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Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro
- user3939382 3y ago[flagged]
- hsdropout 3y agoBlammo's best seller!
- sen_armstrong 3y ago[flagged]
- 38 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HALtheWise 3y agoIt's always surprised me that there's not more interest in log-scale/floating-point ADCs built directly into camera sensors. Both humans and algorithms care a lot more about a couple-bit difference in dark areas than light, and we happily use floating point numbers to represent high-range values elsewhere in CS.
- morcheeba 3y agoThere was a company that did this circa 2003 - SMaL. Their "autobrite" sensor is built to capture log-scale natively. They've switched owners twice since then, but it seems like they're getting more traction in car vision systems than in professional video. https://www.vision-systems.com/cameras-accessories/article/16743047/smal-camera-technologies-releases-cameras-for-security-and-surveillance https://www.vision-systems.com/cameras-accessories/article/1...
- jeffreygoesto 3y agoBlast from the past. You could do things like that [0] in 2005... Autobrite was the first thing to go out the window, once we knew how the chip worked we did or own exposure control... [0] https://youtu.be/0UaTYX-ygG8?feature=shared https://youtu.be/0UaTYX-ygG8?feature=shared
- verall 3y agoA lot of the processing steps expect linearity and would have to be reworked for floating point or log scale data. Most HDR sensors are using some kind of logarithmic compression for sensor readout, but I've never really heard of a floating point adc. Google seems to suggest tbey're not readily available.
- raverbashing 3y agoYeah there isn't, it's not that simple, even at sensor level to have that much dynamic range A linear ADC with enough range is usually fine, you can do the math later. But maybe for this case it needs a non-linear element before the ADC? (no idea how log recording needs anything at the HW level)
- fiedzia 3y agoMost recently microphones/recorders started using it for recording sound
- _kb 3y agoFrom my understanding, the ADC's are still fixed point and linear. Two (or more) then run in parallel over different signal levels to produce the 32-bit float output. Encoding audio with different log-scale companding has been around for some time too (since the 1970's) with A-law and mu-law in G.711.
- u320 3y agoIt doesn't really matter HOW they do it, as long as you get the advantages of float encoding (practically infinite headroom). Of course if you zoom in enough there will be something in there that uses integers, but this would be true for e.g. a floating point adder as well.
- numpad0 3y agoIt should matter that "practiaclly infinite headroom" comes from the fact that the raw samples has 64 bit of dynamic range, than output format being float. (does that mean there is a crossover in the middle of amplitude range that shows LSBs of one of ADCs poking their heads, I mean, in a hypothetical ultra-naive implementation?)
- whyoh 3y ago>the advantages of float encoding (practically infinite headroom) The best implementations have a dynamic range of about 140-150 dBA. Floating point is not needed to achieve that and it isn't always used (look at Stagetec products).
- FunkyDuckling 3y agoI'm not entirely sure what you mean by floating point for an ADC. from a super high level all ADCS do is quantize an analog signal. They take in a voltage from say 0 - 1.8V and quantize that on a 12 bit range. Return a value from 0-4095. You could build one that scales this range with non-linear steps. But this doesn't add any value. We won't get more accuracy at smaller steps. Our noise and accuracy problems won't be solved by this as they are due to thermal noise or mismatch. quantization noise is not the problem. (We already build segmented ADCs to try and do this)
- nvy 3y agoI feel like professional/prosumer photogs, aka the kind of people who buy fancy SLR cameras and serious business lenses, probably already know this stuff. I also suspect that the vast, vast majority of phone users just want subjectively good-looking photos.
- dclowd9901 3y agoYeah, 100%. About 99% of the customer base just wants to take a good photo with the smallest effort possible. Which makes it even more remarkable the company cares enough to include this kind of functionality in a consumer product.
- LoganDark 3y ago> Which makes it even more remarkable the company cares enough to include this kind of functionality in a consumer product. Maybe people are just starting to get sick of this argument being used against everything.
- robertlagrant 3y agoHow is this an argument against anything?
- LoganDark 3y agoWhenever someone wants a new feature or gets disrupted by the loss of a previous feature, people go, "you have to think of the consumers. Consumers don't use those features, because consumers are stupid. I can't see why anyone would ever add/keep a feature that's not going to be used by those consumers." The comment I replied to didn't go nearly that far, but it's an argument I've seen so often that I feel compelled to point out that "consumers" are not the only target audience for Apple - they are trying to also market themselves to creators, as well as professionals, and they absolutely know the difference and notice when things like these become available.
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- kqr 3y agoIs the quantisation error on a modern 14-something bit sensor really that big of a problem compared to something like the inherent shot noise of dark areas?
- numpad0 3y agoThere is no floating point ADC, just a stereo assigned to two volume levels to be stuffed into a float. hardware accelerated HDR on cameras are commonplace these days, especially in dashcams and CCTV cameras.
- amaterasu 3y agoSome sensors do this internally, unusual though. The rest of the high-end ones apply curves manually in software directly at the egress of the sensor. The reason they don't in all cases is that it complicates black level correction, gamut transforms and demosaic operations (without some assumptions).
