EVA1: Is HEVC 10 bit this bad or is my camera acting up?

[Amulet Man]

ALL-I looks great to me. But HEVC does not:

Red channel:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zp6yl41e8rb1zz8/Screen Shot 2019-07-25 at 2.44.47 PM.png?dl=0

with basic LUT:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gt508pbn8xcjpnk/Screen Shot 2019-07-25 at 2.59.40 PM.png?dl=0

These are V Log with just the Panasonic rec709 LUT.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y742ickk5v5knaj/Screen Shot 2019-07-25 at 2.40.28 PM.png?dl=0

But ALL-I looks nice.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/schp5uvf8jf702h/Screen Shot 2019-07-25 at 2.40.46 PM.png?dl=0

Looks as good as (if not better than) ProRes.

Is the discrepancy this big?

The camera is also not recognizing SDXC cards as SDXC, but it might be the cards. They test at 150MBpbs read/write, though.

 

[Amulet Man]

Edit: my camera has got to be faulty. h264 8 bit 150Mbps looks 100X better than HEVC 10 bit 150Mbps...

Or is anyone else experiencing this, too?

 

[NorBro]

Is there a better way you can show us what you're seeing? Maybe some high-quality stills with other subjects with good color?

Are you referring to the blotches/compression?

 

[Amulet Man]

Forgive the filthy wall (not my place) but it was the best to bring out the problem.

These are straight out of camera + Panasonic "Nicest rec709" LUT.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/96srtivtercwyzp/HEVC150Mbps.psd?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/57a69dlu3gb4q6q/h264150Mbps.psd?dl=0

h264 8 bit looks soooo much better to me. I just updated to 3.0 firmware today. :/

Toggle through RGB channels to see the full extent of it, it's bad.

 

[NorBro]

It's indeed a mess.

I have no answer, but maybe another EVA1 user that sees this can provide you a test of their own to rule out if it's your camera.

 

[Amulet Man]

Thanks, yeah I can't imagine this is how it's supposed to be.

I think it looks somewhat better in Resolve, weirdly?

But then the h264 file won't even open in Resolve.

Weird.

 

[Mitch Gross]

Please contact Panasonic Support and our engineers can check your files. This should not be the case.

 

[Amulet Man]

Whom should I contact? Do you have an email address I can send these to?

 

[Mitch Gross]

I don't know in what country you are based. You need to contact Panasonic in your region. If you are in the US, please see the link below. That is the product page for the EVA1. Scroll to the bottom to find the various ways you can contact Panasonic Support.

https://na.panasonic.com/us/audio-v.../cinema-cameras/au-eva1-57k-super-35-handheld

 

[Amulet Man]

I don't know in what country you are based. You need to contact Panasonic in your region. If you are in the US, please see the link below. That is the product page for the EVA1. Scroll to the bottom to find the various ways you can contact Panasonic Support.

https://na.panasonic.com/us/audio-v.../cinema-cameras/au-eva1-57k-super-35-handheld

East coast USA, and thanks.

I'm not seeing this problem so severely in Resolve. Talking with an EVA1 owner in the UK about it now. Is it possible this is on Adobe's side? These screen grabs are from After Effects (32 bit mode, though).

 

[NorBro]

It is possible it's on Adobe's side. Wouldn't be the first time.

If you make a clip downloadable, I can look at it for you in FCP X if you would like.

 

[Seanik]

It is possible it's on Adobe's side. Wouldn't be the first time.

Right, Adobe (and how you have it configured), or also might be that older laptop you're trying to play it back on. It might not have sufficient ability to keep up with the decode in real-time.

Also, doesn't this HEVC codec use 4:2:0 color sampling (I forgot)? If it does, maybe that's why you are seeing the mess in the red channels?

Just for the heck of it (because it should be quick and easy to do), try transcoding an HEVC clip to ProRes (any flavor) in Media Encoder and try playing that back. If it looks better, it's your machine (processor and/or GPU) that can't process it fast enough. And, if that's the case, try a proxy workflow (e.g. ProRes Proxy scaled down to 1/2 or 1/4 size) for the HEVC footage and see if you can't work with that. I sure hope it's not your camera! Good luck!

 

[Barry_Green]

Also, doesn't this HEVC codec use 4:2:0 color sampling (I forgot)? If it does, maybe that's why you are seeing the mess in the red channels?

Yes, HEVC as implemented in the EVA1 and the CX350 uses 4:2:0 color sampling. You should be seeing a cleanly-compressed, 1920x1080 red image when viewing the red channel from 4K footage.

