Nikon Mirrorless for Video - Thoughts?

Hello Divers,

I am considering selling my D850 and going Mirrorless and in doing so I was looking over the current Nikon options. The driver behind staying with Nikon is that I have a huge collection of Nikon lenses that I don't want to part with. 

Is anyone out there shooting the Nikon Mirrorless with success? I know Sony is really the gold standard these days but I don't want to have to buy all new lenses.

Anyone have any thoughts or experience with expert type video on the Nikon Mirrorless ?

We are likely mere days from a Nikon Z8 announcement. Hold on to your D850 for a little longer.

I went from D850 to Z9 underwater this summer.   Shot some macro and wide angle in Roatan in September, then spent 9 days in Truk doing wide angle.  I did try some video on the D850, and I sure ran into limitations with autofocus there.  I've barely used video on the Z9 yet, but it's clearly better in autofocus there, plus all the extra options.

The lenses are clearly better on the Z9, at least comparing the 14-30 to the 16-35 and the 105f to the 105z.

I did not use the old f-mount lenses on the Z9 for underwater use.  I just replaced the lenses.   The Nauticam Z9 housing was outrageously expensive at $7500 - double the cost of the D850 housing.

Above water, I do use some f-mount lenses, and I may experiment more.   In particular I use the 500pf, but I've shot the 70-200 as well. They work at least as well as they did the D850.

In general, the D850 and Z9 files seem about the same, which is a good thing.  I think the Z9 holds better white balance into high ISO without going magenta.   Neither camera does a custom white balance below about 50 foot, though I found you might be able to get a bit more depth setting WB in video more instead of stills mode.

I view the move to the Z9 as a success overall, but the D850 sets a very high bar.   Where the Z9 is good, it is better than the D850.  Since I always shot the D850 with a grip, I find them about the same size and weight, though the Z9 with a z-mount lens is typically lighter than the f-mount equivalent.

When the Z9 is bad though, meaning certain times with autofocus, it's then worse (by far) than the D850.   The typical issue is the camera grabbing an unintended subject and refusing strenuously to give it up.  Often that is something in the background.   On the D850, there must be better distance discrimination because 3D Tracking on it really respects the distance to the subject and favors closer subjects.  But the Z9 seems only weakly able to discriminate distance, and sometimes it just seems to not see a closer subject in favor of the background.  This tendency is much improved with firmware 3.01, and I hope it is completely fixed later.

Honestly, I don't think Sony has an edge underwater, and firmware improvements on the Z9 give the possibility of further improvement.  If going to ML, definitely leverage your old lenses.  They work very well on the Z9.   As for other Nikon ML models, none of them interested me after the D850.

1. You can adapt your nikon lenses to Sony e-mount using the monster adapter.

2. Not wanting to do that you are looking at the Z9 which is a large camera with a large housing

On 4/24/2023 at 10:09 AM, phxazcraig said:

I went from D850 to Z9 underwater this summer.   Shot some macro and wide angle in Roatan in September, then spent 9 days in Truk doing wide angle.  I did try some video on the D850, and I sure ran into limitations with autofocus there.  I've barely used video on the Z9 yet, but it's clearly better in autofocus there, plus all the extra options.

The lenses are clearly better on the Z9, at least comparing the 14-30 to the 16-35 and the 105f to the 105z.

I did not use the old f-mount lenses on the Z9 for underwater use.  I just replaced the lenses.   The Nauticam Z9 housing was outrageously expensive at $7500 - double the cost of the D850 housing.

Above water, I do use some f-mount lenses, and I may experiment more.   In particular I use the 500pf, but I've shot the 70-200 as well. They work at least as well as they did the D850.

In general, the D850 and Z9 files seem about the same, which is a good thing.  I think the Z9 holds better white balance into high ISO without going magenta.   Neither camera does a custom white balance below about 50 foot, though I found you might be able to get a bit more depth setting WB in video more instead of stills mode.

I view the move to the Z9 as a success overall, but the D850 sets a very high bar.   Where the Z9 is good, it is better than the D850.  Since I always shot the D850 with a grip, I find them about the same size and weight, though the Z9 with a z-mount lens is typically lighter than the f-mount equivalent.

When the Z9 is bad though, meaning certain times with autofocus, it's then worse (by far) than the D850.   The typical issue is the camera grabbing an unintended subject and refusing strenuously to give it up.  Often that is something in the background.   On the D850, there must be better distance discrimination because 3D Tracking on it really respects the distance to the subject and favors closer subjects.  But the Z9 seems only weakly able to discriminate distance, and sometimes it just seems to not see a closer subject in favor of the background.  This tendency is much improved with firmware 3.01, and I hope it is completely fixed later.

Honestly, I don't think Sony has an edge underwater, and firmware improvements on the Z9 give the possibility of further improvement.  If going to ML, definitely leverage your old lenses.  They work very well on the Z9.   As for other Nikon ML models, none of them interested me after the D850.