- audunw 3y agoFrom an analog design perspective, I don't think that makes sense. Not that I'm an analog designer, but I worked closely with them as a digital designer on CMOS camera sensors. You're already extracting as much information you can from the analog signal on the least significant bits. It's not like designing a log-scale ADC lets you pull more information from the least significant bits. So you don't really have anything to gain. Why make a more complicated analog circuit to extract less information? It's generally better to let the digital side decide what to keep, how to compress the signal, etc. And I should mention that CMOS camera sensors can often do a lot of digital processing right there on the chip. So you can do log-scale conversion or whatever you want before you send the data out of the CMOS camera chip. It might be possible that you could reduce the power consumption of a SAR (successive approximation) ADC by skipping AD conversion of less significant bits if you have signal on the more significant bits. But I doubt the power savings would be very significant.
- adql 3y agoSee but you don't necessarily want full range logarithmic. If your darkest pixel is halfway down the ADC range, on linear you're throwing away one bit, on logarithmic you're throwing out way more bits. Just using higher bit linear ADC then converting it to logarithmic in post-processing seems more sensible. Hell you could even go signal magic and merge few photos with different shutter speed together to get most detail. Also proper log-to-in converter like AD8307 costs like $20 so I'd assume doing that woudl bring the sensor price way up if you needed to have a bunch of them.
- ta8645 3y agoI've never owned an Apple device. I don't take photographs or video with my phone very often. But this video presentation was captivating. It was clear, concise, without any nonsense, and thoroughly interesting.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI don’t know if it’s the same thing, but capture on my Nikon D7100 always felt more “manipulable” than capture on an iPhone or the like, I suspected as a downstream effect of using RAW format with a larger image sensor. Interpreting log through this understanding, it felt pretty intuitive reading through this post. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it feels accurate…
- matsemann 3y agoOne reason is also that phone cameras have many limitations, so to get good images they have to "cheat" to work around those limitations. Additionally they often apply filters to the images so it looks good "out of the box", like contrast, smoothing, sharpening. Those choices done for you mean you lose information to do better yourself.
- olivermuty 3y agoWhich is a great if you consider that 99.98% of iphone owners wont know how to do it better themselves. It will be fascinating for anthropologists a few hundred years from now to see the increase in quality in «every day photography» that came with the increasing quality of smartphone camera software.
- yieldcrv 3y agoIs this essentially RAW at 24-60fps?
- pixelbath 3y agoIt is less processed, but TFA points out that it is definitely not RAW, particularly in the section titled "Log is Half Baked."
- mavidser 3y agoThat'd be 'ProRes RAW', which I don't think an iPhone can shoot in. Log is still processed video, just graded in a flatter profile so you can do more degrees of adjustments in different dimensions like color and exposure. RAW footage, can barely be called video. Those files don't even have any White Balance and ISO data baked in, just raw data from the sensor, providing even more amount of control in post production, at the expense of working with extremely large files.
- isomorphic 3y agoAlso, just to muddy these waters, Apple has the ProRAW format--which isn't a video format at all, it's a still-picture format. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- perbu 3y agoThe video is still compressed, but the colors are RAW. Sort of.
- mikae1 3y agoNo, it's demosaiced[1]. Not raw data. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
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- tehsauce 3y ago> Apple shocked us all by addressing this head-on: The iPhone 15 line charges via USB-C instead of Lightning, and this standard USB port can do a lot
- Insanity 3y agoEven more so than their revolutionary new design?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3x35r22m4u 3y agoCould someone please confirm or deny Samsung has it better because they included 10 times larger sensors, 20x better zoom, titanium since 2017 and hired BTS for their ads? Reference: https://youtu.be/dLHJl7mwY7M?si=e0Cm2q4bnn_u14Qf https://youtu.be/dLHJl7mwY7M?si=e0Cm2q4bnn_u14Qf
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoHow could that possibly be confirmed or denied? If you’re not asking a question don’t use a question mark: just make your point.
- bux93 3y agoSince Apple sources their camera chips from Sony, the more relevant question is how Sony's flagship (the Xperia 5 V?) stacks up with its Sony IMX888 vs the Sony IMX803 in the apple. It used to be that Sony's flagship had a slightly better imaging sensor than the Apple flagship, but I don't think that's the case any more. At any rate, Android doesn't seem to provide an API that exposes log/raw-ish sensor data for video (although for stills, it's been there since 2015).
- internetter 3y ago> hired BTS for their ads Hardly a selling point. > titanium since 2017 Source? > 10 times larger sensors 4 times (48mp vs 200mp), and zooming into the highest quality images produced by both cameras yields little difference. This comment feels like grasping at straws. The iPhone and Samsung both have excellent cameras, and excel in different places. Camera comparisons by professional photographers show that much. In my non-professional opinion, samsung wins in some edge cases, but the iphone generally has a better colour profile and undeniably better video capabilities, but debating about minute differences in camera processing in a text only forum feels counter productive, especially when plenty of professional comparisons exist.
