Sigma Fp review and interview / Cinema DNG RAW

[rawshooter]

2 hours ago, paulinventome said:

Mine doesn't... Or at least i've not noticed this. 

Can you give me a specific setting that you lose after power off?

 

Just tested it again: Record settings (such as resolution, audio levels) are not remembered after the camera wakes up from sleep.

[mercer]

Maybe there just isn't enough footage from the FP out there to accurately judge, but from what I've seen, the FP struggles in the shadows and the highlights more than the 5D3 does.

I'd say there's almost a stop difference. If I had to guess, the FP has between 11-11 1/2 stops and the 5D3 has +/- 12 stops of DR.

However, the 14 bit color could just give the perception of more DR. I'd have to use them side by side to know for sure.

[paulinventome]

1 hour ago, mercer said:

If I ever get an FP, I'd use the dng files the same way I use MLVFS with my 5D3... use Resolve for a very rough cut, color corrector and maybe a CST before transcoding to ProRes for FCPX.

It's an $1800 camera, we cant expect miracles here... in fact... for $1800 it's pretty impressive.

With that said... what's keeping me from pulling the trigger on the FP is that the FP seems to have less DR than my 5D3.

Has anyone tested the internal 1080p raw... that's 12 bit, right?

For the money it is incredible what you get. The sensor is better than the A7sII in terms of overall image.

So remember in all modes the dynamic range is the same. 8, 10 and 12. The brightest and the darkest point are identical. The difference is how the steps in-between are recorded. And the potential is for Sigma to do a 10 bit version that distributions the full 12 bits from the sensor up to 30fps. And that would be perfect.

As for comparison with the 5D3 does that do RAW video? Most sensors *do* alter their range in motion. So if you have a RAW file from it, a DNG, of a full range scene with clipping then we could look at the data and work out what the range really is.

When you do comparisons with other cameras that aren't RAW and you use step wedges you really don't know if those other cameras are using highlight recovery internally. I guess most of them are in which case those greyscale wedges are such an easy target to tweak for. I suspect the sigma would give another stop or two on wedge charts if done properly in RAW.

I personally think a lot of the dynamic range stats floating round are meaningless because it's really about what channels clip when. Ideally wedges should be R, G and B not grey and you'd get a better understanding of what's happening. Commonly green is less sensitive than the others.

And yes 1080p is 12 bit to an SD card as well, it is close to 12 bit from UHD but as the sensor is being run in a different mode it is *slightly* different. The image is softer though, it's binning pixels.

Cheers
Paul

[rawshooter]

1 hour ago, Brian Williams said:

Mine doesn’t forget anything. Whenever I turn back on, it’s in the same mode as I left it, with all video and still settings as they were before turning off. 
Now if I’m using one of the custom modes (which I do, C1 for stills and C2 for video) that does reset itself each time you go back to it, but that’s just the nature of custom modes in all cameras.

The problem is that you need custom modes for zebras to be visible.

But I also have this behavior in M mode.

Correction: It only happens when the camera wakes up from sleep, not when turning it off and back on.

 

[paulinventome]

4 minutes ago, rawshooter said:

Just tested it again: Record settings (such as resolution, audio levels) are not remembered after the camera wakes up from sleep.

In that case there's something up with yours.

I just found the audio adjustments, changed them, turned it off. Came back turned on and it was all as expected.

That's odd. You are running off the normal battery? Is there a setting or something?

cheers
Paul

4 minutes ago, rawshooter said:

The problem is that you need custom modes for zebras to be visible.

But I also have this behavior in M mode.

 

My Zebra settings persist between turning off and on too...

5 minutes ago, mercer said:

Maybe there just isn't enough footage from the FP out there to accurately judge, but from what I've seen, the FP struggles in the shadows and the highlights more than the 5D3 does.

I'd say there's almost a stop difference. If I had to guess, the FP has between 11-11 1/2 stops and the 5D3 has +/- 12 stops of DR.

