NIKON D5200 Impressions

I needed a new good quality semi-pro camera, which will save stills as RAW files as well as jpeg's.

The new Nikon D5200 has been receiving great reviews, so, having owned a D40 some years ago, I took a chance and picked one up.

Hoping to use the apparently great video shooting capabilities of this camera to record extra "B" roll footage, I set about testing the video abilities of this camera.

HDMI - Not!

HDMI output is supposed to be clean and capable of external recording on a Ninja or a Black Magic Hyperdeck - so far, I can only get a "cropped" output from this camera - too bad - also when you put the camera into record, the HDMI output reverts to 720 and not 1080 at all - pretty crap for trying to record backups to your internal SDHC card at the same time as recording on the Hyperdeck or Ninja 2 - even if you could!

"Bag of Snakes"

D5200 has an external audio input with level controls - YAY!! sorry to piss on your fireworks but the external input has an appalling noise ceiling, making it useless for even the most amateur use - meanwhile the internal camera mic suffers less from amplifier hiss 

"Grain and Gain"

When set to manual control of video settings such as iso, F-stop and shutter speed, the visual noise levels increase as you zoom in - indicating that the iso level is changing to compensate for the aperture change during the zoom. Brightness does not increase, but the overall noise level does.

"Alias Moiré and Jello"

On the up side, this camera shows almost no moiré or aliasing at all - good 24MP sensor then - BUT - awful "Jello" so never use this camera with fast moving pans  - best stick to
a tripod or slider here and go slow - especially if you are using 24P - depth of field is of course tight as a ducks posterior, so use high F- stops for greater depth when shooting video, if you need it, and try to stick to anything under iso 3200 for least noise. 

Update: The extreme Jello effect seen in Live View on the monitor is just that,
only on the monitor, no idea why, but the effect is much reduced on your recorded data.
page 49 of the handbook.

Video Noise Reduction

Neat Video Noise Reduction software is great, no doubt. You can find it here:

http://www.neatvideo.com/

It plugs into loads of things - even Edius.

However, have you considered this? Magic Bullet Denoiser II ?

You can find some information here:

http://www.redgiant.com/products/all/denoiser-II/#tabs

I'm afraid it doesn't plug into quite as many applications, and does not work

with Edius via the AE plugin bridge ....BUT...

give it some thought - as in my humble opinion, it is

BETTER!

it is also really fast now as it supports
GPU acceleration - so before
you follow the crowd, check out the 1.4 version of
Denoiser II

These samples come from a Sony EX1 35mbs. All are shown at 800% enlargement.
The sample frame is identical, noise reduction at default, both running in interlace mode
as the original was 50i.

original shot at 800%

after Neat 3 clean up

after Red Giant Denoiser II clean up

I find that the detail retention of Denoiser II is better, note the spider web looks smoother
with the Red Giant plug, but the detail is retained - I also find there is less in the way
of "plastic" colour characteristics with Denoiser II.

They are both undoubtedly very good tools.