- piperswe 3y agoI didn't know it could record straight to USB-C storage! That gets rid of a major reason to spend crazy money on a 1TB phone, and it's definitely a game changer for anyone shooting 4K ProRes.
- radicality 3y agoAfaik it’s actually not even possible to record that directly to the phone, it has to be into an external usbc drive. If I had to guess it’s probably because of overheating concerns with the high write rate.
- skunkworker 3y agoThat requirement is for 4k60 Log only. 4k30 log will write to disk but takes up around 100mb/sec. From some videos I shot last weekend.
- karolist 3y agoTo capture any 4K ProRes footage with 128GB 15 Pro you need an external drive, this is presumably because 128GB model has a single memory chip and data write speeds are insufficient.
- woobar 3y agoI might be doing something wrong, but when I tried to set BlackMagic Camera to ProRes Log 4K60 it had no problem recording it. I was even able to apply different free LUT files and export it to photos. It is 1.6Gb for 8 seconds, but did not require an external disk. [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/9vUdPcg https://imgur.com/a/9vUdPcg Edit: iPhone 15 Pro 128G
- radicality 3y agoHuh, interesting, I just tested it too and does work in Blackmagic camera (iPhone 15 pro 1TB). I guess it’s only a limitation of the official Camera app while 3rd party apps can do otherwise.
- keyle 3y agoGreat video btw. Well explained and as succinct as possible.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- sudosysgen 3y agoIt's a bit of a gimmick. These phones just don't have the noise performance to make log video work outside if very very specific conditions. I had it also on my old LG V30 and it only was remotely useful in full sunlight (and since we're talking about very low processing, not much changed since then). This is inevitable because the noise floor is just too high to have a large usable dynamic range unless illumination is high. Combined with video compression it's just not great. It's not really even unique to smartphones, many DSLRs/MILCs when they first started supporting log video had similar issues, but obviously it's going to be much worse for a smartphone.
- dharma1 3y agoThe sensor size is the limiting factor here re: noise performance and dynamic range, but the iPhone does better than most with some ML and other “computational photography” tricks for denoising that other small sensor cameras don’t have. And ProRes is a great codec that doesn’t really have compression artifacts at high bitrates. It’s not going to replace your Alexa or even full frame dSLR but can be useful and is a welcome evolution.
- sudosysgen 3y agoProRes is actually worse at the same bitrate when compared to H.265 or AV1, and sometimes even worse than H.264. The advantage is that it's easier to edit because it's all intraframe, not that it has higher quality - it's worse. Even intraframe HEVC is going to be better than ProRes. H.265 really is going to give you consistently better pSNR and SSMI than ProRes, and that shouldn't be surprising - interframe compression is better for quality. The only advantage here is slightly better denoising, yes. But denoising doesn't change the dynamic range limit, it just hides the noise visually. The SNR is actually going to be lower.
- mirsadm 3y agoThis is not true. We've compared RAW video from smartphone cameras to a couple of professional cameras and the difference is not as much as you might think.
- dannyw 3y agoDoes this also disable the excessive sharpening of iPhone's video processing? Even 'ProRAW' photos are sharpened and aggressively denoised, which ruins detail.
- dharma1 3y agoIt’s mentioned in the article - turns sharpening way down. The footage still goes through iPhones ISP - with denoising etc - just with less processing and log profile
- foldr 3y agoThe sharpening is just the default display setting for ProRAW files in many apps. If I edit a ProRAW file in Lightroom and turn down the sharpening and denoising then it looks roughly as you’d expect (though there is some denoising inherent to multi-shot blending). It’s a tricky one, because when you’re aligning and stacking multiple captures, you definitely do want some sharpening (as the result is significantly softer than a single capture would be). But the default is maybe a little aggressive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kqr 3y agoAlmost all the benefits mentioned in the video are (a) lack of post-processing and (b) high dynamic range. Is that what "log" means in videography?
- rebuilder 3y agoNo, ”log” just means some form of logarithmic response curve when encoding color data. You don’t necessarily get better dynamic range per se, but you get a more useful distribution of the light samples your sensor is taking.
