Sony A7S III

[noone]

3 hours ago, ajay said:

Are you sure about this? I had heard that it disables eye and tracking AF, but didn't disable AF completely.

PB in the video between your and my post says eye AF is disabled in clearzoom.

[thefactory]

6 hours ago, Hangs4Fun said:

My Sony a9, has had 6 major firmware releases over a 3 year period, and some of those firmware upgrades literally brought it some amazing features and usability (eye AF, animal eye AF, intervalometer, video eye AF, etc, etc..  They do these firmware upgrades based on the processor, sensor, and body capabilities.  

I enjoy the A9 a lot. I would love just one more update on the a9, its never going to happen. PICTURE PROFILES. 

[ajay]

4 hours ago, noone said:

PB in the video between your and my post says eye AF is disabled in clearzoom.

I get that. But just like other Sony cameras using Clear Image Zoom, I would think (and hope) it will do some form of autofocus but w/o eye AF and no tracking.

[Hangs4Fun]

8 hours ago, ajay said:

Crap! That's what I have. Hopefully this will be resolved before I get my camera. Thanks for the info and if you don't mind, please be sure to let us know what you find out as far as a resolution to this. I'm also a PRO Support member. Maybe I will contact them as well.

 

8 hours ago, MeanRevert said:

Good info, thank you.

So any V90 card can handle all the modes including slow mo and All I?

 

The modes that you need CFexpress Type A cards for are:

• XAVC S-I 4K at 120p
• XAVC S-I HD at 240p

But you can still do XAVC S-I 4K 10bit 4:2:2 at 24/30/60P on a V90 card. 

I can't afford the CFexpress Type A cards right now, so I will be doing 4K/120p in either XAVC HS 4K or XAVC S 4K (both have max bitrate of 280Mbps), but my guess is since H.265 can squeeze twice the image quality in the same file as H.264, that I will likely use the new XAVC HS 4K code for 120p (I ALWAYS use 422 ProRes Proxy files for editing any way).  And unless a customer wants to cough up some extra money, I have no plans on doing the above 2 at All-Intra.

VERY interesting thing was I learned there was also a 1,200Mbps  frame rate on the A7SIII (I had only heard 600Mbps till then), was S&Q mode for XAVC S-I 4K at 120P.   The stated Playback speed was 240mbps, but the Write speed was listed as 1,200Mbps (holy crap that's gonna be expensive!!).  I DOUBLE checked with PRO Support that this was not a typo and that everywhere else had published 600Mbps.  I saw the 1,200Mbps on official Support docs in the Zoom session (I may have snapped a couple of photos of the screen with my phone under the visibility of my laptops camera, wink-wink)

What surprised me, was the number of modes and options you could be in where the V90 was an option (many of those had Max bitrates of 550Mbps to 600Mbps). 

[Hangs4Fun]

3 hours ago, thefactory said:

I enjoy the A9 a lot. I would love just one more update on the a9, its never going to happen. PICTURE PROFILES. 

holy crap, IKR!!   NOT gonna happen, over Sony's dead body, lol.   Can you imagine their fastest camera, also having strong video adjustability?

I will be honest with you though, Straight out of the camera, that A9 shoots beautiful 4K footage.  First time I ever felt no need to muck with the settings on the camera.  I usually spend a good bit of time coming up with custom Picture Profiles (when I am going to shoot B roll to go with an FS7ii or FX9, I shoot them against a color checker card like the Passport and scope out the levels of the camera I want to "copy its' colors", then take the B Roll cam (a7Riv, a7iii, a6600, etc) and point at the same card in the same lighting and adjust the colors via the picture profiles until I get the lines to match up as close as possible.  btw, this process takes a loooooooooooooooong time, and you have to go back and forth in the picture profile settings sometimes.  I can see why Andrew charges for those settings.  Any way, once I get them nailed down, I can then shoot with the "color science" of the main camera. 

With the a9, I can't do this obviously, but I still profile it under the same conditions, so I know about how much off it is from the main camera, which makes color correcting a little easier.

I am not concerned that the a7Siii doesn't have "S-Cinetone" colors or the "Venice color science", because I will just make my own picture profile, that essential gives me just that.  NOT to mention, this will be the very first mirrorless where I felt we could actually use S-Log3.  So I'm 100% confident that I will be able to match the colors from the a7Siii with the FX9 or even the Venice (sadly I don't do much with that beautiful beast).

