Panasonic S5 ii Moiré vs the sudden strange appearance of S1H Moiré in raw with Blackmagic Design 12G Video Assist

[jgharding]

Hi all,

After using S5 ii and S1H on a shoot together I noticed a few interesting things RE moiré.

The S5 ii definitely suffers from sensor-Moiré in certain situations, here you can see that as a distant rough-tweed cover on the gobo comes into focus with the pan down, it dances like crazy with brightly coloured red and green Moiré. I just edited around it TBH:

You could do some repair in post for this, but for the odd cutaway on the post budget the film has, it's not worth it TBH.

Interestingly below though, the S1H actually suffered with Moiré in some of the interviews, while the S5 ii didn't. I've not seen this before. The S1H has an OLPF and has never shown any Moiré til now. This shot is in 25p BRAW and has a mild yellow and blue Moiré on the shirt, it then cuts to the close shot on the S5 ii, where there's no Moiré at all. This doesn't look like sensor Moiré to me, and indeed that wouldn't make a lot of sense. I've punched in a lot so it survives YouTube compression, and you'll need to watch in 4K. I edited the topic etc as I had thought it was just in 4K S35 BRAW, but actually its in both 6K and 4K raw, open gate and S35.

I do wonder if this is something to do with how BRAW is being processed, the S1H generally has been Moiré resistant over a ton of shoots in the last few years, so perhaps the BRAW processing in Resolve has changed in some negative way I thought? Resolve wise I've tried all the scaling filters, every raw decode quality, every raw profile, and it's still there, so I think it may be a Video Assist 12G glitch.

To me, this looks like some kind of aliasing from scaling, so at some point there's scaling happening in software either in the Video Assist 12G or maybe even the S1H?

I admit it's mild and YouTube covers most of when it's full size, but back to back with Moiré-free footage it's distracting. If I can't find any other options or settings I'll flag it to Blackmagic Design and see what's up.

[jgharding]

PS. the S1H Moiré is actually visible on YouTube at 1080p and above. I'd hate to have to stop using BRAW...

I'm aware I can secondary the shirt etc etc, but a lot of these shoots are very quick turnaround so it would be far preferable to not have to deal with it.

[BTM_Pix]

Not an answer to your specific query about BRAW playing a role but here is a side by side that someone has done with the S5ii and S1H comparing moiré.

Its there in both but far more pronounced in the S5ii with the suspicion that the OLPF of the S1H is the differentiator but I doubt that is the whole tale.

From that test, it would be expected to be more from the S5ii but its interesting that you are seeing more with the S1H in BRAW than internal. 

Could be additional processing in the camera is taming it when recording internally ?

[jgharding]

6 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Could be additional processing in the camera is taming it when recording internally ?

I'm not sure TBH, I've not seen it before, so it's a bit strange

[deezid]

Also noticed that the S1H is more prone to moire shooting BRAW.
I think it may be caused rather inferior debayering inside the BMD VA.

[Andrew Reid]

Speculative, but wonder if Blackmagic reserves a higher quality proprietary BRAW debayer for their own cameras, and uses a less advanced method for everyone else?

I am curious to see how the S5 II is for moire vs the A7 IV, Nikon Z9, and the X-H2.

The S1H internal recording in 6K is really nice and OLPF great to have. It's one of those camera that's just absolutely great straight out the box bare bones.

Just be careful updating firmware as when I went from V1.0 on my S1H loan unit from Panasonic to 2.5 it bricked it!