Lumia 950 - Low Light Street Footage in 4K @ 25 fps - No Editing

[talknshoot]

My other topic got a little flooded, so I will start a fresh one with some random shots I took today with my Lumia 950.

No editing at all: Full Colour Range, no Sensor Crop in 4K mode, Directional Audio enabled by default on Windows Mobile 10, tiny tripod or windshield car mount.

I'll leave the judgement to you. I will only say that the auto white balance seems to be fairly accurate in almost every situation, and certainly on these ones.

I got them all uploaded to YT, so bear in mind that the image quality is not the same as on the original files.

I recommend downloading them and watching them on MPC-HC.

For comparison purposes (between the original file and the ones uploaded to YT) here there are two frames grabbed from one of the original clips:

This first clip was shot at -3.0 E.V.

NOTE.: The exposure compensation can be higher or lower depending on the brightness of the focus point you select, unless you select the focus at infinity by default.

Lighting: -3.0 E.V.

Shot from inside the car, thus the hissing noise (Air-con): -3.0. E.V.

More to come...

[talknshoot]

Also -3.0 E.V.:

Trying different exposure values to match what I actually saw on the scene. The eyes can see a great amount of shadow detail, and I think it's well preserved here. Could've undersposed a bit more and tried to recover detail in PP:

-2.3 and -2.7 E.V.:

-2.3 E.V.:

-2.7:

 

[vaga]

Wow! All the clips look really nice! There's certainly some noise but the performance is really surprisingly good! I feel that a good cinematographer could take a feature film with this (if only just to make a statement). The grain/noise looks very random and pleasing because there's not much chroma noise. 

 

What is the bitrate? And what level of manual control do you get?

[talknshoot]

2 hours ago, vaga said:

Wow! All the clips look really nice! There's certainly some noise but the performance is really surprisingly good! I feel that a good cinematographer could take a feature film with this (if only just to make a statement). The grain/noise looks very random and pleasing because there's not much chroma noise. 

 

What is the bitrate? And what level of manual control do you get?

Hi!

Thanks for the comments.

Regarding the manual controls, they are a bit limited. You have manual focus, white balance (sunny, incandescent, etc) and E.V. (ranging from -3.0 to +3.0), and all of them can be changed both before and during the recording. There's also a LED toggle. The problem is that there's no lock other than focus lock. It would be great if they at least provided exposure and white balance locking as well.

The bit rate is another let-down. Although it seems good the way it is, it's a mere 43 Mbps in 4K and 25 fps. It goes up to 53 if you select 30 fps.

On a a nutshell: it's good, but it also got an unexplored potential.

I've already contacted Juha (https://twitter.com/jalakarhu - the man in charge of the imaging department at MS) regarding these concerns, but he only replied he'd make note of my suggestions.

Here's another one: