[ScooterMaxi Jim]

That does answer the question to the satisfaction of Madbrain, so he is likely to be happy with the K-3 in this regard. I do believe that the K-3 is the best of the Pentax cameras for musical recording based on slight improvements in the video (higher resolution sensor) and the ability to use headphones for monitoring (highly efficient earbuds work best due to the extreme damping in video record mode). However, the K-01 is also quite good, and without a mirror - you have one less noise concern.

The K-30 is a cannon shot in terms of shutter noise. The coupling of mirror to shutter requires the noise related to triggering video. As an owner of the K-3, K-01 and (formerly) the K-30, the shutter (and mirror) sound difference is a great many decibels. In any event, I do believe that programs such as Audacity are fully capable of removing shutter noise easily if you have existing audio files you want to clean up.

[stevebrot]

Anyway, in this case, the Pentax behavior is quite inconsistent, reportedly firing off the shutter with some lenses at some apertures, and not others.
That's definitely not documented anywhere in the user manual. Hard to call it a feature. Definitely strange behavior.

Not with the K-3 and the behavior is poorly characterized on the K-30/K-50.


Steve

[stevebrot]

Thanks. When you said, it works - you meant the K-3 shutter didn't fire automatically when the recording stopped ?

The shutter does not fire on the K-3. What happens is that that the shutter closes and the mirror lowers, in that order.


Steve

[stevebrot]

But to do a video recording, I have to set the mode dial to "video". At that point, the camera shows the image on the LCD rather than the optical viewfinder, ie.it is in "live view".

I think you will find that while the view is "live", the modes are quite different.


Steve

[stevebrot]

The K-30 is a cannon shot in terms of shutter noise.

Yep

In any event, I do believe that programs such as Audacity are fully capable of removing shutter noise easily if you have existing audio files you want to clean up.

Cool idea! Thanks for sharing.

[madbrain]

I wasn't sure what happened on my K-3 when the video reached its recording limit, so I tried it today.
The answer is, if you set sleep timer to off, it will stay in video mode indefinately ( as long as the camera has power). So you will never hear any mirror or shutter noise in any of the three circumstances you asked about, at least on a K-3.

Thank you. This is great news !
I might just have to snatch one when the prices on the K-3 get low enough, perhaps when the FF gets released.

---------- Post added 02-11-15 at 05:06 PM ----------

That does answer the question to the satisfaction of Madbrain, so he is likely to be happy with the K-3 in this regard. I do believe that the K-3 is the best of the Pentax cameras for musical recording based on slight improvements in the video (higher resolution sensor) and the ability to use headphones for monitoring (highly efficient earbuds work best due to the extreme damping in video record mode). However, the K-01 is also quite good, and without a mirror - you have one less noise concern.

The K-30 is a cannon shot in terms of shutter noise. The coupling of mirror to shutter requires the noise related to triggering video. As an owner of the K-3, K-01 and (formerly) the K-30, the shutter (and mirror) sound difference is a great many decibels. In any event, I do believe that programs such as Audacity are fully capable of removing shutter noise easily if you have existing audio files you want to clean up.

Yes, it sounds like the K-3 would work for me.
I'm not sure how the higher resolution sensor will improve video quality - it's still 1920x1080 / 30 fps as far as I know, on both the K-3 and my current K-30 .

The K-01 may not have a mirror, but it still has a shutter. If you have it, do you know what the behavior is with the shutter when the video recording stops ?

I agree the K-30 shutter is quite loud.

As far as cleaning up the noise in Audacity or other program, it's easy to do if it happens during a period of silence. However, if it happens in the middle of a performance, stacked on top of the harpsichord, I don't know how it could be removed.

Also, this sort of editing of the audio from either the camera's audio, or the separately recorded audio from my preamp/mics , may cause issue with the synchronization in the video editing program, Powerdirector.

The A/V clip synchronization is based on audio - and if the programs can't recognize that the tracks match between cameras, the clips won't sync. At that point, one has to align things manually, which is what I used to do a few years ago.
While this is not hard to do, it is extremely time consuming.

I also don't know of a program that could clean up the audio inside of a video file - the programs I use deal with separately recorded audio.
For all these reasons, I don't think cleaning up the audio to remove the shutter noise is practical.

[ScooterMaxi Jim]

Yeah, working on the audio and re-syncing is a lot of work. Quality audio with video is time-consuming to get just right. If you really need to have recordings over 25 minutes regularly, you'd be best off going with dedicated video - not a dSLR.

The K-01 is silent in video mode, as far as I know.

