Dpreview interviewed the Lumix Imaging Business Unit Director

Dpreview had a chat with the Director of the Lumix Imaging Business Unit, Mr. Toshiyuki Tsumura. Here are a couple of statements he made:

  • I believe the demand for shooting both videos and photos with a single camera and sharing them as works of art is underpinning the overall demand.
  • Real Time LUT, which has expanded the LUT function to stills, has received high praise for its ability to enjoy colors in both video and still images and is driving sales,
  • Our basic stance is to become a manufacturer that can provide a wider range of value to our customers as a system with an open platform
  • We recognize that camera smartphone apps are becoming one of the most important workflows, especially for young creators. Smartphones are excellent when it comes to the workflow of taking pictures and sharing them immediately, but cameras are superior when it comes to the quality of the work.
  •  In order to widely spread mirrorless cameras for streaming, I believe it is important to innovate UX from seamless connection to smartphones, high-speed WiFi, and up to editing and streaming.

I believe that the first company to make mirrorless cameras as easy to use as smartphones will win a large share of young content creators. This aspect is now much more important than the megapixel or sensor size competition! What do you think?

New Topaz Video AI brings All-new enhancement model, Plus After Effects integration, alpha layer support, and more

Topaz just released the new Video AI 5.2 version (Click here to see th product page). Press text:

This release includes the new Rhea Enhancement model, Pro seat management, Frame Interpolation for After Effects, Alpha layer support, and many UI and backend fixes.

  1. Rhea Enhancement Model

Rhea represents a combination of Proteus and Iris. The model is intended to be more accurate in preserving fine details across a wider range of subjects, while also handling text in a less destructive way.

This model and Rhea internally processes inputs at 4x scale and then downscales to your selected output resolution.

We’re very excited to see your results with Rhea, here are some example frames from this model:

image
image (9)
  1. Frame Interpolation for After Effects

Today we are also launching Frame Interpolation in Adobe After Effects. This plugin addition includes access to all Frame Interpolation models for up to 16x slow motion conversion.

For more information on using the After Effects Frame Interpolation plugin, see this post in the Video AI Plug-ins forum section. 62

  1. Alpha (transparency) layer support

Video AI can now copy alpha layers from inputs and merge them back with AI model output videos. Alpha layer copying is supported in the following codecs:

  • QuickTime Animation
  • TIFF
  • PNG

image

Pro seat management

After a pre-launch period with several Pro teams around the world, Video AI Pro will be officially launching later this week. This new license tier offers seat management, commercial usage rights, and multi-GPU support for teams working with Video AI.

As part of this transition in licensing, we will be discontinuing the previous implementation of multi-GPU rendering for the standard license. Our team found that less than 2% of users made use of the multi-GPU setting, and further development will be focused on multi-GPU optimization for Pro teams.

If you are affected by this change and would like to discuss further options, please contact enterprise@topazlabs.com

Bug fixes & other improvements:

  • Preview set saving functionality restored.
  • UI lag greatly reduced, specifically for long operations.
  • Ensures colorspace correctness for input videos with a wider list of colorspace related flags.
    – Uses the setparams filter instead of -colorspace, ... flags to explicitly override the input metadata to ensure only the metadata tags are updated without changing the video data itself.
  • Timeline width now adjusts correctly between different video inputs.
  • Export preferences now save consistently.
  • Added pause/resume controls to right-click menu.
  • Fixed crop settings auto-populating after first digit.
  • Time remaining/elapsed toggle now available for both Previews and Exports.
  • Fixed “Open in Explorer/Finder” button for previews and exports.
  • Disabled automatic generation of TIFF sequences for Previews. These temporary files are no longer in use and the app now reads preview files in the selected Export format.

TTartisan announced a “non Tilt & Shift” version of their 100mm f/2.8 macro lens.

As you know TTartisan is offering a 100mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift 2x macro lens at TTartisan store, Pergear shop and Amazon worldwide store.(400$ / 499 euros).

Today TTartisan announced they will soon launch a “non tilt-shift” version that should be more affordable. There is no reorder option yet but the lens will be available in all different mount version (E / X / Z / RF / L / GFX / EF / F)

 

Sigma CEO Yamaki says FP sales are picking up again and he wants to “evolve” the FP lineup

Sigma’s “SIGMA fp” mirrorless camera series experience event, “fp hour,” was held in Shibuya, Tokyo on Saturday, June 1st. At that even Sigma CEO Yamaki had a chat with DC.watch journalists.

He said that the Sigma FP sales are lately increasing in Japan and also a tiny bit in China. The Sigma team cannot find a clear reason for the sudden increase in sales over the past year.

Regarding the future strategy for the SIGMA fp series, President Yamaki commented, “It hasn’t been decided yet, but basically we want to evolve it.” President Yamaki emphasized that there is potential in the SIGMA fp concept of compactness, simplicity and expandability, and said, “We want to continue to pursue this in the future.”

 

 

Message to Sigma source: Thanks for the info!

I just got an important “rumor” from an anonymous messenger using our contact box. First of all I wanna thank him! And I wanted to ask him also to keep me posted about the next Sigma rumors he gets. Would like for example to get the date of the announcement 🙂

P.S.: That new “product” is really nice!