guys i have to tell you: the D7100 is coming.....

[Marcus Martell]

Nikon Announces the D7100: the New 24.1MP Flagship DX-Format DSLR | BH inDepth

Now with 25-30 p it's a more all around camera! My question is: will it be similar to the image quality of the D600?

[Sam Renkin]

Yup, I saw the announcement and I'm impressed by the feature set - very similar to the D600 (which is similar to the D7000). The 24MP sensor is the in the D5100 as well - that's my travel/family camera.

Honestly, if I hadn't purchased the D600 on sale in December, this would probably be the camera for me. The D7100 has 1080/60i video as an option - that's always nice to have for multicamera shoots that mix different video camera technologies.

What's up with removal of the low pass filter on the sensor?

[Kyle Root]

I was following all that the other day as well on Nikon Rumors and DP Review.

It's definately nicer spec wise, than my D90.

I'm not an early adopter though and am going to hold out a few months to see if there are any issues like with their FX cams (D600 oil/dust, D800 left focus).

I've got my Sony NX5U, Nikon V1, and Canon HV 40 to cover me on the video side for a while.

[Jonathan Bird]

I just bought a pair of D7100 cameras and there is a huge problem with the 60i video mode. The 30p mode looks good and sharp, and acts as it should when converted to AIC or ProRes or whatever, and dropped into Final Cut. 60i (i.e. properly called 29.97i) is another story.

Bear with me, this gets a little technical

When you drop the "60i" files into any straight conversion app like streamclip, which can convert any other 60i files just fine, they come out unplayable in FCP 7 by my Blackmagic card--as if they are unsupported 60p files (my older Blackmagic card will not play 1080/60p files). The camera is definitely creating interlaced video (you can see that by just opening the raw H264 file from the camera in Quicktime player and the interlacing is obvious in frames with motion). In fact, if you just open in Quicktime player and check the inspector, sure enough, it shows up as a 59.94 file, not a 29.97 (interlace) as it should.

But here's the double weird part.

When I step through a panning shot one frame at a time in quicktime, using the curser keys, I see a pattern. Some of the frames have the tell-tale "combing" effect of interlacing as you would expect, but some don't. There is a strange mix of "progressive" (no combing) and "interlace" (combing) frames tucked into a 60p file format. And the pattern is:

PiPiiiPiPiiiPiPiii

Where:

P = a frame of progressive
i = a frame of interlace

So a progressive frame followed by a single interlace frame, followed by a progressive frame, followed by three frames of interlace, then it starts over. In real time it appears to play back like a normal interlace file (which would be just iiiiiiiiiii) but it's not. And keep in mind that each "interlace" frame is a frame of 60p with two fields in it, not a frame of 30i.

So if you couple those into "pairs" of 30i the pattern would look like this:

Pi-Pi-ii-Pi-Pi-ii-Pi-Pi-ii

See that pattern? WTF is going on here? Almost a weird 3/2 pulldown thing between progressive and interlace. I have never seen anything this messed up.

This explains why Final cut will not play it as a normal 29.97 interlace if you just convert it from an H264 to an AIC file. It also explains the softness of the image in 60i mode...the 24 Mbps compression is spread over many extra frames, some of which are progressive and some are interlace, half of which are duplicates. The overall effect is to have considerably less bandwidth (more compression) per frame. Hence a softer image.

And I had to build a custom preset in Compressor just to turn this file format into a useful 30i file for FCP.

Basically, the interlace mode of the camera is utterly flawed and useless until Nikon recognizes the problem and releases a firmware update. Honestly, it is clear to me that Nikon is miles behind Canon with video, and this is coming from a Nikon guy. :(

I am hoping there will be a firmware fix for this ASAP. As it stands now, the "60i" mode on the D7100 is utterly completely useless.

Jonathan

[Duane Adam]

Are both cameras doing the same thing?

[Jonathan Bird]

Yep. It's a problem with the file format.

Today I dropped a few "60i" files from the cameras into Compressor and looked at them in the inspector. The inspector thinks they are 59.94 progressive files.

No doubt about it, the D7100 interlaced files are completely whacked.

I wrote to Nikon about this, but I'm betting they will ignore me, and it will take months before enough people realize what is going on and make a stink, getting them to look into it. I knew Nikon was clueless about video, but I had no idea just HOW clueless.

[Jonathan Bird]

As I expected, a totally useless response from Nikon on this issue:

Dear Mr. Bird,

Thank you for contacting Nikon. I do apologize for any inconvenience. In regards of this issue, we cannot troubleshoot nor comment as you are using third party software(s) with our Nikon product. We also can not guarantee that third party software will work with our products.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Nikon Support.

Best Regards,
-Armando

[Petter Flink]

What video editing suite or software do they want you to use then?

About the PiiPii effect, it reminds me of how some non supported flash encoded videos behaves in some apps. The p25 clips are identified as p50 and played out of order like 12323456567898.

Can you play the i60 clip from the d7100 directly in VLC for example?

[Marcus Martell]

Will be this issue fixed?