All,

I would like to share with you a bit about my experience with the X5R. DJI was gracious enough to allow me access to an X5R, and I embarked on a 2 week roadtrip around the western United States to test it out. We logged 7300 miles, an average of 8 hours driving every day, and traveled to some of my favorite landscapes in the US to put the X5R through its paces. For those of you who are interested in specifics and details, I'll try to provide a bit more in posts that will follow below. But the most important thing I can show you is, of course, image quality. So, here are a number of different links for you:

The first link below is a Vimeo link to the final edited piece "The West in Winter". It is shot entirely using the DJI X5R using the Zuiko 12mm, 17mm, 25mm, and 45mm. It was uploaded in 4k at 100mbps H.264 with a 2-pass encode at max render quality from Adobe Premiere.[B] I have made the file available to download on Vimeo[/B]. [I]Please ensure that you're logged into Vimeo in order for the download option to appear[/I]. Although compressed to H.264, this 2-pass encode at 100mbps should still show a good approximation of the quality of the X5R footage. There are a couple of scenes that display a bit of H.264 compression that is [B]not found in the original source RAWs[/B]. And a couple of scenes where I didn't fully nail focus (user error). Other than that, I hope this upload, with its variety of locations, lighting, and environments, will allow you to get a good sense of the image quality that the X5R is capable of:


If you prefer to watch on YouTube, the following link should serve you:



Now, please carefully note the next two links. These are ALSO Vimeo and YouTube links to "The West in Winter". HOWEVER, for this particular render, the LEFT half of the frame shows the original footage WITHOUT any color correction. The RIGHT half of the frame shows the footage WITH a color grade pass. This is so that you can see an example of pre/post graded footage. The links are as follows:

Vimeo:


YouTube:



Yet another way I'm going to try to make this footage available is via direct-download from my personal server. [B]Please use this option LAST[/B]. Please first try to download from Vimeo, because I'm not sure how long my server will be able to allow downloads for this footage since each link is a 3.5GB file.

FINAL GRADE:
www.iancresswell.com/downloads/x5r/TheWestinWinter.mp4

LEFT HALF PRE-GRADED/RIGHT HALF GRADED:
www.iancresswell.com/downloads/x5r/TheWestinWinterHalfGrade.mp4


I wanted to first and foremost make this footage available for people to hopefully get an idea of the X5R's level of quality. In the following posts below, I will try to go into some more specifics about using the X5R, how well it performed on the Inspire 1, and what it was like to transcode, edit, and export the footage.

Here's a bit of a review/thoughts mixed with a little bit of behind-the-scenes about the "The West in Winter" trip. It's a bit long, and a lot of it is just me talking straight to the camera, but hopefully it will be helpful to some.

AMAZING! All aspects: grading, shots, and the camera! Love it! Is the footage 4k at 30fps? It looks very fluid for 30.

Thanks. Yes, everything shot 3840x2160 30fps. Part of the fluidity may arise from the fact that I used ND filters to ensure the shutter speed was always between 1/60 - 1/120. Most of the time it was at 1/80. As such, the motion blur should be a bit more pleasing to the eye.

Ian Cresswell Posted at 2016-3-24 01:07
Thanks. Yes, everything shot 3840x2160 30fps. Part of the fluidity may arise from the fact that I us ...

Damn, you do some good work sir. very impressed.

Awesome! Thanks for the post.
Did you have to denoise any shots?

Neraxus Posted at 2016-3-24 00:48
Awesome! Thanks for the post.
Did you have to denoise any shots?

Thanks. The final shot, with a silhouette look is the only shot that was denoised because I was at a higher ISO.

Awesome work Ian.
Really good to see some correctly shot stuff with really spot on grading....
I am downloading your original footage, but I think my mind is made up.....there is going to be nothing better than this in the forseeable future for the pricpoint, and it looks like it will intergrate into my exisiting 4k workflow and match up well enough with the ground based camera's to make good Cine.

I will be placing and order for a New Bird complete with the X5R.
Thanks again

Harb

Yep, just watched the download split in the 4k original uploaded file.......awesome.....just awesome
It will never cease to amaze me what you can do with a camera less than the size of a baseball and a platform you can carry in one hand.

I will be selling all my helicopter lenses and grip gear very shortly I think.........the results from this setup just doesn't warrant the cost of the traditional method of doing the same thing.
3 days fuel costs pay for this complete setup !!


Thanks again Ian.

Just updated my second post with a video review/BTS. Cheers

god damn thats some amazing footage right their. excellent work Ian

Such an awesome and much needed post Ian, thank you so much for sharing your experience and work with us!

Edit:      Just finished downloading the original off Vimeo and watched on a 4K monitor -   I want it now!!! Footage and detail is so pretty for how tiny this camera system is!

As  a huge favor to the community could you share a short RAW clip with us  so we can test drive? The examples DJI provided us with are poorly shot  and don't exactly showcase the actual abilities of this camera, we need a  more properly captured material to get a real taste of what X5R is  capable of.

