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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: October 24, 2018, 08:50:12 AM »

Yes I graded it to look sorta like my Ursa Mini Pro footage No noise removal although I could have... also sharpened quite a lot more than I normally would! It honestly looks very nice, its just a bit dull on detail!

I know for a fact the sensor manufacturer makes higher resolution sensors as ive been messaging them for info! I hope Chronos team has something up their sleeve cause this could be a real winner if it was higher resolution also.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: October 24, 2018, 03:38:13 AM »

Sorry guys, been super busy and forgot about this...

So Aaron well done on the footage, exactly what I wanted

So in conclusion, the resolution is a bit poor BUT, when shot properly I dare say it's usable in a professional setting when watched online at least. Here's a grade of Aaron's footage:

https://vimeo.com/296841634/895e927c7a

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 17, 2018, 06:40:07 AM »

I just wrote a huge post and the site didnt load.... blahhh
The sensors etc are much cheaper now, normally a manufacturer would lower prices in this case and/or release a new improved version using new tech.I hope the prior comes along for broadcast quality! I agree though it's great value but if things got competitive, could get a lot lower based on the cost of technology in china.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 17, 2018, 05:17:07 AM »

NiNeff it was a much appreciated effort, no need to explain yourself! I know it's not easy with a high speed camera especially. Id recommend using soft diffusion with sunlight. For example:
https://www.slrlounge.com/make-diy-scrim-50/

So you wait till noon when the sun is directly above and you place what you're filming inside a sort of lightbox with the diffusion. A thin material would be best as you want as much light as possible. On a sunny day I regularly use 4000 or 8000 even shutterspeeds when shooting wide open so this should be enough light. An IR filter to go on the end of the lense would help take away the green tint also.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 17, 2018, 04:56:40 AM »

Hey its a cool project. I'm interested to see if it can fit in with professional timelines but it's not looking like it can. The same sensor company has released 2 new, improved sensors in the years since this camera has been released so hopefully thats something in the works... The thing is a camera such as the sony rx 10 gives practically as good 1000 frames per second now at 3x cheaper price. Also a very usable cam for 240 fps or 4k shooting. So I think Chronos is pretty dated for the pricing and cost of the sensors.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 17, 2018, 04:37:55 AM »

There's no point in making a process for this cause it was basically repairing badly under exposed footage. If I can get some properly exposed footage  with a decent lense I'll see what I can do. I didn't do anything special in this case, just used the python raw2dng tool on this website and it gives decent results. I then grade in Blackmagic Resolve.

Yes the sensor size is perfect, just the resolution is not... I'm fairly sure quality canon glass or nikon can be mounted to the cmount. Even a nifty 50 1.8 by canon is very cheap and sharp, with great low light gathering ability. Also its light for the small cmount. I get that it's a kickstarter campaign but I just think if they had spent say 500 bucks on a videographer to do some studio shots or even found one willing to test the camera, they would get so many more sales.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 17, 2018, 03:52:18 AM »

https://vimeo.com/285466957/e2e79a02af

So I had a go at working with the raw. It's hard to conclude anything since the image is very under exposed which will create noise, the lense and/or sensor is dirty and not in focus properly. Also a lot of infra red polution i.e green, which you can remove somewhat in raw fairly easily but the thing needs an IR filter. Thanks for posting it though but yes... more light, clean your lense and sensor

I pushed the image in post to something close to how I think it should look so it's got even noisier due to being quite under exposed compared to this. I think the camera is fairly ok... just low resolution as Nikon previously mentioned. Plenty of small sensors give out good hd quality, I mean just look at the quality of edgertonic or even the arri sensor is little over 2k in size but thats dual gain. You actually don't want too big a sensor, I believe 2x the resolution is fine for a clean conversion or 1x1. In this case I find it very weird that there doesn't seem to be any testing done by a professional cinematographer. Wouldn't cost much to have them put this camera into a studio situation, use canon glass with an ef to c mount adapter and see what is possible. Really cant understand it :S

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 16, 2018, 07:32:20 AM »

I'm not saying I want to do it, I'm saying on the sensor's tech page they say it does 2x2 binning. Maybe this is how it achieves such high frame rates but at the expense of reduced true resolution like you say.

Hopefully thats not correct and it's simply bad post processing. I'd love to get a hold of the recent raw bird footage. That looked almost ok... I think if I can get my hands on it potentially I can make it clean 720p. If it is down to the sensor, I'm not sure why they havent upgraded to the newer 1080p sensor available from the same manufacturer. The markup between the cost of the sensors and selling price is huge already.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 16, 2018, 07:17:53 AM »

The sensor is advertised as doing 2x2 binning... maybe it's just an option but would make sense considering the jagged edges. There's certainly more bad things going on than just low resolution. Also I think maybe what you're referring to is the way an image is debayered depending on the bitrate. A 14 bit raw video should retain all the details providing there are enough photosites. 8 bit video is where some of the pixels are guessed effectively, based on key pixels.

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Chronos User Discussion / Re: I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 16, 2018, 05:25:04 AM »

Thanks for your responses guys. Thank you so much NiNeff, I will take a look at the raw data but I'm afraid it's too blurry to begin with. Maybe its the lense you're using? I'd suggest stopping down the aperture as far as you can go without having to push the iso above the lowest setting to improve sharpness. I do worry the jagged edges and noise we see is to do with the 2x2 binning method I believe this sensor uses which is likely gonna create jagged edges. If someone could do a test with a known sharp lense such as the nikkor, stopped down a bit to increase sharpness, it would be perfect.

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Chronos User Discussion / I am a professional colorist & would like to try improving your raw footage

« on: August 16, 2018, 12:14:47 AM »

The project is great but basically as a professional, I've seen nothing impressive from this camera until recently, with the raw update it looks almost usable in a professional video. The bird footage looks very weak, artifact-ed, noisey and just bad coloring but I'd like to get my hands on some raw data to see if thats down to hardware or poor post processing which I suspect.

If I can I will share my workflow. If someone could be so kind to either film under studio lighting or failing that, get me some static shots of a subject on a cloudy day, so the shadows (dark areas) are fairly well exposed and no clipped highlights. Just a quick few seconds worth of frames ie 100 or so. If I could get the raw image data and some dng's even better and I will try a variety of debayering methods.

I dont need anything fancy, just some movement in the shot such as a falling coin and well exposed.

Thanks