish tank" video.

Also, it's not just the bit rate that's gone up, it's the heart rate too! I think the heart rate is closer to 100 BPM! LOL

Cheers,

To be honest the NX1 responded quite favourable to grading even in the days of version 1.01 and 1.20

This shitty shaky no-budget video was shot on firmware 1.20 which gave the NX1 the GammaDR mode and you can see me pushing these settings quite a lot, and the original footage did have a lot of dark spots nothing drastically but it recovers them quite nicely, if this been the GH4 it would been a mosquito fest worse than the deepest moist forests of Finland in those dark areas.

And this was all before the big increase in bitrate came to us all in video mode. I have used the NX1 a ton, I just have not posted much on YT because most of my work with the camera have been family videos which cannot be shared, music videos, interviews which cannot be shared either and various random stuff I have not had time to make videos about yet.

Damn, I even got a 2 hour 120fps firework session with the camera and when I apply the log lut from EOSHD, the darkness actually bloody reveals something, like clouds and smoke from fireworks its not bright and clear as day but its there, amazing! And this is of course 1080p120 shot in the firmware 1.40 in GammaDR with contrast set to 0 because before 1.40 I got nasty banding issues with contrast on -10 and even -5 and I never touched it since, but I changed my mind a few days ago when I tested it on a blue sky again, the banding is not as bad and quite manageable.

Of course all my grading is done in SpeedGrade CC2014/CC2015 as its a lossless grading tool whereas Premiere Pro is really not unless you use the lumetri tool which I rather recommend you do, grade the footages in SpeedGrade or DaVinci and export a LUT and apply it in Premiere instead in a separate adjustment layer on top of the footage.

 

[SMGJohn]

28 minutes ago, lucabutera said:

Take a look at this: http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/h265vsh264.html

We gotta remember here, H264 suffers at low bitrates whereas the HEVC biggest strengths are just that, at low bitrates! 

But the higher you go with the bitrate, the HEVC starts to suffer and loose against the ageing H264 and this simply comes down to the way HEVC is designed for, streaming and low bitrate use. Its not meant to be used in video cameras and for high bitrate use they specifically states it.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=170986

Here they do a huge comparison of the x265 versus the x264 and it shows, low bitrate it shows strengths but at high bitrates it does funky stuff.

Again here we see it once more, it destroys fine details in images even with the specific setting grain on http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=172458

Now the x265 is constantly under development the x264 was not perfect at its beginning either, but the NX1 uses early HEVC version unless there is evidence of it being updated in the firmware. HEVC is basically made to look good, not keep info which is why we have camera specific codecs to do just that.

[Beritar]

24 minutes ago, SMGJohn said:

We gotta remember here, H264 suffers at low bitrates whereas the HEVC biggest strengths are just that, at low bitrates! 

But the higher you go with the bitrate, the HEVC starts to suffer and loose against the ageing H264 and this simply comes down to the way HEVC is designed for, streaming and low bitrate use. Its not meant to be used in video cameras and for high bitrate use they specifically states it.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=170986

Here they do a huge comparison of the x265 versus the x264 and it shows, low bitrate it shows strengths but at high bitrates it does funky stuff.

Again here we see it once more, it destroys fine details in images even with the specific setting grain on http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=172458

Now the x265 is constantly under development the x264 was not perfect at its beginning either, but the NX1 uses early HEVC version unless there is evidence of it being updated in the firmware. HEVC is basically made to look good, not keep info which is why we have camera specific codecs to do just that.

Very interesting post, the HEVC codec destroys fine details and even if the bitrate is very high, we will not see a big improvement. So the only option is a hack who allow to use a different codec ...

[sandro]

there must be a point when even hevc shows fine details right?

[Pavel Mašek]

35 minutes ago, SMGJohn said:

We gotta remember here, H264 suffers at low bitrates whereas the HEVC biggest strengths are just that, at low bitrates! 

I am not expert in codec science and I do not believe that HEVC is so efficient - I saw quite heavy macroblocking on my NX1( I believe that h264 would look better in similar situations with similiar bitrate). 

But I cannot agree that HEVC does not preserve fine details - I could saw every single needle on the tree but then there was heavy macroblocking on the sky - 80Mbit simply could not handle it all. But I am convinced that higher bitrate will solve it. Moreover - it seems that it also brings higher dynamic range. You saw video from hacked NX1 - do you think that H264 would hold so much information in shadows?

I would wait on proper test and comparison of hacked NX1... 3 weeks at least :-(

[SMGJohn]

21 minutes ago, Beritar said:

Very interesting post, the HEVC codec destroys fine details and even if the bitrate is very high, we will not see a big improvement. So the only option is a hack who allow to use a different codec ...

 

17 minutes ago, sandro said:

there must be a point when even hevc shows fine details right?

 

12 minutes ago, Pavel Mašek said:

I am not expert in codec science and I do not believe that HEVC is so efficient - I saw quite heavy macroblocking on my NX1( I believe that h264 would look better in similar situations with similiar bitrate). 

