Tag Archives: 4K

4K, final cut pro, HDR, Panasonic GH5, Tips, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Panasonic GH5M2 and S series Demystifying Movie recording settings 2022 Update

January 24, 2022 interceptor121 1 Comment

In 2018 I wrote the original article as I had acquired the GH5 and I was faced with a ton of non-sense on which format to use when I was shooting video. With the S series software stack Panasonic has made some changes to the options available and I thought it was about time to refresh the original article. As Before I will focus my analysis on 4K video and ignore other formats. This time I will be looking at the NTSC standard of 29.97 and 59.94 frames per second. This is simply because today majority of content produced by Panasonic consumer digital cameras is consumed online and all computer screen work at 60 Hz refresh rate so shooting anything different than 30 or 60 will result in choppy video. This presents some challenges if you are in a PAL zone and are shooting under artificial lights however for the purpose of this article I want to just ignore this issue, obviously you could shoot 24 fps and hope in a 24 – 30 conversion which is scatty of course. For simplicity I will refer to 30 and 60 fps and not exact values.

Today we have 5 settings for UHD

200 Mbps 420 10 Bits Long GOP 60 fps
150 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long GOP 60 fps
100 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long GOP 30 fps
150 Mbps 422 10 Bits Long GOP 30 fps
400 Mbps 422 10 Bits All-Intra 30 fps.

The last option is only available on the GH5 series and on the S1H. The first option is only available on the S series and the GH5M2.

Long GOP vs All Intra

The difference between Long GOP and All Intra is that in the Long GOP what is encoded is a group of pictures (GOP) and not separate individual pictures.

Within a Group of Pictures there are different type of frames:

I (Intra coded) frames containing a full picture
P (Predictive coded) frames containing motion interpolated picture based on a prediction from previous frames
B (bi-predictive coded) frames containing a prediction from previous or future frames

It is important to note that frames are not stored sequentially in a GOP and therefore the GOP needs to be decoded and the frames reordered to be played, this requires processing power.

The reason why H264/HEVC is very efficient is that within a group of picture there is only one full frame and the rest are predictions clearly if the prediction algorithm is accurate the level of perceived quality of long GOP is very high and similar to All-Intra clips.

This is the reason why comparing All Intra and Long Gop using static scenes or scenes with repetitive movement that can be predicted very accurately by the codec is a fundamental error.

So which format should you choose?

In order to understand the workings we need to dig deeper into the structure of the GOP but before doing so let’s evaluate the All-Intra codec.

AVC All-Intra explanation

This codec records at 400 Mbps so with 30 fps this means circa 13.4 Mbits per frame or 1.67 MB per frame and there is no motion interpolation so each frame is independent from the others. The implementation of All-Intra of the GH5 does not make use of CABAC entropy but only CAVLC coding is used, this makes the resulting files easier to read and to edit. The idea of All intra is that you don’t require powerful hardware to edit without conversion in an intermediate codec. However based on my experience this is not entirely through and you need a decent GPU to play it back and edit real time without issues.

If you consider a Jpeg image of your 3840×2160 frame on the GH5 you see that it stores around 4.8 MB per image because there is no chroma sub-sampling so if you wanted to have exactly the same result you would need to use ProRes 4444 to get a comparable quality (this not even taking into account that Jpeg are 8 bits images).

Video uses chroma sub-sampling so only part of the frame contain colours at a given time. Apple in their ProRes white paper declare that both ProRes 422 and 422 HQ are adequate to process 10 bit colour depth and 422 sub-sampling however they show some quality differences and different headroom for editing. If you count 50% for 4.2:0 sub-sampling and 67% for 422 you get around 2.34 MB and 3.5 MB frame sizes that correspond to ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ individual frame sizes.

it would appear that All Intra 400 Mbps would fall short of Apple recommended bit-rate for 422 10 bit colour however practical tests show that AVC All intra at 400 Mbps is perceptually identical to ProRes 422 HQ and uses much less space. We also did some SNR measures time ago with the friend Paal Rasmussen and we did not find significant improvements shooting ProRes 422 HQ vs All-I on card.

Long GOP Codecs

Coming back to the other recording quality option we still need to evaluate how the various long GOP codecs compare relative to each other.

In order to fully understand a codec we need to decompose the GOP into the individual frames and evaluate the information recorded. If you look on Wikipedia it will tell you that P frames are approximately half the size of an I frame and B frame are 25%. I have analysed the Panasonic GH5M2 clips using ffprobe a component of ffmpeg that tells you what is exactly in each frame to see if this explains some of the people claims that there is no difference between the settings.

Link to Panasonic on the H264 implementation is here: documentation

There is unfortunately no documentation of the HEVC implementation that I have found to date.

200 Mbps 420 10 Bits Long GOP 60 fps Analysis

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=30 and M=1 where N is the length in frames of the group of pictures and M is the distance between I or P frames.

This codec does not have B frames but only P frames.

Analysing a set of I frames of a fixed subject at 60 fps resulted in a frame size of 1.16MB for the I frames. This value is quite low however we need to understand that HEVC is much more efficient than H264.

I shot this test video time ago comparing the recording of this codec with a Ninja V in ProRes 422 HQ. As you can see no major differences however I have not pushed the grading in the clip.

The speed ramps in this video use this codec

150 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long GOP 60p Analysis

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=30 and M=3 where N is the length in frames of the group of pictures and M is the distance between I or P frames.

So each Group of Pictures is made like this

IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBB before it repeats again.

Analysing a set of I frames of a fixed subject at 30 fps resulted in a frame size of 1.26MB for the I frames.

One very important aspect of the 150 Mbps codec is that as the GOP is double the length of the single frame rate 100 Mbps codec there are the same number of key frames per second and therefore it is NOT true that this codec is better at predicting motion however the additional frames result in better slow motion performance than what is done in software in majority of cases.

100 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long Gop 30 fps Analysis

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=15 and M=3 where N is the length in frames of the group of pictures and M is the distance between I or P frames.

So each Group of Picture is made like this

IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBP before it repeats again.

Analysing a set of I frames of a fixed subject at 30 fps resulted in a frame size of 1.49MB for the I frames which is the highest if we exclude All I.

150Mbps 422 10 Bits Long Gop 30 fps

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=15 and M=1 which means this codec does not use B frames but just I and P frames so the GOP structure is as follows:

IPPPPPPPPPPPPPP before it repeats again.

Analysing a set of I frames of a fixed subject at 30 fps resulted in a frame size of 1.25MB for the I frames.

H264 Codec Ranking for Static Image Quality UHD

So in terms of absolute image quality and not taking into account other factors the Panasonic GH5M2 and S series Movie recording settings ranked by codec quality are as follows:

400 Mbps 422 10 Bit All intra 30 fps (1.67 MB per frame)
100 Mbps 420 8 Bit Long Gop 30 fps (1.49 MB per frame)
150 Mbps 420 8 Bit Long Gop 60 fps (1.26 MB per frame)
150 Mbps 422 10 Bit Long Gop 30 fps (1.25 MB per frame)

The 100 Mbps and 400 Mbps codec are marginally different with the 150 Mbps long GOP really far away.