However, the 14 bit color could just give the perception of more DR. I'd have to use them side by side to know for sure.

The fp has a full 12 stops as far as i can tell but of course that's somewhat dependant of your tolerance for shadows. Running in full 12 bit cDNG it's very good.

As you say, you'd need to side by side them. I would be very very surprised if that canon sensor was doing 14 bit in motion, regardless of the depth of the final files.

cheers
Paul

[rawshooter]

13 minutes ago, paulinventome said:

That's odd. You are running off the normal battery? Is there a setting or something?

 

I use the normal, original Sigma battery, yes.

Can you test the following with your camera: Change the record setting (for example, from 12bit FHD to 8bit UHD), let the camera go into power save sleep, activate it and see whether it remembered the setting?

Plus, Zebras only work in the custom modes - so whenever the camera is powered on again  defaulting to the saved  values, temporary adjustments have been forgotten.

[paulinventome]

7 minutes ago, rawshooter said:

I use the normal, original Sigma battery, yes.

Can you test the following with your camera: Change the record setting (for example, from 12bit FHD to 8bit UHD), let the camera go into power save sleep, activate it and see whether it remembered the setting?

Yes it did. I did it a few times - (i didn't realise there was a power save sleep!). I set that to 1min and let it sleep a few times and changed settings within. And also the audio stayed as well.

So that's odd right?

Paul

[paulinventome]

52 minutes ago, rawshooter said:

Just tested it again: Record settings (such as resolution, audio levels) are not remembered after the camera wakes up from sleep.

I wonder what the difference between the cameras is then.

My power setting was 1min. Do you have an SD card in? I wonder if it writes settings to that as it sleeps?

What about ECO setting? (I tried on and off but it still worked). I have no idea what ECO mode even is!

Paul

[Brian Williams]

12 minutes ago, paulinventome said:

I have no idea what ECO mode even is!

I just looked it up-

“The LCD monitor is darkened to reduce battery use when the camera has not been operated for eight seconds.”

Also, everyone here is running the updated firmware? I don’t have my camera here with me at the moment, so I can’t test, but I know you can’t use zebras if focus peaking is on.

[mercer]

1 hour ago, paulinventome said:

As for comparison with the 5D3 does that do RAW video?

Yes, the 5D3 can do FF 14bit uncompressed or 14bit lossless raw running the Magic Lantern firmware.

1 hour ago, paulinventome said:

And yes 1080p is 12 bit to an SD card as well, it is close to 12 bit from UHD but as the sensor is being run in a different mode it is *slightly* different. The image is softer though, it's binning pixels.

Good to know, thanks. I'm mostly interested in internal recording. 

In the end, I think most DR comparisons are merely splitting hairs with any camera at or below 12 stops of DR. Even with BM cameras that purport to have 13 stops, I don't see a major difference. But since I don't really need 4K, then DR is one part of the equation that will help me to make a decision to purchase one or not.

[paulinventome]

2 minutes ago, mercer said:

In the end, I think most DR comparisons are merely splitting hairs with any camera at or below 12 stops of DR. Even with BM cameras that purport to have 13 stops, I don't see a major difference. But since I don't really need 4K, then DR is one part of the equation that will help me to make a decision to purchase one or not.

Sure. All i meant was it doesn't matter how big the bucket is (14 bit) but is it filled by the sensor properly?

I don't know anything about the 5D3, can you get a cDNG out of it, is there any sample footage around?

cheers
Paul

[Lars Steenhoff]

Yes Mlv is the container, that gets converted to cdng in post. 

Its possible with the hack since 2013.

search for magic lantern online and you will find some footage.

 

[KnightsFan]

48 minutes ago, paulinventome said:

I don't know anything about the 5D3, can you get a cDNG out of it, is there any sample footage around?

