Honor's first flagship was the Magic3 Pro. The camera was one of the biggest features that the company boasted about. We would be transformed into miniature Tom Cruises, shooting TikToks as if they were destined for the movie theater. Honor's successor, the Magic4 Pro, has arrived in Europe, but the phone never left its native China.
The Pro model has two cameras, one with a primary camera and one with an ultra-wide camera. There is an 8x8 Direct Time of Flight sensor that gives it a whip-fast focusing ability.
Honor enlisted the assistance of a professional colorist to come up with a color scheme for the video. A series of Look Up Tables for the phone was created by Bryan McMahan. There are two modes that make your footage look like it was shot at the height of summer and a third that makes everything look like it has been through a bleach-pass. One of the best things about Focus is that it makes everything look like a music video.
The phone claims to be able to shoot in Log, which is the standard used in most Hollywood movies. The point remains the same, even though it is a custom format Honor designed to work with mobile devices. Log is a method of filming that preserves as much of the dynamic range and tone as possible. It will preserve scenes in high contrast, as well as shadows, highlights and whites that a conventional digital camera might try to smooth out.
Some of the takes I shot for my piece to camera were plagued by strobing. Since my light bulbs shouldn't be strobing, and the camera only picks up on it every now and again, it was odd. I had to record my audio on an external microphone because of the sound. This is common for most professional cameras, but the point is that people are going to use this as a camera for their vacation videos.
You could give your footage to a colorist if you shoot Log. Theory. It was hard to pull out a lot of the detail and dynamic range that should be there in the first test shots. I sent Steve Dent the phone and all of my footage because he is a professional colorist.
There is a lot of detail in the footage that can't be accessed. Since MagicLog is designed to be mobile-friendly, it's likely that this is a result of compression. It means that my clips couldn't get the pops of color that we were hoping for. Steve couldn't simply run it through the standard model because Honor doesn't seem to offer a stand alone LUT for editing software.
Steve says it is difficult to shoot with the Magic4 Pro. You have to expose for them and not the shadows because it clips highlights. There is no way to tell if you are shooting safe footage as there is no built-in display LUT. It takes a lot of hitting and hoping to shoot in MagicLog.
The Magic4 Pro isn't terrible, awful or a waste of money, but it is. It's easy to shoot in the standard mode and the results were good enough for me to make a pro-quality video. It feels like until Honor finishes building out the Log offering with a display LUT, video level display and making it easier for non-pros to color correct afterwards, this isn't something novices should be playing with.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