Note that as the technology is different I cannot directly compare the new 200 Mbps codec however based on visual impression and ability to grade I would recommend this over the 150 Mbps 420 8 bits

Conclusion

If you have a camera that has the 400 Mbps All Intra this remains the best format to use. V90 cards have dropped in price and are now available up to 256 GB. Unfortunately this option is only available on the GH5 series and on the S1H.

If you have a camera that does not have the All-I you can of course purchase an external recorder that in some cases will allow you to shoot RAW however this is not necessarily going to give better image quality and will definitely extend your processing time.

My revised advice, if your camera does not have the ALL I and you don’t have an external recorded, is as follows:

Use the 100 Mbps Long Gop codec it is very efficient in the compression and the perceived quality is very good. You need to get the exposure and white balance right in camera as the clips may not withstand extensive corrections. There is a risk with footage with a lot of motion of some errors in motion interpolation that can generate artefacts but this based on experience is not very high.
Use the new 200 Mbps HEVC for double frame rate it is not hard to process as HEVC 10 bits has hardware acceleration on all platforms.

Generally there appears to be no benefit using the internal 422 10 Bit codec nor the 420 8 bit double frame rate due to the limitations of the GOP structure, in addition the lack of hardware acceleration for H264 10 bits means you will need to convert the files for editing and they do not open with standard programs or load on phones or tablets. The same is true for All Intra but at least you can edit it ok.

To conclude this is a summary table with all key information

Additional Considerations

A certain number of GH5 users have upgraded to the S5, I was one of them until I sold the camera after 1 month of using and after buying a Ninja V. If you are a Panasonic S1/S5 user you need not only to contend with recording time limits but also with lack of codecs on the camera to fully use the potential that it has. You need to add an external recorder to really see the benefits because in real life situations you are not shooting a step chart so the dynamic range is destroyed by compression quality and errors and SNR drops. It would be interesting to test how does the GH5M2 400 Mbps compare with one of the S cameras using the 150 Mbps 10 bit codec but this is not something I did. I would only warn everyone going down that path that you may get less than what you think and you may require additional hardware to get there. Take also into account that S series only shoot 50/60 fps in APSC/Super35 mode and that in full frame mode there is a substantial amount of rolling shutter that makes pans and tilt practically not possible.

4K, grading, HDR, Panasonic GH5, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Producing and grading HDR content with the Panasonic GH5 in Final Cut Pro X

March 30, 2020 interceptor121 Leave a comment

It has been almost two years from my first posts on HLG capture with the GH5 https://interceptor121.com/2018/06/15/setting-up-your-gh5-for-hlg-hdr-capture/ and last week Apple released Catalina 10.15.4 that now supports HDR-10 with compatible devices. Apple and in general computer are still not supporting HLG and it is unlikely this is ever going to happen as the gaming industry is following VESA DisplayHDR standard that is aligned to HDR-10.

After some initial experiments with GH5 and HLG HDR things have gone quiet and this is for two reasons:

There are no affordable monitors that support HLG
There has been lack of software support

While on the surface it looks like there is still no solution to those issues, in this post I will explain how to grade HLG footage in Final Cut Pro should you wish to do so. The situation is not that different on Windows and DaVinci Resolve that also only support HDR-10 monitors but I leave it to Resolve users to figure out. This tutorial is about final cut pro.

A word about Vlog

It is possible to use Vlog to create HDR content however VLOG is recorded as rec709 10 bits. Panasonic LUT and any other LUT are only mapping the VLOG gamma curve to Rec709 so your luminance and colours will be off. It would be appropriate to have a VLOG to PQ LUT however I am not aware this exists. Surely Panasonic can create that but the VLOG LUT that comes with the camera is only for processing in Rec709. So, from our perspective we will ignore VLOG for HDR until such time we have a fully working LUT and clarity about the process.

Why is a bad idea to grade directly in HLG

There is a belief that HLG is a delivery format and it is not edit ready. While that may be true, the primary issue with HLG is that no consumer screens support BT.2020 colour space and the HLG gamma curve. Most display are plain sRGB and others support partially or fully DCI-P3 or the computer version Display P3. Although the white point is the same for all those colour spaces there is a different definition of what red, green and blue and therefore without taking into this into account, if you change a hue, the results will not be as expected. You may still white balance or match colours in HLG but you should not attempt anything more.

What do you need for grading HDR?

In order to successfully and correctly grade HDR footage on your computer you need the following:

HDR HLG footage
Editing software compatible with HDR-10 (Final Cut or DaVinci)
An HDR-10 10 bits monitor

If you want to produce and edit HDR content you must have compatible monitor let’s see how we identify one.

Finding an HDR-10 Monitor

HDR is highly unregulated when it comes to monitors, TVs have Ultra HD Premium Alliance and recently Vesa has introduced DisplayHDR standards https://displayhdr.org/ that are dedicated to display devices. So far, the Display HDR certification has been a prerogative of gaming monitors that have quick response time, high contrast but not necessarily high colour accuracy. We can use the certified list of monitors to find a consumer grade device that may be fit for our purpose: https://displayhdr.org/certified-products/

A DisplayHDR 1000 certified is equivalent to a PQ grading device as it has peak brightness of 1000 nits and minimum of 0.005 this is ideally what you want, but you can get by with an HDR-400 certified display as long as it supports wide colour gamut. In HDR terms wide gamut means covering the DCI-P3 colour space at least for 90% so we can use Vesa list to find a monitor that is HDR-10 compatible and has a decent colour accuracy. Even inside the HDR-400 category there are displays that are fit for purpose and reasonably priced. If you prefer a brand more orientated to professional design or imaging look for the usual suspects Eizo, Benq, and others but here it will be harder to find HDR support as usually those manufacturers are focussed on colour accuracy, so you may find a display covering 95% DCI-P3 but not necessarily producing a high brightness. As long as the device supports HDR-10 you are good to go.

I have a Benq PD2720U that is HDR-10 certified, has a maximum brightness of 350 nits and a minimum of 0.35, it covers 100% sRGB and REC709 and 95% DCI-P3, so is adequate for the task. It is worth nothing that a typical monitor with 350-400 nits brightness offers 10 stops of dynamic range.

In summary any of this will work if you do not have a professional grade monitor:

Look into Vesa list https://displayhdr.org/certified-products/ and identify a device that supports at least 90% DCI-P3, ideally HDR-1000 but less is ok too
Search professional display specifications for HDR-10 compatibility and 10 bits wide gamut > 90% DCI-P3

Final Cut Pro Steps

The easy way to have HDR ready content with the GH5 is to shoot with the HLG Photo Style. This produces clips that when analysed have the following characteristics with AVCI coded.

Limited means that it is not using the full 10 bits range for brightness you do not need to worry about that.

With your material ready create a new library in Final Cut Pro that has a Wide Gamut and import your footage.

As we know Apple does not support HLG so when you look at the Luma scope you will see a traditional Rec709 IRE diagram. In addition, the ‘Tone Mapping Functionality’ will not work so you do not have a real idea of colour and brightness accuracy.

