Why did Fujifilm limit the X-T30 to 4k 30FPS and made high speed FHD recording played back in slow motion?

[freshwings421]

Hi everyone, I hope you are all doing well. 

I have recently made the switch from Canon mirrorless line to a Fujifilm X-T30 and not regretting it one bit. I have been shooting in 4k 25FPS at 100mbps and I am absolutely loving Eterna and its post production potential. 

I never missed the 4k 60FPS to be fair. However, recently I got a project where I had to have some slow motion shots overlapping with normal-speed shots so I have now to record at a higher frame rate, and the way I usually do it is recording in 50FPS. First thing I did obviously was to revert back to 1080p and shoot there with 50FPS at 100mbps, and then I had some issues while uploading the footage to YouTube in 1080p. The quality dropped significantly so I had to upscale the footage to 1440p in order to preserve the quality, but I could tell that the image is defintely obviously upscaled and doesnt have that certain crisp to it like the 4k does, and this is when I started missing the 4k 50FPS.

I made some tests and I started noticing some odd things. First thing is, the frame rate does not affect the size of the video file neither in 4k nor in 1080p, unlike the Canon cameras. With Canons, the higher the frame rate, the bigger the file size becomes and the faster the camera overheats. Go ahead try it yourself and you will see that the file size stays almost the same on the Fujis.

Secondly, the video resolution does not also affect the video size at all. 4k at 100mbps has the same video size as 1080p at 100mbps. The only thing that changes the video size is the 200mbps feature. Other than that it stays the same which leads me to asking: 

Why cant we have the option of recording in 4k 60FPS on the X-T30? I really wish that this can be fixed because I really think it is a very unnecessary limitation. I can live with the 10 minutes recording limit, that is absolutely fine as to not go crazy with the camera, but the 4k 60FPS being left out like that is just odd in my opinion because the camera is very much capable of recording in 4k 60FPS... or is it? 

From what I am seeing, since the frame rates and the resolution do not affect the file size it means that the camera is putting the same amount of efforts into recording them? It is just a small haunch. Correct me if I am mistaken please! 

And the other annoying thing is that slow motion playback of high frame rate videos... I mean why. Why cant we just review the video normally without the extremely slow playback? I would really appreciate it if we had at least an option of changing the playback speed.  

[mawz]

The X-T30 doesn't have a fast enough card slot to record 4K60 at a reasonable bitrate, thus the limitation. You really need UHS-II V60 for 4K60 and the X-T30 is limited to UHS-1 V30