Crash course in shooting video on the original A7s?

[newfoundmass]

Yeah, I really can't think of a lot of reasons to film with the A7s over the A7iii. You might do a little better in low light, but it'll be lacking in pretty much every other way. Better rolling shutter, battery life, auto focus, IBIS (vs. None at all), color, less prone to overheating, etc. 

You used to have to really rig the A7s (and the A7sii) up to get the most out of them,  especially when it came to battery life. One of the reason the production company I was working with at the time ended up selling theirs and going with the GH4 was because that, the rolling shutter, and overheating. That low light though, it blew our minds at the time. Low light across the board has improved so much, but 10 years ago it was voodoo magic! 

[bjohn]

6 hours ago, kye said:

With the A7s you'd probably be taking RAW stills?  If so, the colour science doesn't really matter as there's no baked-in look, and you should have robust files with lots of leeway to colour them in post, including any crazy WB issues if you happen to take a shot when a very coloured light happens to be the one illuminating the scene.

Have you got lenses sorted for the two?

Yes, raw stills; I think the only difference is that the A7s only offers compressed raw whereas the A7iii has the option of uncompressed (which I use), but in practice I haven't noticed a difference; if I were shooting landscapes I might see a difference but for concert and dance photography it hasn't been an issue for me. I've taken thousands of raw photos at events like this with my A7s and have been happy with the results. When the lighting is really poor there's always the option to convert to B&W, which I often do.

One big advantage of the A7s for stills is that I can take more than 1,000 photos and still have plenty of room on my SD card, whereas the same-size card on my A7iii will be close to full at 1,000 photos. And stills are much less demanding on the battery; I shot 1,200 photos at a wedding reception on my A7s earlier this month and the battery wasn't even halfway drained by the end. Video drains the A7s battery quickly; it looks like I'd have no more than 20-25 minutes. Sony made a supplemental battery grip for the A7s but I think on the A7iii I'll be able to get by with the internal battery for the short amount of video I'll be shooting.

I was planning to use my rangefinder lenses for the stills, which is what I typically use at concerts and dances for their more "magical" rendering and bokeh; I have a good selection of fast M- and LTM-mount lenses, a few of which also have unclicked aperture rings, and all but the 28mm perform well on Sony. The only problem, though, is that I don't have ND filters for most of those lenses, and step-up rings aren't even available for some of the vintage ones because their filter threads are in long-obsolete sizes. So I might end up using my rangefinder lenses only for the photos (I generally won't need ND for those) and my Minolta Rokkor lenses for video; I have step-up rings and ND filters for all my Rokkor lenses. I also have one e-mount f0.95 lens that I sometimes use when taking photos at dances, and can use my ND filters on that as well so will bring it along.

[bjohn]

7 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

Yeah, I really can't think of a lot of reasons to film with the A7s over the A7iii. You might do a little better in low light, but it'll be lacking in pretty much every other way.

Based on the ISO sensitivity charts I've seen and my own experience I think the A7iii is just as good in low light as the A7s except at the very highest ISOs which I'd never use anyway. So using the A7iii would be a win regardless. The "larger pixels = better low-light performance" mantra is largely a myth, as explained well in a video that I don't think I can link to here because it's on DPReview.

I could simplify things even more and use the A7iii for both video and photos, saving video to one card and photos to the other, but I'd have to remember to turn off my picture profile at the end of each video shoot before switching to stills, because it has been shown by Gerald Undone and others that picture profiles can affect raw stills files. I suppose I could set up one of the custom dial buttons for video and one for stills, but I have both of my custom dial buttons set up on the A7iii already for different stills shooting scenarios and I'd rather not change them since I don't plan to shoot much video on that camera in the future.

[bjohn]

My larger problem here is that I'm running out of time: this gig is next weekend, I have a very busy week ahead at work, and we'll be out several nights this week (one night I'll be shooting photos at a concert in a dark jazz club, so can at least try shooting some video to see how that works in low light).

There's a lot to learn about shooting video on the A7iii; I've watched a few tutorials and it seems I need to use different picture profiles for low light vs. daytime, and I won't have much time to test. So if I'm not feeling confident by Friday I'll just stick with the Micro Cinema camera, put my fastest lenses on it (I do have an f1.4 lens for example), and try to find the best-lit spots for any video of the evening dances; the daytime shots won't be a problem. I'll have my Sony for photos and can take a few low-light videos with it, but they'll be at 4k so I'll need to supersize the BMMCC timeline to match if I end up needing to use that footage.

[bjohn]

I settled on using the A7iii for video and will leave my Blackmagic cams at home. I did a lot of tests with the Sony, including one at a concert Tuesday night, all of which came out better than I expected.

Now my only quandary is lenses. Ideally I'd shoot all the video on one lens for consistency/continuity, but I only have one zoom, the Tokina ATX Pro 28-70 f2.6-2.8 (the Angénieux design) and while I love it in daylight I've been less than thrilled with the images I get from it at concerts. I have that lens in Nikon mount, and the other Nikon mount lens I have is the Zeiss ZF.2 Distagon 35mm/1.4, which is an amazing lens but won't match well with the Tokina. On the rangefinder prime side I have three Sonnar lenses (50mm, 73mm, and 105mm) but nothing wider than 35mm.

