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Nikon V1 - shooting 4K 60fps raw for $200


Andrew Reid
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2. Some people seem to believe that the companies' main goal should be to make us happy. Well, no, their main goal is to make profit. Otherwise, they cease to exist and nobody (not even the consumers) would profit if Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, Nikon or Canon etc. go bankrupt, right?

Companies have strategies and marketing plans. Their plan (I suppose) is not to withhold better and cheaper technology from us because they are mean but because they want to increase their profit. If they gave us 4K RAW 60 fps, moire-/aliasing-/banding-free shooting DSLRs now, for $300 (or even $1000), who would want to buy their next generation cameras? Who would want to buy their videocameras? 

 

I agree that companies should try and make a profit, but what we see today in the market appears to be collusion, which might be illegal*. The video market is ostensibly "competitive": there are many manufacturers, and the differentiation between products(across manufacturers) is rather small at each price point. You'd expect manufacturers to undercut each other at each feature set, and equilibrium prices to approach marginal cost. Instead we see video features get nerfed on cameras like the 5D3, so that they are essentially on par with its main rival, the D800.

 

*Tacit collusion is not illegal(at least in the US).

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I have two of the bodies of Nikon V1, this camera is my everyday video camera for working on assignments, as well as primary camera for Video/Interactive Art Projects.

 

About the C-Mount lenses. In traditional shooting mode you can not see exposure information while non-coupled lenses are attached, you can not zoom in for manual focusing, so be careful about correct focus distance.

 

Now the C-Mounts will be driven in price :(

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red-epic-nikon-v1.jpg

 

Good things happen in small bursts :)

 

BTW - I tried removing the chip from the lens mount on the 10-30mm kit lens. The electronic contacts come off easily when attached to the camera mount underneath a c-mount adapter, the camera is not fooled into thinking there's a lens attached. So it really does look like you need the V2 for non-CX glass in burst mode, unless an AF confirm chip adapter reaches the market from Asia.

 

The good news is, the 10-30mm CX kit zoom is par-focal and has a pretty good minimum focus distance.

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I picked up a V1 kit yesterday on clearance from a US store called Microcenter.  I even found one that was "open box" return and got it for $330.

 

Been shooting all day today with it.  The 60fps thing confused me for a bit.  But to clarify, the camera will only do a burst of 30 frames.  if you set it to 60, it will still only do 30 frames, but it will do them in half of a second instead of 1 second.   The only advantage to shooting with JPG instead of RAW is that it will finish writing a bit faster, so you will be able to start shooting again.   Is this correct?  

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Yes JPEGs are cleared to the card much faster, so if you need the resolution (4K) more than raw, then you're better off switching it to JPEG only. You can also shoot JPEG + RAW but then that takes the longest to write to the card.

 

Helpfully the camera has a buffer indicator telling you how many burst mode shots you can take whilst the card is being written to. It counts up from between 0-15 to 30 as the buffer is dumped out to the card. As soon as it reaches 30 you can go ahead and do another full burst. The good thing is the camera isn't locked whilst it writes the shots so you can go straight ahead and work on composing, framing, focussing the next shot.

 

I've also played briefly with the 400fps video mode today and it is very interesting in a low-fi way, much like the Casio F1 Slow Moscow video. I will certainly be using this artistically as well as the 1 second bursts.

 

Some people I notice are not quite getting the 1 second thing - yeah it is a very small amount of run-time but that is the beauty of it. It gives your work a theme. I already have sequences in mind that will be lucid flashes of a day, cut together - it is all in the cutting and editing. The way you sequence the clips will form your narrative, rather than letting each clip play out on its own. This is an interesting style of filmmaking. I also plan to do some quite extreme slow-mo with Twixtor where a 4K raw clip would be able to last almost 10 seconds and look like the 400fps mode but in 4K raw. As long as you keep the movement in the frame quite subtle, Twixtor is very good at emulating a Phantom Flex and now with so such a large frame and so much detail to process it could be even more accurate in the way it predicts motion. I cannot wait to Twixtor some 60fps half a second clips from this camera in 4K raw, it is going to look mind-blowing.


No manual focus in burst mode BTW on the V1. But since you're not going to be racking focus within a 1 second shot and the AF stays locked for the course, this isn't the issue it would be in a standard video mode.