[Hangs4Fun]

3 minutes ago, Hangs4Fun said:

holy crap, IKR!!   NOT gonna happen, over Sony's dead body, lol.   Can you imagine their fastest camera, also having strong video adjustability?

I will be honest with you though, Straight out of the camera, that A9 shoots beautiful 4K footage.  First time I ever felt no need to muck with the settings on the camera.  I usually spend a good bit of time coming up with custom Picture Profiles (when I am going to shoot B roll to go with an FS7ii or FX9, I shoot them against a color checker card like the Passport and scope out the levels of the camera I want to "copy its' colors", then take the B Roll cam (a7Riv, a7iii, a6600, etc) and point at the same card in the same lighting and adjust the colors via the picture profiles until I get the lines to match up as close as possible.  btw, this process takes a loooooooooooooooong time, and you have to go back and forth in the picture profile settings sometimes.  I can see why Andrew charges for those settings.  Any way, once I get them nailed down, I can then shoot with the "color science" of the main camera. 

With the a9, I can't do this obviously, but I still profile it under the same conditions, so I know about how much off it is from the main camera, which makes color correcting a little easier.

I am not concerned that the a7Siii doesn't have "S-Cinetone" colors or the "Venice color science", because I will just make my own picture profile, that essential gives me just that.  NOT to mention, this will be the very first mirrorless where I felt we could actually use S-Log3.  So I'm 100% confident that I will be able to match the colors from the a7Siii with the FX9 or even the Venice (sadly I don't do much with that beautiful beast).

Here is a similar technique that I loosely described above.

For example the below picture profile settings, came from Paul over at "extrashot", he used similar techniques to arrive at these settings for the A7 mark III to get as close to the FX9's s.Cinetone as possible (limited of course due to the 4:2:0 8bit nature of the a7iii's sensor, but close enough for government work, lol):

**A7 Mark III Picture Profile settings to simulate FX9 and s.Cinetone:

Black Level: -10
Gamma: Cine2
Black Gamma: Range Middle, Level -7
Knee: Mode Manual, 100%, Slope 0
Colour Mode: Still
Saturation 0
Color Phase: -1
Colour Depth:
R: +2
G; +1
B: -1
C : 0
M: +1
Y: 0
Detail: Level -7
**to get as close as possible, A7iii is 8bit camera, soooo, not gonna be perfect 😉

If Paul doesn't beat me to it, I will share the settings I come up with color matching the A7Siii with an FX9's  s.Cinetone (I signed up for prioritized shipping from Sony PRO support and had my pre-order confirmation email in hand within the first 10 secs of 10am on 7/28, so I should be one of the first with a production model).

Changes are Paul will beat me to the punch, since he owns an FX9, and I will have to arrange to borrough one.  He uses almost the same exact technique as me, so his results would be pretty much identical.  We both try to do it as scientifical as possible, which is why our results comes out almost the same (but there is still a "gray" area when doing the picture profile adjustments, which is very touchy)

[noone]

8 hours ago, ajay said:

I get that. But just like other Sony cameras using Clear Image Zoom, I would think (and hope) it will do some form of autofocus but w/o eye AF and no tracking.

Agreed.     Maybe it is ONLY eye AF disabled.    

What is this "tracking" thing of which you speak (in an A7s!)?  

Nah, I think I would be very very happy with the A7siii for tracking since its granddad can barely track a seated musician

[ajay]

13 minutes ago, noone said:

What is this "tracking" thing of which you speak (in an A7s!)?  

Nah, I think I would be very very happy with the A7siii for tracking since its granddad can barely track a seated musician

I believe it has the same tracking as the A9, A9II, A7RIV and the newer crop-sensor cameras. Touch-to-track a subject. (Using the touch screen.) I wish the end of September would get here.

[wobba]

9 hours ago, Hangs4Fun said:

Here is a similar technique that I loosely described above.

