FS7: Switching to MPEG422 CODEC Sometimes Unreliable, Locks Camera

basspig

basspig

Veteran
This is the second time in a month that this has happened to me. Always when switching from XAVC-I 4K to MPEG422 on the CODEC menu. The other commonality is I'm in Cine EI and shooting S-Log2. Has never happened in S-Log3.


Here's what happened:
After the switch, the camera doesn't reboot, but the screen indicates 1920x1080 on the status. Time remaining for empty 64GB XQD cards shows 12 minutes. Menu response becomes v-e-r-y l-a-g-g-y.. I tried to change my shutter speed and it was two seconds delay for the menu to repaint itself after ever turn of the thumbwheel.
Then I found I could not record. Pressing REC, nothing happened. Tried both the handgrip and the one on the side of the camera body. Tried to power down, but the VF continued to display image, even after the status menus vanished. Had to pull battery.


Restarted camera after reinstalling battery. Menus laggy with 2 second delay for every action. But was able to record. 1920x1080 MPEG422 displayed in VF, but only 12 minutes on an empty 64GB card still displayed. Did some recording. When I was done, I noticed that both A and B slots had their green LEDs both illuminated at the same time. Pressing record was delayed by two seconds.


When I offloaded my footage, I was stunned at the size of the files.. over 1GB for just a few seconds per clip. When I played one of the clips, it was 4K, not HD!


This is with the latest firmware, but I had it happen one other time the first day I owned the camera, back in early June, with the original 2.0 FW.


Switching this camera into MPEG with S-Log2 selected seems to be the fatal combination. Doesn't happen in other shooting modes.
 
Last edited:
Apparently, this problem is repeatable. Several more attempts to switch CODEC to MPEG422 resulted in laggy menus, inability to record, and having the camera unable to power down, requiring battery removal.


After five attempts, I finally got the camera into HD 23.976fps mode. But then I notice that all my camera settings were wiped out and back to factory settings. Selecting MPEG422 23.976 gave me 720p 60. After another boot attempt, I randomly ended up with 1080 60i (this after choosing 1080 23.976).


I also noted that the scopes weren't working until the final reboot attempt number five, where I was able to set 23.976 1080 MPEG422 and suddenly, I had waveform display in the VF.


This camera is way too flakey. I'm reluctant to bring this on a paid shoot next week. I think I'm going to bring my EX3 as a backup, just in case.


I did some more testing of switching back and forth between modes while in the studio and it switched reliably on two trial runs, switching CODEC between XAVC-I and MPEG422. But outdoors, when I do this, it doesn't switch properly, and the remaining time is wrong for the particular CODEC and the camera can't record and won't shut off. Hmmmm.... There is an FM broadcast tower across the road from me. I wonder if this camera has poor shielding. Oddly, my EX3 works reliably outdoors as well as in, so I doubt that has anything to do with it. And I've used my cell phone near the FS7 and not had any unexpected behavior. Still bothersome. Seems like the sequence of some modes followed by switching to other modes stimulates this problem. But then when I explicitly switch back and forth to try to find the combination of menu selections that lead to the lockup, it won't lock up anymore.
 
basspig said:
Switching this camera into MPEG with S-Log2 selected seems to be the fatal combination. Doesn't happen in other shooting modes.
Click to expand...

The camera may or may not have a bug, but that combination is a dumb move anyway. You don't want to be shooting S-LOG with 8-bit MPEG. Avoid that combination, and then maybe the bug won't make any difference even if it does exist.
 
I'm testing it with baked in LUT in Cine EI with ISO set to 500. It looks amazing.

I'm testing various "low budget" work flows here. If I record in Cine EI with the Hypergamma LUT, the result is a pretty much ready to hand off file with backward compatibility. I'm really amazed that even at 400% zoom on the monitor, the images are conspicuously free of macroblock artifacts.

In keeping with minimizing the back end work, shooting to a compatible CODEC with S-Log and baking in a hypergamma LUT produces a clean, nicely saturated image that I like the look of. The footage takes up 1/8th the space of 4K XAVC-I, and can be edited on any NLE released in the last 8 years.

For low budget shoots, I don't want to be struggling with XAVC and LUTs in post. I want to be able to drop my clips into CS6, do some quick cut edits, drop in titles and render. For more elaborate shooting, workflows all the way up to RAW are on the table, but the thing I'm shooting next week will end up on Youtube exclusively.
 
Okay, if you're baking in a LUT that certainly is better than using pure S-LOG with MPEG, but I still wouldn't do it just because of the lack of white balance control. You should explore the options for custom mode during your testing and see what you results you can get. Anything you can do with one of the built-in LUTs you can do better with a scene file . . . in my opinion.
 
Most of my earlier testing was at the 4K resolution, and I did a few quick tests with Custom mode and hypergammas, but observed quite a lot of noise in the shadow areas. It wasn't a scientific apples to apples test, so not conclusive. Some here have asserted that they get better results with Custom mode. But what I got with the hypergamma LUT baked in looks very pleasing, free of noise and has decent latitude.


When I switch CODECs, the camera automatically switches to a 60i frame rate. The peculiar thing is that this is not always repeatable. At least indoors, I cannot seem to get it to malfunction.

