SONY FX3 new camera to be announced

[Llaasseerr]

2 hours ago, deezid said:

A 12 bit debayered Log codec like BRaw is actually all you need. Only gripe with Braw I have is its strong processing which e.g. on the EVA-1 produces an image looking worse than its 10 bit internal counterpart. Blackmagic does a great job applying the right linearization and transformations though even for different colorspace outputs.

Exactly. The processing on BRaw is off-putting. I believe on the one hand it's to get around the Red patent, but also it's a way to help mitigate the fixed pattern noise that still persists on some more recent Ursas by tackling it before debayering. I heard there was chroma subsampling. I could be wrong on all of the above though.

[HockeyFan12]

39 minutes ago, Llaasseerr said:

If you think about it, with subsampled chroma even that fucks with the noise (grain) regardless of disabling a camera's nasty internal NR methods. It makes it more blocky. You need to do away with both chroma subsampling and NR to see if the sensor has a nice noise profile.

I tried shooting 10 bit log 4:2:0 ALL-I 400mb compressed for a personal creative project, and although the image looks nice straight out of camera it just fell apart really quickly in post. Lots of blocky artifacts when doing a power window or an aggressive film LUT. If you convert the colourspace to YCbCr and look at the chroma channels they are just appalling garbage. They look like a highly jpeg compressed screengrab from an 80's Atari game. It's for delivery not acquisition.

10 bit log from what camera?

I'm confused because the Alexa Mini shoots 200fps at 2k (if I remember right), which correlates with a 5ms rolling shutter. 8ms makes sense for a 120fps sensor.

How do you deal with Red raw footage in Nuke? 

 

[Llaasseerr]

1 minute ago, HockeyFan12 said:

10 bit log from what camera?

I'm confused because the Alexa Mini shoots 200fps at 2k (if I remember right), which correlates with a 5ms rolling shutter. 8ms makes sense for a 120fps sensor.

How do you deal with Red raw footage in Nuke? 

 

X-T3

I have never personally needed to deal with red footage in Nuke. The footage goes through the ingest department at E-Film or wherever and we got EXR plates.

 

[HockeyFan12]

14 minutes ago, Llaasseerr said:

X-T3

I have never personally needed to deal with red footage in Nuke. The footage goes through the ingest department at E-Film or wherever and we got EXR plates.

 

I assume Arri ProRes is also delivered as EXRs? EXRs are high dynamic range 32 bit linear files, correct? 

When the colorist is grading and there's a sequence involving both vfx shots and regular footage, are they grading EXRs as linear files to match Log C or do they transform the EXRs into Log C somehow before grading? How do they get them back to Log C to match the non-vfx shots?

[Llaasseerr]

Just now, HockeyFan12 said:

I assume Arri ProRes is also delivered as EXRs? EXRs are high dynamic range 32 bit linear files, correct? 

When the colorist is grading and there's a sequence involving both vfx shots and regular footage, are they grading EXRs as linear files to match Log C or do they transform the EXRs into Log C somehow before grading? (Or transform everything using ACEs?) 

It depends if it's an indie film orr not. For low budget indie films and for TV shot on Alexa, they are generally staying as ProRes.

I've worked on small-ish films where the ProRes was converted to DPX, which is more popular on the lower budget studio projects, whereas EXR is more for the big VFX blockbusters, but that's starting to change now because of ACES gaining more mainstream acceptance.

If the footage is all ingested as EXR, then the VFX people will work linear but the DI will work log. That is handled transparently by ACES/Resolve where you pick either ACEScc or ACEScct as your working space. If the project is Arri log, it's common for vfx to work Arri wide gamut linear, but send back to production as Arri log dpx to drop into a log dpx DI timeline.

There are situations where the ingested footage is Arri Wide Gamut EXRs, which would be converted to logC with a LUT or a lossless mathematical transform before the DI begins. This is very similar to ACES.

 

[deezid]

46 minutes ago, Llaasseerr said:

X-T3

I have never personally needed to deal with red footage in Nuke. The footage goes through the ingest department at E-Film or wherever and we got EXR plates.

 

Ugh, the X-T3 and 4 have a nasty artificial and plastic looking image with strong temporal filtering on top of the excessive sharpening which gets thrown on the footage even when it's set to -4. Even the A7s3 performs better in that regard.

Really no comparison to the S1H with NR set to -1.

[Llaasseerr]

1 minute ago, deezid said:

Ugh, the X-T3 and 4 have a nasty artificial and plastic looking image with strong temporal filtering on top of the excessive sharpening which gets thrown on the footage even when it's set to -4. 

Really no comparison to the S1H with NR set to -1.

