[Espen Fyksen]

Follow the link to download a ProRes HQ file for comparing D800 internal/external recording

https://largesensor.com/downloads/

[Espen Fyksen]

I will make some footage I have shot both compressed and uncompressed available for download later today or tomorrow, I will let you know when it is out there. The difference in data rate is enormous, but the difference in visual quality is not that enormous. I was very surprised myself when I first tested this.

The h.264 encoding is very advanced, and for a guy like me who has been around since we did everything uncompressed because the compression technology was that lousy, it’s amazing to see how much data you can get rid of these days without compromising the quality severely.

I would like to do some tests where I am stressing the h.264 codec a little bit more than I’ve done so far, but I still think the benefit of recording the HDMI signal will mainly be for green screen and other extreme conditions.

[Espen Fyksen]

Thanks for your response. I totally agree with you, the options are endless. We used two Zeiss Planar 50mm f2.0 lenses, one with F-mount and one with EF for all the tests, except for the F3, where we used the 50 mm Sony lens that comes in the kit. We used neutral/off for picture profile on all the cameras.

I see that people are claiming that recording to external recorder is making a world of difference. I have done some testing recording both to ProRes and uncompressed with the D800, and so far I can not see that this makes that much difference under normal shooting conditions, but I obviously have to dig deeper in to this.

[Espen Fyksen]

Hi Michael, interesting that you find the test snobbish, I wouldn’t thought of that reaction 🙂

I’m very aware that FS 100 and F3 have the same sensor, that was why I was quite surprised myself that the FS 100 were doing better in the tests we did. But the signal processing in the two cameras are different, and this can make a lot of difference. For instance, the FS100 has equal to ISO 800 at 0 dB gain, and the F3 has 400, so the engineers at Sony has obviously taken some different choices on these two cameras when it comes to what happens after the sensor. That is also obvious from the specs, FS100 has 8 bit signal processing, while F3 has 10 bit.

We encourage people to make up their own opinion based on the material you can download from the site.

Good luck to you as well 🙂
Espen