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Fuji X-H1. IBIS, Phase Detect 4K beast?


Dave Maze
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@Matthew Hartman That’s just one of the reasons I went ahead and ordered X-mounts for my Veydras - to see if I can’t use the X-T2 for narrative and documentary. Shooting with the $13,000 Cabrio 20-120mm on the set of TCSTV’s Collateral is like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture on the wall. Not very impressed at all with Veydra the company however - I paid $85.00 for shipping alone, it’s nearing a week already and as far as I know, the mounts haven’t even shipped yet. $85 should be overnight delivery. It is the New Year holiday here though, so they probably won’t arrive before the end of the month anyhow. When shooting the Mini Primes with the GH5, I usually just take along two lenses and use ETC mode, essentially getting four focal lengths in an extremely compact form factor. Like landscape mode on my iPhone, it’s a feature I wouldn’t want to be without.

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11 minutes ago, jonpais said:

@Matthew Hartman That’s just one of the reasons I went ahead and ordered X-mounts for my Veydras - to see if I can’t use the X-T2 for narrative and documentary. Shooting with the $13,000 Cabrio 20-120mm on the set of TCSTV’s Collateral is like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture on the wall. Not very impressed at all with Veydra the company however - I paid $85.00 for shipping alone, it’s nearing a week already and as far as I know, the mounts haven’t even shipped yet. $85 should be overnight delivery. It is the New Year holiday here though, so they probably won’t arrive before the end of the month anyhow. When shooting the Mini Primes with the GH5, I usually just take along two lenses and use ETC mode, essentially getting four focal lengths in an extremely compact form factor. 

Yeah, I have more affection for mini primes too. Do you not have a local rental house? I know you're not in the states so I don't know the logistics of your area. 

Those mounts not shipped yet would make me OCD. I'd be on the horn every day until they ship. $85 is not chump change. 

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3 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

One property I notice with cinema cameras is they only resolve sharp detail where its needed, giving a nice eq balance to the image.

Please, can you clarify this more - how camera alone could know where sharp detail is needed, where not?

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2 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

I have a question for everyone. How do you purchase your gear? Cash?

Cash. But I'm very cautious to sell everything I tried and didn't find best choice for me (and you have to be lucky to accomplished it if you are not in the big market country). Just now I kept only Voigtlanders 17.5 and 42.5 and Olympus 75mm. Reason for Voigts - I found that you have to have every single gout of light for Panasonic GH5 to keep it under 1600Iso. (That's also reason, besides construction, why I preferred V42.5 over Panalaica 42.5 which has T value about 1.6-1.8) Reason for Oly - also light capability and pure optical (not electronical) details discerning power that, in conjunction with ETC mode, made this lens as 3-4steps zoom (because of pure sharpness, it is quite easy to magnified in PP a little and stay quite safe).

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2 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

I hate how these manufacturers make people feel like they MUST have the latest and greatest. If we thought of these cameras in terms of say a cresent wrench, would we "upgrade" so often?

That's the topic where we have to be intelligent and where I find the value of evaluating forums as EOSHD. Simply put, I find that there are major and minor upgrades - task for manufacturer is to hide that minor upgrades are minor and present them as enough big... That's, for example, why I'm not interested in GH5s... I think in-reality-minor upgrade and minor (or even major!) downgrade IBIS wise. GH5 is major step in every field - not at least at finally getting Iso1600 usability that stay rich and cinematic-manipulative... GH5s looks as ISO3200 usable, but under the hood of agressive NR I found it is the same as GH5 with Resolve NR. Everything above is a gimic - type of shown in TheCameraStore lowlight scene above. To conclude this excursion trying to be exemplar about the camera I know - Panasonic don't squeeze everything from new senzor... just little bit of finer color manipulation... so I even expect there will be one more GH camera between now and widely expected 2020 Tokyo version. GH6 or similar with GH5s sensor and back of IBIS integration and even better color-codec usage.

Sorry if I pollute Fuji topic too much with such observations.

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22 minutes ago, jonpais said:

The GH5 is certainly no slouch when it comes to rendering skin tones either.