For example the below picture profile settings, came from Paul over at "extrashot", he used similar techniques to arrive at these settings for the A7 mark III to get as close to the FX9's s.Cinetone as possible (limited of course due to the 4:2:0 8bit nature of the a7iii's sensor, but close enough for government work, lol):

**A7 Mark III Picture Profile settings to simulate FX9 and s.Cinetone:

Black Level: -10
Gamma: Cine2
Black Gamma: Range Middle, Level -7
Knee: Mode Manual, 100%, Slope 0
Colour Mode: Still
Saturation 0
Color Phase: -1
Colour Depth:
R: +2
G; +1
B: -1
C : 0
M: +1
Y: 0
Detail: Level -7
**to get as close as possible, A7iii is 8bit camera, soooo, not gonna be perfect 😉

If Paul doesn't beat me to it, I will share the settings I come up with color matching the A7Siii with an FX9's  s.Cinetone (I signed up for prioritized shipping from Sony PRO support and had my pre-order confirmation email in hand within the first 10 secs of 10am on 7/28, so I should be one of the first with a production model).

Changes are Paul will beat me to the punch, since he owns an FX9, and I will have to arrange to borrough one.  He uses almost the same exact technique as me, so his results would be pretty much identical.  We both try to do it as scientifical as possible, which is why our results comes out almost the same (but there is still a "gray" area when doing the picture profile adjustments, which is very touchy)

Great info. If you don’t mind sharing, I would be interested to also see your A9 settings.

[Hangs4Fun]

4 hours ago, wobba said:

Great info. If you don’t mind sharing, I would be interested to also see your A9 settings.

Believe me, I WISH I could do Picture Profiles on my a9, but unfortunately, the Sony cripple hammer has kept the picture profile options from the a9 series.  So with the a9 it is what it is when it comes out of the camera.  I will say though, that the a9's video quality straight out of camera is pretty dang good (for a 4:2:0 8bit camera)

[wobba]

31 minutes ago, Hangs4Fun said:

Believe me, I WISH I could do Picture Profiles on my a9, but unfortunately, the Sony cripple hammer has kept the picture profile options from the a9 series.  So with the a9 it is what it is when it comes out of the camera.  I will say though, that the a9's video quality straight out of camera is pretty dang good (for a 4:2:0 8bit camera)

Thanks. Good to know. 

[Santoso]

5 hours ago, Hangs4Fun said:

Believe me, I WISH I could do Picture Profiles on my a9, but unfortunately, the Sony cripple hammer has kept the picture profile options from the a9 series.  So with the a9 it is what it is when it comes out of the camera.  I will say though, that the a9's video quality straight out of camera is pretty dang good (for a 4:2:0 8bit camera)

I agree. While playing around with the A7SIII Slog3 footage that has been posted makes me drool, the A9 will give you a fairly malleable image at Standard (or Neutral) -3-3-2. 

[Hangs4Fun]

4 hours ago, Santoso said:

I agree. While playing around with the A7SIII Slog3 footage that has been posted makes me drool, the A9 will give you a fairly malleable image at Standard (or Neutral) -3-3-2. 

yes, agreed.  It's a great photography camera (I primarily got for fast action: sports and BiF), and for other types of photography where an a7iii or other standard mirrorless camera works, the a9 does that in its sleep, its real strength is in fast action especially if your subject is all over the place with lots of distractions around).  I didn't get it for video.  But in preparation for buying the A7Siii, I sold my A7Riii over a year ago thinking I will just use my a9 for video until the A7Siii.  Now, mind you, it had been over 3 years since the A7Sii had come out, so I thought for sure I would be without a proper mirrorless suitable for video (which was my A7Riii).  Dang did Sony take their time on the A7Siii.  I was this close to buying the S1H and some lenses.  The R5 rubbed me the wrong way right from the beginning, the way they pushed it like it was primarily a video camera.  It's basically Canon's version of the A7RIV and should have been pushed as a high res photography camera (with AMAZING BiF capabilities btw) ... oh, and.. it has good video capabilities with occassional 8K options and high quality 4K options. 

Luckily, Sony released the A7Siii, I was about to do something drastic, lol...

I can not wait to take my first 4K/120p footage in 4:2:2 10bit in an All Intra codec (if I can find a single CFExpress Type A card).  I also plan to do some 16bit RAW output to my Ninja V (in 12bit ProRes RAW HQ).  But unless customers are willing to pay for that RAW, my plan is to just use the internal codecs at 4:2:2 All Intra.  Will be the first time I can actually shoot in S-Log3 in a mirrorless AND still push the grade around without it falling apart.

[cpc]

On 8/17/2020 at 12:39 AM, Llaasseerr said:

Just checking out the DR with the bike trail footage. I used the clips showing the sun, since the sensor is clipping. This can be confirmed by looking at the waveform. Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but it seems the Resolve Clip Attributes>default data level on import is incorrect.