 

Once again that video for anyone lost on the creative uses of this feature...

 

https://vimeo.com/42191484

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I wanted to clarify because i was looking at it and are the videos just lots of pictures or actual video?

 

Just a lot of pictures, stitched together to a video.

 

 

 and if it is a video is there any way of making it film more then 1 second at 4k and 30fps, like a faster SD card?

 

Simple answer: no...

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I ordered a refurbished V1 yesterday to experiment with c-mount lenses in 30P as well as using the cx lenses for 4K capture. I do not have DaVinci software and I am looking for info on a RAW workflow. Perhaps someone can outline their workflow with RAW files from the V1. Perhaps its better to use JPEGS  for the burst mode rather than RAW files but details of JPEG workflow are helpful as well. At it's price point the V1 is hard to ignore. The V1 also has a much better battery life than the V2. Thanks to Andrew for breathing some life into the cx format and not dismissing it as so many others have. It's also interesting to note that user Abadona has been using 2 V1's as primary cameras. Even the 30P video looks very good in the samples I've seen. I'll be curious to see the results with 4K and Twixtor. The low-res 400fps in-camera looks marginal at best, but overall the V1 looks to have more going for it than appears at first glance.

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For those looking at a non-Davinci workflow, I simply loaded all of the raw images into Aperture for Mac.  Picked the first shot frame in the sequence and manipulated it to my liking.  Then I copied those adjustments to the other 29 frames in the particular shot.  Next, I exported all of the frames as JPEGs into another folder and loaded all of those shots into a little few dollar time-lapse making app.  Set the output video to be 24/25/30/etc. fps.  This seemed to work really well if you are just wanting to quickly piece together your shots to see what you got!  I would love to hear what others are doing as well.  Here is a snapshot of the little app called Time-Lapse.  Hope this helps.

Screen%20Shot%202013-03-13%20at%2011.04.Screen%20Shot%202013-03-13%20at%203.41.4

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Any link to the Time-Lapse app?

 

That's a useful workflow Zach.

 

By the way... You can do a burst every 5-10 seconds when shooting at 2.8K JPEG and image quality is quite lovely.

 

Also you're getting the full vertical resolution of a 3:2 sensor from the V1, which is handy for anamorphic shooters with 2x stretch lenses.

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No manual focus in burst mode BTW on the V1. But since you're not going to be racking focus within a 1 second shot and the AF stays locked for the course, this isn't the issue it would be in a standard video mode.

 

When I shot my test video - an generally, when shooting nearby objects -, this was an issue because the autofocus area selection wasn't precise enough to figure out which of the foreground objects (=leaves of grass) would be focused on.

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Next, I exported all of the frames as JPEGs into another folder and loaded all of those shots into a little few dollar time-lapse making app.  Set the output video to be 24/25/30/etc. fps.

 

Most video editing apps can import those image sequences as video files, saving you the additional conversion step. Quicktime Player does it too.

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These guys are correct, there are quite a few apps that allow you to stitch the photos together. I had used Time-Lapse before to make timelapses so it was the first app I opened up to do it. There are dozens of ways to go about it. This was just what worked fairly quickly for me.
This is the app here. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/time-lapse/id451563308?mt=12

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Stitching together single frames is really simple in Final Cut Pro X:

  1. Import one image sequence
  2. Drag it into the timeline, select all images/clips that belong to it
  3. Click the timer display above the timeline, enter "1" for 1 frame
  4. -> every imported image will now be one video frame in the time line
  5. make a compound clip of those selected images
  6. the image sequence now behaves like a video clip.

Thanks to native raw support in Mac OS X, you can import the raw images and do all color adjustments within Final Cut Pro X.

 

Another note: we're also discussing V1 raw video making on the German-language Slashcam forum. My fellow forist Jan, with whom I discovered V1 raw video shooting last summer, has the V2 and confirms that

  • 30/60fps raw burst mode now supports full-manual settings and honors whatever settings have been set in P/A/S/M mode.
  • the camera buffer now holds 45 frames instead of 30. (Probably, it has been doubled, but given the higher pixel resolution of the V2, this didn't result in a doubled number of burst image.)

Now only the price of the V2 needs to come down.

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