hmcindie

Using S-log the a7s keeps DR quite well when going high in video.

'> What could possible be gained by scaling the channels as the C100 at the moment already does pixel perfect HD from 4k? AVCHD will destroy the color channels to fourth their original size anyway at 4:2:0. Scaling the colors to 10000k won't change that.

A lot of cameras are already quite sharpened out of the box. Those sharpening artifacts (halos etc) will also get sharpened, enhancing the digital look. When you take out the built-in sharpening of the 5dIII it will completely remove any and all sharpening. A lot of other videocameras will still sharpen the image even when set to 0. 5d is completely soft at 0. But that's the reason it sharpens so well afterwards. The codec is also way better than similar codecs (5dIII h264 all-i has less compression artifacts than the a7s).

Great stuff BUT... Isn't it a huge disadvantage having Andrew do just one camera review for DPR here and there? There are so many cameras that are left out of reviews that it seems like cherry picking. Especially when the competitors then just feature some generic "it takes video" reviews.

The lowlight advantage of the A7s is during video. With stills the advantage isn't as good. With video I can get about 2-2,5 stops of advantage over the 5dmarkIII (from ISO max 6,400 with the 5d to 25,600 or slightly higher) A7s seems to already do internal noise reduction (there are noise trails after going over 12,800 like some software does). That noise reduction works pretty well when nothing is moving much (most test scenes on the internet) With stills the advantage of the a7s drops surprisingly, compared to the 5dmkIII I'd say it has maybe less than a stop and it only shows when going over 12,800. (checked with dpreviews studio comparison scene scaled to print size)

I was talking about RAW. A7s is considerably worse than 5dmarkIII RAW. Actually almost every camera is. But the workflow is too much for most people (not for me though). We just shot a video with all kinds of cams, 5dmarkII, III, GH4, a7s, fs700 and gopros. Funny how well all of them actually cut together.

You can't put "any setting you want" there. For example the aps-c mode is something you can't put into the quick buttons. One thing about asking for help on the internet is the fact that a lot of people giving advice may have not even used any of those cameras. In internet fashion it all seems to boil down to: "This camera has a better and cooler feature!" which is kinda weird. First of all, C100 does have a better looking image until you go over iso 3200. A7s can do crazy high ISOs and it would work wonders in weddings. But why not just rent it first and try it out before selling a working system and doing a complete switch?

They are talking about rolling shutter dudes... I'm almost speechless now... Every single CMOS camera uses a different readout speed than what is recorded. The readout is just how fast the sensor gets read. 24p, 25p, it has nothing to do with the end result. And in that white paper it should say 1/60s readout speed, not fps. You do know that every single CMOS camera (except global shutter cameras) do this? So keep your horses in your stables.

I've been doing a bit of assistant editing with Avid Media Composer and my god that software...great little things but it just crashes immediately and oh lord the bins management! It really reeks of the 90's software design. People actually work with this thing? I guess it's enough that it does multi-editor projects pretty well. And in other news, the new UI in Premiere and After Effects seems very childish. So much contrast and blue.

I'm actually quite surprised how well my A7s keeps batteries. Just set it in airplane mode and those batteries last long enough. I have 4 and don't think I've used them all up in a shoot yet. One can last me several hours (depending on the intensity of the shoot) But yes, considering how much the 5d III gets flack, I'll still shoot my own projects with it (and raw) and keep the a7s as a b-cam and for those lowlight situations (though I think a lot of the a7s lowlight ability is also due to very good noise reduction. You can see the noise reduction blending frames a bit after going over 12,800). 5d raw is suprisingly usable with neatvideo, it cleans it up so much better than h264 material.

What card are you using? How much VRAM? 4k might need more than 2gb.

As an editor I disagree with this. How do you edit with multiple people the same project using Premiere? You don't. And I really like Premiere (current version)

Most people that get good results don't actually want to share all the secret tips. It's actually quite normal. It's about competition and being better at certain stuff than other people.

Though I'd wonder what guys at Sonys stand would be like if you went there and asked about the horrible blue clipping on the a7s. Are these big corporations that different from one another? Sony makes cool innovations that somehow always seem to lack the little important things. Canon makes stuff that's usually thought out pretty well but never really innovates and is a couple of years late. Panasonic is like a melding of these two and is really trying hard these days. Pick your poison.

