Fujifilm X-T1 XPan Mask

A small patch to the X-T1's firmware that switches its "HD Framing" 16:9 guidelines into a 65:24 panoramic mask in the viewfinder and on the LCD screen. This has been a fun project which has helped revive an older camera (from 2014) that was otherwise sitting around unused.

A 3:2 viewfinder view with thin 16:9 guidelines near the top and bottom
Before: 16:9 lines
The same view with black bars above and below a 65:24 panoramic window
After: 65:24 mask

What it does

The "HD framing" option under Screen Set-Up → Framing Guideline → HD Framing is switched from 16:9 to 65:24 (and is set to a full mask, rather than just being thin lines). No cropping occurs however, images (JPEG and RAW) are left untouched, and the chosen aspect ratio is not changed (it's best to ensure that 3:2 is selected, with "L" JPEGs).

You'll want to crop the output images yourself when importing from the SD card.

Try it

Make sure you have Python 3 installed on your system, and that your X-T1 is already running the official firmware 5.52.

  1. Download the official X-T1 firmware 5.52 (FWUP0005.DAT) from Fujifilm
  2. Download the patch kit, unzip it, and move FWUP0005.DAT into the unzipped xt1-xpan-mask-kit folder: Download the patch kit zip · 4 KB
  3. Open a terminal in that folder and run the patcher (it'll refuse to write anything unless your file is the 5.52 file): 
    python3 patch_dat.py FWUP0005.DAT out/FWUP0005.DAT xpan-mask.patch
  4. Copy out/FWUP0005.DAT to the root of a freshly formatted SD card
  5. Make sure your battery is fully charged, set Screen Set-Up → Framing Guideline → Grid 9, and set Image Size → L 3:2
  6. Update the camera the way Fujifilm's own firmware instructions describe (eg. holding DISP / BACK and powering it on)
  7. Set the Screen Set-Up → Framing Guideline → HD Framing guideline, you should now see the "XPan" crop in your viewfinder and LCD screen

File hashes

Official 5.52 file (SHA-256)
4cf56ba6abb4298a844422c016289228bb0acce0a2ae2c6755c05fffb38e92db
Patched file (SHA-256)
f4ba1f041f795e30617443c15d964d862d1195a79acce622c94d8f38784c700b

Undo it

Flash the unmodified official FWUP0005.DAT the same way (you might want to keep a copy of it somewhere safe).

Cropping your photos

The camera still saves full 3:2 files. For an exact 65:24 frame, crop the 4896×3264 image to 4896×1808.

On macOS, you can use jpegtran to crop a whole folder of 3:2 JPEGs without re-compressing them. Install it with Homebrew (brew install jpeg-turbo), then open a terminal in that folder and run this, which saves the crops to a new cropped folder and leaves the originals alone:

mkdir -p cropped && for f in *.[Jj][Pp]*[Gg]; do jpegtran -crop 4896x1808+0+728 -copy all -outfile "cropped/$f" "$f"; done

Feedback

Open an issue on the GitHub repo (note: no support provided).