Canon 7D raw video with the Mosaic Engineering anti-aliasing filter

[slakjaw]

I was at the state fair last year and I had my camera hanging down my back while I was having a beer. some dude snuck up to it and did the shocker symbol and pushed the shutter button. He got off a few shots before I noticed. So I went ahead and put his photo on craigslist casual encounters male seeking male section.

 

And I laughed pretty hard about it.

[tfraser]

when you shoot 1728 x 972 on the 7D in raw mode what is the 35mm equivalent crop factor please?  It's a crop of a 1.6 cropped sensor, so I'm not confident I'm coming up with the right figure...

[Sean Cunningham]

Isn't that just undersampling on the full sensor?

[Andrew Reid]

Yeah it uses the full sensor area and samples at that resolution. There's no crop.

[Andrew Reid]

Andrew, You've got it totally wrong. In many European countries, according to the law, it is the other way round. Before you start filming or taking pictures, it is the person who is holding the camera who must walk towards and talk to the people in the street, and ask permission to use the camera on them.

 

You Europeans and your laws. You have some absolutely nuts ones. I'll seriously consider taking my blog out of Germany and back to the UK if I was ever stopped from practicing my arts by tree hugging personal privacy nuts.

 

It's just unpleasant, which is why I don't really want to talk about it on the forum.

 

I was once out with Slashcam testing the Canon 1D C and testing the lens for focus breathing by racking focus some shrubbery on my side of the pavement to a woman stood smoking on the other side of the road, at least 25m away and out of earshot. Guess what, 2 mins later she was stomping down the U-bahn steps after me and demanding I format the card. Horrible encounter with a nut job. Some people just need to chill out. It is not the era of the Stasi secret police any more, it is the modern world we live in.

 

The funny thing is these politicians are always banging on about the freedom of artists and freedom of expression then putting laws in place which diminish freedom.

 

Dear Berliner on the street with your finger up... My freedom begins where yours ends. Don't overreach yourself.

[sunyata]

I've been going crazy for weeks now trying to decide what camera to get and for a second I thought this answered my question! But wait.. little snag here: Magic Lantern is capturing at 5x cropped and then you have to upscale to 1080. So we are getting 1/5th the resolution of the sensor?

 

Granted, it's nice video.. but I need to find a camera that I can use to capture stock footage that will be used in compositing and effects. It's a bummer, but we have these clock punching sadistic QC people that look for banding frame by frame and even do ridiculous gamma tests to catch artifacts, which is common if you are shooting something dark and luminous like fog, smoke, fire, neon, which is like 90% of what our clients want. I'm thinking I'll have to pony up for the 5DMarkIII or the BM Cinema or Production Cam. When you get footage that was shot on film, the grain of the film, 10bit gamma and motion blur helps knock all the banding out. I'm trying to find an "affordable" digital camera that matches the live action I usually get. 

 

Going from 4k 4:2:0 down to 1080 in a float comp actually won't get rid of bad artifacting (i'm thinking the GH4 4k to 1080 4:4:4 workflow thing), not if it clearly exists in the source. It's also doing a lot of pixel removal depending on the program and algorithm. It softens the grain but if you have clear banding in the source, it will still be there in the smaller version. 8 bit is only 256 steps of gray.. that's really problematic in low light. Seems to cancel out the benefits of the GH4's improved sensor. And magic lantern is for Cannon.. not Panasonic, so forget about waiting for a crack to fix the 8 bit internal problem. Capturing the 10bit out is an option but with the BM cams you can use SSD's.

 

Sorry, these are the internal ramblings of a man that has officially been researching this topic for 2 weeks. I think the bottom line is that these camera companies just don't get us.. oh wait, that is unless you have 3k to spend, then it seems we're all good. 

[Jon-R]

You Europeans and your laws. You have some absolutely nuts ones. I'll seriously consider taking my blog out of Germany and back to the UK if I was ever stopped from practicing my arts by tree hugging personal privacy nuts.

 

It's just unpleasant, which is why I don't really want to talk about it on the forum.

 

I was once out with Slashcam testing the Canon 1D C and testing the lens for focus breathing by racking focus some shrubbery on my side of the pavement to a woman stood smoking on the other side of the road, at least 25m away and out of earshot. Guess what, 2 mins later she was stomping down the U-bahn steps after me and demanding I format the card. Horrible encounter with a nut job. Some people just need to chill out. It is not the era of the Stasi secret police any more, it is the modern world we live in.

 

The funny thing is these politicians are always banging on about the freedom of artists and freedom of expression then putting laws in place which diminish freedom.