Right, it's also a lot cheaper though. I ended up getting it looking pretty organic. It's definitely capable of some nice footage, or maybe we got lucky. There's just pain dealing with compression in post.

I ended up getting some nice results shooting HLG and using a custom ACES IDT, partly because of @androidlad's HLG tests. There seems to be more DR shooting HLG than F-log, although the middle grey point is in a weird different place to where you would expect. At this point though, I'm looking for a more robust "small" camera with a more predictable workflow...like the FX3 maybe.

[josdr]

1 hour ago, deezid said:

Ugh, the X-T3 and 4 have a nasty artificial and plastic looking image with strong temporal filtering on top of the excessive sharpening which gets thrown on the footage even when it's set to -4. Even the A7s3 performs better in that regard.

Really no comparison to the S1H with NR set to -1.

You should share what you are drinking buddy . Keep the Panasonic vcr colours , we will keep the lovely and unparalleled Fuji colour science.. You have no idea on how to use one do you??

[TomTheDP]

2 hours ago, Llaasseerr said:

Exactly. The processing on BRaw is off-putting. I believe on the one hand it's to get around the Red patent, but also it's a way to help mitigate the fixed pattern noise that still persists on some more recent Ursas by tackling it before debayering. I heard there was chroma subsampling. I could be wrong on all of the above though.

I am guessing it also is trying to appeal to people obsessed with noise and clean images. Being good in "low light" is a selling point these days among the low budget/prosumer market. Otherwise you'll get a million people asking why their footage looks so noisy.

[Llaasseerr]

9 minutes ago, josdr said:

You should share what you are drinking buddy . Keep the Panasonic vcr colours , we will keep the lovely and unparalleled Fuji colour science.. You have no idea on how to use one do you??

It's true, the Fuji colours are exceptional at times. I'd love it if the X-T3 was able to output ProRes Raw or something.

[josdr]

13 minutes ago, Llaasseerr said:

It's true, the Fuji colours are exceptional at times. I'd love it if the X-T3 was able to output ProRes Raw or something.

I can find lots of faults with Fuji, but their colour science is just great...  I think he is confusing smaller cameras destined for Asian markets where skin over-processing is something that is sought for with what the X-T series can output. My X-t2,3 and 4 are stellar in this.  It all sounds like a bad YouTube video reeking of fanboyitis shouting for Full frame good, aps-c bad. I will concede that Panasonic has improved , there was a poster here with one of the S series cameras that posted some great footage, but even that has a video look to it in most cases. Prores raw externally may come eventually to Fuji but I am very happy with great 10 bit log footage as well. Take the C70 for example. Its 10bit output seems better to my eyes than Blackmagic's raw efforts. I have found the 10 bit footage from the X-T3- X-T4 very malleable to correct/transform if exposed decently enough. 

 

Back to the F-X3 now. I read that They just released Cinetone for the A7siii

[deezid]

39 minutes ago, josdr said:

You should share what you are drinking buddy . Keep the Panasonic vcr colours , we will keep the lovely and unparalleled Fuji colour science.. You have no idea on how to use one do you??

Not talking about color, which can be altered anyway or just by using better Rec709 conversions than the ones provided by Panasonic which quite frankly aren't great.

The processing is the culprit. Even with noise reduction and sharpening both set to -4 (lowest) and interframe NR OFF the X-T4 showed more sharpening artifacts than my GH5 even with lots of ghosting and smearing on top. Also color separation and tonality on Fuji cameras using F-Log both internally and externally is quite awful. Maybe the HLG workflow @Llaasseerr mentioned helps with both issues but didn't try that myself.

[deezid]

35 minutes ago, TomTheDP said:

I am guessing it also is trying to appeal to people obsessed with noise and clean images. Being good in "low light" is a selling point these days among the low budget/prosumer market. Otherwise you'll get a million people asking why their footage looks so noisy.

It's more related to keeping file sizes small from what I've heard.

[EphraimP]

41 minutes ago, Llaasseerr said:

It's true, the Fuji colours are exceptional at times. I'd love it if the X-T3 was able to output ProRes Raw or something.

Ninja V is your pal.

[josdr]

11 minutes ago, deezid said:

Not talking about color, which can be altered anyway or just by using better Rec709 conversions than the ones provided by Panasonic which quite frankly aren't great.

The processing is the culprit. Even with noise reduction and sharpening both set to -4 (lowest) and interframe NR OFF the X-T4 showed more sharpening artifacts than my GH5 even with lots of ghosting and smearing on top. Also color separation and tonality on Fuji cameras using F-Log both internally and externally is quite awful. Maybe the HLG workflow @Llaasseerr mentioned helps with both issues but didn't try that myself.

