4K will require hardware update

Simon Shasha said:
If the S-Log doesn't come in 10bit, the whole point of S-Log being so flat is pointless. 8bit grading on a flat-profile is not logical.
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This.

I think Sony really need to step it up a bit with the hardware update on the FS700, if people are paying for an update and sending their camera away to enable something that was "ready", it better come back better than it was before, not just really really "ready". We know we're getting s-log2 and we know we're getting raw (which doesn't need a log) so logically we should be getting 10 bit s-log2 out.

As they're upgrading internal hardware at a cost, these I think are the low end options Sony will bring us:
Option 1: 10 bit s-log2 internal with a higher bitrate is what they should give us (to compete with BMC pocket!!!!) and would be great
Option 2: 10 bit s-log2 out via SDI is what I think they'll give us and will still be good
Option 3: No real change, 8 bit s-log2 internal and out via SDI is what they might give us and is almost useless, nobody compresses 12 stops into an 8 bit log for a reason

We're no longer in the world when the F3 was released,cameras with a poor internal codec aren't really going to be tolerated/purchased anymore for anything more than £2k. Look what the Canon DSLRs can do internally now! Or the tiny, cheap BMC pocket when that's released. This hardware and software update is a chance for Sony to step it up based on the competition and it would keep the FS700 in the game for indie shooting as the 4k raw recording is not really aimed at your average FS700 buyer due to it's cost. Option 1 should be a no brainer in my opinion, it's not going to affect the F5 and the F3 is already massively depreciated due to BMC etc. If they go for option 3 I think they've really misjudged the competition.
 
I agree with you 100% Tobyloc. 4:2:0 8-bit internal was a bit dated even for 2012. It's 2013 Sony, so start competing because the internal codec is really weak. Especially if they are doing S-Log, they should just do it right, and not half ass (which is what I suspect they will do). Surprise us please Sony, for once. FS700 now really sits beneath the F5 (the F3 will be discontinued soon IMO), so make it feel like it does.
 
I have some really good news for all of you. Yesterday I spoke to a Sony representative and he answered most of my questions... because he could. There is a mail spread from the Sony headquarters that there will be an announcement within the next coming week from Sony with all the details we are waiting for!!! Finally!

And for those who read my previous posts and read my question to Sony: their answer was YES, it will be on the FS700! And I'm not talking about RAW ;-)

And gene_can_sing, you were right about the F3. It is discontinued because Sony thinks the F5 is a major upgrade in the same price range. If you still need one: hit the shops!
 
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eliomys said:
I have some really good news for all of you. Yesterday I spoke to a Sony representative and he answered most of my questions... because he could. There is a mail spread from the Sony headquarters that there will be an announcement within the next coming week from Sony with all the details we are waiting for!!! Finally!

And for those who read my previous posts and read my question to Sony: their answer was YES, it will be on the FS700! And I'm not talking about RAW ;-)

And gene_can_sing, you were right about the F3. It is discontinued because Sony thinks the F5 is a major upgrade in the same price range. If you still need one: hit the shops!
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Well well. I reckon they were holding back all the info because they've been working on improving a few extra things for us!! :) THanks for the info eliomys!
 
thank you for your post, David!
i'm gonna join the small seminar by Sony headquarters in few days and it's gonna be the world's first meeting, open for everybody, for playing with 4K2K raw option with R5. Sony Japan will start this type of seminar/meeting in major cities in Japan through the next month so your Sony rep's story is pretty reasonable, they all must know the details.

i don't know about any schedule for spec announcement in my country however i'm pretty sure that every owner in Japan has exactly the same question we've talked so hope i can get some answer from them for sharing.

one thing i'm sure about that internal recording will be stick with AVCHD, 8bit420. i'm asking about this dozen times since FS700 came out last year but they said that FS700 is designed for AVCHD and it's not changeable BASICALLY. so no XAVC nor ProRes internally...unless some miracle happens, i don't know.

the FS700 i've borrowed from Sony was already upgraded, it was still beta test camera but that baby was full equipped, the menu shows the all raw option. BTW, i was so excited when i see this 4K 120fps setting :)
FS700_MENU_4KBURST.jpg

so if upgraded FS700 does 10bit422 out, the footages i uploaded should be 10bit422, not 10bit422 wrapped by Samurai.

unfortunately it looked just another 8bit422 signal to my eyes...is that banding happens in 10bit? i just don't know.

so i still doubt about FS700 will do 10bit out by this upgrade. HOWEVER, the camera i borrowed was upgraded in early stages so hope some very nice decision has been made after that and we will get the spec we want!

10bit422 out will be the biggest thing to me, it makes even the greater bit depth of "240fps out" to the Odyssey7, not the Odyssey7Q. of course it's not that continuously 2K raw but i'm happy with 10bit422 8sec burst!!
 