@phxazcraig I have been lent a z9 updated with a z800 by nikon for 3 weeks for a doc assignment but was topside i didn't get to try it underwater but was super pleased with the af as well as the ibis never thought i would shoot birds without a tripod.... I have seen the other thread where everyone comments about the wb balance going out the window below 15m but no one ever talks about the wb balance in post prod if you film in raw. There is one backscatter article and there response on this matter is not very straight...  would love some thoughts on someone like you  that actually filmed on nikon raw.. With the Z8 around the corner i need to up my set up.  thx

18 hours ago, nomadadv said:

@phxazcraig I have been lent a z9 updated with a z800 by nikon for 3 weeks for a doc assignment but was topside i didn't get to try it underwater but was super pleased with the af as well as the ibis never thought i would shoot birds without a tripod.... I have seen the other thread where everyone comments about the wb balance going out the window below 15m but no one ever talks about the wb balance in post prod if you film in raw. There is one backscatter article and there response on this matter is not very straight...  would love some thoughts on someone like you  that actually filmed on nikon raw.. With the Z8 around the corner i need to up my set up.  thx

I've done several videos with the D850, but only took a few quick test ones with the Z9.  I don't have any video post-processing skills yet either.  I assume you could do more below 15m in post, but if there is no red there to start with...

I absolutely love my Z9 but no camera system is perfect.

I’m very happy working in post and you need to be reasonably competent with Resolve to get the most out of NRAW. I use a colour managed work flow interpreting the NRAW footage at Rec2020/Linear with timeline set to Arri or davinci wide gamut and output at Rec709. This lets me match footage to my BMPCC4ks BRAW using the same settings.

One quirk with resolve is that no matter what the custom white balance is set too, once it’s past 10000K it imports into resolve at 10000k and tint always imports at 0. E.g if I set a custom wb and shoot a raw photo, import to lightroom, I can see a white balance value of 30000k and 100 tint. Take a video using that same custom white balance and import to resolve, it imports as 10000k and 0 tint but looks very similar to the still.

The tint slider doesn’t seem quite as impactful as it should either and occasionally you need to add a node to push tint further than raw controls alone. The 12bit footage does seem to handle this exceptionally well though.

This can be frustrating as I had previously been able to estimate the wb for a clip if I knew the rough depth I was at. I hope that since the lawsuit with red was just dropped, Black Magic  invest a bit more time in the implementation of NRAW.

Adding a Keldan filter lets you grab a custom wb deeper, I’ve used one at depths of 20m or so - beyond this there isn’t much red left anyway and lights are going to be your friend. I’m using the 28-75 2.8 in WACP-1 which normally gives something like 130-80 degree field of view which is a nice range. The filter prevents quite a bit of zoom through though - I would guess making it more like 130-110. I also learnt that 4.3k120 FX does not play well with filters, best to change to 4k120 DX which means you lose a little resolution but it’s no longer line skipped which causes weird problems at the focus plane.

Even without the filter, you can recover colour nicely, like I said the 12bit footage holds up well with adjustments as long as your working in a colour managed profile. Because the camera just gives an error when you get too deep, you need to remember to have a custom wb saved at the most extreme depth you can successfully wb. That way if you descend too quickly and forget to wb as you go, you can switch to your max depth wb and know it’s going to be as good as it gets.

Autofocus underwater is interesting, Ive had animal detection work on the most random creatures. It recognises jellyfish, picks up eyes of camouflaged cuttle fish (I’ve no idea how, it doesn’t event look like an eye) but sharks it has no idea about. You would think the machine learning would have had more shark pics than jelly fish but who knows. Using subject tracking in video with continuous works kind of like single point but then you can tap the set button to start tracking anything, when animal detection kicks in it’s really quite sticky but you generally need to be quite close for this. I alternate between this and custom  mid sized box which I use for wider shots.

I love how it also captures a 1080 proxy, not because working with the files is unmanageable but because cloud storage is cheap but nothing lets you preview raw footage without downloading. This makes archiving and re-downloading required clips a lot easier, you don’t have to down load a 10gb file just to check if it’s the right one.

In short, if your prepared to do the work in post, you can do very well with the Z9 (and I assume the Z8) with NRAW, you just have to push past the nuances of a new codec that’s only recently been added to Resolve. It’s a fantastic hybrid providing professional level stills and exceptional video in the highest resolution currently available that’s not a dedicated cine camera.

Hi @glasshouse thank you for you indepth response. Yes 100% i would be spending more time on post prod or would be passing my shots to an editor for post productions. But i am worried having spoken to a director yesterday who told me i was going to struggle to get hired if i work on nikon ... his concerns being the workflow he is coming from land based doc industry. Anyhoo i was quite stressed out about this and wanted to ensure the it is possible thank you so much you have no idea how bananas i ve been going with this.  let us see what will happen with the Z8 maybe nikon has some wonders waiting for us. After all till now everything are only rumours and speculations and i do remember with the z9 the actual specs came out after the camera came out through the firmware updatem, so lets see!! :-) 

No worries, if you ever want to have a play with some footage, let me know and I can send you a sample clip.