At this stage you have two options:

Proceed in HLG and avoid grading
Convert your material in PQ so that you can edit it

We will go on option 2 as we want to grade our footage.

Create a project with PQ gamut and enter your display information in the project properties. In my case the display has a minimum brightness of 0.35 nits and max of 350 and it has P3 primaries with a standard D65 white point. It is important to know those parameters to have a good editing experience otherwise the colours will be off. If you do not know your display parameters do some research. I have a Benq monitor that comes with a calibration certificate the information is right there. Apple screens are typically also P3 with D65 white point and you can find the maximum brightness in the specs. Usually around 500 nits for apple with minimum of 0.5 nits. Do not enter Rec2020 in the monitor information unless your monitor has native primaries in that space (there are almost none). Apple documentation tells you that if you do not know those values you can leave them blank, final cut pro will use the display information from colour sync and try a best match but this is far from ideal.

Monitor Metadata in the Project Properties

For the purpose of grading we will convert HLG to PQ using the HDR tools. The two variants of HDR have a different way to manage brightness so a conversion is required however the colour information is consistent between the two.

Please note that the maximum brightness value is typically 1000 Nits however there are not many displays out there that support this level of brightness, for the purpose of what we are going to do this is irrelevant so DO NOT change this value. Activate tone mapping accessible under the view pull down in the playback window this will adapt the footage to your display according to the parameters of the project without capping the scopes in the project.

Finalising your project

When you have finished with your editing you have two options:

Stay in PQ and produce an HDR-10 master
Delete all HDR tools HLG to PQ conversions and change back the project to HLG

If you produce an HDR-10 master you will need to edit twice for SDR: duplicate the project and apply the HDR tool from HLG to SDR or other LUT of your choice.

If you stay in HLG you will produce a single file but is likely that HDR will only be displayed on a narrower range of devices due to the lack of support of HLG in computers. The HLG clip will have correct grading as the corrections performed when the project was in PQ with tone mapping will survive the editing as HLG and PQ share the same colour mapping. The important thing is that you were able to see the effects of your grade.

Project back in HLG you can see how the RGB parade and the scope are back to IRE but all is exactly the same as with PQ

In my case I have an HLG TV so I produce only one file as I can’t be bothered doing the exercise two times.

The steps to produce your master file are identical to any other projects, I recommend creating a ProRes 422 HQ master and from there other formats using handbrake. If you change your project back to HLG you will get a warning about the master display you can ignore it.

4K, final cut pro, HDR, Panasonic GH5, Tips, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Panasonic GH5 Demystifying Movie recording settings

August 13, 2018 interceptor121 18 Comments

EDIT: January 2022

This article is now obsolete, I wrote a new one that also considers the S series cameras and you can find it here

Panasonic GH5M2 and S series Demystifying Movie recording settings 2022 Update

There are a lot of videos on YouTube that suggest that there is not much difference among the various recording settings of the GH5 for UHD.

To recap we have 4 settings for UHD (I will refer to PAL system because it is easier but all applies equally to 24p, the 30p/60p format will be the same with worse results)

100 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long GOP 25p
150 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long GOP 50p
150 Mbps 422 10 Bits Long GOP 25p
400 Mbps 422 10 Bits All-Intra 25p

The difference between Long GOP and All Intra is that in the Long GOP what is encoded is a group of pictures (GOP) and not separate individual pictures.

Within a Group of Pictures there are different type of frames:

I (Intra coded) frames containing a full picture
P (Predictive coded) frames containing motion interpolated picture based on a prediction from previous frames
B (bi-predictive coded) frames containing a prediction from previous or future frames

It is important to note that frames are not stored sequentially in a GOP and therefore the GOP needs to be decoded and the frames reordered to be played, this requires processing power.

The reason why H264 is very efficient is that within a group of picture there is only one full frame and the rest are predictions clearly if the prediction algorithm is accurate the level of perceived quality of long GOP is very high and similar to All-Intra clips.

This is the reason why comparing All Intra and Long Gop using static scenes or scenes with repetitive movement that can be predicted very accurately by the codec is a fundamental error.

Incorrect example here:

The scene is composed of static predictable objects with no motion and after YouTube compression the (wrong) conclusion is that there is no absolute difference between the codecs. Instead what this shows is the effectiveness of Long GOP when the prediction is accurate which is exactly the point of the codec plus the fact that YouTube flattens differences due to heavy compression and use of Long GOP.

Another example is a bit better as it uses a fountain which is a good representation of unpredictable motion

In the 300% crop you can see how All_Intra performs better than Long GOP in terms of prediction despite the YouTube compression, but generally those tests are unreliable if you see the last section of the video where there is a semi-static scene you cannot really take the three examples apart.

So why is that and is there any point selecting different settings on your Panasonic GH5?

In order to understand the workings we need to dig deeper into the structure of the GOP but before doing so let’s evaluate the All-Intra codec.

AVC All-Intra explanation

This codec records at 400 Mbps so with 25 fps this means circa 16 Mbits per frame or 1.9 MB per frame and there is no motion interpolation so each frame is independent from the others. The implementation of All-Intra of the GH5 does not make use of CABAC entropy encoding as Panasonic does not believe this is beneficial at higher bit-rates making this AVC-Intra implementation very close to ProRes as both are based on Discrete Cosine Transform.

In simple terms All Intra 400 Mbps would fall short of Apple recommended bit-rate for 422 10 bit colour for circa 92 Mbps is like saying you are missing 0.44 MB from your ProRes 422 frame and 1.6 MB from ProRes 422 HQ and you have 0.3 MB more than ProRes LT however I do not have the full technical details of ProRes to evaluate directly.

The real benefit of such codec is that it can be processed with modest hardware without conversion as the AVC Intra codec is edit ready and each frame is captured individually without any motion artefacts and therefore the computer does not have to do a great deal of work to decode and render the clips.

In order to record All-Intra in your memory card you need a V60 or higher specs card which in terms of $ per GB costs you more than an SSD drive however you no longer need a recorder.

Coming back to the other recording quality option we still need to evaluate how the various long GOP codecs compare relative to each other.

In order to fully understand a codec we need to decompose the GOP into the individual frames and evaluate the information recorded. If you look on Wikipedia it will tell you that P frames are approximately half the size of an I frame and B frame are 25%. I have analysed the Panasonic GH5 clips using ffprobe a component of ffmpeg that tells you what is exactly in each frame to see if this explains some of the people claims that there is no difference between the settings.

Link to Panasonic documentation

100 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long Gop 25p Deep Dive

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=12 and M=3 where N is the length in frames of the group of pictures and M is the distance between I or P frames.

So each Group of Picture is made like this

IBBPBBPBBPBBP before it repeats again.

A size analysis shows that B frames are in average 14% of the I frame and P frames are around 44% of the I frame.

	I	B	B	P	B	B	P	B	B	P	B	B
Size	1648326	247334	237891	728777	231947	228048	721242	228347	227544	713771	236866	232148
Ratio to I frame	100%	15.01%	14.43%	44.21%	14.07%	13.84%	43.76%	13.85%	13.80%	43.30%	14.37%	14.08%

With an average video bit-rate of 94 Mbps each GOP has 45.3 Mbps which means an I Frame has around 13.1 Mbits or 1.57 MB per frame and an equivalent All-Intra bit-rate of approximately 328 Mbps however this codec is using CABAC entropy encoding that Panasonic states is 20-30% more efficient than CAVLC used in All-Intra so net of motion artefacts this codec is pretty strong.