I would certainly recommend decoding the footage in various other software before assuming the camera is at fault. I remember we had a running issue here years ago where folks kept complaining that the footage from one of the AVC-HD cameras was ungodly noisy, whereas other folks thought it looked perfectly smooth. Turned out some h.264 decoders were making the footage look noisy. Decoding in different software led to it looking just fine. Now, that's not to say that there isn't possibly something wrong with that particular camera, I mean, you have to keep all possibilities on the table until you sort out what the actual issue is, but I would encourage you to try different decoders first.

 

[Barry_Green]

The camera is also not recognizing SDXC cards as SDXC, but it might be the cards. They test at 150MBpbs read/write, though.

For the record, what the cards "test at" is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is their "V" speed rating (V10, V30, V60, V90). It wouldn't matter if the cards tested at a terabyte per second, if it doesn't report the proper "V" speed rating, the camera will say it's incompatible. V30 is generally fine for all recording, and V60 is necessary for the highest-bitrate recording modes (like 400mb ALL-I).

 

[Zak Forsman]

Thanks, yeah I can't imagine this is how it's supposed to be.

I think it looks somewhat better in Resolve, weirdly?

But then the h264 file won't even open in Resolve.

1) I'm assuming the other NLE you are using is Premiere. This isn't the first time I've read about and have seen image problems in Premiere that weren't there in Resolve. Premiere seems to have an inferior decode of certain codecs. I see a lot of artifacts from my Z-Cam footage in premiere, that looks perfectly clean in Resolve. I'm sure that's why you're seeing an improvement. That being said, it seems your issue extends beyond that.

2) You need the paid studio version of Resolve to work with 10-bit h264 files.

 

[Amulet Man]

1) I'm assuming the other NLE you are using is Premiere. This isn't the first time I've read about and have seen image problems in Premiere that weren't there in Resolve. Premiere seems to have an inferior decode of certain codecs. I see a lot of artifacts from my Z-Cam footage in premiere, that looks perfectly clean in Resolve. I'm sure that's why you're seeing an improvement. That being said, it seems your issue extends beyond that.

2) You need the paid studio version of Resolve to work with 10-bit h264 files.

Thanks, it looks like it's just Adobe, actually.

FCPX plays my footage back the same way until I pause and it gets cleaned up. Finder plays it back like this, too.

But Resolve looks good and FCPX looks good when rendered, too. It's particularly bad for me I guess because I chose situations that pushed it.

Also, weirdly, I bought a new Lexar V60 card that tests below 400 Mbits/second on my Mac... and it works fine for ALL-I. Weird. Shouldn't have bought open box cards before. Returning them to where they came from (Amazon).

 

[NorBro]

FCPX plays my footage back the same way until I pause and it gets cleaned up.

Change your quality settings to "Better Performance" and the footage will playback and look the same as what you're currently seeing when paused.

 

[TheDingo]

I bought a new Lexar V60 card that tests below 400 Mbits/second on my Mac... and it works fine for ALL-I.

I bought a pair of the new LEXAR 1000x 128GB V60 cards on sale at B&H for $46. They didn't work properly shooting ALL-I 400 Mbps until I did a low level format (slow format) on my computer and then reformatted them in camera. They've been great ever since.

 

[Amulet Man]

I bought a pair of the new LEXAR 1000x 128GB V60 cards on sale at B&H for $46. They didn't work properly shooting ALL-I 400 Mbps until I did a low level format (slow format) on my computer and then reformatted them in camera. They've been great ever since.

Thanks, yeah it was Lexar 1667X that ended up working with ALL-I despite testing slower than other cards that didn't. Weirdly including a "refurbished" Lexar 2000X or something.

 

[Seanik]

Thanks, it looks like it's just Adobe, actually.

FCPX plays my footage back the same way until I pause and it gets cleaned up.

So, if you prefer to continue using Premiere, go to Project Settings -> General -> Video Rendering and Playback -> and chose a different "Renderer." The FCPX system you played back on is likely using Metal or OpenCL. If you have Nvidia chips that can use CUDA, just know that Apple is no longer supporting it past OSX High Sierra (so, can't use it in Mojave). Metal and OpenCL will work differently depending on your GPU, but both are alright. Just don't use "Mercury Playback Engine Software Only."

And while you're at it, you might as well go to Premiere Preferences, clear out your Media Cache, and go to "Memory" to make sure you have enough RAM allocated to Premiere.

Congrats that it's not a camera issue! Don't cut corners on SD cards! Good luck!