Screen Shot 2018-02-18 at 2.19.59 PM.png

Screen Shot 2018-02-18 at 2.20.51 PM.png

Screen Shot 2018-02-18 at 2.21.03 PM.png

For me, as I wrote - color strategy of Panasonic GH is to sugest completely neutral, i. e. human-eyes-seen reality... It is high task, usually belongs to league above. Nothing illegitimate or wrong to have different strategy, especially for prosumer market - I think Fuji tries to be extremely and indeed seriously pleasant, which is maybe a better choice. And I've say Fuji mastered it... I just hope it will not too high mastered it with wow-emulation beautiness.

1 minute ago, Matthew Hartman said:

You're entitled to your thoughts and opinions. I'm actually quite enjoying your broken English. :)

Of course I'm entitled to thoughts... I wanted to say that it is Fuji not Panasonic topic...

About your enjoying in my language :) - to say an private secret... maybe the reason is that, in one side of my life, I'm a writer with Collected works and some big echoes :) But I'm struggling with (especially) fast writing English :( Hough - you may call me Vinetoo!

1 minute ago, Matthew Hartman said:

You're entitled to your thoughts and opinions. I'm actually quite enjoying your broken English. :)

Of course I'm entitled to thoughts... I wanted to say that it is Fuji not Panasonic topic...

About your enjoying in my language :) - to say an private secret... maybe the reason is that, in one side of my life, I'm a writer with Collected works and some big echoes :) But I'm struggling with (especially) fast writing English :( Hough - you may call me Vinetoo!

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31 minutes ago, anonim said:

Please, can you clarify this more - how camera alone could know where sharp detail is needed, where not?

I'm going to be honest, I actually can't explain it in technical terms. I just know it when I see it. 

Take a face for example. With my NX1, every freaking clogged pore, wrinkle and hair stubble is very detailed and pronounced along with of course the eye area. (Which is excellent) 

But when I see footage from an Alexa, RED, BMD, Canon (cinema) only the eyes are in crisp detail, everything else is somehow smoother or more "weighted". Skin looks thicker and there's generally a sense of more dimension in what the camera resolves. I also notice edges don't suffer from chromatic aberration, or edge fringing. 

Now, I'm not saying this isn't possible with a $3,000 camera. It is. I already know that through my own experiences. And obviously certain lens' have different characteristics, I just personally see more footage in this bracket [$3,000] where it looks "too sharp" or what some here have been calling "thin", 'video-y" "digital", etc.  

One of these days I'll be able to put it in better technical terms. Maybe someone here can help with that? 

@anomin

"wow-emulation beautiness" 

I'm stealing this! :grin:

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@anonim My color correction and grading abilities are nil, so there's that. But the shots might be of interest to those considering purchasing the X-H1, as there is no footage whatsoever available online shot with the Veydras on a Fuji camera. The clips were all shot using the 50mm T2.2 Mini Prime.

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1 minute ago, Matthew Hartman said:

I'm going to be honest, I actually can't explain it in technical terms. I just know it when I see it. 

Take a face for example. With my NX1, every freaking clogged pore, wrinkle and hair stubble is very detailed and pronounced along with of course the eye area. (Which is excellent) 

But when I see footage from an Alexa, RED, BMD, Canon (cinema) only the eyes are in crisp detail, everything else is somehow smoother or more "weighted". Skin looks thicker and there's generally a sense of more dimension in what the camera resolves. I also notice edges don't suffer from chromatic aberration, or edge fringing. 

Now, I'm not saying this isn't possible with a $3,000 camera. It is. I already know that through my own experiences. And obviously certain lens' have different characteristics, I just personally see more footage in this bracket [$3,000] where it looks "too sharp" or what some here have been calling "thin", 'video-y" "digital", etc.  

One of these days I'll be able to put it in better technical terms. Maybe someone here can help with that? 