- jorlow 3y agoLog is lower contrast so it's less likely to clip (be a fully saturated color or pure white or black). And clipping inherently limits your max dynamic range. Log also means a "look" is not baked into the image so, since you're starting from scratch, it's 1) easier to tweak the images so you can cut between two cameras from different manufacturers without distracting differences and 2) you can give the image more of your personality. As a general note, I've found that in the world of "cinematography", tech terms aren't used very rigorously and there's a lot of cargo cult which comes from the benefit of one tech being conflated as a benefit of something else. It's often hard to sift through the noise when learning.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoA little bit. The log format is non linear. This means there are more details in the shadows relative to the really bright areas. This mimics the human eye and brain which also do not have a linear range of sensitivity. Basically, the common unit of light in cameras (a stop) is one click on the aperture wheel. E.g. going from 1/11 to 1/16 halves the amount of light. Some cameras of course have a few settings in between. It looks linear to us but it is effectively logarithmic. The dynamic range of the human eye is much larger than the typical camera, screen, or print medium. The human eye has a range of about 20-22 stops (between black and white). A good camera might get between 12 and 14 stops. A decent screen might get to something like 8-10 and print medium is more like 5-7. Taking photos and shooting videos involves a lot of creative choices about what looks natural to us. HDR is basically taking and combining multiple exposures in a way that still looks natural to us on a medium that has less dynamic range than our eyes (-ish, a lot of HDR photography looks a bit unnatural for this reason). Digital photo processing is about compressing and moving light around to make the most of the much more limited dynamic range of the screen or print medium you are targeting relative to the camera that you used to capture that. When you do that, most of the interesting information is going to be captured in the darker portions of the image. You typically expose for neutral grey values which is only about 18% of the light. That means half of the darker information (shadows) is in that 18% range of values. And the other half is in the brighter part. Except our eyes are much more perceptive of the darker bits. So, a linear format is not ideal to store that. A log format allocates more bits to the dark half and less to the other 82%. That's a good thing because that allows you to do things like brighten shadows and pull out detail there. The log format does this by applying a log function to the raw sensor readings. That's why the format looks so flat because all the values end up being relatively close to the 18% mark (neutral). You "undo" this by applying a suitable lut that multiplies the values suitably. You deepen the shadows to near black and brighten the bright stuff to near white. The difference is that you now have full control over this process; can move the white, grey, and black points around. And you can apply color math to the log values before you apply the lut. This is not that different from how you'd process a linear format except now your starting point is better as you are using more bits for the darker parts of the image than for the lighter parts. This gives you more of the captured dynamic range to play with in post processing. The weakness of the iphone is that while it stores log format, it's not really capable of switching between LUTs on camera or while you are shooting. I'm guessing this just takes too much CPU/battery. So, you have to wait until post processing to see what the end result is going to look like. Some high end cameras have a lot of in camera processing that you can tweak in post processing.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoThe video is so good I watched it to the end despite not even having iPhone nor having any plans to have it or shoot videos. Packed and succinct. But makes me wonder how soon we would see an... SSD iPhone cases? Because you can always duct tape the external drive to the phone but it would block the screen. *grin* Sure, you can use double sided tape, but... And slightly tangential - how short and compact USB-C cable can be? Sure there are tons of the angled on the market, but I assume they aren't guaranteed to give you full 10gbps Gen2 speeds.
- walteweiss 3y agoI think that would be not a short cable, but more like Mophie juice pack (it’s a case with external battery). Also, back in the days I bought a card reader for an iPad 3, for 30 pins connector. Could be something similar, as SD-cards are quite big these days as well.
- Cockbrand 3y agoI’d assume that SD cards don’t provide the required write speed, limited by their flash memory or even the interface specs.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> more like Mophie juice pack (it’s a case with external battery). >> SSD iPhone cases But yeah, this is what I vaguely had in mind though I did forgot those rigid cases even existed, because my phones lasts at least two days on their own finger guns. Considering the case would be quite fat and rigid for the SSD alone, it would make sense to skip cable shenanigans and just use a 'dock style' connector.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI'm thinking a hand-held mini Steadicam with a hard disk as the counterweight.
- dist-epoch 3y ago> Sure, you can use double sided tape, but... You got it wrong. Camera people LOVE the tapes, look at any picture of a movie shooting behind the scenes and you'll see every camera has 4-5 pink/yellow/green sticky notes on it. So taping an SSD to your iPhone while shooting a movie it's actually a cool thing. Makes you look authentic "don't give a shit" kind of thing.
- amaterasu 3y agoIf I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing market (both with Final Cut, and codec design), they control a number of the common codecs, and they have _millions_ of devices in the field along with substantial manufacturing capability. The cinema end aren't in trouble yet IMO, but the rest should be concerned...
- mrtksn 3y agoWell, Apple seems very cozy with blackmagic design but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to be sherlocked. Apple already has offerings in all these categories, it’s just that the markets are different and will stay different some time more because of workflows and laws of nature but the laws of nature don’t seem as safe anymore. Currently, the best editing software for social media appears to be CapCut as its ease of use for the power it provides is miles ahead of anything else.
- novok 3y agoThe market for 'actual' pro & prosumer cameras and such is pretty tiny. I think they'll be pretty safe for quite a long time. But they have pro video editing features! Yes, but it's a subfeature of their general platform, so they can 'count that low' for a hardware feature like that, that will also be useful for their entire userbase since everyone takes videos with their hardware and watches video on their devices anyway.
- sbierwagen 3y agoCell phones already killed standalone cameras: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/Camera-Sales-Decline.png https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/sit... This is just the mop-up operation. The only products left are going to be super-telephotos for live sports (sales: a hundred a year, if that?) and 4K+ IMAX digital cine cameras.
- quenix 3y agoLooks like they killed cameras with built-in lenses. Cameras with interchangeable lesnes, which would've been used by the pros, have kept their market share identical if not grown a bit.