Maybe some others chan check this. The Auto setting is mapping to Data levels, but then the max value (the sensor clipping point in this case) seems too low. Setting it to Video levels appears to correct this. The Color Range metadata tag on the clip is full range though, so I can see why it's doing this.

The default "Full" levels max Slog3 value in the clip is 0.87106 which converts to a linear sensor clipping point of 12 when inverting the log curve. So the log max value when the sensor clips is nowhere near 1.0, and considering the Slog3 curve max linear value is 38.42, it's under utilised.

Manually setting to Video levels, the max Slog3 value in the clip is 0.94408 which is much closer to a theoretical max of 1.0 and converts to a linear sensor clipping point of 23.203 when inverting the log curve. As a comparison, the original a7s had a max linear value of 8.43214 so this is an additional 1.5 stops - not too shabby!

If I'm right, then Video levels shows a much fatter image on the waveform monitor.  I can now see the black levels looked a little milky on the default Full levels image, and there's no black level clipping occurring at Video levels which is a telltale sign that it's set incorrectly. Although the shadows are pushed down further and the image is punchier, it's not clipping. It will be good to check this against ProRes RAW clips when they start appearing.

With the middle point mapped as per the specification, the camera simply lacks the highlights latitude to fill all the available s-log3 range. Basically, it clips lower than what s-log3 can handle.

You should still be importing as data levels: this is not a bug, it is expected. Importing as video levels simply stretches the signal, you are importing it wrong and increasing the gamma of the straight portion of the curve (it is no longer the s-log3 curve), thus throwing off any subsequent processing which relies on the curve being correct.

[Hangs4Fun]

20 hours ago, ajay said:

I believe it has the same tracking as the A9, A9II, A7RIV and the newer crop-sensor cameras. Touch-to-track a subject. (Using the touch screen.) I wish the end of September would get here.

 

On 8/18/2020 at 2:47 AM, noone said:

PB in the video between your and my post says eye AF is disabled in clearzoom.

So I asked Sony PRO Support about this and here is the official Sony response:

"The CIZ works in 4k and 1080, AF works in both modes but is wide area only, the touch tracking is disabled while in CIZ"

My guess is this could be resolved in a future firmware upgrade.  Most likely the Active Tracking functions either need increased processed and/or the way they get data (each frame) to determine where the object being tracked is in the frame, then get focus info and set lens focus position to that distance (the A7SIII can do this 120 times per second btw).  With CIZ being a subset of the sensor output, the Active Track may need a new function written to consume this new data feed (each frame of the subset of the sensor output from CIZ).  

Keep in mind, with video, CIZ can be at multiple levels.  So when the algorithms determine what the subject is at 1.1x and then you "zoom" to 1.3x, there is going to have to be some new functions created the determine where the subject is.  They could have some easy lookup tables to convert pixel locations based on which zoom level you are at, but none of that is there yet.

I have not doubt that the dual BIONZ XR processors would be able to do this, and probably will have less to process to support active subject tracking with a smaller frame, but the pixel readout stream that goes through processing needs to be tweaked to work with current active tracking functions or a new function written.  I'm pressing Sony on this, as they could absolutely do this.  And many of us will be using CIZ when shooting video as our "zoom lens".

[Hangs4Fun]

5 minutes ago, cpc said:

With the middle point mapped as per the specification, the camera simply lacks the highlights latitude to fill all the available s-log3 range. Basically, it clips lower than what s-log3 can handle.

You should still be importing as data levels: this is not a bug, it is expected. Importing as video levels simply stretches the signal, you are importing it wrong and increasing the gamma of the straight portion of the curve (it is no longer the s-log3 curve), thus throwing off any subsequent processing which relies on the curve being correct.

What if this is an on-set exposure issue?  I think the assumption being made is that the S-Log3 footage is properly exposed.  If your goal was to protect even the sun rays, then setting exposure levels is critical.

So my main argument here is, we need to know what the exposure settings were when shot to draw conclusions here.  Better to do tests with varying levels done and see if this is really the camera, the NLE, or just the recording conditions not matching the post production goals

[cpc]

11 minutes ago, Hangs4Fun said:

What if this is an on-set exposure issue?  I think the assumption being made is that the S-Log3 footage is properly exposed.  If your goal was to protect even the sun rays, then setting exposure levels is critical.