150 Mbps 420 8 Bits Long GOP 50p Deep Dive

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=24 and M=3 where N is the length in frames of the group of pictures and M is the distance between I or P frames.

So each Group of Pictures is made like this

IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBB before it repeats again.

A size analysis shows that B frames are in average 13.4% of the I frame and P frames are around 41% of the I frame. With an average bit-rate of 142.7 Mbps each GOP has 68.5 Mbits which means an I Frame has around 11.3 Mbits or 1.35 MB per frame and an equivalent all Intra bit-rate of approximately 566 Mbps. Again this uses CABAC entropy encoding so the equivalent All-Intra is higher.

One very important aspect of the 150 Mbps codec is that as the GOP is double the length of the single frame rate 100 Mbps codec there are the same number of key frames per second and therefore it is NOT true that this codec is better at predicting motion. In fact it is exactly the same so if you had acquired a 100 Mbps codec at 25 fps and then slowed down the footage to half speed asking your editor to interpolate intermediate frames it would come to the same result although with some more processing required.

150Mbps 422 10 Bits Long Gop 25 fps

An analysis with ffprobe shows a GOP structure with N=12 and M=1 which means this codec does not use B frames but just I and P frames so the GOP structure is as follows:

IPPPPPPPPPPP before it repeats again.

A size analysis shows that P frames are on average 53% of I frames so this codec is in fact less compressed however this has also some consequences.

With an average bitrate of 150 Mbps each GOP has 72 Mbits which means an I Frame has around 10.5 Mbits or 1.25 MB per frame and an equivalent all Intra bitrate of approximately 262 Mbps. So this codec in terms of compression efficiency this is actually the worst and this is due to the lack of B frames.

We can only think that the Panasonic GH5 processing is not strong enough to capture 10 bit and then write 422 Long GOP with IPB structure.

Codec Ranking for Static Image Quality UHD

So in terms of absolute image quality and not taking into account other factors the Panasonic GH5 Movie recording settings ranked by codec quality are as follows:

400 Mbps 422 10 Bit All intra 25 fps (1.9 MB per frame)
100 Mbps 420 8 Bit Long Gop 25 fps (1.57 MB per frame)
150 Mbps 420 8 Bit Long Gop 50 fps (1.35 MB per frame)
150 Mbps 422 10 Bit Long Gop 25 fps (1.25 MB per frame)

The 100 Mbps and 400 Mbps codec are marginally different (21% larger frame size) with the 422 10 Bits long GOP really far away.

Conclusion

If you want to record your footage to the internal memory card you are really left with two choices:

Use the 100 Mbps Long Gop codec it is very efficient in the compression and the perceived quality is very good. It does however require you to convert to ProRes or similar during editing if you don’t want to overload your computer as the codec is really heavy on H264 features. You need to get the exposure and white balance right in camera as the clips may not withstand extensive corrections. There is a risk with footage with a lot of motion of some errors in motion interpolation that can generate artefacts.
Buy a V60 or V90 memory card and use 400 All intra at single frame rate. This will give you edit ready footage of higher quality without motion artefacts, You still need to get exposure and white balance right in camera as the headroom is not so large to allow extensive corrections. The bit-rate and frame size is not sufficient to really give you all the benefits of 422 sampling and 10 bit colour but it will be a good stepping stone to produce good quality rec709 420 8 bit footage.

Generally there appears to be no benefit using the internal 422 10 Bit codec nor the 420 8 bit double frame rate due to the limitations of the GOP structure, here Panasonic has created a few options that to be honest appear more a marketing effort than anything else.

There may be some use to the 150 Mbps double frame rate if you intend to slow down the footage after the conversion to ProRes or similar but the extremely long GOP does not make this codec particularly robust to scenes with a lot of motion and in any case not more robust than the 100 Mbps codec.

A final thought if you are interested in 10 bit colour is that the FHD All Intra 200 Mbps codec has enough quality and headroom to allow manipulation. This is in fact the only codec that has bit-rate higher than ProRes HQ at least at 24 and 25 fps so if you want to check the real range of colours and dynamic range the camera is capable of you should try this codec.

4K, ambient light, filter, Sony RX100 Mark IV, Stabilization, UNDERWATER VIDEO, White Balance, wide angle

Getting the best underwater colours for your 4K Sony RX100 Mark IV

April 17, 2016 interceptor121 19 Comments

It is not a mystery that even the new Mark IV version has issues with custom white balance.

The ergonomics have not changed and you need to go into photo mode to set custom white balance but generally underwater results are poor. Using filters is therefore a necessity also on the new 4K version.

RX100 Mark IV Video Behavior

The RX100 offers now a 4K 100 mbps mode and can use picture profiles.

I have used a modified version of PP6 that use the cine2 gamma curve, I have however changed the colour to the Pro mode and changed a number of other settings in my last video in Puerto Galera.

The water was green and murky but this gives you an idea of what you can get.

Filter Options and Wide Angle

Although the Nauticam WWL-1 is the best lens for the RX100 it does not take filters and therefore is not adequate for video.

In this review clip you can see the options available on the market.

In terms of wide angle you have two options for 4K:

Inon UWL-H100
Inon UWL-100

Both lenses work fine in 4K however the older UWL-100 achromat does vignette in photo mode.

The UWL-H100 offers a very wide field of view also in HD mode with no vignette and accepts the mangrove/deeproof filter.

This filters is loaded with magenta so I suggest adjusting the tint in the auto white balance mode to +2 green.

The UWL-100 works fine in 4K and is wider than the UWL-H100 however has only the M67 mount. If you have one of those lenses you can use the Ikelite 6442 filter. This filter required you to remove the rubber ring on the lens and does work quite well except has a yellow cast to it you can reduce by changing the tint to +2 blue and increasing also magenta to +1.

For flexibility purposes probably the UWL-H100 is better as it takes the bayonet but the UWL-100 is really wide and has a little less fringing. Some people do like the UR/PRO filters better.

I hope you find this post useful and good luck with getting the best colours from your Sony RX100 Mark IV

4K, Fisheye lens, MFT Lenses, Micro 4:3, Panasonic GX7, Underwater Photography, UNDERWATER VIDEO, wide angle

Nauticam WWL-1 with Macro Port 29 for Micro Four Thirds

November 26, 2015 interceptor121 Leave a comment

Nauticam has recently released a new Macro port 29 that is shorter than the 35 and is designed for optimal compatibility with the following lenses and the WWL-1 Wet lens.

Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R
Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH Mega OIS
Panasonic Lumix G X Vario Power Zoom 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 Power OIS

I have had the port and wet lens for a few days and those are my observations with the Panasonic lenses as I do not own the Olympus.

In general terms none of those lenses are amazing in terms of optical quality and only the Panasonic lenses are stabilized. This is not so important for still images but an advantage for video.

