A clearer glimpse inside the camera...

[kye]

We all know that cameras produce (sometimes dramatically) different images and image quality, and yet we also know that within a given price range those same cameras typically use the same sensors from Sony and are recording to the same codecs in basically the same bitrates.  It's maddening!

So, WTF is going on?  

Well, I just came upon this talk below, which goes through and demonstrates some of the inner workings in greater detail than I had previously seen:

It's long, but here's my notes...

Firstly, how you de-mosaic / de-bayer the image really matters, with some algorithms being higher quality and require higher processing power:

(Click on the images to zoom in - quality isn't the best but the effects are visible)

If you're not shooting RAW then this will be done in-camera, and if your manufacturer skimped on the processor they put in there, this will be happening to your footage.

If the camera is scaling the image, then the quality of this matters too:

and if the scaling even gets done in the wrong colour space then it can really screw things up:

There's more discussions in there, especially around colour science which has been discussed to death, but I thought these might be illuminating as it's not something we get to see that much because it's buried in the camera and typically it's not something we can easily play with in the NLE.

All these add up to a fundamental principle that I have been gradually gravitating towards.

If you're shooting non-RAW then shoot in the highest resolution you can shoot in, and just un-sharpen (blur) the image in post.

Shooting in the highest resolution means that your camera will be doing the least downscaling (or none), and most glitches and bad processing will be at the pixel-level, which means that the higher the resolution the smaller those glitches and errors compared to the size of the image, and un-sharpening de-emphasises these in the footage.  

You might notice that all of these shortcomings make the footage sharper, not duller, so the errors have made your footage sharp but in a way that it never was - it's fictional sharpness.

Also, the more modern displays are also themselves becoming sharper, so it's no wonder that footage all now looks like those glitch websites from the late 90s that were trying to be cool but looked like a graphic designer threw up into them...

FilmLight (who make BaseLight which is the Resolve competitor that costs as much as a house) seem to be on a mission to get deeper into the image and bring along the industry on that journey, and I'm really appreciative of their efforts as they're providing more insight into things we can do to get better images and get more value from our limited budgets.

[ac6000cw]

As an electronics design engineer who has spent a large a proportion of my career designing video processing and transmission equipment, I find it almost unbelievable how bad the video image processing can be in some hybrid cameras sometimes. For example, look at the amount of false colour and aliasing there is in the FHD from the Sony A6600 versus the (four year older) Pana GX8 in the image below (grabbed from this DPReview video test chart )

Sony has much improved the false colour situation in the recent A6700, but aliasing is still an issue (full test chart ) :

I well understand the issues of heat and power consumption in small battery powered devices, but e.g. Fuji and Panasonic can do it much better than Sony in comparable size cameras...

[ND64]

8 hours ago, ac6000cw said:

but e.g. Fuji and Panasonic can do it much better than Sony in comparable size cameras...

Different pixel sizes, probably different pixel fill factor, different AA filters, different resolving power in lenses used. You should make sure all of these are equal in your comparison, then discuss about the difference in algorithms and processing strategies.