I'm doing a major video project this week, which is letting me flesh out the D4/D800 capabilities a bit more. Here's the bottom line: you can capture superb video, good video, or poor video, but those aren't settings you dial in, they're the result of a lot of attention to detail.
Never have I been more aware of the difference between having features you can set, versus making a photographer's life easier by the camera maker understanding what the user is trying to do. Nikon put in the features. They don't understand what the videographer is doing. Yes, it's the age old workflow issue all over again, but this time caged with nuances in workflow that extend back into just getting the camera ready to record.
Things you need to set are scattered willy-nilly through the extensive menu system, not explained in the Nikon manual, not capable of being set as a logical group, and one of them will almost certainly catch you by the short hairs if you don't cross all T's and dot all I's every time you turn the camera on. Everyone knows about the "take card out to ensure that you record the highest resolution video out the HDMI port," right? You're going to forget some day, and there's nothing to remind you. But it doesn't stop there. I count five other major things that can trip you up when you're not looking. One of them is the croc sitting in the water waiting for you to not be paying attention.
I'll have an article on getting state-of-the-art video out of these cameras some time next week. In the meantime, if anybody at Nikon is listening: just because a user can doesn't mean a user will. If you don't understand that sentence, you don't understand how to create discoverable, reliable, and repeatable UI to a purpose, simple as that. A good tool makes what we're doing and how the camera does it obvious. Sure, we can get clean HDMI, but we're never sure whether we're actually getting that until we review the outboard signal carefully. Yep, another darned set of workflow steps that we don't want or need.
Video is bad enough for workflow as it is. We don't need even more steps and more settings that can cause you grief. This is doubly problematic because the D4/D800 are very portable units. Even with a Ninja hooked up you can be extremely spontaneous and free in movement. But, that spontaneity is broken by all the detail you have to pay attention to.
The problem is made more acute by Nikon's stubborn insistance on how settings banks work (or don't work, as most of us have been saying for years). Yep, you guessed it, the settings you'll be dealing with are scattered between the SHOOTING, CSM, and SETUP menus, which means you can't configure a "Video bank" to ease the pain.
So, while I appreciate the features—and there are plenty—I don't appreciate what I have to do to fully take advantage of them, particularly when it comes to video. I don't think I'll be alone on this complaint. Sure, some of the long-term video pros are used to dealing with this kind of nonsense, and it's a job creation program for them, too. But it doesn't have to be this way, it shouldn't be this way, and it needs to change if Nikon really wants to get some attention in the video world.