Are you sure your sensor/ glass are in pristine condition for starters? How do you handle the footage? Do you transcode the h265 to something else? I was a bit abrupt in my answer but colour is not a fuji shortcoming and I am not seeing the noise/sharpening reduction problems you are seeing. Why don't you try taking the nr and sharpening to -3 or -2 and see If that is better even if it seems counter logical. Sharpening artefacts , ghosting and smearing are not my experience . the X-T4 sensor is a bit more noisy than the one in the X-T3 (they are almost the same, with the X-T4 having a bit faster sensor readout If I remember correctly) but that's it really, definitely no plasticky over processed skin to the X-T series even with the 8bit x-T2 footage

[josdr]

4 minutes ago, EphraimP said:

Ninja V is your pal.

It is still 10 bit.... No real quality gain there compared to internal recording

[EphraimP]

9 minutes ago, josdr said:

It is still 10 bit.... No real quality gain there compared to internal recording

True, in terms of 10 bit vs 10 bit. When I read Llaasseerr's comment I saw ProRes. Missed the RAW part. I find that ProRes files are some much nicer to use on a long/complicated edit. Plus, you do get the bump from 420 to 422 and a bigger, brighter screen with pro monitoring tools like false color, monitoring luts and desqueezing anamorphic footage. 

[Llaasseerr]

49 minutes ago, josdr said:

Are you sure your sensor/ glass are in pristine condition for starters? How do you handle the footage? Do you transcode the h265 to something else? I was a bit abrupt in my answer but colour is not a fuji shortcoming and I am not seeing the noise/sharpening reduction problems you are seeing. Why don't you try taking the nr and sharpening to -3 or -2 and see If that is better even if it seems counter logical. Sharpening artefacts , ghosting and smearing are not my experience . the X-T4 sensor is a bit more noisy than the one in the X-T3 (they are almost the same, with the X-T4 having a bit faster sensor readout If I remember correctly) but that's it really, definitely no plasticky over processed skin to the X-T series even with the 8bit x-T2 footage

I've found that shooting HLG and underexposing by 2 stops with a -2 ND, then bringing it back up in post gives a nice grainy look with the X-T3. In this scenario, I used a HLG IDT in ACES into Resolve.

Re: the compression, the best way for me to combat it would have been to shoot everything DCI 4K to an Atomos at ProRes 422HQ and then scale down to 2K DCI. But I shot some stuff internally at 400 ALL-I then converted it to ProRes422HQ, and the compression starts to be a bit of a problem. Also, scaling from 4K to 2K does not fully remove the chroma subsampling artifacts.

I basically want a more simple workflow with better results though, for what I do. BUT: I would love it if the Ninja V recording trickled down from the GFX100 to the X-T3/4. Also, I like the fact you can record DCI 2K with the X-T3 and I would love if you could record ProRes Raw DCI 2K.

[TomTheDP]

7 hours ago, Llaasseerr said:

I've found that shooting HLG and underexposing by 2 stops with a -2 ND, then bringing it back up in post gives a nice grainy look with the X-T3. In this scenario, I used a HLG IDT in ACES into Resolve.

Re: the compression, the best way for me to combat it would have been to shoot everything DCI 4K to an Atomos at ProRes 422HQ and then scale down to 2K DCI. But I shot some stuff internally at 400 ALL-I then converted it to ProRes422HQ, and the compression starts to be a bit of a problem. Also, scaling from 4K to 2K does not fully remove the chroma subsampling artifacts.

I basically want a more simple workflow with better results though, for what I do. BUT: I would love it if the Ninja V recording trickled down from the GFX100 to the X-T3/4. Also, I like the fact you can record DCI 2K with the X-T3 and I would love if you could record ProRes Raw DCI 2K.

Prores raw 2k would be line skipped but at least you’d still be getting the extra color information. The Xt3 and 4 can’t due Prores raw due to the xtrans sensor tho

[josdr]

12 hours ago, EphraimP said:

True, in terms of 10 bit vs 10 bit. When I read Llaasseerr's comment I saw ProRes. Missed the RAW part. I find that ProRes files are some much nicer to use on a long/complicated edit. Plus, you do get the bump from 420 to 422 and a bigger, brighter screen with pro monitoring tools like false color, monitoring luts and desqueezing anamorphic footage. 

I would argue that the 422 is really useful with green screen recordings rather than anything else . Prores are much nicer to use, but any decent mid tier Nvidia  gpu can handle h265 natively nowadays..  But we all do like to whine :)..  If they would allow the X-T3 to output 12bit to the ninja v I would personally not think to "upgrade" a camera body  for a long time. 🙂