Magic Lantern shoots native 14 bit DNG image sequences and puts each sequence into a .MLV container. If you mount the container as a drive, you literally copy/paste DNG frames out of the container--you don't actually have to convert anything. For 12 and 10 bit, Magic Lantern truncates the words which is why there is a DR penalty. (Or at least that was the case last time I used it, which was a few years ago).

I can dig up some of my old footage if you can't find any samples online.

[paulinventome]

37 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

Magic Lantern shoots native 14 bit DNG image sequences and puts each sequence into a .MLV container. If you mount the container as a drive, you literally copy/paste DNG frames out of the container--you don't actually have to convert anything. For 12 and 10 bit, Magic Lantern truncates the words which is why there is a DR penalty. (Or at least that was the case last time I used it, which was a few years ago).

I can dig up some of my old footage if you can't find any samples online.

I'd just read that natively it was around 11.5/12stops but they have a cool approach of varying the ISO on different lines to extend that at the expense of vertical resolution. That's a neat approach - especially if the debayer takes that into account.

So i guess that's how it's done.

I saw some samples and it looks like it will work in certain situations. 

cheers
Paul

[KnightsFan]

16 minutes ago, paulinventome said:

I'd just read that natively it was around 11.5/12stops but they have a cool approach of varying the ISO on different lines to extend that at the expense of vertical resolution. That's a neat approach - especially if the debayer takes that into account.

So i guess that's how it's done.

I saw some samples and it looks like it will work in certain situations. 

cheers
Paul

I haven't seen any measurements of the DR of the 5D3 raw, but that seems about right based on my comparisons to the BM 2.5k. I tried that iso mode a bit, but i didn't like it and never used it on a project, i cant remember exactly why.

[Lars Steenhoff]

Because it causes aliasing and loss of resolution, basically you are alternating lines, one high iso, the next low iso.

And when you combine them you have less resolution as if you would have shot at one iso only.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here a worst case sigma Fp test, lit with some little energy saving light that outputs horrible color.

Iso 6400, 8 bit cdng.

manual focus85 mm lens handheld 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/biq7g9afi999lmi/AABRYDSG9spbYp0WJ5l5g-SAa?dl=0

 

[Brian Williams]

On 11/18/2019 at 5:08 AM, Lars Steenhoff said:

 

AndI wonder if this fits under the camera:

 

 

 

Lars, did you ever buy this? Also wondering if is fits under.

[rawshooter]

18 minutes ago, Brian Williams said:

Lars, did you ever buy this? Also wondering if is fits under.

Slashcam just ran a test concluding that most adapted SATA SSDs do not reliable work with the Sigma fp:

https://www.slashcam.de/artikel/Kurztest/slashCHECK---Guenstige-SATA-SSDs-an-der-Sigma-fp.html

[Lars Steenhoff]

Not yet, I'm still interested to try it out

Don't get a sata drive.

Usb 3 with Nvme should work in theory

[paulinventome]

1 hour ago, Lars Steenhoff said:

Because it causes aliasing and loss of resolution, basically you are alternating lines, one high iso, the next low iso.

And when you combine them you have less resolution as if you would have shot at one iso only.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here a worst case sigma Fp test, lit with some little energy saving light that outputs horrible color.

Iso 6400, 8 bit cdng.

 

Nice dog! and the sensor does a great job. We mustn't loose sight that this is a really good sensor in here. Steve Huff seems to be favouring it over the Leica SLs

I don't see why alternate lines at a different ISO would reduce resolution but maybe it's not what i imagine, i don't know how many sensors let you set iso on a per line readout basis. Is it the same line being read out with two ISOs?

I am using a 2TB SanDisk extreme at the moment, lighter than other SSDs i have and seems no issue on performance:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Extreme-Portable-SSD-Read/dp/B078T9SZ3K?th=1

Rugged as well. I was planning on velcro'ing it to some quick release clamp. Anyone know when the small rig fp cage is due?

cheers
Paul