- t0bia_s 3y agoWho is a target audience? Most Apple users wont spent time in postproduction and colour grade their footages. Pros will stay with dedicated technology made for cinematography.
- te_chris 3y ago“Pros” is a wide space these days. Hell, my mate has a film released on hbo max which was entirely shot in 4K on iPhones probably 6 years ago now. Think of the sheer amount of ‘content’ (used pejoratively) these days. That is not being made by traditional cinematographers. It’s videographers, maybe with a pro camera, but maybe with an iPhone, or maybe one pro camera and an iPhone or two for backup. Think of weddings or similar as well, massive demand. Apparently everything needs to be video so why not this. As an aside, aforementioned director shot our wedding as a favour to us (in 2019) on a 4K lumix and an iPhone. It’s the camera you have on you, innit.
- scottapotamas 3y agoPeople vlogging would probably prefer the ergonomics and weight of a phone over something more serious, so I wouldn't be surprised if this competes with the GoPro on functionality and image for 'walk and talk' people? Guerrilla film-makers will probably love it - iPhones aren't really noticed and are allowed in plenty of places where serious cameras aren't. I can also see it being useful for some specific commercial ad work, I've seen people specifically shoot on phones to get the relatable phone 'look' for specific shots.
- indeyets 3y ago“Enthusiasts”, YouTubers, …
- t0bia_s 3y agoWhy? Whats the benefit of having slightly more options on postproduction when you put output to compressed, 8bit, low bitrate platform that most people consume on their tiny mobile screens with blue light filter?
- newaccount74 3y agoSlightly off-topic, but is there a way to disable some of the photo processing on iPhones? For example, iPhones automatically brighten people once they detect a face, which is especially noticeable when taking photos against the light. It ruins the contrast and makes the photo look really bad. Is there a way to turn that stuff off?
- dijit 3y agoI think blackmagics iPhone App disables a lot of automatic processing; however I haven't tested post-processing behaviour myself. Given that it gives such fine-grained control of the sensor, it wouldn't surprise me though.
- omnimus 3y agoBlackmagic Camera app doesnt take pictures. Its for video.
- dijit 3y agoQuite right, this shows how little I actually looked at it.
- joking 3y agowell, there are some other apps like Halide, but I doubt they are free.
- internetter 3y agoHalide costs 12$ a year (or 60$ OTP I believe). I don't like subscriptions, but given the app has replaced 1500$ worth of camera I used to carry with me, I'm ok eating the 1$ a month.
- kouru225 3y agoI think you gotta buy a more professional camera app to fix stuff like that, and even that doesn’t work for some things. I’m always pissed about bad the iPhone is at taking photos of rainy days.
- emsixteen 3y agoGreat video - Concise and informative, without any guff.
- adityapurwa 3y agoI always wondered why some of the raw vs edited video on social media shows the raw one as a very washed and unsaturated picture. I even thought they made the raw looks so bad, so that the edited one looks great. I never owned a pro-camera, only a smartphone. So, reading this article now I learned that it was washed and unsaturated for a good reason. Is this Log thing 15 pro specific or its software so that we can use it on an older iPhone?
- stephen_g 3y agoThis was a huge problem even for professionals at one point - there was a time starting a bit before 2010 where more cameras started to switch from doing all the process in camera to raw and log recording, and people didn't understand how to work with it, properly expose it, etc. I remember for example with RED's first cinema camera, seeing people do shootouts (camera comparisons) where they'd record and compare the low-quality, partially decoded monitor output that didn't have a proper LUT applied, to HD cameras that did all in-camera processing. Later cameras could do all the 4K processing and apply proper LUTs in the hardware in real-time, but earlier ones didn't have the processing power, you had to do it all in post. People just didn't get it, and it worried people when things come out all washed out before applying any kind of LUT. Crazy some of this is trickling down into phones.
- ricardobayes 3y agoI don't like this new modern color keying in videography, to me everything looks yellow and washed out. What's wrong with contrast?
- chrismorgan 3y agoLook at the picture of the dog: some of its fur is overexposed, and you can’t get the values back. A logarithmic scale means you lose less detail at the extremes (bright and dark), so the log picture isn’t overexposed.
- wazoox 3y agoI think the question was more about the general tendency to make movies with that teal/orange look, that's still going on strong after 12 years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stephen_g 3y agoWhat screen are you looking at it on? There are all sorts of colour grading styles, often it does go through trends but punchy images are still very common, and I’m not sure what you’re talking about with yellow ones…
- OJFord 3y ago> Standard iPhone video is designed to look good. A very specific kind of good that comes from lots of contrast, punchy, saturated colors, and ample detail in both highlights and shadows. I remarked to my wife showing me a video recently that you could tell it was taken on an iPhone, I don't think it's just the 'punchiness', for me the main thing is the way it seems to attempt to smooth out motion - the 'in' thing seems to be to sort of spin around showing what's around you while selfie-vlogging and tik-tokking and what-notting, and iPhones make it look like you did it with a steadicam rig that's not quite keeping up.