So my main argument here is, we need to know what the exposure settings were when shot to draw conclusions here.  Better to do tests with varying levels done and see if this is really the camera, the NLE, or just the recording conditions not matching the post production goals

The sun is so bright that you'd need significant underexposure to bring it down to below clip levels (on any camera). And these images don't look underexposed to me. A clipping value of 0.87106 is still very respectable: on the s-log3 curve, this is slightly more than 6 stops above middle gray. With "metadata ISO" cameras like the Alexa the clip point in Log-C moves up with ISOs higher than base, and lower with ISOs lower than base. But on Sony A7s cameras you can't rate lower than base in s-log (well, on the A7s you can't, at least), so this is likely shot at base s-log3 ISO 640.

I any case, the s-log3 curve has a nominal range of around 9 stops below mid gray (usable range obviously significantly lower), so this ties up with the boasted 15 stops of DR in video. You can think of the camera as shooting 10 - log2(1024/ (0.87*1024 - 95)) bit footage in s-log3. That is, as a 9.64 bit camera. 🙂

[Hangs4Fun]

10 minutes ago, cpc said:

The sun is so bright that you'd need significant underexposure to bring it down to below clip levels (on any camera). And these images don't look underexposed to me. A clipping value of 0.87106 is still very respectable: on the s-log3 curve, this is slightly more than 6 stops above middle gray. With "metadata ISO" cameras like the Alexa the clip point in Log-C moves up with ISOs higher than base, and lower with ISOs lower than base. But on Sony A7s cameras you can't rate lower than base in s-log (well, on the A7s you can't, at least), so this is likely shot at base s-log3 ISO 640.

I any case, the s-log3 curve has a nominal range of around 9 stops below mid gray (usable range obviously significantly lower), so this ties up with the boasted 15 stops of DR in video. You can think of the camera as shooting 10 - log2(1024/ (0.87*1024 - 95)) bit footage in s-log3. That is, as a 9.64 bit camera. 🙂

I will take that all day long, if I'm being honest.  I'm so used to crappy 8bit from Sony Mirrorless (or you would say 7.38 bit, lol)  Very cool, I have never calculated the bit range like that before.

[Llaasseerr]

3 hours ago, cpc said:

With the middle point mapped as per the specification, the camera simply lacks the highlights latitude to fill all the available s-log3 range. Basically, it clips lower than what s-log3 can handle.

You should still be importing as data levels: this is not a bug, it is expected. Importing as video levels simply stretches the signal, you are importing it wrong and increasing the gamma of the straight portion of the curve (it is no longer the s-log3 curve), thus throwing off any subsequent processing which relies on the curve being correct.

I know what it does to the log curve if you apply the wrong interpretation, and I would never do that. I'm putting this out there in case the tag is wrong in preproduction. It will be clear when ProRes RAW footage is available to review along with an Slog3 clip.

I realise that it's going to clip quite far below the Slog3 latitude since that was designed for Venice, F65 et al.  But 12 is too low on a curve with a max value of  38.42. I can get a max linear value of 12 shooting HLG on my X-T3.

The "stretched" max value in video levels it's still ~24 which is about half a stop below the Slog3 max, and more like what I would expect. The max value in Slog2 is about 13.75,  so if the DR really taps out at 12 then Sony could have just used that instead of Slog3. And in log, the current max value is 0.87 so this is more like V-logL vs V-log.

 

[Hangs4Fun]

3 minutes ago, Llaasseerr said:

I know what it does to the log curve if you apply the wrong interpretation, and I would never do that. I'm putting this out there in case the tag is wrong in preproduction. It will be clear when ProRes RAW footage is available to review along with an Slog3 clip.

I realise that it's going to clip quite far below the Slog3 latitude since that was designed for Venice, F65 et al.  But 12 is too low on a curve with a max value of  38.42. I can get a max linear value of 12 shooting HLG on my X-T3.

The "stretched" max value in video levels it's still ~24 which is about half a stop below the Slog3 max, and more like what I would expect. The max value in Slog2 is about 13.75,  so if the DR really taps out at 12 then Sony could have just used that instead of Slog3. And in log, the current max value is 0.87 so this is more like V-logL vs V-log.

 

I hope they haven't taken notes from Canon's Cripple hammer.  Would it be expected to get close to 38.42 in that published clip, what was the expectation?

Are you thinking that it is pre-release firmware issues and/or the footage itself?