 

Dear Berliner on the street with your finger up... My freedom begins where yours ends. Don't overreach yourself.

 

Germans value their privacy. It might be a foreign concept for someone from the promised land of CCTV, but Germans take it very, very seriously. You might not like it, but you should at least respect it. And if you can't, then you shouldn't live there. There are plenty of places on earth where there isn't really any concept of privacy when you're out in the public. They might suit you better. When in rome, do as the romans. I've lived in Freiburg for a couple of years now, and that simply means that street photography isn't really an option for me at the moment here, because it's too much of an hassle. But I won't blame the Germans for it. I chose to move here, so I'd damn better respect the way the natives want to live their lives. Different folk, different strokes, and as long as no-one is forcing you to live in Germany, I don't see the problem.

[Jon-R]

Well let be the first to say Berlin looks like a complete Eastern European ph-cking dump.  The trash and spray paint everywhere tells you something about the mentality of the people that inhabit that city.  I've never been there and based on your videos I may never go.

 

Also you have to realize privacy laws in Germany are different from other places.  This is covered a lot in photography forums.

Berlin is a 3.5m population city. There are precious few cities of that size that don't have less than desirable quarters.

[sunyata]

Hey Jon-R

 

I get what you are saying, I hate it when I'm out and someone is taking a photo while I eat, walk, ride, hike or probably if I keeled over on Santa Monica Blvd, while I grasped my chest and breathed my last breath; but this is the world we are living in today, for better or worse. There is no going back. 

 

Also, ironically, in a police state, citizens would not be allowed to take photos and post them for public consumption.

[Jon-R]

Hey Jon-R

 

I get what you are saying, I hate it when I'm out and someone is taking a photo while I eat, walk, ride, hike or probably if I keeled over on Santa Monica Blvd, while I grasped my chest and breathed my last breath; but this is the world we are living in today, for better or worse. There is no going back. 

 

Also, ironically, in a police state, citizens would not be allowed to take photos and post them for public consumption.

 

There's no reason why Germany has to be like that. They don't like it either, and like it so little that they've made legizlation to that point. It's not that public photography is illegal. Taking idetifiable pictures of persons without their consent is illegal. In practice, that means taking photos/video of people with their faces large and in focus enough to be identifiable without asking them first. The idea is that your privacy is your own, and no-one can rob that from you. If you want to voluntarily reliquish it for a picture or video however, that's completely fine. In a sense, privacy is considered a core right of each individual. Basically, this is very similar to how things work in the States, with the big difference that in the States, being in public spaces automatically means that you have no expectation of privacy. That's not the case in Germany, and there's no technical reason why one law is correct while the other isn't. The laws simply reflect the wishes of the populus.

[sunyata]

Yes, if it's the law then it's the law. No argument there. I can't even imagine how you could enforce that in the States. At a Starbucks, someone takes a group shot and you're right next to the table... what are you going to do, jump up and demand they delete the photo? You're walking on the boardwalk and everyone is snapping selfies.. you happen to be in the shot, are you going to flip them off? When I go surfing people are taking photos from the parking lot.. what am I going to do, flip them off and scream at them to delete their photos? It seems ridiculous.

[Jon-R]

Yes, if it's the law then it's the law. No argument there. I can't even imagine how you could enforce that in the States. At a Starbucks, someone takes a group shot and you're right next to the table... what are you going to do, jump up and demand they delete the photo? You're walking on the boardwalk and everyone is snapping selfies.. you happen to be in the shot, are you going to flip them off? When I go surfing people are taking photos from the parking lot.. what am I going to do, flip them off and scream at them to delete their photos? It seems ridiculous.

 

Well, laws need to be supported by social norms to be effective. Because the social norm in Germany is that recording other people without their consent is unacceptable, the law works because it only needs to strengthen that. Due to the norm, recording people in general is less comon in Germany than in other places. Due to the law, the people have a way to enforce the norm if push comes to shove. They're in a position where they can, if bothered, with confidence demand that someone deletes recordings of them if someone does record them.

 

The norm and the law in the US is that recording in public spaces is A-OK. Suddenly chaning that law with the old norm in place would make the law really, really ineffective. As you said, what are you supposed to do when people are recording strangers literally everywhere? It would simply be unenforcable. It's a bit like seatbelts. It took decades of pro-seatbelt propaganda and really active policing before people started wearing them.