- basisword 3y agoThat’s a specific camera mode (action mode I think). Does the standard video mode also do heavy stabilisation?
- OJFord 3y agoDoes it perhaps auto-enable when it deems it appropriate? I don't have an iPhone, I've just noticed this (perhaps it's more obvious to me because I don't have one) in others' videos.
- twobitshifter 3y agoThe stabilization is partially physical driven on phones this is called OIS. https://www.androidauthority.com/image-stabilization-1087083/ https://www.androidauthority.com/image-stabilization-1087083... EIS is not usually needed for video but maybe in some cases it’s used?
- duffyjp 3y agoI suspect iPhones do both. I have a 12 Pro, and when taking video the file is much more stable than the viewfinder while recording.
- mattigames 3y agoSomeone used an iphone to record their desktop screen playing call of duty and the top comment on Reddit was how it made the game look Disneyesque, a spot-on assessment.
- ayoisaiah 3y agoLog seems like a strong reason to finally switch from Android to iPhone if you're a photography/filmmaking enthusiast like myself. The ecosystem is so much more mature and the gap seems to be growing not shrinking. Android has Raw Video with MotionCam which also produces insanely good results¹ (even better than iPhone's ProRes video), but everything else just sucks. [1]: https://youtu.be/O5fnGDR4i9w?feature=shared https://youtu.be/O5fnGDR4i9w?feature=shared
- dharma1 3y agoMotionCam is great! They’ve been flying under the radar of RED lawyers (patent for compressed raw video) - long may it continue
- mirsadm 3y agoI'm the dev of MotionCam. AFAIK the app is not infringing on that patent because I use my own form of lossless compression.
- pas 3y agoIf RED has a patent granted with a claim on compressed RAW data streaming/storage, then it doesn't matter which algorithm. (Though of course one could argue it's too broad, but it's not cheap to make this argument.)
- mirsadm 3y agoI am not a lawyer but I believe their patent is regarding visually lossless compression of RAW data. MotionCam uses a form of bit packing to compress frames in real time losslessly. AFAIK that is not the same thing and does not infringe on the patent. Again I could be wrong and if I turn out to be wrong I can always disable compression entirely or just run it through zstd. I doubt their parent extends to just compressing some integers because zipping a RAW frame would not be possible which is clearly nonsense.
- xchip 3y agoLUTs are a pretty basic stuff and videogames have been using them for ages, plus HDR, tone mapping and color grading. Old stuff.
- xchip 3y agoI have implemented all these algorithms myself, but thanks for the down votes :D
- wruza 3y agoI’m very far from photography. Can someone explain why this is revolutional or something? I thought that for “pro” photos you just get the original pixel values from the sensor and work from there. X, Y and some color format of a specific bit depth (is that RAW?). What does “Log” do basically? Save space? Limit the exposition? Or is it just a format that existed for decades and iphone decided to support it? Or is the industry in such state that integrations like this are huge? It’s not clear from the video. Thanks!
- danw1979 3y agoThe article does a pretty good job of explaining it. I went from complete ignorance to layman’s understanding in the 10 minutes it took me to read it.
- crazygringo 3y agoIt actually doesn't, it doesn't explain it at all. Because camera data is already encoded logarithmically in common image and video formats. The article didn't explain what its "log" is at all. Is it the same as gamma? The same as HDR? Something professional? Or something new? If you don't know anything about photography, it seems like they're explaining something new. If you do know things about photography, you realize the article is full of buzzwords that aren't actually explaining anything at all.
- krackers 3y agoSee my response in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37877599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37877599. "Log" is basically just another transfer function (like srgb, pure-power gamma, etc.). It's confusing because despite the seeming similarities video and still-image people don't use any of the same workflows and thus don't have any shared terminology to talk about things (video people don't use an ICC color managed workflow, and separately think about an EOTF and OOTF. They use the term LUT to describe the transformation a CMS would normally do to convert between color spaces. On the other hand with an ICC-style color management an EOTF and OOTF are by definition inverses of each other). The main benefit of log as opposed to gamma encoding I can see is that log shares the nice property that each f-stop gets allocated the same number of bits; this results in the fact that while gamma encoding tends to allocate less bits to the brightest parts of an image to allocate things in a "perceptually" fair way (at least according to Steven's power law model), log encoding tries to allocate things in a "physically/optically" fair way, which I guess ends up working out better for editing? Of course in terms of benefits I suspect that "log" mode also reduces a lot of post-processing.
- expertentipp 3y agoSpeaking of their raw formats. What's up with the iphone HEIC photo format? I only convert all HEIC to JPEG on Macbook and have no idea what advantage this format can offer me.
- canbus 3y agothe way i see it is it's the video equivalent of a RAW file for a still picture.