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eliomys said:
I have some really good news for all of you. Yesterday I spoke to a Sony representative and he answered most of my questions... because he could. There is a mail spread from the Sony headquarters that there will be an announcement within the next coming week from Sony with all the details we are waiting for!!! Finally!

And for those who read my previous posts and read my question to Sony: their answer was YES, it will be on the FS700! And I'm not talking about RAW ;-)

And gene_can_sing, you were right about the F3. It is discontinued because Sony thinks the F5 is a major upgrade in the same price range. If you still need one: hit the shops!
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yaay :D eliomys
Are you saying he told you that it would be a better internal codec and that it would be true 10-bit out of the camera?
 
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freshTEA said:
yaay :D eliomys
Are you saying he told you that it would be a better internal codec and that it would be true 10-bit out of the camera?
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Only the second part I'm positive about. The internal AVCHD can't be changed to 10-bit, that's part of the format every camera manufacturer agreed upon or no editing suit would recognize it. Even so the codec transcoding with Sony cameras is done by special chips and not by the firmware in the main processor.

On the other hand there is still the new XAVC-S that hasn't been used in any camera so far and will be available in their consumer camera's soon. So why would we have a 4K capable camera but without an internal codec that can record it? This fact only could make the shelf life of the FS700 very short if it will become the only camera in Sony's range of camera's that won't do 4K internally.

I also saw the insides of a couple of camera's (not the FS700) and to my surprise they existed mainly out of a lot of smaller electronic circuit boards. Since Sony will replace at least one of them, we can wonder what functions will be added or changed... We could still be in for another big surprise! And boy do we like surprises!!

Yesterday was also the first time I could see some live gradings of RAW material from the Arri Alexa and the BMDC on Davinci Resolve. I had seen S-Log gradings before, but this was a completely different ballgame. Maybe RAW will be too much data for all of us for now, but if used in some cases it will change our life as a cameraman. Incredible how much of the image you can recover even if you under or overexpose by 3 stops by mistake. It would still be usable without any doubt. It's like shooting on film again. 13+ stops of latitude! No doubt it would save your skin in those impossible shots or moments where you have to shoot in a hurry and can't adjust the camera properly in time or you miss the shot. It will be there and it will be usable. Unless you didn't focus of course :tongue:

Greetings,

David
 
freshTEA said:
yaay :D eliomys
Are you saying he told you that it would be a better internal codec and that it would be true 10-bit out of the camera?
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second that! Do you mean higher internal bitrate eliomys? 10 bit internal or 10 bit external? Or all of the above? (wishful thinking!). I'm guessing it will have 10 bit out but no change to internal and to be honest, if it does I'll be really pleased, as Freiheit says, the CD Odyssey 7 will give you a reasonably priced (compared to small HD) 720p 7.7" OLED screen and allow 10 bit slog-2 240fps for 8 seconds. That's very good.
 
eliomys said:
Only the second part I'm positive about. The internal AVCHD can't be changed to 10-bit, that's part of the format every camera manufacturer agreed upon or no editing suit would recognize it. Even so the codec transcoding with Sony cameras is done by special chips and not by the firmware in the main processor.

On the other hand there is still the new XAVC-S that hasn't been used in any camera so far and will be available in their consumer camera's soon. So why would we have a 4K capable camera but without an internal codec that can record it? This fact only could make the shelf life of the FS700 very short if it will become the only camera in Sony's range of camera's that won't do 4K internally.

I also saw the insides of a couple of camera's (not the FS700) and to my surprise they existed mainly out of a lot of smaller electronic circuit boards. Since Sony will replace at least one of them, we can wonder what functions will be added or changed... We could still be in for another big surprise! And boy do we like surprises!!

Yesterday was also the first time I could see some live gradings of RAW material from the Arri Alexa and the BMDC on Davinci Resolve. I had seen S-Log gradings before, but this was a completely different ballgame. Maybe RAW will be too much data for all of us for now, but if used in some cases it will change our life as a cameraman. Incredible how much of the image you can recover even if you under or overexpose by 3 stops by mistake. It would still be usable without any doubt. It's like shooting on film again. 13+ stops of latitude! No doubt it would save your skin in those impossible shots or moments where you have to shoot in a hurry and can't adjust the camera properly in time or you miss the shot. It will be there and it will be usable. Unless you didn't focus of course :tongue:

Greetings,

David
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Thx for the swift reply David :)

Haha I only got the firs sentence, the rest was out of my league :D
Is there a chance for 4:2:2 8-bit AVCHD internally?
 
@ Freiheit,

I was wondering when I was grading some of your tests, why there was a noticeable difference in banding and artefact in the bright reds between the park sequences and your last film Minatomirai on Vimeo. I loved that one (and also the music by the way, made me think of the mid '90s Ken Ishii :thumbsup:)

Did you find the same on your original Prores files or only on the transcoded .mp4 files?