Photozone has tests of all the three lenses

Olympus Test

Panasonic Vario G X PZ Test

Panasonic 12-32 Test

The Panasonic power zoom is better than the Olympus however the lens has issue of vignetting and pretty high chromatic aberration. The Panasonic 12-32mm is surprisingly good and has similar resolution and less issues of fringing.

I attached the 29 Macro Port to my GX7 housing and took some tests shots in the sink with the WWL-1 petals touching the subject.

The image is wide and the corner sharpness is great with minimal to no chromatic aberrations.

The 12-32mm lens does not vignette at wide end and gives similar performance to the PZ lens with the benefit of increased field of view.

The shots are taken at f/4 ISO 1600.

For comparison I mounted the 4.33″ dome and the 8mm fisheye and took a similar shot.

The field of view is wider but of course distortion in the corners is very high to the point they become garbled.

Clearly if you do need a fisheye lens the 8mm is still the choice however the WWL-1 has the advantage that you can use the full zoom and a field of view of around 130° with a 28mm equivalent lens and around 135° with 24mm equivalent.

One thing that is interesting is the use of the 12-32mm with the Macro 29 port combined with the Panasonic GH4 in 4K.

The crop factor of 1.2x means that the focal length with this lens at 4K 16:9 is 31.38mm. This makes this port compatible with a number of flat wide angle lens of the old generation.

Specifically the old Inon UWL-100 would give a field of view of 100° equivalent to 18mm in 4K. The additional benefit is that you can use the Ikelite UR/PRO push on filter and the full zoom. At the tele end 83.7mm may be a bit short however the fact that you have a fully rectilinear lens and you can use a push on filter is a big advantage.

The Macro port 29 is also compatible in normal mode with the Inon UWL-H100 at 24mm equivalent as per image.

The field of view appears narrow as the lens can get closer to the subject compared to the WWL-1. The optical quality is excellent with minimum fringing.

In summary the Macro Port 29 is a must purchase for the following users:

4K Panasonic GH4 video users
4K Panasonic GX8 Users
HD and Still images micro four third users wanting a full wet lens set up

The 12-32mm lens also give almost the same field of view of the Panasonic 7-14mm with wide angle port at much lower cost when coupled with an Inon UWL-H100 allowing use at apertures of f/4 and f/5.6 with one to two stops advantages on the 7-14mm.

On a final note for the users of the Macro 35 port Nauticam has now released the zoom gear for the Panasonic 14-42mm II Mega OIS. This lens is better than all of those discussed in this post in terms of optical quality and it comes as kit lens on lower end Panasonic cameras. If you already have the Macro Port 35 and a kit lens or if you don’t have any lens or port this is definitely the best option in terms of cost and optical quality

4K, Sony RX100 Mark IV, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Sony RX100 Mark IV Picture Profile Part 2

November 15, 2015 interceptor121 Leave a comment

I have done some further research on the picture profiles and found out quite a bit of information.

In this post I will focus on the luminance and black gamma.

Luminance

Luminance determines the range of black and white that are in the footage. People familiar with the Panasonic GH4 will know that you can set luminance fundamentally in two ranges: 0-255 and 16-235.

What this means that you have in the first case 256 grades of grey and the in the second 220. Some people confuse luminance with dynamic range but they are not the same thing.

You will somewhere find the definition of limited for 16-235 and full for 0-255 this is what it means.

In particular video broadcasting legal luminance is 16-235 so if you use a clip produced at 0-255 the extremes will be clipped this is anyway resolved as the levels are mediated when clips are produced for compatibility.

On the other hand if you use a clip with range 16-235 on a computer that has 0-255 luminance range it will look as lacking deep blacks or whites.

Ultimately you need to decide what is that you are shooting for and if your clips are going to be played on a computer that works in RGB or on a Tv that has YUV.

Profile Name	Description	Luminance Range	Dynamic Range
PP1	Movie	0-255	< 7 stops
PP2	Still	0-255	< 7 stops
PP3	Video Natural	0-255	7 stops
PP4	Video Vivid	0-255	7 stops
PP5	Cine1 109%	0-255	10 stops
PP6	Cine2 100%	16-235	10 stops
PP7	S-log	0-255	13 stops

So the only profile that is broadcast compatible before editing is PP6 or the Cine2 gamma curve.

You can see that the dynamic range is the same for PP5 and PP6 so the fact that the camera records more grey levels does not really change things as the cine2 curve is smoother so it can accept higher input signals.

Black Gamma

In order to increase depth of blacks it is possible to use the black gamma setting. This has 2 controls, one is the Range Narrow, Medium, Wide and the other is the level that goes from -7 to +7

If you are going to grade your footage of and if you are going to use the video gammas PP1-PP4 you should not touch the black gammas otherwise you risk crushing the blacks.

However if you intend to use the cine profiles straight out of the camera you can tweak the black gammas accordingly.

The range determines where the setting will be effective.

Broadly speaking Narrow works on the first 10% of the signal, medium around 20% and wide around 30-35%.

What it means is that Narrow really works on the deeper blacks as you move to Wide you are altering also the grey and effectively changing the balance of the whole image.

More details here http://helpguide.sony.net/di/pp/v1/en/contents/TP0000909110.html

For what concerns the level a positive value will move black towards grey and a negative value shift grey towards black.

There are two main uses of the black gamma: get deeper blacks without altering the overall contrast this is obtained using the Narrow setting and a value between -3 and -7 or use the Wide setting with negative values to give the whole image a darker tone.

A setting of Wide with level around -3 gives an overall darker tone to a Cinegamma if you don’t want to change the blacks in post and remains overall balanced.

Which leads to my current favorite profile that is a customised PP6 setting the parameters that I have changed are:

I have tested the various Gamma with backlight situation and I found that Cinema2 performs best on my Tv where I watch my clips.

I prefer Cine2 even on the computer to be frank but it is true that the blacks are a bit light.

Color mode: I have tried Cinema and Pro am now on Pro with Saturation +8

Black Gamma: Range Wide Level -7 as the cine2 mode is quite dull I like to push the blacks a little overall.

As the Sony RX100 Mark IV records at 8 bit my opinion is that using S-gamut is not worth without an external recorder. And to be honest the amount of grading possible is quite limited so my approach is to get the video as good as possible out of the camera.

This is a little test with my Kitten

4K, Sony RX100 Mark IV, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Picture Profiles for the new RX100 and A7 Cameras

November 8, 2015 interceptor121 4 Comments

The new cameras in the RX100 and A7 series can record 4K video internally but what is more important come with significant enhancements for video shooters.

Probably the most important feature is the availability of picture profiles that have a number of presets that can be further customized by the user.

There are many forums on the internet with custom setting to try to extract cine like look from Panasonic GH4 clips but all in all we can say that the controls in a still camera have been quite limited so far.

The new software that comes with the RX100 and A7 is a real step forward in this respect and contains all characteristics and functionality previously only present on Sony professional and semi professional video cameras.

The Seven Presets

The starting point of using a picture profile is to find one that we like as a starting point for further customization; the new Sony cameras have 7 profiles already loaded with example settings. The profiles have many characteristics that can be configured but probably the most important is the shape of the gamma curve because it also determines the minimum ISO and the availability of other features.

