Originally posted by MarkJerling If your goal is to shoot video and extract stills from that then I understand John. But My goal is to shoot stills.
My goal is to tell travel stories. And I usually travel alone, so action shots of me riding a motorcycle have been notoriously challenging. I've tried everything and was initially attracted to Pentax and Ricoh in 2008/2009 thanks to their built-in intervalometers to help me get these shots. And I still frequently use my Q as a crash cam to get shots that make people wonder, "How did he do that?"
Ontario_RoadRUNNER_Jun14.pdf by
John Flores, on Flickr
Pulling stills from 4k (and 6k) video is another way for me to get the shots that I want. And the publisher pays me, not Pentax, so I will use the gear that will get me what I need.
Originally posted by Kunzite Oh, wait - you're a m4/3 user now; that explains everything, especially your desire to unfairly and unnecessarily make Pentax looks bad.
What works best for you and what works best for us can be very different things (or brands). You would not buy a camera without 4K video; for me, video is just a necessary feature to sell the camera.
And do you know your m4/3 cameras have a feature that makes them undesirable, even unworkable to me? Still, I won't bash them; I have no issue accepting that they work for you - and demand the same courtesy in return.
That's real nice of you to label me a heretic LOL.
The majority of these published photos were taken with Pentax cameras and I'm the only motojournalist that I know that's shot with Pentax. But if I see an opportunity to improve the photos that I take then I will consider it, regardless of brand.
I still have a large collection of Pentax gear and shoot it regularly. I took the Q7 with the 08 Wide Angle Zoom, 03 Fisheye, Q-K adapter, and DA 55-300 with me on my trip to capture the total eclipse and several photos taken with that kit will likely get published.
Total Eclipse from Mackay, ID by
John Flores, on Flickr
I know that this is a stills-centric forum and I'm still 95% stills-centric. So I included examples of how 4K video can be used to produce stills. Anyone that wants good stills of youth sports, birds in flight, and other action might be interested in 4K video.
Originally posted by surfar I said that too, then i tested a K-1(do you "still" want one?)
Mind you the next camera body i buy(this year) will have 4K or 6K, just havent decided if its M43 or Apsc.
My FA31 and FA43 are anxiously awaiting a full-frame camera...maybe a K-2 with 4k?
Originally posted by Rondec 4K video is a relatively recent phenomenon and hasn't come to that many larger sensored cameras. As far as I can tell, the current APS-C cameras that offer 4K video are D500, A6300, and NX 500 (no longer available). Full frame cameras offering 4K video are several of the 1D series cameras, 5d MK IV, D5, and several Sony cameras (A9, A7r II, A7s, and A7s II). 4K video is gradually coming, but it certainly hasn't come to the majority of APS-C and full frame cameras at this point.
As far as the whole extracting stills from a video stream, it sounds terrible to me. Sure, it can work in a situation where you don't have other options, but the idea of wading through a stream a 30 frames a second to try to find something worth using is not ideal. Coupled with the fact that images that you get back are jpeg quality or slightly less than your average jpeg (depending on the codec). This means less dynamic range, more noise. In addition, video typically looks best with frame rates that are different from those preferred by still photographers.
Of course you may be right from a sports standpoint. There will probably come a day when ESPN and SI lay off all of their photographers and just have computers comb through their 6K video streams to find the best images, but certainly for average folks it won't be ideal and still photos will be shot as stills.
Edit: The issue with using video streams to capture still photos really isn't the number of megapixels you get out of it. It is the number of photos you are dealing with and the quality of the image produced. The goal of most still photographers is to be as efficient as possible. When my wife shoots a wedding, her goal is not to come away with a higher number of images that she has to cull, but to have a smaller number of high quality images that require fewer deletions. If you want to give your client seven to eight hundred images from their wedding, it is foolish to shoot 5000 images. That is going to make your life harder.
Anyway, I go on and on just to say that I think this can work in certain situations, but the whole point of 4K video should be for generating video purposes. The occasional time that you might steal a frame from a video stream is neither here nor there.
The whole point of 4K video for me is getting stills that I can use in my stories.
In practice, extracting stills from a 4K video stream is actually easier than wading through dozens upon dozens of still images in order to pick the right one. You have a single file to deal with and you can either do it in camera (step through the file and then export the frame that you want) or on the computer (open in Photoshop, step through the frames until you find the one that you want). There are issues with AF performance, particularly tracking AF, but in those situations where that is not a big concern (or managed with smaller apertures/increased DOF), I'd prefer the workflow of 4K stills vs. a high FPS stills camera.
In some ways it is like shooting a JPG (it's best to nail your exposure and white balance in camera) and pick shutter speeds and apertures with the still in mind (no 2 times the frame rate calculations).
And the quality is surprisingly good when you do it right. When I submit my stories, I send the publisher a folder of images. They choose the ones they want to publish and choose which photo to feature on the two page spread. Without knowing, they chose the shot that was pulled from 4k video for the two page lede spread above. And of the nine photos of mine chosen for the story, five of them were stills pulled from 4k video. Not once did they question the quality, and I know that they are picky.
I'm very much intrigued by the GH5 with 18 megapickle stills from 6k video. There are very intriguing stills applications for 4k and 6k video and I hope that Pentax recognizes this.