Compression generally gets a lot worse when transcoding it into another codec, maybe for upload, maybe after Vimeo conversion? How did you grade it? To maintain the quality of 10-bit you must use at least 10-bit rendering. In Final Cut Pro and Premiere you needs to adjust the render setting otherwise it's done in 8-bits. Also even shot in 8-bit the final grading looks a lot better with Color, Resolve or After Effects... Much less compression artefacts.

Greetings,

David
 
freshTEA said:
Is there a chance for 4:2:2 8-bit AVCHD internally?
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Hi FreshTEA,

I'm afraid not (but don't shoot me if I'm wrong), because AVCHD was a codec standard jointly developed by Sony and Panasonic for their consumer range of cameras. And if you have a standard that works on a large range of products like DVD players, tv's of many different brands, they have to stick to certain agreements. Some products have the AVCHD standard hard coded in their chips and to prevent that some films would not play on older models, they will not change the AVCHD codec. Some things like 4.2.0 8-bit color space and maximum bitrate of 25 to 28 Mbs will stay like that for this reason. In the case of the Panasonic GH2 they could only change some parameters of how it was handled, not the color information unfortunately. And it had to be done by hackers! Panasonic couldn't have done it themselves because of the agreements. XDCAM or HDCAM had updates because they were Sony's own codec standards and were not build into consumer products of course.

If somethings gets changed, they need a another, but different codec. And to do that they need to replace hardware, not just by a firmware update. They could not have build inn another codec like XAVC they could unlock later with a firmware update, because it didn't exist yet when the FS700 got launched.

So if something will be changed on the internal recording it will be a different codec standard by replacing part of the hardware, but that would be the first time ever in history that a camera manufacturer does this. Don't hope for it too much. Although Red did do sensor upgrades and Arri and BMD did a codec upgrade by firmware... Since the F5 and F55 isn't only the best of ideas around (Alexa, Red and their own put into one), Sony might also be tempted by business strategies of other companies as well I guess. On the other hand if a company holds back information for so long and it doesn't leak out, it must mean big news. We begin to see a pattern here for some years now. Red, Canon and now Sony. We could be disappointed, but when was the last time we got disappointed by Sony? We'll have to wait... only a couple of days.

Cheers,

David
 
Dan Keaton said:
Dear freshTEA,

Yes, we have the upgraded FS700 in our lab.

And we have the decompression module from Sony in our lab, which we have had precisely one week today.

We are working to make all of this work. We have images on the screen, and our engineers are working hard to perfect these images.

This is all part of the normal process of bringing a product to market.

As soon as practical, we will post some images.

And, as soon a practical, the updated FS700 + Odyssey7Q with our FS700 Recording Option will be in the hands of a filmmaker.

The best I can say for now, is "Stay Tuned".

Respectfully,


Dan Keaton
Convergent Design
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Dear Friends,

I quoted my original post, since I had promised updates on our progress.

The next day, we perfected the image and then recorded from the upgraded FS700 in 2K Raw (to Cinema DNG).

The images that we recorded were the Raw images from the FS700, without any color balancing, thus they looked magenta on the Odyssey7Q monitor.

Then we processed these RAW Images (as industry standard Cinema DNG files) in a NLE, performing deBayering and color correction.

The processed images looked perfect to our eyes.

This first end to end test was performed at 120 fps. We are now stepping up to 240 fps.

We will also be adding internal color correction inside the Odyssey7Q soon, so that the images look correct on our 7.7" OLED monitor.

This is just a standard step that is required in developing a recorder and this should be accomplished soon.

It is our plan to show the upgraded FS700 + Odyssey7Q + FS700 Recording Option, at Cine Gear Expo, in Hollywood, Friday May 31 and Saturday June 1st.

This will be a live, working unit, and we expect to be recording live footage at Cine Gear Expo, either in our booth or Sony's.

Our Booth is S222 on Sound State 32, across the isle from Sony (S218). This is on the Paramount Studio Lot in Hollywood.

If you have not attended this show, please consider it, as this is a wonderful, exciting event. It has a completely different feel than other trade shows.


There have been discussions in this thread about the advantages of recording in Raw.

As discussed, there are many advantages. It is so nice to be able to pull out images that are either very overexposed or very underexposed (or both in the same frame).

And if one is shooting under varying lighting conditions, it is great to be able to adjust to various color temperature lighting, if needed, without compromising the image quality.

There are many other advantages also. One is that one can record in Raw, then deBayer for the destination format, be it HD, 2K, or other formats to obtain the best quality.

I do expect Sony to release the Bit-Depth information for the FS700 at Cine Gear (or just before).

