Oppo the phone company based in Dongguan, China has released their flagship phone the Oppo Find X. Comparisons will be made to the iPhone X nut just in name but also on shape and design. However, the Oppo has no notch but it also has a similar aesthetic to the Galaxy S9 from Samsung but with the impressive feature which slides a motorized top part with both the rear and front cameras. Design wise this phone might be the most impressive and elegant phone ever made up to this point.
The phone has no 4k 60p like others in its class but does have 240fps 1080p and 480fps 720p video. There is something akin to this phone and the OnePlus 6 in that they share the video specs. Are these phones similarly built or it is just a fluke? We tend to see a homogenized spec sheet on these handsets as technology is standardized in China within camera modules. It is encouraging to see so many phones having the slow motion feature included and prominently displayed in the feature run-down.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
NVIDIA has been hard at work on the problem posed by high frame rate interpolation of video data shot on lower fps. We have had this tech since the late 1990s with the advent of Twixtor and refined over the decades in systems like Twixtor Pro and Adobe’s Optical Flow in After Effects. You are still not getting real temporal detail data since the frames are created by extrapolating velocity and direction vectors plus pixel values between frames to get the result.
We explored this technique in our post on interpolation here and why it is no substitute from a real slow motion camera solution. NVIDIA’s new method uses machine learning along with 11,000 videos to arrive at a more convincing result. Considering the relatively small sample size we can imagine a future where hundreds of thousands or millions of footage samples are used to generate near flawless interpolation. This technique takes some serious computation and data sets so as of now it is not really ready for the mass market but that could change with the cloud very soon.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Chronos 1.4c Team has released the latest v0.3 RC2 software for testing. Be aware that this is not mission critical stable software so only use on your own private testing and not for recording mission critical shoots. The Interface can now be flipped to the left side though we would love to see an option to be concentrated on the lower part for better screen real-estate distribution.
We have tested over the last few days and are happy to report that the software has been stable and rock solid with no lock-ups and no sluggishness. The Color science was improved since the first v0.3 RC1 release to render the red colors among others more faithfully. In our testing, there was a definite improvement but we would like to see better treatment of the deep blues and magentas. We are happy to see White Balance is now supporting built-in presets!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Sony RX100 VI camera has not reached the reviewers yet for a full in-depth look but the early press shoots did gather some slow-motion footage which shows the camera in action. We also got a final word from a good source that the camera has the exact same HFR resolution and timing features as the RX100 V which means there is no improvement in the quality of the image when shooting higher frame rates.
In fact, you may even get lesser quality footage due to the lens being now an 8x f2.8 to f4.5 lens 24-200mm (35mm Equivalent) which is much slower and by optical standards, it should trail the 2.91x f/1.8-2.8 Lens 24-70mm (35mm Equivalent) of the RX100 V. So you get a $250 price increase for a better AF system, better color in video, a better tilt screen which is now full touch and the ability to zoom 8x. If those things are important to you then the extra money may be worth it.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Chinese tech company Xiaomi has released it’s latest high-end flagship phone the Mi 8 which has the highest ever specs for a Xiaomi Phone with great benchmark scores to boot. It has up to 8GB of RAM with a Snapdragon 845 chip at 2.8Ghz which should perform admirably. The phone is targeted for under $500 in Asia for the lower version spec and under $700 USD for the highest Explorer version.
The video modes are what you would expect from a competitive flagship with UHD 30p 4k and 1080p up to 60fps standard with the option to go 120fps and 240fps in both full HD and regular 720p HD modes. 240p is becoming a standard for full HD and it is encouraging to see that phones all over the globe are adopting these specs as near standard now at least in the higher end. The 4k 60p spec is missing here so the iPhone and other phones that can do it are still preferable for high-end phone video capture.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The new Fuji X-T100 may be an afterthought for videographers due to its stills focus. It has a 4k UHD mode but only records at 15fps which begs the question why bother including it? It is certainly useless for everything except time-lapse video recording if you think stuttering footage is rubbish. However, the camera does have a 720p 120fps mode that can record for up to 7minutes while conforming into a file at 30fps which equates to a 4x slowdown or if later edited at 24p a 5x slowdown from real time.
Fuji industrial design is just eye-catching and excellent when it comes to looks. The X-T100 does not disappoint with its retro but chiseled look with a flippy screen that screams for a better video mode. We are fans of the Fuji cameras and are glad to see that even in this low-end entry the high frame rate video recording feature is retained. We hope to see them implement 240fps or higher in future models as their recent efforts in the X-H1 show encouraging initial results in 1080p with superb color rendering.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