Thank you in advance on behalf of everyone here!

Great footage. Any reason there aren't any sunrise/sunset shots (except for the last shot)?

Seems like this camera really needs to be tested in high DR range to determine if it's that much better than the X5. Too bad there aren't many shots which test this...

Wow!  The X5R really does live up to the hype.

Wow. This is really phenomenal stuff. Like ridiculously so!

How was exposing? I noticed that in your pre-grade footage it's REALLY dark in a few of the shots but the final shot was GORGEOUS. Was that an accident or is that how it's supposed to be exposed?

Some brilliant footage! Nice one!

Ian Cresswell Posted at 2016-3-24 15:33
Here's a bit of a review/thoughts mixed with a little bit of behind-the-scenes about the "The West i ...

Ian you really have put some work into this.
Its probably the most comprehensive test and an honest one I have come across.
I have for a long time flown Heavy Lift gear, and used real Helicopters for a lot of my shots, and the polishing of the inspire system with the X5R has now made me rethink my whole way of shooting.
I like you, like to gather footage in the wilderness, in my case the outback of Australia , and simple aerial shots have in the past required use of full size Helicopters with hours of rigging just to do something relatively straight forward.....plus the issues of even getting the copter on site, usually a long where from anywhere .
Then that evolved into heavy lift octo's which made it better and cheaper, but there was still a lot of space needed to take all the required gear with us, and the multitude of spares, batteries etc etc.
Now, I can take 2 Inspires, one as a spare, a couple of multi battery chargers and thats it for my aerial equipment.
To say I am excited to be able to pull of the side of the road anywhere and be up and shooting in minutes is going to be a game changer........ following animals before they run off, desert storms and dust devils etc , will now be all possible....... this is going to be fantastic.
So again I want to thank you for the effort you have put in here.
I have been holding back on signing up on the new system until I saw some legit testing, and it now looks like I can move forward and get the whole thing together before my next project which is looming closer and closer.

PS..... I bet you are a lot fitter after running that bird up and down those dunes lol
So from down under, Cheers and good shooting !


Oh and I'd also like to thank DJI for letting you do this test in the first place....good move DJI ;)

Thnx for in depth review Ian!!

Absolutely amazing work! I deserves the place on a main page of the forum!

That was very nice to watch!! Im impressed thanks for your work

Thank you all for your very kind comments. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed the video, that means a lot.

Harb- It really is amazing how far the technology has come, isn't it? $6k for a full dual controller setup shooting 4K RAW ultra smooth aerials on a quad that weighs under 8 pounds. Mind-boggling!

Morrisson- I did underexpose a number of shots. This is because currently the histogram in the app is tied to the H.264 setting. I had it set on D-LOG which makes the image, specifically the shadows, show boosted quite a bit higher on the histogram than they really are being recorded to the SSD. I've suggested to DJI that the histogram reflect the RAW recording, or be switchable between the two. In the meantime, if you're exposing for the RAW recording to SSD, I would leave the H.264 picture profile on "none" so that the histogram doesn't show boosted levels.

ge0se- Thanks! Well, my DNG files (the compatible with Premiere versions) are 16MB per image. And at 30fps that means almost 500MB per second of footage. Right now I'm not sure I can really upload a sequence at that size, but I'll try to see what I can do. Maybe I can at least post 1 frame from a number of different sequences.

anirudh0802- There are a few sunrise/sunset shots. This was a last minute trip though so we were at the mercy of the logistics of driving 7300 miles in 14 days, plus the weather. So, we didn't get to chase golden hour as much as might have been preferable. Several of the scenes do show a very wide dynamic range though. Often mid-day sun actually provides some of the most challenging dynamic range of all. Regardless, hopefully the footage was helpful to you

Ian, Thank you very much for creating these informative and visually beautiful films.

Would you mind elaborating on the performance of the SSD Reader, Cinelight, and your process. I ask because I received my new I1R and have just completed filming a few tests with color charts, etc., and have noticed some very slow Cinelight performance which isn't present in your BTS. When accessing the SSD via the reader via USB3 Cinelight is mostly unusable, and it's about all I can do to just get a file to export.
I'm using a late 2015 5K 27" iMac 4GHz intel Core i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395X, 64GB Memory, 1TB SSD, as upgraded as it gets, and am on El Capitan.

- When using Cinelight in your BTS were you accessing the clips directly from the SSD via USB3?
- Is it possible to use finder to copy the files off of the SSD?

I can not see the files when directly viewing the card via finder, it just appears to be empty, and I'm suspecting my Cinelight problems are being caused by the slow read write speeds of USB3.  Perhaps there's a Cinema DNG plugin I need in order to view and copy the files to my internal drive?

I appreciate your time and assistance.

Thanks again!

HelloAirbot Posted at 2016-3-25 02:57
Ian, Thank you very much for creating these informative and visually beautiful films.

Would you min ...