Profile Name	Description	Minimum ISO	Knee Mode
PP1	Movie	125	Auto/Manual
PP2	Still	125	Manual Only
PP3	Video Natural	200	Auto/Manual
PP4	Video Vivid	200	Auto/Manual
PP5	Cine1 109%	200	Manual Only
PP6	Cine2 100%	200	Manual Only
PP7	S-log	1600	Manual Only

The descriptions above are my personal short description as the user guide is quite confusing.

Profiles PP1 to PP5 are usable straight from the camera, PP6 is optimized for editing and PP7 can’t be used without editing.

Standard Profiles

The profile PP1 and PP2 emulate the camera behavior in movie and still mode in terms of contrast and saturation. The main difference between the two is that the Still mode has stronger contrast and saturation than movie. Both use a minimum ISO of 125 and they allow customization of the standard camera modes.

Within a profile you have access to controls for color and sharpness at much granular detail that you have with the camera in normal mode. For example the saturation slider goes from -32 to +32 and the sharpness can be completely controlled manually. Colour depth is available in the range -7 to +7 for the whole RGCCYM palette. The customization of those controls lets you have the colours you want off the camera this can be particularly important to people looking for a specific look of certain colors typically red and blue.

For a complete description see this link:

http://helpguide.sony.net/di/pp/v1/en/contents/TP0000909111.html

Another feature that is incremental to the normal movie mode is the knee setting. The knee is particularly useful with highlights and with back lit shots. What it does it to compress the highlights within the usable signal range.

The knee is a way for those who like video look footage to capture more highlights and avoid hard clipping of back lit images.

Video Profiles

The profiles PP3 and PP4 use the ITU709 gamma curve that is the standard for high definition video television. The gamma curve has a low light gain of 4.5 dB and for this reason the minimum ISO is 200.

The video profiles bring substantial increase in both shadows and highlights to the image compared to the standard profiles.

The difference between those two profiles is the selection of the color mode. The PP3 profile has a Pro colour mode that the manual says ‘it is similar to professional Sony broadcast cameras’ the PP4 instead has an ITU709 Matrix colour mode.

What it means is that the Pro colour is slightly below the standard saturation whilst the ITU709 Matrix is extremely saturated looking like the Tv program that go these days. Both settings allow usage of the knee setting in auto and manual mode. The idea is to restore the highlights and make the footage look less harsh. The issue is of course that this has only effect on the highlights and not on the shadows.

Cine Profiles

The profiles PP5 and PP6 use the two different Cine gamma curves one is limited at 109% and the other at 100%.

Those are the official descriptions:

Cine1: Softens the contrast in darker image areas and emphasizes gradation changes in lighter image areas, producing a subdued tone overall (equivalent to HG4609G33). Gamma curve that obtains a dynamic range of 460% when the exposure is adjusted to 33% video output with 18% reflectance gray. The maximum value of video output is 109%.

Images shot with this gamma can be used without grading, but since the images have smooth gradation characteristics, this can be used to grade and finalize the viewed image in the post-production process.

Cine 2: Similar results to [Cine1] but optimized for editing with up to 100% video signal (equivalent to HG4600G30). Gamma curve that obtains a dynamic range of 460% when the exposure is adjusted to 30% video output with 18% reflectance gray. The maximum value of video output is 100%.

Both curves are cine like and therefore do not use the knee function by default this is because a cine gamma curve is already clipping at much higher signal levels. The Cine2 curve has less contrast than Cine1 and is limited to 100% as opposed to the standard 109% so it is optimized for editing and the footage will lack whites and look fairly grey.

Practically the cine profile achieve a higher dynamic range using a smoother curve, this compares to the video profiles where the curve is pretty much the same until the highlights get compressed using the knee function.

S-log2

The PP7 profile is for S-log2, this has the highest dynamic range but the minimum ISO is 1600, the footage looks really bland out of the camera but this can be really enhanced through editing to bring out all the details.

My Take on the Picture Profiles
I think the whole cinema like video is a very overrated subject for underwater use. An acid test to understand where you stand is your own TV. If you use the picture settings Vivid or Standard then you are a video like person, waste no time pursuing cinema like look as in the editing you will effectively bring it back and eliminate all the detail you capture by increasing contrast and saturation.

If instead your TV is set to Cinema or is even calibrated then you are a Cine like person.

Personally I think S-log2 for underwater use at 100 mbps is a total waste of time and it is only worth with external recorders. The bitrate is too low to capture that amount of detail and resist extensive grading and actually shooting at 1600 is pretty difficult and requires ND filters (that the RX100 has) to perform decently.

You can take still shots with the picture profile so the first thing to do is to take a few pictures and see what image you like the most, then you can start tweaking.

I found myself to like the cine settings in terms of contrast but I find then too bland in color so I have settled for +20 saturation right now.

Between Cine1 and Cine2 is quite difficult to choose because although Cine2 is in theory optimized for editing actually it looks pretty good straight from the camera for my liking. I particularly like the fact that the highlights almost never clip with this setting even in harsh conditions. It is possible to mix the Cine profiles with the Pro color mode but I found that using saturation was giving the same result.

Detail setting (aka Sharpness)

The last feature of the RX100 and A7 new controls is the fine tuning of the sharpness setting. I find that the default works pretty well except at high ISO where you want to start adjusting slightly the behavior.

The full guide is here http://helpguide.sony.net/di/pp/v1/en/contents/TP0000909112.html

But it takes a bit of time to understand the settings.

The starting point for me is the crispening setting that in perfect Sony tradition means exactly the opposite of what you would think. So a setting of +7 means actually limit the sharpening on speckles and noise where a clear shape can’t be detected. Once you set crispening to the max and you shoot at high ISO you see how it reduces the noise. However the issue is that now the sharpness has also reduced so in order to restore the effect you go back to the total level of detail and set it to 7. Once you do that you find out that now the sharpening applied correctly is actually excessive so the limit setting effectively clips the amount of sharpening applied to the edges I use this at 3, as this results in a reduction of highlights sharpening (glass reflecting objects look dull) I then set the highlight detail to +2. After I did all of that the end result was very similar to the standard setting and a bit softer on the edges, practically it was only better at very high ISO so I went back to the original setting.

4K, Panasonic LX100, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Best Settings for 4K video with the Panasonic DMC-LX100

September 28, 2015 interceptor121 2 Comments

There is no doubt that the Panasonic LX100 is a very capable camera and has a great 4K mode that works great especially at the wide end. In this post we will look at the settings that in my opinion maximize the camera features and have the best ergonomics for shooting underwater and actually also on land for most.

There is quite a bit of confusion between still image settings and movie settings and if your objective is to shoot video I recommend saving all the settings below or your preferred choice in a custom memory. The LX100 has 3 custom memory so you can save your settings for movie, stills and something else. Note that due to the absence of mode dials aperture, shutter and exposure are not saved so check you have the right settings before starting your recordings.