The 1920x1080 is an important factor, but as I'm sure you have noticed the compression from H.264 (cameras after the K-5 series) significantly degrades the overall quality. Working off the H.264 compression, a higher resolution should and does appear to render somewhat improved image quality. Possibly, the compression ratio is slightly less because the K-3 has a much heftier buffer. In any event, my limited video work with the K-3 appears to show a slight improvement. I'm sure others have more-solid evidence than I can offer as a relatively new K-3 owner who shoots video only occasionally.

[madbrain]

Yeah, working on the audio and re-syncing is a lot of work. Quality audio with video is time-consuming to get just right. If you really need to have recordings over 25 minutes regularly, you'd be best off going with dedicated video - not a dSLR.

My other 2 cameras are an old Canon HG21 camcorder, which records continuously - and a Canon T3i DSLR with Magic lantern installed - which allows the video recording to restart automatically - but it loses a second or two at that time.

I also have an LG G3 cell phone which can record video in 4K . Unfortunately, only for 5 minutes - after that, it overheats and the phone essentially has to shut down.
Not particularly useful to me as I can almost never get a good take in just 5 minutes.
Too bad, because the video from the G3 is surprisingly good for what I'm doing.

I wish the K-3 had 4K video recording, that would definitely make buy one now.
Maybe the Pentax FF will.

The K-01 is silent in video mode, as far as I know.

Good to know !
I almost snapped one up when they were going for sale for $200 new at some point, but I passed.
Doesn't look like that price is available now, though.

The 1920x1080 is an important factor, but as I'm sure you have noticed the compression from H.264 (cameras after the K-5 series) significantly degrades the overall quality. Working off the H.264 compression, a higher resolution should and does appear to render somewhat improved image quality. Possibly, the compression ratio is slightly less because the K-3 has a much heftier buffer. In any event, my limited video work with the K-3 appears to show a slight improvement. I'm sure others have more-solid evidence than I can offer as a relatively new K-3 owner who shoots video only occasionally.

Yes, I have definitely noticed the effects of H.264 video compression.
And when uploaded to Youtube or - shudder - Facebook, the video quality gets further murdered .
But I hope some day there will be bandwidth and video hosting sites that can show the video with at least the full bitrate that I'm producing at.

It could be the K-3 is recording at a higher bitrate. Some HD camcorders record 1920x1080x60i HD at 16 Mbps, and others do so at 24 Mbps.
My aging HG21 records at 24 . The bitrate on the Canon T3i can be set even higher with magic lantern, but usually that causes buffer full errors so the video just gets interrupted.

[ScooterMaxi Jim]

I did test the K-01 and it is silent (didn't run it 25 minutes, though) - you can opt in the menu to not allow the camera to shut off when inactive. I should warn you, though, that the line recording (using the audio recorded by the camera) is horrible for quiet passages due to very prominent AGC. You can run your recorder out to the camera mic-in and get proper sync with a discrete recorder - minimum effort in doing that. Its a shame because the on-board stereo mics on the K-01 are really quite good for spot situations.

The AGC problem is not a factor for the K-3; also audio sample rate is 48k, as compared to the unacceptable 32k on the K-01/30/50. With a good mic, you'll get pretty good sound directly recorded. So the audio on the K-3 is a huge step forward. I should have made that point earlier in this thread. Even if you plan to do discrete recording, backing up directly is a nice safeguard.

I also should clarify about Audacity, and removing noises. This would not have an impact on the sync; you are scrubbing the noise, not splicing it out.

I did a quick test of dark slide video bitrate (shooting with the lens cap). The K-01 and the K-3 set at full hd (1980) 30 fps rates out around 21 mps on both cameras. Still, it is apparent to me that the K-3 is slightly sharper when using high quality optics with less apparent compression - especially when you are moving the camera around, or shooting action. Reviewers also have indicated that the K-3 is somewhat improved in this regard.

[madbrain]

I did test the K-01 and it is silent (didn't run it 25 minutes, though) - you can opt in the menu to not allow the camera to shut off when inactive. I should warn you, though, that the line recording (using the audio recorded by the camera) is horrible for quiet passages due to very prominent AGC. You can run your recorder out to the camera mic-in and get proper sync with a discrete recorder - minimum effort in doing that. Its a shame because the on-board stereo mics on the K-01 are really quite good for spot situations.

Yes, AGC is an issue on many cameras.
Anyway, the 32 kHz mono audio on the K-01 , like on the K-30 is fairly useless - the only reason I care to have some is to allow synchronizing with the other video clips from the other cameras.

The AGC problem is not a factor for the K-3; also audio sample rate is 48k, as compared to the unacceptable 32k on the K-01/30/50. With a good mic, you'll get pretty good sound directly recorded. So the audio on the K-3 is a huge step forward. I should have made that point earlier in this thread. Even if you plan to do discrete recording, backing up directly is a nice safeguard.