[Guest Ebrahim Saadawi]

Yes, if it's the law then it's the law. No argument there. I can't even imagine how you could enforce that in the States. At a Starbucks, someone takes a group shot and you're right next to the table... what are you going to do, jump up and demand they delete the photo? You're walking on the boardwalk and everyone is snapping selfies.. you happen to be in the shot, are you going to flip them off? .

Actually that's not what we do either, even in the most religiously conservative, and most police-domimated countries in the world (Egypt). And I would guess that germany isn't different.

We don't mind being in a corner of picture others are taking in starbucks, we're not jerks, its just some of us mind being photographed specifically where we are the entire subject of the photo-video.

And it's not law as it's more of traditions- respect, for example shooting a female subject would be highly disrespectful here, or an older in age individual, whilst a normal guy wouldn't probably mind. I don't mind myself, but I understand it and respect my fellow citizens' religions and laws.

Shooting a landscape including people is fine, shooting a scene with people appearing in the background in fine, shooting people when they're doing a performance (street bands, etc) is fine. It's just shooting specific faces that's to be take sensitively.

[Guest Ebrahim Saadawi]

Anyway this subject could really use a separate thread. I hope my input wasn't too misplaced or unacceptable (if considered legal-talk)

[Andrew Reid]

Germans value their privacy. It might be a foreign concept for someone from the promised land of CCTV, but Germans take it very, very seriously. You might not like it, but you should at least respect it. And if you can't, then you shouldn't live there. There are plenty of places on earth where there isn't really any concept of privacy when you're out in the public. They might suit you better. When in rome, do as the romans. I've lived in Freiburg for a couple of years now, and that simply means that street photography isn't really an option for me at the moment here, because it's too much of an hassle. But I won't blame the Germans for it. I chose to move here, so I'd damn better respect the way the natives want to live their lives. Different folk, different strokes, and as long as no-one is forcing you to live in Germany, I don't see the problem.

 

Look up the definition of public. Public is the opposite of private. A public space is by definition NOT a private space. Yet Germany tries to pass a law that makes it like a private one. Then maybe you can see why I have a problem with the logic of it.

 

What do you do at a gig or concert with faces in the crowd? Is the crowd allowed to sue the videographer shooting back at them from the stage?

 

Nutty or what?

[Andrew Reid]

Yes, if it's the law then it's the law. No argument there. I can't even imagine how you could enforce that in the States. At a Starbucks, someone takes a group shot and you're right next to the table... what are you going to do, jump up and demand they delete the photo? You're walking on the boardwalk and everyone is snapping selfies.. you happen to be in the shot, are you going to flip them off? When I go surfing people are taking photos from the parking lot.. what am I going to do, flip them off and scream at them to delete their photos? It seems ridiculous.

 

Exactly, ridiculous is the word. Extremely limiting of freedom of expression and artistic expression. Yet I've been in Berlin 3 years now happily shooting away and will continue to do so, ignoring this nonsense concept of total personal privacy in public spaces. What matters is respectful distance, respect of the subject, and most of all respectful use of the material. Unless someone has behaved in a way to void their rights to respect. If someone has a problem with me making them look cinematic and filming completely innocent street scenes which they happen to be part of then that is their unpleasant psychological difficulty and I'm not responsible for it.

[sunyata]

Crazy, anyway.. moving on...

 

I see that you commented that the full sensor is used on the 7D when it's cropping 5x, so then it's using 1/5th of the resolution of the chip to achieve 1080 24p RAW? Maybe this is largely responsible for the moire that needs to be removed. It seems like this is something that could be designed out of the downsampling process with the hack, if you mimicked how film grain works for example, you would not get a moire because there would be no symmetry in the sampling. I wonder if you could sample 1/5th of the sensor using perlin noise. Anyway, you're still using a fraction of the sensor. 

[Andrew Reid]

The norm and the law in the US is that recording in public spaces is A-OK.

 

Maybe I need to move!

[Andrew Reid]

The idea is that your privacy is your own, and no-one can rob that from you. Basically, this is very similar to how things work in the States, with the big difference that in the States, being in public spaces automatically means that you have no expectation of privacy. That's not the case in Germany, and there's no technical reason why one law is correct while the other isn't.

 

The technical reason why the German law is not correct is that it defies basic logic.

 

From such a logical bunch of people and such an intelligent culture, I am really surprised at some of their directives and government practices.

[Andrew Reid]

Berlin is a 3.5m population city. There are precious few cities of that size that don't have less than desirable quarters.

 

I'm not sure how you guys came to the conclusion that the Mauerpark area and Prenzlauer Berg are 'undesirable quarters'. It's yuppie central!