- macintux 3y agoThe article links to another article comparing them. https://prolost.com/blog/rawvslog https://prolost.com/blog/rawvslog
- thrdbndndn 3y agoThe concept of Log seems needlessly confusing from (still) digital image processing perspective, which I have some experience. Firstly the name is called "Log" (for logarithmic) but isn't that what gamma does in color spaces like sRGB since forever? "Normal" video standards like BT.709 also have non-linear transfer functions. I don't get why "log" is stressed here. Maybe it just means a different/higher gamma coefficient (the author didn't talk much about the "log" part in the article). And the main feature of it, at least according to this article, is that it clips the black and white level less, so leaves more headrooms for post-processing. This is definitely very useful (and is the norm if you want to do something like, say, high quality scanning), but I failed to see how it warrants a new "format". You should be able to do that with any existing video format (given you have enough bit depth, of course).
- dist-epoch 3y ago> but I failed to see how it warrants a new "format". You should be able to do that with any existing video format It's about support. The .zip format supports LZMA/ZStandard compression and files larger than 4 GB. But if you use that, a lot of software with .zip support will fail to decompress them. The same way with log. While in theory you could probably make .mp4 or .mkv files with H264 encoded in log, I bet a lot of apps will not display that correctly if at all.
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- jlouis 3y agoThe transfer functions in your (rec.709) color space is non-linear indeed. However, the pixel values you store are in a linear relationship with each other. The difference between values 20 and 21 are the same as the difference between values 120 and 121, assuming an 8bit signal. I.e., the information is the same for all pixels. Further down the chain, these values are then mapped onto a gamma curve, which is non-linear. What the "log"-spaces are doing is to use a non-linear relationship for the pixel values, as a form of lossy compression. If the signal has to factor through 8bit values, using a compression scheme before it hits the (final) gamma curve is a smart move. If we retain less precision around the low and high pixel values and more precision in the middle, we can get more information from the camera sensor in a certain region. Furthermore, we can map a higher dynamic range. It often looks more pleasing to the eye, because we can tune the setup such that it delivers a lot of precision and detail where our perception works the best. In short: we are storing (8bit/10bit) pixel values. The interpretation of these values are done in the context of a given color space. In classic (rec.709) color spaces, the storage is linear and then mapped onto a non-linear transfer function. In the "log" spaces, the storage is non-linear and is then mapped onto a non-linear transfer function. In essence we perform lossy compression when we store the pixel in the camera.
- switch007 3y agoCan title be “Logarithmic encoding is the …”? Pretty confusing as “Log is the…”
- kepler1 3y agoConstant puzzle to me: Video is just made up of single sequential still images. Why are the color issues / tuning of videos like 100x more complicated and involve so many more tools than those of still images?
- elAhmo 3y ago> Video is just made up of single sequential still images. It might seem like this, but modern video codecs are very advanced and video files produced by modern cameras cannot really be described as sequential still images. Codecs such as HEVC used many techniques to reduce the file size while preserving the image quality, like various frame prediction techniques and encodings. This makes workflows completely different. Images produced by smartphone cameras use different software and hardware features to produce the best possible image, and many of those cannot be equally applied to video.
- elAhmo 3y agoI am by no means someone who shoots a lot of videos, but I have been playing a lot in the past few days with the camera app mentioned in this article, Blackmagic Camera, and I am super excited to do some shots that might seem a bit more professional.
- video-log-comp 3y agoA question to the experts here: What happens if we take the "log" video and compress it using current compression algorithms and ship the LUT with it? If I understand this correctly, the quality of dark scenes should then improve. Would that then also allow users to edit the LUT or supply their own to get a better picture on their respective monitors?
- wayfinder 3y agoStoring data on a logarithmic scale requires a higher bitrate otherwise it will actually look worse. So for a finished product, the way it is now is better. Plus storing extra data in the dark areas for display is pointless. You only do it because you want to manipulate the data and maybe bring something out of the dark area, but in the final product, dark is dark. If you, for whatever reason, wanted to give the user more data, then you would provide a 10-bit or 12-bit linear file.
- video-log-comp 3y agoThank you for your explanation. Do I understand correctly, that this idea wouldnt work because you either end up with the same quality, but bigger files or with the same file size, but worse quality? I had this idea that you could increase the amount of black colors a monitor could display if you combine 4 pixels. Having 3 black, and one of them "one bit" less black. This way you could have a more fine grained black-white transition. I thought a "log" video might be able to contain the information to allow this without to much overhead.
- wayfinder 3y agoLog + LUT as a final product would look the same but take up more file size. Right now we can transmit levels of black with a regular 8-bit PNG file. The issue is that you can’t display it unless you are using an OLED screen, which your phone probably has but your computer monitor doesn’t (usually due to $$ for your average person).
- fallingmeat 3y agoI don't know anything about photography, but curious to know what the cheapest "pro" alternative is. The phone is now $1200! This feature is cool, but if you wanted that feature, is it cheaper in a purpose-built device?
- yabones 3y agoThe original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema was about $500 on sale, but only shot in 1080p. The new generation is about $1300. And then you have to buy lenses :) So, overall it's not bad value. It's not going to replace pro gear any time soon, but it's great that it can do stuff like this now.
- marosgrego 3y agoCanon EOS M can be bought for around $100 used and shoot 1440p raw with Magic Lantern. Also it can use cheap old 16mm film lenses with crop mode.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoYou can buy a two year old Android phone to do the same thing, which is very inexpensive. Just disable every app except the camera app.