Thanks, that's good to know. Due to the way my recording equipment is setup, I won't be feeding the separate audio directly back to the camera, though.

I also should clarify about Audacity, and removing noises. This would not have an impact on the sync; you are scrubbing the noise, not splicing it out.

It will still affects the sync. Even though the noise would be scrubbed and not spliced out, it would half to be scrubbed the same way on the audio clip from each camera. If it's scrubbed in one video clip but not the others, then Powerdirector won't be able to sync the clips because the audio analysis won't be able to match them.

In any case, I don't believe Audacity can edit the audio inside of H.264 video files, so this wouldn't even come up.

I did a quick test of dark slide video bitrate (shooting with the lens cap). The K-01 and the K-3 set at full hd (1980) 30 fps rates out around 21 mps on both cameras. Still, it is apparent to me that the K-3 is slightly sharper when using high quality optics with less apparent compression - especially when you are moving the camera around, or shooting action. Reviewers also have indicated that the K-3 is somewhat improved in this regard.

Thanks, good to know. I'm using my cameras on tripods only, and the only action I'm shooting is my body and hands/fingers moving around the keys. This shouldn't require very high bitrate if the algorithms were smart enough. But they aren't, and higher bitrate still produces a better picture with fewer artifacts even in the "still" parts.

[ScooterMaxi Jim]

Just to be clear, the K-01 has stereo mics on board, and the mic input is also stereo. However, the sound quality is the bigger problem.

Audacity can work on the audio only, and re-sync with H.264 after separate audio processing is a bit of a challenge. Having the on-board recording can help with that, though.

The problem with action is somewhat related to bit rate, but is even more troublesome if you leave the SR function in the "on" setting. This is a crude software-based SR, not the sensor; Pentax came to the conclusion that the sensor movement causes too much noise and eliminated it after the K-5s. As such, video quality will improve considerably if you turn off SR for movies on the later bodies we are discussing. You probably know that already, but it is important. This is especially important given that you're using the cameras on a tripod.

[madbrain]

Audacity can work on the audio only, and re-sync with H.264 after separate audio processing is a bit of a challenge.

Yes, it would be.

The problem with action is somewhat related to bit rate, but is even more troublesome if you leave the SR function in the "on" setting. This is a crude software-based SR, not the sensor; Pentax came to the conclusion that the sensor movement causes too much noise and eliminated it after the K-5s. As such, video quality will improve considerably if you turn off SR for movies on the later bodies we are discussing. You probably know that already, but it is important. This is especially important given that you're using the cameras on a tripod.

I always turn off the SR for video on my K-30 body since it's on a tripod indeed.
On my K-30, however, I still hear the "washing machine" noise in the audio, even with SR disabled.
I haven't inspected the video for differences with SR on/off.

Anyway, I don't think any camera audio would satisfy me, I record my audio with separate professional mics and preamps which will always be superior to what's built-in to the camera. The only reason I care for any audio at all in the video clip is for synchronization.

The main problem I'm worried about in this thread is that the K-30 shutter gets heard in the separate mics (on their own mic booms).
Those are very sensitive mics, they can pick up some things on a different floor of my home sometimes ...

[Steve.Ledger]

Yeah, working on the audio and re-syncing is a lot of work. Quality audio with video is time-consuming to get just right. If you really need to have recordings over 25 minutes regularly, you'd be best off going with dedicated video - not a dSLR.

The K-01 is silent in video mode, as far as I know.

The 1920x1080 is an important factor, but as I'm sure you have noticed the compression from H.264 (cameras after the K-5 series) significantly degrades the overall quality. Working off the H.264 compression, a higher resolution should and does appear to render somewhat improved image quality. Possibly, the compression ratio is slightly less because the K-3 has a much heftier buffer. In any event, my limited video work with the K-3 appears to show a slight improvement. I'm sure others have more-solid evidence than I can offer as a relatively new K-3 owner who shoots video only occasionally.

Unless you forget to lock the exposure, in which case you will get nasty aperture noises when lighting conditions change during recording.
Lock the exposure and yes, it is silent.

[ScooterMaxi Jim]

I never imagined that I would set variable aperture in video. Who would do that when you have TAv mode? I suspect that the "washing machine" noise would be aperture changes, as well. SR on the newer cameras - is entirely software enabled, very poor - but it most certainly is silent. In any event, I think its important to lock shutter speed and aperture (shoot in M or TAv). Setting the aperture to the best quality image setting does make the overall quality of a video better, overcoming some of the softness due to low bit rates. Lens quality makes a big difference.