S1H 4k to external recorder

boosh

boosh

Well-known member
I'm still running the original firmware on my S1H but wondered if anyone has outputted to an external recorder to shoot 4k? I know the new firmware enables 6k raw to the Ninja V but I'm interested in shooting 4k prores on a Ninja Flame at 25FPS rather than internal, purely for the fact I have much larger SSD cards than I do cards for recording internally. If I output to 4k Prores, will I loose any quality seeing as its not a raw feed coming out the camera or will the quality be on par with the internal 4k 10 bit 422? Anyone with any knowledge of this? Cheers.
 
You would certainly not lose any quality in addition to it being on par with internal recording. Also, you will see additional benefit from the editing process because ProRes is more friendly to editing software.
 
Technically, at least on paper, the bitrates of HQ double the internal 400mbps, so if anything you may personally see even better quality if you're working with the footage day in and day out.

But will anyone else notice? No, definitely not. Maybe only @100-200mbps. Maybe.

The only other thing I would add is sometimes recorders change your colors or crush your blacks a tiny bit. AFAIK, the S1H's external capture could be 100% exactly the same, but just something to consider if you already have your post workflow dialed-in and would be expecting the exact same image that is being produced internally.

Most of the time it's pretty minor, but the change can be more major with some cameras.
 
The top internal codec is a similar quality to ProRes HQ. It's simply more efficient math. ProRes was designed as an editing codec and is optimized to be most efficient as such.

As to the change in colors/blacks, this is in reference to Legal v Extended range (aka Video v Data). Most NLEs will assume any ProRes file coming in is Legal or Video gamma. But if you record in Log it will be in Extended (Data) gamma. So you'll need to alter the gamma in the NLE to compensate. The Odyssey recorders have a setting for this and I believe the latest generation of Atomos software has introduced an adjustment. In some NLEs it is easy to fix the gamma, in particular Resolve let's you simply change the input gamma from Legal to Extended at the tap of a tab. Other programs are more complex. There are numerous articles and videos explaining this and how to adjust.
 
Legal/extended is the answer only if that's the question.

But IMO, it can/may be more complicated than that as I don't think there is always a 100% match between a camera's HDMI/SDI output and its internal compression.

There are ultra-fine and elusive shifts that would only be noticed by those who have way too much time on their hands.

Which piece of hardware is responsible for the end-result, I don't know.
 
Hmmm. I don't know of a camera offhand that has such an issue with color and/or black level. I could be wrong but my experience is that when people see a difference between internal & external images it usually comes down to Legal v Extended. But I could be missing something.
 
I always say...you'd know best [and I truly mean it].

But if we think about it more critically...how is it possible that there is 100% accuracy between every camera's internal compression and its recorded output on different recorders from 3-4 different companies?

Meaning...are recorders that simple of devices that they are all supposed to capture everything exactly the same?

There's no possibility that camera X's image from a 7Q's DNxHD may look slightly different than a Shogun's PR HQ and also X's internal compression?

If the range is correct, do you really think the colors are 100% exactly the same from all three?
 
NorBro said:
I always say...you'd know best [and I truly mean it].

But if we think about it more critically...how is it possible that there is 100% accuracy between every camera's internal compression and its recorded output on different recorders from 3-4 different companies?

Meaning...are recorders that simple of devices that they are all supposed to capture everything exactly the same?

There's no possibility that camera X's image from a 7Q's DNxHD may look slightly different than a Shogun's PR HQ and also X's internal compression?

If the range is correct, do you really think the colors are 100% exactly the same from all three?
Click to expand...

Oh, there are ABSOLUTELY differences between various compression schemes and ever the SAME codec as executed in different devices. But that might effect sampling structures, edge rounding and other compression parameters. It almost certainly will not alter things like color and gamma. These are pretty clearly delineated parameters and it wou;d be very odd to see differences here, especially as we are comparing first generation codecs at relatively high sampling rates.

Now when you're talking about bouncing something off a Qualcomm transponder at 175x compression for a third-tier cable channel with limited bandwidth and temporal interpolation to drop the framerate in half -- well then all bets are off. The only time I see weird color shift, saturation boost and gamma shift as a matter of transcode is when stuff goes up on YouTube. Boy can they screw the pooch sometimes.
 
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