Yes using CineLight I was accessing the clips directly from the USB3.0 card reader. I was using a Mid-2014 max-spec'd Macbook Pro. I don't think the USB3.0 reader is the issue, it's likely something else going on here. The performance from CineLight isn't blistering, but it's actually pretty good on my machine. I'm still on Yosemite on my laptop though, and I'm not 100% if I'm on the same version of CineLight I'll need to check. I may try to upload  a video showing how fast the export is in different formats for reference.

So far as I know, no you can't just transfer over the footage straight from the card. This was one of the first things I brought up to DJI. This is really, really important especially for people transferring footage in the field. AC/DIT/Data Wranglers will want to be able to use something like ShotPutPro to carbon copy a drive and then deal with transcoding/exporting later. I'm not sure if this will change in the future, but personally I'd much prefer to be able to access the card directly. Not certain the reason behind this, but for now it seems the data on the card can only be accessed by CineLight.

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes a video displaying a start to finish import would be very nice to see. (please don't feel obligated) I certainly hope this inability to carbon copy is remedied immediately as it presents a host of professional usability concerns. I'm just imagining the end of a long day with a couple full cards and a homicidal DIT.

HelloAirbot Posted at 2016-3-25 16:33
Thanks for the quick reply! Yes a video displaying a start to finish import would be very nice to se ...

Ok I did a quick test and screen recording. Now, this video is sped up 400% so that it's not obnoxiously long. However, you will still be able to see the elapsed time stamps for how long each process took/would take.
The computer used is a max spec'd Mid-2014 15" Macbook Pro

30 second clip to Adobe DNG: ~35 seconds
30 second clip to Adobe DNG compatible with Adobe Premiere: ~2 minutes 15 seconds
30 second clip to TIFF: ~18 minutes
30 second clip to ProRes 444XQ: ~5 minutes
30 second clip to ProRes Proxy: ~5 minutes

I hope it won't be too long before we start to see Tutorial videos pop up  with some good explanations on how to work the software great job very informative post Ian I enjoyed watching all of your videos thanks again!!

Great shooting man. And thanks for the very in-depth BTS.

Nicely done Ian! Wow That was fast.

Well. Found the solution to the Super Slow Cinelight performance. The latest El Capitan Update,10.11.4, was the Fix. It actually included a bug fix for "Raw images opening slowly in Photos." The bug was obviously effecting Cinelight too, It's nice and snappy now.

HelloAirbot Posted at 2016-3-25 21:29
Nicely done Ian! Wow That was fast.

Well. Found the solution to the Super Slow Cinelight performan ...

Good find.....I use DaVinci , but I tried Cinelight and was having the same issues....updated and all is good....its actually not a bad little program...... easy to operate thats for sure

That is some fantastic work. Watching this is so awesome and gives ideas on how to film correctly. Thank you and also very jealous you got to fly that bird.

Ian Cresswell Posted at 2016-3-24 00:33
Here's a bit of a review/thoughts mixed with a little bit of behind-the-scenes about the "The West i ...

Very nice work mr. Cresswell, I plan on making a similar trip in the spring just driving and shooting different places that Mother Nature provides.

Ian Cresswell Posted at 2016-3-25 03:36
Thank you all for your very kind comments. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed the video, that means a l ...

Ok! I thought it was something like that. I've been used to measuring with a histogram on "Standard" color profiles and then switching back to whatever flat setting for the final record. Kind of annoying but fruitful! Thanks for the data.

Ian Cresswell Posted at 2016-3-25 15:36
Thank you all for your very kind comments. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed the video, that means a l ...

Ian, thanks for even consdering to share a clip. Really all we need is a clip or two, 5 to 10 frames each is more than enough to play with and understand how camera performs. It shouldn't be more than 200 MB in size.

Again, great post and review, truly appreciate you sharing your ecperiences with us!

I want one of these

Great footage, (and music, and editing). Thanks for sharing interesting infos.

Ian,

Thank you for sharing your experience and awesome footage. You took a lot of time to explain all the amazing points of the new platform. DJI should award your work on this forum!!

One question, did you get the GL658C remotes with your new Inspire??  I just received my new Inspire 1 V2 X3 T601 but the remotes were the older (less powerful) GL658B
I live out west and near the mountains where most of my flying is located. I would prefer to have the highest power remotes available and this is why I ordered the new V2.
I maybe returning this to DJI if they decide not to exchange the "B" for the newer "C" remotes

Thanks
Rich

Thats it I'm buying. Thank you this is all I needed.

WOW, incredible Ian, thank you so much for your incredible work.
And for those who want a chance to have the Inspire X5 RAW, there are a few available for purchase right now.
http://store.dji.com/product/inspire-1-raw

Breath taking footage. Hope to see more from you.

Ian Cresswell Posted at 2016-3-24 00:33
Here's a bit of a review/thoughts mixed with a little bit of behind-the-scenes about the "The West i ...

Great review. We appreciate your insight.