Hmmm... I think, or even I'm sure from my experience - Alexa's or Red's footages that we seen are simply better and more accurate postproduced. I do it always - as I wrote above about TheCameraStore footage, and I'm sure you know it  - one of the main task in PP is to protect and differently manipulate most important areas with secondary color correction tools. I do it always. From my experience, most of the best cameras in the market are seriously capable and very very close pure out-picture wise (i. e. without distracting spectator with bad results) to highends - but manipulation capability is their main power.

I know everybody know it - but, please, lets remember again that Upstream color - little bit an work of genius - is shoot with GH2 and Voigtlanders.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084989/

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7 minutes ago, jonpais said:

@anonim My color correction and grading abilities are nil, so there's that. But the shots might be of interest to those considering purchasing the X-H1, as there is no footage whatsoever available online shot with the Veydras on a Fuji camera. The clips were all shot using the 50mm T2.2 Mini Prime.

For me your clips are/were extremely useful - putting them such, out of camera, I can make my own conclusion about base color strategy of manufacturer, such as I wrote above. So, please, keep going with them you and every other precious testing contributor.

About your last concrete examples - for my taste, as starting point of base skin tones, I prefer look of GH5 as the most neutral between other offers in prosumer market. (But I'd like to have  Fuji or Son products, which I also tried and respect...not because I'm especially polite pussy, but really :)

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For all the talk about in-camera F-Log, since the X-T2 was released, there's actually been precious little uploaded to YouTube apart from some 15-second test shots - little better than the situation of Sony's 8-bit HLG HDR, of which there is only one poor clip of some burning logs. 

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53 minutes ago, Matthew Hartman said:

I'm going to be honest, I actually can't explain it in technical terms. I just know it when I see it. 

Take a face for example. With my NX1, every freaking clogged pore, wrinkle and hair stubble is very detailed and pronounced along with of course the eye area. (Which is excellent) 

But when I see footage from an Alexa, RED, BMD, Canon (cinema) only the eyes are in crisp detail, everything else is somehow smoother or more "weighted". Skin looks thicker and there's generally a sense of more dimension in what the camera resolves. I also notice edges don't suffer from chromatic aberration, or edge fringing. 

That's because the NX1 has a lot of sharpening artifacts. Those cinema cameras do not add sharpening to the shots. It's like using unsharp mask in photoshop. Works great, but it is not a natural look and if it goes too far, it will look weird. A lot of low budget cams do that, phones have HUGE amounts of unsharp masking going on.

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6 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

That is terrible color. She looks like she is ready to be laid out in a casket! Please tell me your monitor is not calibrated. :grin:

In the first shot she is quite pale, but it looks correct to me. The overall image looks balanced. Some other cameras, especially Panasonics, have a tendency to put a lot of warmth/orange into skin that shouldn't have any, and I bet it would do it to this. 

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15 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

As for dynamic range...

4K H265 from the NX1 on standard certainly has more information in the blacks than 4K H264 on the Fuji X-Pro 2 / X-T2 (set to Classic Chrome)

Again this is big area of change since NX1's release... If you set it to 235 from 255 you can recover a ton of stuff in the highlights and with the higher-bitrate codec hack it holds onto more in the shadows as well. Original v1.0 firmware and H.265 support on the computer side killed dynamic range, tons of clipping!

NX1 (240Mbit):

Screen Shot 2018-02-17 at 18.27.46.png

X-Pro 2 (100Mbit):

Screen Shot 2018-02-17 at 18.27.45.png

X-Pro2 is not really a good comparison because Fuji's profiles are quite contrasy and on the X-pro2 you can not change the shadow retention setting. I have no doubt that my G80 could pull up detail there on CineD, nevermind an XT2 or XH1.

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1 hour ago, hmcindie said:

That's because the NX1 has a lot of sharpening artifacts. Those cinema cameras do not add sharpening to the shots. It's like using unsharp mask in photoshop. Works great, but it is not a natural look and if it goes too far, it will look weird. A lot of low budget cams do that, phones have HUGE amounts of unsharp masking going on.

There are workarounds if not too much oversharpened at the root though.

People tend to overstate the issue instead. With the high-end, people would call it sharpness or not Canon-like softness at that 1080p time, 720p output in disguise of full HD... :-D

Yeah, people are funny. Never done, never enough ;-)

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