- sandworm101 3y agoI am not an influencer. I am not a fashion model. I am not an interior designer. I don't use my cellphone camera to generate "content". I use it to document things. I need it to take clear pictures that accurately represent things that I see. We are now moving away from auto-focus and auto shutter speeds toward on-the-fly retouching, editing, of material by the camera. This is dangerous. Pictures taken buy such cameras can no longer be considered accurate representations. Correction of shadows, the replacement of dull color with vibrant, the smoothing of textures ... every photo is now a crafted work of art by the machine. They are a distorted representation. This will come back to haunt us. Think of this: a cop body camera that auto-adjusts faces to display them more clearly at night. Sounds like a good idea. Then something happens. The cop says "I couldn't see the guy's face" but the body camera shows the face clear as day. Yes, the camera did take a more clear and useful photo, but it is not a proper depiction of the reality experienced by the officer.
- lang_agnostic 3y ago> We are now moving away from auto-focus and auto shutter speeds toward on-the-fly retouching, editing, of material by the camera This is a great point but it's not what the article is about. This is about bringing existing features of digital cinema cameras to a portable phone.
- sandworm101 3y agoYup. And the move from a camera to a cinema camera incorporating cinematography trickery represents a marked change in what a personal camera is and does.
- lang_agnostic 3y agoThis isn't any trickery, this is a file format. One that actually avoid the uncontrollable computational photography done by default and actually changes the nature of the picture without the input of the user. This is helping conserve what we think of pictures as a digital capture of light. Rather than what it's becoming, which is the product of hallucinated details by a neural network.
- pyrophane 3y ago> With its high bit depth and dynamic range, log footage has many of the benefits of raw. But Apple Log is not raw, and not even “straight off the sensor.” It’s still heavily processed — denoised, tone-mapped, and color adjusted. I wonder if this is because, at the end of the day, it is still a tiny little camera with a small sensor and small lens, and so with none of the processing magic the image would look pretty terrible under most circumstancdes.
- stu2b50 3y agoRAW video isn’t like RAW photography. The sheer size of raw footage is insane - it’s normal for cameras to be unable to record RAW footage natively without an external recorder. Thats not to say processing isn’t part of it, but even $2k mirrorless cameras don’t record RAW video internally.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoThis is how all phone cameras work now. The sensors and lenses are small, and now processors are very fast. And as it turns out, the vast majority of people do not want photos or videos that are "accurate" or "real". They want ones that look good. So, processing has been the name of the game. It's all about making an image people will like to look at, regardless of how different it is from reality.
- twoWhlsGud 3y agoProbably true, and I enjoy using my phone for social snapshots. But the way in which everything ends up looking "iphony" annoys me for anything where I care about the image, and so I'm shooting more with my dumber digital cameras that are about documenting what was actually in front of me rather than spinning up a "good looking" image. I like being able to remember what a scene actually looked like, rather than what the AI in my phone thought it should look like ; )
- rperez333 3y agoEven high-end cameras that can shoot in Log, like the Sony A7 series, apply some noise reduction on their end. This is important for most compressed formats. However, most people would be horrified to see how noisy and unsharp the images from top cinema cameras are when most post-processing is disabled.
- boulikakos 3y ago[flagged]
- ChuckMcM 3y agoThis was a great read, clear, concise, and entertaining. It also struck me how "over powered" phones are these days. I get that the latest chip with the latest GPUs/APUs/IPUs/whatever are really capable, but the weird "I don't need a cinema capable device in my phone" feeling starts to get overwhelming. If nothing else I feel like we're going to force Apple (and others) to go back to easily replaceable battery technology because a "phone" will meet its user's needs for a decade or more and the parts that wear out will need to be replaced several times.
- hatsune 3y agoLog does not work great in heavy computational video right now. It was the case with RAW on phones till manufacturers find ways to bake computated (i.e. stacked, stablised, etc.) data into RAW, like xiaomi, huawei, pixel, and apple. That's a weakest point of phones as by exposing to log curve, you exactly showcase the poor latitude of phone sensor. With the price and additional rigging required (and cooling), just save and get a bmpcc. The argument of getting out a phone and handheld for night photography (first saw in Huawei P30) or slow-motion and get really great image is valid. The argument of randomly getting out a phone with cases, cooling, external SSD, mounted battery, matte boxes (especially for strong glaring on iPhone), and a camera stabliser (because a phone stabliser is not tailored for this weight), will be over 1.5kg. That does not sound like valid. Log is quite useless other than controlled or professional shooting as exposure matters a lot more, and lack of IRE exposure (false color i.e.) makes it not feasible.
- tlhunter 3y agoHere's a great list of free LUTs. I use them with darktable when editing raw photograph files: https://github.com/cedeber/hald-clut https://github.com/cedeber/hald-clut
- system2 3y agoI am betting in 5 years apple will come up with a 1" or 3/4" sensor for their phones. iPhone 20 maybe.