The other thing that is really strange is the extremely laggy response. It's near impossible to set a shutter speed, because a few seconds later, it updates and I literally have to step one detent at a time and slowly update the shutter speed to the target value. Any function on the camera, when it's like this, is lagging a good two seconds from each action on a button or scroll wheel. It reminds me of Windows 3.0 while it's formatting a floppy--can't do much else and other tasks become glacially slow.
 
Did I say I was shooting other than HD? I said this was for BUDGET shoots, where I don't have to grade footage.
The hiccup is when I switch the camera to HD CODEC (MPEG422) while outdoors, it does unexpected things, like not really switching the CODEC (it still records in XAVC, even though the VF displays MPEG422 and 1920x1080 in the upper right corner. Only hint that something is wrong is my recording time is 12 minutes on a 64GB card. And a few seconds of test footage comes to over 1GB. After subsequent reboots, the camera finally DOES record in MPEG, but it won't go in one operation of select and execute. The behavior seems like extremely buggy firmware, of something wonky with the microprocessor. The fact that everything slows way down, so that menus take seconds to paint on the viewfinder is disturbing. Maybe the CPU is in energy saving mode and slows the clock way down?

I also note that soon after this fiasco, I got a low battery warning. Checking the status, I had 17 minutes left.
After I put a freshly charged BP-U30 battery on the camera, I could not reproduce the problem indoors.
This raises another question about reliability of the camera when the battery is less than fully charged. The warning system seems not to be working properly. If the charge in the battery is too low, the camera should warn the user, rather than act flakey.
 
Speaking here is near useless. Contact Sony, through dealer/phone lines and through their forum. This is definitely a massive firmware/hardware fault that needs fixing.
 
What's the difference between shooting Cine EI with a Hypergamma LUT and just shooting Hypergamma in Custom mode?
And if you are in CINE EI in the first place why not make an Extended LC709A in LUTCalc and bake that in? It looks tremendous.
 
Last edited:
If you're going to bake a look in, why not just shoot custom to begin with and have a lot more control of the camera?
 
Ebrahim Saadawi said:
Speaking here is near useless. Contact Sony, through dealer/phone lines and through their forum. This is definitely a massive firmware/hardware fault that needs fixing.
Click to expand...


I posted on the Sony Community forums, but the post has received zero responses. It's like no one is minding the store over at Sony.

The more I retrace my steps, the more I am becoming convinced that there is a problem with this function when the battery is below 50% charge. The times when I DON'T experience this is when I am using the larger BP-U60 batteries. But for testing, I use the smaller batteries (to save charge cycles on the bigger ones) and frequently, they last about 30 minutes or less. The fact that shortly after the problem arose, I got the low battery warning. Put a fresh battery on, I cannot reproduce the problem. Hmmm.. Just another quirk I need to be prepared for. Others have developed workarounds for the "shutter bug", and I will make sure I'm using a fully charged battery before switching to MPEG mode.
 
Run&Gun said:
If you're going to bake a look in, why not just shoot custom to begin with and have a lot more control of the camera?
Click to expand...

Well if you roll your own LUT actually your scope for control of the image is much greater than custom.. and arguably easier to do.. but that aside.. one other aspect of Cine EI is you are out of the dreaded Sony look 709 color space... agree the only pit fall at the moment is the having to keep to the preset WB.. (which is for Log recording).. I don't think Sony thought folks would be recording the LUTS! .. but hopefully they come out with say 100K segment adjustability in a future up grade.. there is a very nice.. extended LC709A.. available on the Sony F cam site.. which even deals with florrie lights really well in daylight WB..
 
Indeed, LUTcalc is very powerful, and I think it's the key to controlling nearly every aspect of picture color and luma. However, it requires a deep knowledge of camera color science to understand how to get predictable results, else it becomes random experimenting.

What I have not been able to do is replicate the colors I get with the baked in hypergamma LUT. The images coming out of the camera with that LUT are really quite nice.

I tried replicating that with a LUT, but maybe the MPEG422 CODEC I am shooting tests in is too limited, for I find no detail in the shadows--it all gets crushed to black.

Regarding Custom mode, I've had noisier images in that mode for some reason than I get with Cine EI. The problem I can't seem to fix is that the differences in lighting color temperatures is dramatic, and not like the eye perceives them. In Cine EI, I barely have to worry about white balance, because the camera images match closely what my eye sees. In Custom mode, daylight looks blue and tungsten looks too orange. In Cine EI, these differences are not exaggerated like on a REC709 or REC601 camera. I'm going to guess and assume that's the wider gamut in Cine EI that's responsible for that high fidelity color. That gamut seems not to be available in Custom mode. The camera is basically an EX3 with more DoF in that mode.
 
"What I have not been able to do is replicate the colors I get with the baked in hypergamma LUT. The images coming out of the camera with that LUT are really quite nice.

I tried replicating that with a LUT, but maybe the MPEG422 CODEC I am shooting tests in is too limited, for I find no detail in the shadows--it all gets crushed to black."

But it already is a LUT ??? why replace a LUT with the same LUT.. or have I missed something here..


 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top