Firmware 4.0 - Fuji X-Pro 2 4K Test Footage
With the release of firmware 4.0, the Fuji X-Pro 2 now supports 4K video. I did some quick testing, recording some footage in some local parks. There is a mix of hand held and tripod. All was shot using ProNeg Standard as the film profile. There was some very light colour correction done in Final Cut Pro as well as a custom profile to give the footage a slight grade, but this was kept to a minimum. I didn’t stabilise or adjust the geometry of any footage, so as not to affect the detail.
Unfortunately, you still can’t use the picture control options to adjust the picture profile, and so things like sharpness have no effect. Highlight and shadow tone options have no effect on video either. The only thing you can change that affects video is the film simulation profile. I don’t believe that this is a limitation on the X-T2. This is a real shame because even on what I believe is the flattest profile, it’s still not quite flat enough in my opinion, and you’re loosing dynamic range compared to still shooting. It’s fine if you’re inside, or in controlled lighting situations, but in anything with any kind of high contrast situations, it’s going to still be an issue.
Another thing of note is that in 1080 there is a degree of "super white" data in the video. This means that above 100% white there is still some highlight data that can be recovered. This is not the case in 4k. At 100% there appears to be a hard clip of luminance data. I need to do some more testing to confirm this, but that's what I'm seeing based on my initial testing. That doesn't necessarily mean it's capturing any less, it's possibly just the way the recording format works in 4k.
On most other cameras, including I believe the X-T2 (any X-T2 owner out there can correct em if I’m wrong) you can lower the contrast when shooting video, but not on the X-Pro 2. Also the default sharpness is too sharp in my opinion. It’s fine for some shots, for examples scenes of a single subject, where the majority of the frame is out of focus, but for shots with a lot of fine detail, the sharpening produces a noticeable over-sharpened look in my opinion. (You can see this towards the end of the video in the wide shots of the plumb trees.) Lowering the sharpness with the picture controls has no effect on video, so there's no way to adjust this, unfortunately. Maybe in the next firmware update?
Overall though, and I’ll cover this in more detail in a full review, the quality of the video in 4K is good. It’s vastly superior to what the quality was in 1080p before the firmware update, and downsampling to 1080 produces a really nice 1080 image, albeit with the dynamic range limitations mentioned above. I will do more testing over Christmas to see if any of the other profiles produce a flatter image.
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