FS700 and PMW-F55 raw tested side by side.

[Alister Chapman]

At the broadcast Asia trade show I was able to record raw footage from both the FS700/R5 and a PMW-F55 with R5. It was not a very scientific test, just done on the Sony booth but it did confirm what I expected and that's that there is very little difference in the raw from these two cameras. The F55 does have a wide colour gamut and the 16 bit raw can be pushed a bit harder before artefacts become visible compared to the 12 bit raw from the FS700. The differences however are very small and for most productions it would make little difference. I was very impressed by the FS700 raw, but that was what I expected.
Stunning FS700 raw performance, really impressive! | XDCAM-USER.COM

[Christopher Young]

Thx for that Alister. Interesting reading. Think I will be waiting for the Odyssey as well. Seems like a good price / performace point.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Alister Chapman]

Especially as the Odyssey 7Q FS700 option price has just been lowered to $795 and the price of the SSD's has been slashed while the capacity increased!

[Christopher Young]

Makes it all the more interesting. Most of my work is for broadcast so going 4K is more of me wanting to go 4K rather than it being a business driven proposition. The freedom to pan/crop/2:35 a 2K out of it is what appeals to me.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Alister Chapman]

4K acquisition is fantastic. My HD looks so much better when shot in 4K and then down converted.

[Fred Wilharm]

Any chance you could post some example footage-- AVCHD and downconverted 4K?

[Alister Chapman]

There's really no point in making 8 bit AVCHD or similar copies of the raw clips, they won't tell you anything useful about the quality of the footage. You can download a couple of the original raw files from my website and the Sony raw viewer will allow you to work with them.

[Fred Wilharm]

Actually, it would tell me a lot- whether the final product (AVCHD or H264 for the web, or straight to DVD) will be improved any by spending thousands to shoot 4K/raw. If it's not a noticeable gain, and I'm not going into theaters or even on Blu Ray, why invest the cash?

"4K acquisition is fantastic. My HD looks so much better when shot in 4K and then down converted".
__________________

OK, let's see some HD.

[Leonard Levy]

Are you guys concerned about how good the quality will be from realtime compressed 4K and downconverted 2K output from the Odyssy?

[Alister Chapman]

I do have some concerns over the quality of the 2K and need to do some tests. The 2K is derived from the entire sensor, there is no line or pixel skipping so it will be interesting to see what the aliasing is like. Plus, how much softer will the 2K raw be than the HD? Don't forget this is 2K bayer so after de-bayer it may end up lower resolution than HD.

It will be interesting to see just how good the 4K compressed from the Odyssey will be. I should be pretty good, comparable to the 4K S-Log2 XAVC from the F55. But we'll have to wait and see.

Fred: Take a look at this clip. If you choose HD quality then you'll see how amazingly clear the HD looks. By shooting in 4K you start with a 4K optical low pass filter, so at HD you have a higher MTF which gives you greater contrast at the limits of HD resolution. The end result is better clarity and contrast on small details.

[Chris Medico]

With that in mind Alister would you think it would be more sensible to capture in 4k compressed then do the scaling to 2k or HD in a computer where it doesn't have to be real time?

The record times seemed workable for 4k compressed.

I will also be interested to see how real time 2k from the 4k stream compares.

I don't plan to do a full 4k workflow but it will be nice to have the option to do a bit of reframing/stabilizing in post to improve a shot.