Nikon RAW Recording Over HDMI is Finally Here...

Thomas Smet said:
I can see an advantage for this for someone like me that shoots stills and video. As nice as a cinema camera is for raw video it doesn’t really shoot stills. That’s where the Nikons come in. Great stills and now great raw video as well.

Plus there is the whole FCPX factor and since I prefer to edit with FCPX it makes sense to have ProRes raw over BRAW.

What I’m not crazy about is investing in Nikon glass since EF is more of an unofficial lens standard on cinema cameras. EF just seems like the better logical choice for the future. Plus the whole having to use an external recorder is a more complicated workflow. It all comes down to a hassle during the shoot or a hassle in post having to find a way to get BRAW into FCPX.

I’m not opposed to using external recorders and use them for ProRes all the time but I know it’s a complication for many other users. The P4K method of using a simple external SSD is vastly more comfortable way to shoot.

If I was a Nikon photographer and just happened to have this camera and also actually have a use for raw video on a professional level this may make sense but that’s a lot of ifs. I just don’t see film makers investing $3k into a raw camera setup when they can get the P4K for $1,300 and add a small 512GB SSD for $80 to at least get started shooting raw.
Click to expand...

Perfect example of poor timing. Imagine if this would have hit the market well before the BMDs, they might have had something. I sold off all of my Nikon equipment 2.5 years ago, never going back there. Too little, too late as far as I am concerned.
 
Last edited:
Too little too late, indeed. Even for people that need to shoot both stills and video with the same camera, the competition is fierce nowadays: Sigma fp, Fuji XT-3, Sony a7RIV, a6400 and a6600, Panasonic S1, S1H, GH5 and GH5s...
 
Samuel H said:
Too little too late, indeed. Even for people that need to shoot both stills and video with the same camera, the competition is fierce nowadays: Sigma fp, Fuji XT-3, Sony a7RIV, a6400 and a6600, Panasonic S1, S1H, GH5 and GH5s...
Click to expand...

And with the Sigma fp already supporting raw even though it's cDNG, that's now right in the middle between the two Pocket cinema cameras for being the most economical raw recording camera currently in production.

And none of those three require external recorders, the fp just an external SSD of the same type that's become so popular with Pocket cinema camera users because it's so inexpensive for its capacity...
 
There are over 100,000,000 Nikon made lenses out in the free world, not counting those made by the third parties like Sigma and Zeiss. The rest depends on the cameras performance and pricing visavis its competitors.
 
Samuel H said:
Too little too late, indeed. Even for people that need to shoot both stills and video with the same camera, the competition is fierce nowadays: Sigma fp, Fuji XT-3, Sony a7RIV, a6400 and a6600, Panasonic S1, S1H, GH5 and GH5s...
Click to expand...

Those cams exist but they are not Nikon - my experience of some of these cams (like my gh4) is they are s*%t. Poor ergonomics and odd colour bad menu menu lag whatever - the Z6 is nice to use and the basic colour is good
 
I think they are not selling many of these (Lensrentals blog post with nice 2019 data). A 2% market share would be a win for Sigma or for Leica cameras, but for Nikon it smells like death. And the more you talk about how great it is and how much Nikon glass there is out there, the more the sales numbers scream TOO LATE.

Still: glad you like yours. I've been happy to be the weird one out using good kit while every popular kid sings about the inferior gear they're using, and well, if you can avoid the rush to fight for a brand and just enjoy your advantage, it's not a bad position at all. If you think that's where you are, then it's all great I guess.
 
This reminds me of an old "Married w/children" episode where Al borrows a ton of money to open a 555-SHOE hotline.

Steve : Al, you have not received a single phone call.

Al - None today, tomorrow twice as many.

-------------------

In any case, Nikon really hasn't given any reason for its ecosystem owners to switch to mirrorless. For photographys, its cameras still perform very well and there's a bunch of their lower end models that just might be among the best buys (D5600 for $500) for the primary stills shooters. The external Raw upgrade that was promised early in the year for the Z-mount took another eleven months to arrive. Now that it's here though, its only competition at the ~ $2,500 price point are the Pockets and the EZ Cams. S1H is $4,000 and had no Raw yet. Panasonic is MFT, nowhere close to full frame. Sony's still 8-bit, with some uncertain rumors about A7SIII trickling out. Canon crops its pants. Which makes Z6 a very viable option.
 
Gweilo66 said:
How well goes a shooter telling a potential client:Shooting on Nikon Z.
Click to expand...

In my world, the kinds of clients who hire people to shoot where the only camera is a consumer DSLR/mirrorless are usually clueless and or don't care about any camera brands or models.
 
I don't buy into the brand turf war stuff, what's a much more compelling argument to me is that a refurb Z6 by itself (or, not for nothing, a PCC4K) is literally half the price (and size!) of a refub Z6 + new Ninja V and one of the better compatible SSDs and other necessary accessories. I know it's a niche product and not a simple one, and I don't really blame Atomos, but the numbers are what they are. And this coming from a Nikon lover who thinks the Z6 is a great camera.
 
There are tests from users online claiming that Nikon is doing very nasty line-skipping with the external RAW, which turns these cameras into moire hell
 
Samuel H said:
There are tests from users online claiming that Nikon is doing very nasty line-skipping with the external RAW, which turns these cameras into moire hell
Click to expand...

It really looks like the person doing the testing did not know what they were doing at all. They were using a consumer computer monitor to display the test pattern and interpolating the low-resolution image to represent the full 6K of the sensor. I would consider these tests to be completely bogus. ( real world footage shot by folks like Cinema5D shows none of these so called "artifacts" that these defective tests were showing )
 
TheDingo said:
It really looks like the person doing the testing did not know what they were doing at all. They were using a consumer computer monitor to display the test pattern and interpolating the low-resolution image to represent the full 6K of the sensor. I would consider these tests to be completely bogus. ( real world footage shot by folks like Cinema5D shows none of these so called "artifacts" that these defective tests were showing )
Click to expand...

Then thats taken as gospel and spreads like wildfire because of stupid social media. So many misinformed people in our business.
The downside of "Anyone and everyone has a platform."
 
I mean, it's a full-width UHD 4K output from a 6048-pixel-wide sensor, so we can be sure it's downsampled. I agree the methodology in that blog post isn't really good enough to tell us the *quality* of that downsampling (or whether there's also line-skipping).
 
I admit I don't know much about the setup with this camera but typically raw cannot be scaled. It either has to be cropped (windowed) or line skipped / pixel binned to make a large DSLR sensor 4k video resolution. Image scaling is image processing and there is no way to cleanly average surrounding pixels on a bayer sensor without first converting that bayer image to RGB values to actually average.

If the Nikon isn't handling raw video as a perfect 4k crop then there is really no other way to do but line skipping.

I'm honestly not sure why anybody would need a camera like this vs a cinema camera designed for raw video. If one shoots pro stills and somehow lives in a world that also requires raw video then buy two bodies. Trying to do both on the same camera will always compromise at least one of them if not both. Even if a camera someday handles both perfectly I find it way too annoying to gear up a single body for both kinds of work.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top