Movie Menu

Photo Style: I tend to leave this on the standard setting. Some users like to define a custom setting with sharpening of -2 I don’t think this is necessary. Likewise noise reduction is fine out of the box

4K Photo: I leave this option off as I want to shoot in 24p, setting it on will force the camera in 25/30p mode.

Rec Format: mp4

Rec Quality: 4K 24p I like the cinematic movie but also want to extract the maximum quality from the image

AFS/AFF/AFC: AFS single focus at the beginning of the scene

Picture Mode: setting not relevant in 4K

Continuous AF: set to OFF to prevent the camera to hunt focus especially underwater. If used on land this may be set to ON

Metering Mode: I tend to use centered weighted average for macro and multi metering for wide angle.

Highlight/Shadow: this is a very powerful control but I leave it to default

i.Dynamic: set to OFF to avoid unpredictable artifacts

i.Resolution: set to OFF the camera is very sharp no need for this

i.Zoom: set to ON due to the limited focal range it is important to allow for some extended zoom although there is some quality loss especially at high ISO. It works pretty well on the first notch

Digital Zoom: set to OFF the digital zoom looses too much quality

Mic settings: all left default

Wind cut: auto

Custom Settings Menu

Silent Mode: can be set on if you are working with wildlife on land

AF/AE lock: set to AE lock, as we have disabled continuous focus and we keep the focus at the beginning of the scene there is no need for AF lock in video. AE lock allows you to lock exposure when entering caves and wanting to keep a natural light without abrupt changes in exposure

AE/AF lock hold set to on so that the exposure lock is released only when the button is pressed again.

Shutter AF: ON we want to focus when we press the shutter at the beginning of the scene

Half Press Release, Quick AF, Eye sensor AF: all left to OFF

Pinpoint AF time: set to MID

Pinpoint AF display: picture in picture

AF assisted lamp: off

Direct Focus Area: set to OFF otherwise moving the cursor will override other buttons

Focus/Release Priority: irrelevant in movie mode

AF+MF: this allows for fine tuning with manual focus if the shutter is half pressed can be useful if the camera struggles to focus

MF Assist: focus

MF Assist display: PIP

MF Guide: ON

Peaking: ON your preference of color and level. I find the defaults to work fine some people prefer orange.

Histogram: OFF

Guide Line: rule of thirds

Highlight: irrelevant for video

Zebra: I use zebra 2 with 100% setting to just show me overexposed areas.

Monochrome live view: OFF

Constant Preview: OFF

Expo Meter: ON

Dial Guide: ON

LVF/Monitor Display: set default

Info display: ON

Rec Area: Movie, this settings makes the picture format lever redundant if you shoot videos so you don’t need to set the dial to 16:9.

Remaining Display: movie (this is only useful at the end of the memory card)

Fn button set: For underwater use F1-Set record area F2-default(Wireless) F3-Custom memory settings

Zoom Lever: I prefer to move in steps

Control Ring: defauls

Zoom Resume; OFF very important if you have the LX100 in the short port and accidentally you zoom too much leaving this to on can compromise your dive

Q.Menu: preset

iA button: default

Video Button: leave to On

Eye Sensor: LVF Monitor Switch: Mon

Custom Menu

All settings default except

Menu Resume: set to ON

Focus Area: 1 Area recommended for underwater use alternatively pinpoint for macro

Recommended Shooting Settings

Wide Angle

As discussed I prefer 24p and therefore I leave the aperture dial to auto and the ISO setting to auto too for wide angle. Generally the camera will operate prioritizing a low ISO to a small aperture and if you touch the aperture you end up in manual exposure that may be a possibility. Shutter dial on 1/60 with shutter speed reduced to 1/50 this gives plenty to play with in terms of aperture and in bright scenes the aperture will quickly go above f/8. The focus will be fixed as you set it at the beginning of the scene however if you need to refocus you can half-press the shutter and the camera will re-focus.

Macro

For macro other considerations on depth of field apply so you need to get going with the aperture until you get a decent focus, consider that the camera does not follow any rules so in effect you will set the shutter to 1/50 and then play with the ISO until you reach the desired exposure. As you will be shooting macro with lights this should not pose a large issue. If your subject is in the center of the frame use centered weighted average metering if not you need to be careful here is where the zebra control comes very useful. In general is better to avoid under exposure and the zebra can help to ensure you prime subject is exposed correctly. For what concerns focus here you can try auto+manual as a starting point and then fine tune. Depth of field is limited so once you lose the focus it may be worth stopping and starting again instead of trying to refocus.

You can also keep the focus constant and move the camera back and forth.

I hope you find those settings useful let me know how you get on.

4K, close up lens, diopters, Dome Port, Fisheye lens, Flat Port, housing, Micro 4:3, Panasonic LX100, Underwater Photography, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Nauticam NA-LX100 4K Video Review

September 27, 2015 interceptor121 Leave a comment

Following the previous review that was dedicated to still images we now go into the subject of 4K video with the Panasonic LX100 and related Nauticam LX-100.

Currently there are only two compact cameras that produce 4K video the Sony RX100 and the Panasonic LX100.

The housing for the Sony RX100 has a traditional M67 port whilst the LX100 uses the N50 compact port system.

This means you can use all your wet lenses with the RX100 without specific adapters. The LX100 has however a number of benefits.

This table compares the field of view of the two cameras in 4K video mode.

LX100
4K	Horizontal FOV	Vertical FOV	Diagonal FOV	Sensor width	35mm 3:2
26.00	71.90	44.40	79.50	15.80	23.86
81.00	26.20	14.90	29.90	15.80	74.40
RX100
4K	Horizontal FOV	Vertical FOV	Diagonal FOV	Sensor width	35mm 3:2
28.00	67.90	41.50	75.40	11.85	26.73
80.00	26.00	14.80	29.60	11.85	76.37

When the camera shoots in 4K mode the focal length remains the same however the camera uses a smaller part of the sensor. A normal micro four third sensor measures 17.3×12 mm whilst the 1″ sensor of the RX100 is 13.2×8.8 mm. Note that the LX100 does not use the whole sensor due to the multi aspect format that keeps the diagonal field of view unchanged regardless of the image format.

What we can see in the LX100 table is that although the focal length in 4K is 26mm the horizontal field of view is the same of a full frame camera with a lens of 23.86mm this means the field of view in 4K should be slightly wider than a picture taken by the LX100 in 4:3 format.

I put the camera on a tripod and took two sample shots, this is the first at 24mm in 4:3 format that I then cropped to 16:9.

This other shot is from exactly the same position taken extracting a 4K frame from a small video.

As stated the horizontal dimension is just a few mm wider in 4K 16:9.

What this means is that this is the same that any normal camera with a 24mm lens that then is cropped to movie format in terms of field of view.

The Sony RX100 does not have a multi aspect sensor and therefore the horizontal field of view drops more.

With the short port on the LX100 using a wet lens like the Inon UWL-H100 we can achieve more than 97° horizontal which is very wide and zoom all the way to 79° and if we use a wetmate or the mini dome cover the other range between 72° and 50°.

