F5: Accessing 1-50fps in S&Q motion?

Grug

Grug

Veteran
Hi guys,

Just collected my new F5 this afternoon, and good lord are the menus dense! I thought the F3's menus were complicated, but this thing is on another level.

I'm trying to access to more useful framerates of 1-50fps, but the lowest option the camera will give me at the moment is 72fps.

I've upgraded the firmware to v4.0, the camera is in 'shooting mode: custom', YPbPr mode, 2K XAVC, 180 degree shutter, timebase 25p, gamma: SLOG2, media in the camera is a 64gb SxS Pro+ card.

Any thoughts on what the issue might be? I'm assuming I simply have a setting selected that renders 1-50fps out-of-action. But I've tried switching everything obvious and can't for the life of me seem to figure it out.

I've got my first shoot with the camera tomorrow morning, so any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers,

Mark
 
Congratulations Mark! :thumbsup: :beer:

Have you enabled S&Q in the menu?

On side note; Always do an "All Reset" after any firmware updates, if not it will cause the F5/55 to do wonky things.
 
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Thanks Dennis, I think I figured it out - I had to de-activate the 'HIGH' frame rate mode to access 1-60fps (but I have to reactivate it if I want 72-150fps - kinda fiddly and annoying but, oh well).

Urgh... now that I've finally set things up roughly the way I wanted I'm kinda scared to do an 'all reset'! Oh well, I suppose doing it all again is a good way to learn the camera :p

Having not had any time to test different matrixes, I'm tempted to go with the CineEI mode to be sure that I'm getting the flattest, broadest negative possible - but I'm still a little confused by it. I read on Alister's blog that sensitivity is locked at 2000 iSO in CineEI mode, but is that only for the raw recordings? (I don't have the raw recorder and the XAVC I'm recording internally seems to be gained up if I lift the ISO to 3200 or 4000 ISO)
 
Couple things, CineEI use to only be available in RAW mode, that recently changed with a firmware update and can now run with the internal codecs.

Thing is in CineEI you get in-camera LUTS but in CineEI mode the NR is permanently disabled.

This has upset a lot of people. Me, I'm so use to shooting without LUT that I carry on doing so.

Now here's the thing and I know you will appreciate it because you use lighting for you work ;)

If you use CineEI I would definitely recommend you rate the camera 1 stop lower than it is. This will chew off one stop of dynamic range but in post you will be further away from the noise floor and can easily bring exposure back down which will effectively improve the signal-to-noise levels.
 
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Cool, thanks for the heads up on the NR switch off! I'll try rating the camera at 1000 ISO tomorrow and see how I go.
 
Yes and obviously you don't really need "CineEI" to rate you camera lower, just move everything on your waveform up by around 8-10%.

You really dont need CineEi unless you want LUTS on output. And apparently the LUT doesn't work in S&Q mode either anyway. (I have not tried it)
 
Cool, so if I leave my matrixes/black/white etc. alone and just set the camera for S-Gamut/SLOG2 that should yield the same picture?

Matrixes seem like some kind of sketchy voodoo to me, I have no idea what they do. So I just want a plain old SLOG image to take into the grade without any Sony-video-look nonsense to deal with.
 
I don't know that for fact. I always shoot with camera defaults then switch gamma mode to slog2 and shoot.

slog2 will lock out some settings, but there is still the MATRIX setting in the menu which you can also look at turning off.

hahaha Sony-video-look nonsense... it is indeed.
 
Hrmm... I think I'll leave it for the time being, I'll have to do some tests in the near future.
 
Damn it Mark, maybe turning off that matrix function is the holy grail! ie. instantly turns the F5/55 into the Alexa or F35 :D

Now you got me curious.
 
Eureka! I was going to leave it till I had time for some proper testing, but hell, what else am I going to do at 1am the night before my first shoot with the damn thing?!

So I just shot a quick comparison between having the matrix/aperture/detail all switched on (in their default, nothing changed mode), and all switched off.

I've then pushed it through Resolve via the ACES SLOG2 IDT and ODT - and the result is SIGNIFICANT.

With the matrix/aperture/detail options switched on, the colour has significantly more saturation, but the saturation is a little off - there's extra yellow and red that shouldn't be there. Colour artifacting and moire are also quite noticeable when zoomed in.

Compare this with the matrix/aperture/detail options all switched off, and the results are MUCH nicer. Saturation matches what my eyes are actually seeing in the scene, and colours looks significantly more accurate. And colour artifacting and moire also become almost invisible (the comparative difference is almost night and day).

Fine details aren't quite as sharp with the matrix/aperture/detail turned off (I'll have to run some further tests comparing aperture and detail turned off and on individually) but the trade-off for colour accuracy and reduced artifacting is well worth it to my mind.

I think I'll chalk this up as a productive evening :)
 
Very glad for your discovery and will have to test it out on my end as well.

Quite oddly enough and believe it or not I am processing old F3 footage from some projects I shot years ago using a new workflow process in Resolve.

As of late I've been quite obsessed with getting better looks out of any Sony log based footage, I really think ACES adds improvement but moreso I think use of IDT and ODT is key, it puts all the controls in Davinci where they should be and that in itself is a serious improvement over trying to grade log footage in pure form.

More on this in another post and hopefully soon...
 
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