Respectfully,


Dan Keaton
Convergent Design
 
freshTEA said:
Thx for the swift reply David :)

Haha I only got the firs sentence, the rest was out of my league :D
Is there a chance for 4:2:2 8-bit AVCHD internally?
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There is no Such thing as 4:2:2 8-bit AVCHD! - it just does NOT exist! avchd is 4:2:0.
 
tobyloc said:
second that! Do you mean higher internal bitrate eliomys? 10 bit internal or 10 bit external? Or all of the above? (wishful thinking!). I'm guessing it will have 10 bit out but no change to internal and to be honest, if it does I'll be really pleased, as Freiheit says, the CD Odyssey 7 will give you a reasonably priced (compared to small HD) 720p 7.7" OLED screen and allow 10 bit slog-2 240fps for 8 seconds. That's very good.
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Hi Tobyloc,

Only the 10 bit external is a certainty. Unless they are really good at keeping secrets I don't think we can expect 10 bit internally.

But if we get 10 bit 422 in 1080p60 and 1080p50, imagine what the possibilities are: like you say with the CD Odyssey 7 you will be able to record 10 bit in 240 fps straight to the recorder, not the 8 bit playback. Specifically that feature make the CD recorders already a big thing and the Odyssey 7 at that price point an attractive deal. Also no more nagging graders and broadcasters because you shot in 1080p25 (or 1080p30) instead of 1080i50 (or 1080i60) because the image looks too choppy for them. 1080p50/60 gives you the best of both and for broadcast it's the near future after we get rid of those interlaced formats.

Cheers,

David
 
We just checked our modified FS700 using a Tektronix waveform monitor. The HD-SDI output in normal video mode (1080p24) is definitely only 8-bit. The HD-SDI signal is 10-bit, but the last two bits are always set to zero.

However, I can say that the 2K/4K RAW output is much greater than 8-bits...

Mike Schell
Convergent Design
 
Mike Schell said:
We just checked our modified FS700 using a Tektronix waveform monitor. The HD-SDI output in normal video mode (1080p24) is definitely only 8-bit. The HD-SDI signal is 10-bit, but the last two bits are always set to zero.

However, I can say that the 2K/4K RAW output is much greater than 8-bits...

Mike Schell
Convergent Design
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Hey Mike, so what does this mean exactly. Does this mean that NON-RAW recordings will be only 8-bit? You mentioned that the HD-SDI signal is 10-bit, does that mean that we can record the 10-bit signal? What does the "last 2 bits are always set to zero" mean?

Thanks for you insight.

It would be a pretty big let down if the upgrade allowed RAW (which most people would have a hard time working with on a real project plus it's super expensive), but everything else was kept at 8-Bit. I know that Eliomys mentioned that AVCHD 4:2:0 is a consumer codec, but at $8K, the FS700 is priced way beyond a consumer camera so we deserve at least a baseline / minimum pro internal codec with some slightly better recording options. Seems like the FS700 would have a pretty short shelf life if Sony just kept it so dumb down.
 
It means that the HD-SDI signal in the FS700 (with upgraded firmware) is 8-bit signal wrapped in a 10-bit wrapper. No joy there!. Now, there are two possibilities, as I see it:
1-CD does not have a final production firmware upgrade and Sony could still upgrade the formware to 10 bit in a 10 bit.
2-You'll never get 10-bit in the debayered HD-SDI signal from the FS700 external output. If you want 10 bit, you'll have to record raw(2k?).
 
freshTEA said:
That is very sad news.. Im holding off on the camera for now then :/
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This is a real bummer. Recording in RAW 2K to get 10-bit just seems a bit too much hassle for me. The funny thing is all the BMC fanboys were screaming for RAW, but after reading numerous posts, many of them are now just recording 10-bit Pro-Res due to space / workflow issues. Reality is a *****.

I really wish Black Magic would just make a "Grown Up" camera that is versatile like the FS700. I would pay good cash for that and they seem to be the only company that really listens to their customers.

Sony is making the FS700 feel like a compromised camera. You can get 4K RAW, but you have to spend a fortune on Sony's monster sized recorder which would be hell to rig. You can buy a CD Odyssey, but then you can only record 2K RAW (at least give us 2.5K, Sony). You are going to get S-Log, but without a RAW recorder, it's only going to be 8-bit. WTF?
 
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Like I said in a previous, 8-bit S-Log2, however nice, is completely illogical. Grading VERY flat 8-bit images has never been a good idea. We've all been trying to escape an 8-bit world for so long, it'd be a real shame if Sony doesn't allow 10-bit S-Log2 recording in this upgrade - especially given that the FS700 is plenty capable of 12bit RAW.

Surely Sony knows that, to the great many, 10bit S-Log2 is actually a more attractive and sought after option. And given the up-and-coming $995 S16 Blackmagic Pocket camera can do 10bit in a FILM-Log flat profile, I'd be surprised if Sony doesn't allow it in the FS700 upgrade...
 
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