Yup, Sonys have that issue. No reviews actually make mention of it? It looks extremely horrible when your using slog or a flat profile with desatured colors. As then the blue really jumps out and goes "HELLNOO!" One fix is to not shoot s-log and keep white balance at 5000k.

I think you should try the profiles by dvxuser moderator Kholi. http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?326049-A7S-PicPro-Settings I had problems too, Kholis settings helped but yes, the canons are still better color wise than what the a7s is outputting. One thing compared to the 5dmarkIII skinwise is that it's quite easy to underexpose the a7s because the LCD on the a7s is surprisingly bad in displaying blacks and output levels. So you have to constantly use the histogram as it's very hard to tell when something goes too low. It doesn't really get any darker on the a7s monitor, it just suddenly clips. So be sure to give a good exposure, that helps a lot. And practice. It does get easier.

"Every little imperfection from the lens or camera is there front and centre with no scaling to assist in hiding it under the rug." That's not necessarily a good thing. A lot of LCD's that tend to be TN-panels artificially inflate artifacts. I think it's something to do with their gammas that are not very uniform. Also the less dynamic range you get with the monitor the more you will see all kinds of stuff in the shadows.

Sony nex-5n and nex-7 (owned both) and the a7s ALL have this exact same thing and have had it for years. It looks effing horrible but for some reason no one else has been that bothered about it until the a7s came along. Maybe because the a7s has higher sensitivity so you can really blow those lights out. I had this reaction years ago when I compared the nex-5n to the Canon 7d. DXOMark scored the 5n severely higher but I could not see any meaningful difference between them... except that the nex-5n tended to blow out blue leds completely while the 7d kept them way nicer. And that was in RAW stills mode where you can change the white balance. (besides, shouldn't there be a visible chnage in performance as the DXOMark difference was something like 20 points?) Same thing with the Sony FS700 (before s-log updates etc). One shoot, some led lights. 5d mark III came out beautifully, FS700 looks slightly crap with the blues. There are ways to try to avoid it (whitebalance to 5000k etc) but it's always there...somewhere. Hiding to come out.

Sure but you don't need special software for it, any modern-ish NLE will basically do a good scale.

Funny how crazy those raw rigs are when you can capture 1080p raw with the 5d internally to fast CF cards - with the assistance of magic lantern. Ok, it isn't 4k but not even the Alexa captures it's RAW material internally (I've been having a "blast" with the Codex and Alexa Arriraw workflow).

This could be a superwhite problem. Have you tried adjusting the balance afterwards, seeing if you could bring possible superwhites back? In Premiere CC you can do this with the fast color corrector (set it to 16-235 instead of 0-255) or in AE in 32bit float. the avcx-s slog2 doesn't use superwhites (cinegamma4 does) but it could be that the NLE doesn't see the superwhites properly. Can you try getting them back? According to Paul in the dvxuser forum, that's exactly what's happening so basically your not really losing anything (same thing happens when recording cine4 in avcx-s, you have to bring the superwhites back later (and the blacks too)).

Sooo... what happens if you record without s-log? Just a regular picture profile or with one of the cinegammas?

Here's a little weird-o thing we shot with the 5d raw III and the A7s. Sorry about the language. Also shot a bit of 60fps raw to gauge the sharpness. Works ok! 80% 5d raw and rest a7s (all the night shots in the forest and the stars). 5d is still usability wise higher than the A7s. A7s is just more fiddly and everything takes a bit more time. Raw is absolutely astounding. It's quite close to Alexa arriraw (though I'm not very critical) except with the banding in low light and not as good highlights. Colors are great. The a7s is also mindblowing but in different ways. It's mindblowing in lowlight. Being able to see stars (even very noisy ones) opens your eyes. It's also very clean at lower ISOs. I'll be using both from now on forwards. 5d raw when I have the time and luxury of raw (mostly doing my own little projects) and a7s when I have to deliver to clients and I'm not attached to the material.

You need to enable GPU support (speeds it up considerably).

Remember that FCP7 doesn't show you the whole frame if the window is less than 100%. If your playback windows is 96% it will deinterlace and show only half the lines. First check that everything looks ok at 100% on the computer. If it does, then compressor is probably applying optical flow to get to 50i (50 fields inside 25 frames). Check the MASTER FILE you send to broadcast.