Practically the LX100 with wet lenses and wetmate or minidome gives you access to focal lengths between 15.5-21mm and again 24-35mm is like having an 8-18mm lens on a micro four third which is good for whale sharks and mantas this is even wider than the 7-14mm lens on a Panasonic GH4 in 4K and the LX100 has a (weak) optical stabiliser on the lens.

The RX100 mark IV instead can only cover between 96° and 90° before the wet lens stops working properly and we jump to 68° if using a wetmate.

This shot taken at around 15cm shows a nearly rectilinear and very wide image.

In short if you are after some super wide angle in 4K the LX100 is definitely the way to go.

From an ergonomic point of view I shoot video in shutter priority and let the camera work out ISO and aperture, this is relatively easy to do with the LX100 although the absence of custom memory modes on a mode dial is painful.

A control that can be quite useful due to the tendency of the LX100 to go focus hunting is to set the ae/af lock button to af-on. This requires the shutter to be set in release priority with this control you can use manual focus and force the LX100 to refocus when you hit the af-lock. This is a very useful feature.

Update 28 September the method described to fight focus hunting does not work in 4K. There is going to be another post with the best settings for 4K video for the LX100.

For what concerns macro both the LX100 and RX100 present their challenges due to the short zoom lens, the LX100 more so due to the horrible rectangular port. It can be argued that you can’t shoot wide and macro with the LX100 whilst you can do that with the RX100 however the strength of the LX100 is certainly in its very wide lens and the short port that combined with a flat wide angle lens can produce an extremely wide field of view able to cover practically almost any wide angle scene.

For macro the GH4 and upcoming GX8 are probably going to be better placed due to the higher crop factor giving focal lengths in excess of 100mm using the 14-42mm lenses.

If you want to get into 4K video and your focus is primarily wide angle the LX100 is an excellent device.

4K, close up lens, diopters, Dome Port, Fisheye lens, Flat Port, housing, Micro 4:3, Panasonic LX100, Underwater Photography, UNDERWATER VIDEO

Nauticam NA-LX100 housing and port system review

September 26, 2015 interceptor121 2 Comments

Nauticam has given me the opportunity to test the housing for the Panasonic LX100 priced at $1,200 or £922 in UK.

As anticipated some time ago this housing features the new N50 mini port system for compact.

The housing comes with the rectangular port as a standard, as the LX100 has a 24mm equivalent lens and the lens extends quite a lot between the shortest and longest focal length it is not possible to use an M67 long port or there will be vignetting.

In order to install the camera you need to set the aperture to f/16 and the aspect ratio to 4:3 with focus mode in normal and lift the zoom lever. Likewise to take the camera out of the housing.

Unfortunately as mentioned several times on this blog pincushion distortion severely affects the image at focal lengths shorter than 35mm equivalent as our in water test shot demonstrated. If you zoom in the corners you can see also extensive blur and chromatic aberrations.

Furthermore the lack of an M67 port means you now need the Nautical flip diopter for rectangular port that costs $220 or £170.

When you eventually get to put a diopter on the lack of zoom means that magnification with traditional lenses is quite limited.

The frame width is 62mm with a single Inon UCl-165 and goes to 5cm when we stack another UCL-330.

Image quality is ok except some blue fringing at the borders.

A single UCL-100 gives a frame width of 42mm.

Apparently the Nauticam CMC ($320 or £240) gives 32mm frame width that is adequate for macro.

So if you are into macro you need to invest $1,200+$220+$320=$1,740 to have some decent magnification.

If you possess many clamps and cold shoe ball mounts you can buy an Inon M67 lens arm and use the lenses you have saving some $$$ but the magnification is limited unless you get the CMC.

For semi-wide angle a mini dome port is available at $280 or £216.

This restores the field of view in air however you can only zoom to 40mm before the camera can’t focus anymore. I have even tried with dry diopters on the camera there is no improvement.

Optical quality is great.

Probably the most useful port is the N50 short port that has an m67 thread and allows to use wet wide angle lenses.

I went to Swanage but got the tide wrong visibility was shocking still gives an idea of the image quality of the LX100 with the Nauticam WWL-1 wet lens.

SWANAGE (4 of 4) — Atlantic Ocean Anemones

If you have a Nauticam wet mate you can also use it with the short port and achieve the same or better sharpness than the minidome thought with some residual chromatic aberration.

The big benefit is that if you find that your wet wide angle lens is too wide for what you are shooting you can change lens without changing the port.

For what concerns the ergonomics of the LX100 they are quite intuitive on land.

One of the characteristics is the lack of a mode dial.

You have an auto position for shutter speed and aperture and if you leave them as such the camera shoots in program mode.

Once you move the aperture the camera goes in aperture priority mode. Probably the worst situation is the shutter dial that once touched has to come down all the way from 1/4000 to whatever you need it to be.

Also you don’t have thirds of exposure for the shutter dial and for example to get 1/50 you need to go to 1/60 and then use the rear dial.

I found the ergonomics of the camera in water particularly annoying as I was shooting with gloves. I did like the nauticam trigger system for the shutter however the amount of hardware of the nauticam tray and its weight are not really an option for me.

The Panasonic LX100 is a very interesting camera on land but in water ends up quite uncomfortable and expensive. The housing with the 3 ports comes at $1,200+$180+$280 if you add the Nauticam CMC and the WWL-1 you end with a whopping $3,195 the camera costs another $800. Total investment $4,000.

This is a lot of money in my opinion considering that with another $300 you can get a Panasonic GX7 with GX7 housing, an Olympus 60mm with 65 macro port and a Panasonic 8mm fisheye with 4.33″ dome. The LX100 and GX7 share the same sensor but there is no doubt that the macro performance of a dedicated lens as well as the fisheye of the 8mm lens have no comparison.

In conclusion the Panasonic LX100 with NA-LX100 is a bit of a flop for stills the only use that I can think of is wide angle 4K video with the short port and a wet lens but other than that I don’t see how Nauticam is going to sell many of those units.

Interceptor121 Photography & Video Workshops

Tag Archives: 4K

Panasonic GH5M2 and S series Demystifying Movie recording settings 2022 Update

Long GOP vs All Intra

Long GOP Codecs

H264 Codec Ranking for Static Image Quality UHD

Conclusion

Additional Considerations

Producing and grading HDR content with the Panasonic GH5 in Final Cut Pro X

A word about Vlog

Why is a bad idea to grade directly in HLG

What do you need for grading HDR?

Finding an HDR-10 Monitor

Final Cut Pro Steps

Finalising your project

Panasonic GH5 Demystifying Movie recording settings

Getting the best underwater colours for your 4K Sony RX100 Mark IV

RX100 Mark IV Video Behavior

Filter Options and Wide Angle

Nauticam WWL-1 with Macro Port 29 for Micro Four Thirds

Sony RX100 Mark IV Picture Profile Part 2

Luminance

Black Gamma

Picture Profiles for the new RX100 and A7 Cameras

The Seven Presets

Standard Profiles

Video Profiles

Cine Profiles

S-log2

Detail setting (aka Sharpness)

Best Settings for 4K video with the Panasonic DMC-LX100

Nauticam NA-LX100 4K Video Review

Nauticam NA-LX100 housing and port system review

Wildlife photography made easy