Flynt,
Although I appreciate your efforts to adjust the same field of view and film these comparative shots, they may create the wrong impression that the 5k anamorfic mode is much more inferior in terms of image quality than the 3k 1x1 mode. The crop mode uses much smaller sensor area, therefore the depth of field is much larger causing much more of the image to appear sharp. The lack of sharpness in large areas of the anamorphic shots is attributed to the much smaller depth of field which creates an overall impression of a soft image. Those areas are soft not because of lack of resolution or inferior image quality but because of defocus. If you want to be correct with the comparisons, in your anamorphic shots, you will need to close the apperture to achieve equal depths of field in both modes.
In fact, image quality of the 5k anamorphic mode is so good that it is barely distinguishable from 3k. This is evident from the pink flower shots where depth of field for both modes is large enough for the entire flower to appear in sharp focus. I use 5k anamorphic for landscape videography all the time and it resolves fine detail perfectly. Videos look gorgeous on large high-resolution screens.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you. There's no out of focus, softness, etc. Let me tell you something. Just watch other ML videos on my channel, and you'll understand that I know how to focusing, how to work with ML and so on. I'm working with Danne's firmware for about a year, and all this time I've been comparing it with 3K crop rec mode in different situations.
3K footages always look amazing - with any lens, at close- mid- long-range distances , F-number, in real size with 100% crop, in fit in view mode, etc. There are tons of detalization in 3k mode. The keyword is - detalization, not softness or something else.
Yes, at first sight 3K and Danne's mode look pretty close, maybe the same for someone. But Danne's mode has less detalisation, it's a fact, and everyone sees it here, even you. That's what I want to show in this comparison.
Do you really think that 1920x2340 anamorphic pixels upscaled to 5.5K have better detalization than real 3072x1728 pixels, especially with the same or less bitrate, especially in 100% crop comparison? No, even mathematically. And in practice, as i said before, even you see it. These fake anamorphic 5.5K pixels not even close to real 2x anamorphic lens with the same matrix resolution.
I know there are lots of Danne's fans here, and I don't want to say that Danne's mode is bad or something else. It's good when you need to get long-time rec, large FOV, pseudo-panoramic automatization in post, long-range distances. But when you need detalization 3K is better.
As for me, I would prefer to work with real 3K upscaled to 4K (like ARRI Alexa) than fake anamorphic 5.5K downscaled to 4K, but my CF and SD cards don't support long-time rec in 3K mode. That's why I use Danne's firmware. As you can see on my channel 3K looks great in any situation, even with Youtube compression, in post-production you can crop it, or upscale, or whatever you want without details loss.
And also I think you should try 5.5K full matrix resolution mode in ML to understand what 5.5K really means) There is fantastic detalization even with ultra-wide lenses at long-range distance, full sensor area, etc.