But I cannot agree that HEVC does not preserve fine details - I could saw every single needle on the tree but then there was heavy macroblocking on the sky - 80Mbit simply could not handle it all. But I am convinced that higher bitrate will solve it. Moreover - it seems that it also brings higher dynamic range. You saw video from hacked NX1 - do you think that H264 would hold so much information in shadows?

I would wait on proper test and comparison of hacked NX1... 3 weeks at least :-(

I might have said it wrong, HEVC destroys details at low bitrates but the higher bitrate allows for more details however there will still be some details flatten by the HEVC codec in order to save bitrate, this is how it works by design. Higher bitrate will definitely help the image, this is why I think the MJPEG might be a better codec because it saves finer details, it is also less CPU intensive which 'might' and I am no expert in sensor design, but it might decrease rolling shutter if the CPU is allowed for more lavage unless the camera did have its own secondary CPU that did the HEVC encoding, it might be possible to code the secondary CPU to help with sensor readout this is just a theory however and it might be completely impossible.

[Otto K]

@SMGJohn that's not how rolling shutter works and nx1/nx500 have a separate hevc cpu (block). 

[vaga]

@SMGJohn I've seen your video before . I like the look a lot. What's with the blockiness on the shot of the helicopter alone in the sky?

Even back when NoamKroll reviewed the NX1, it was pretty obvious that the camera could have some good information if you protected the highlights and underexposed slightly. That's a camera characteristic that should be independent of the codec. 

While you could raise shadows before and see some detail, you'd see a lot of smearing because of the coding trees. Now that the bitrate is higher, from what I understand, HEVC will dynamically end up making smaller coding trees to produce more data without the smearing. (I hate that it's now inaccurate to say macroblocking!). Thus the information is now less blocky and more deliverable.

[Marco Tecno]

I'm also curious to see how the higher bitrate behaves with 1080@120fps.

[Last Leaves]

8 hours ago, Otto K said:

@Last Leaves is your card formated to exfat? 

Doh! I stupidly thought all of this time that the NX500 defaulted to exfat. I just formatted to expat with disk utility and it worked like a charm. Thanks.

[RieGo]

please stop thinking i don't think h265 has trouble at higher bitrates compared to h264. this is heavily dependend on the encoder used. and we are talking about hardware encoders, not software encoders that have been optimized for 10 years.

i highly doubt the NX1/NX500 would have better quality with h264 at the same bitrate. and furthermore if there's no h264 encoding chip on the board there's no chance to do it anyways.
at 4k resolution no one should be using h264, IMHO

(this was a post based on personal experience and my own opinion)

[Pavel Mašek]

It is interesting that bitrate from hacked NX1 is VERY variable. Is it normal that difference is almost 100%? Or am I using wrong analyzer?

In other cameras (A6300, original NX1,...) is bitrate quite stable with difference just few percents...

[Last Leaves]

1 hour ago, Pavel Mašek said:

It is interesting that bitrate from hacked NX1 is VERY variable. Is it normal that difference is almost 100%? Or am I using wrong analyzer?

In other cameras (A6300, original NX1,...) is bitrate quite stable with difference just few percents...

This was something that I noticed with Vasile's aquarium too. It is normal for bitrates to be somewhat variable, especially with the amount of color and light changing (i.e. less detail, less light, requires less data). But, assuming VLC's "Statistics" panel is accurate, this seems to be inverted with Vasile's clip; when the clip is completely black is when the bitrate is the highest. I have found frames (at around 21 seconds) that are less than 1/4 of the bitrate during the completely black seconds at the beginning. What is going on here?

EDIT: I just checked a clip (DC24P [Cinema 4K] Movie Quality 'Pro') that I shot on NX500 to see if there was variation in bitrate throughout the shot. The shot lasts 8m09s. The subject is moving water at sunset... a huge amount of variation in color and light. The data rate is locked at 71826kb/s (this is for my shot, not Vasile's!). After looking at this shot I looked through a few more and they also have this exact same bitrate.

[SMGJohn]

6 hours ago, Otto K said:

@SMGJohn that's not how rolling shutter works and nx1/nx500 have a separate hevc cpu (block). 

Okay my mistake, I thought the rolling shutter was determined by how fast the CPU read the lines on the sensor. But again I am not expert in that field.

[lucabutera]

Theories about the codecs are all to prove, only certainty is that the best results is take the raw. 

[SMGJohn]

No one seemed to have graded the video footage from Vasile so I decided to have a go and oh boy its glorious, the image has a very analogue feel to it at least in my opinion, I have tried to push the colours very far, much further than I normally would with the regular NX1 footage to see what happens, the NX1 suffers from colour bleeding at times specially when there is strong colour light on a scene like concerts etc. In this footage I did not notice any so that in itself is pretty glorious.

Everyones favourite, the Vasile Frame

EOSHD GammaDR2LOG LUT Applied

Quick Grade with VisionColor's Impulz LUT - Tetrachrome 400 and high colour saturation

A more colourful frame

[solutionkmedia]

+1!!!