The first dance is tonight, but the headline acts are tomorrow night so I'll be able to try out a few different lens strategies tonight to see what works best in this location and under this lighting.

[newfoundmass]

Keep us posted! 

[bjohn]

On 8/26/2023 at 12:22 AM, newfoundmass said:

Keep us posted! 

It worked out okay, but I think I would have done a better job with the Blackmagic cameras I have been using for years. The Sony did do well in low light, although I was mainly at around ISO 3200 in the darker areas, occasionally up to ISO 10,000. The lighting was very challenging; I used the Cine Meter II app on my phone to measure reflected colour temperature and dialed it in manually on the Sony to get me close. We'll see how the video turns out after I edit and do some minor color grading; i'm hoping I'll be pleasantly surprised. I shot it all at 4K except for the slow-motion clips, which can only be shot in 1080p, and I think I'll just do a 1080p timeline and put the 4K clips into it so I can zoom in and pan them if necessary.

[bjohn]

Here's the "souvenir" video I put together for the participants; I'll also do a more fast-paced 1-minute promo version later this year. Shot on Sony A7iii with Tokina 28-70 2.6-2.8 zoom (the Angénieux design) and Zeiss 35/1.4 ZF2. I learned a lot from this experience; I only had about a week to get used to shooting video on the Sony and made lots of beginner mistakes the first night; the second day was better. Focusing manually on dancers in a dark environment is an exercise in futility so I mostly didn't bother; I set a focus point and let the dancers drift in and out. I occasionally shot wide open so I could use lower ISOs but mostly stayed around f4 indoors to get more depth of field. Shot in 4K but edited in a 1080p timeline so I could crop and zoom if needed but I mostly didn't need to; the obligatory slow-motion shots were at 1080p since the A7iii can't shoot those in 4K anyway.

I recorded the audio separately with omni mics on the balcony above the musicians, to capture the ambience, but the camera's own mics were practically usable on their own and I was tempted to just use the camera audio (in the end I used the separately recorded audio and synced by waveform). I didn't spend much time on grading and there are a number of things I'll fix when I have time (including pulling down some highlights); the lighting was challenging and the dancers were bathed in blue-yellow light.
 

 

[kye]

31 minutes ago, bjohn said:

Here's the "souvenir" video I put together for the participants; I'll also do a more fast-paced 1-minute promo version later this year. Shot on Sony A7iii with Tokina 28-70 2.6-2.8 zoom (the Angénieux design) and Zeiss 35/1.4 ZF2. I learned a lot from this experience; I only had about a week to get used to shooting video on the Sony and made lots of beginner mistakes the first night; the second day was better. Focusing manually on dancers in a dark environment is an exercise in futility so I mostly didn't bother; I set a focus point and let the dancers drift in and out. I occasionally shot wide open so I could use lower ISOs but mostly stayed around f4 indoors to get more depth of field. Shot in 4K but edited in a 1080p timeline so I could crop and zoom if needed but I mostly didn't need to; the obligatory slow-motion shots were at 1080p since the A7iii can't shoot those in 4K anyway.

I recorded the audio separately with omni mics on the balcony above the musicians, to capture the ambience, but the camera's own mics were practically usable on their own and I was tempted to just use the camera audio (in the end I used the separately recorded audio and synced by waveform). I didn't spend much time on grading and there are a number of things I'll fix when I have time (including pulling down some highlights); the lighting was challenging and the dancers were bathed in blue-yellow light.

Nice work!

Video looked pretty clean to me, and colours etc seemed nicely rendered too, considering the crazily coloured lighting.  I didn't get any odd impressions about what was in focus and what wasn't, so that seemed fine too.

When you go the promo edit I would suggest adding a bit of sharpening on the slow-mo shots to even them out a bit, but I'm seriously nit-picking there.  I don't know what NLE you're editing / colour-grading in but if you want to even out the parts with very blue lighting a bit then I have a bunch of cool tricks I've picked up that I'm happy to share, just ask.

[bjohn]

8 minutes ago, kye said:

I don't know what NLE you're editing / colour-grading in but if you want to even out the parts with very blue lighting a bit then I have a bunch of cool tricks I've picked up that I'm happy to share, just ask.

Happy for any advice, thanks! And good point on sharpening the slow-mo; I added midtone detail in the other clips but probably forgot to do that in the slow-mo, which I added at the last minute (I'm pretty resistant to slow mo as it's so overused). I'm using the latest version of Resolve; I use Resolve Colour Management.

[kye]

1 minute ago, bjohn said:

Happy for any advice, thanks! And good point on sharpening the slow-mo; I added midtone detail in the other clips but probably forgot to do that in the slow-mo, which I added at the last minute (I'm pretty resistant to slow mo as it's so overused). I'm using the latest version of Resolve; I use Resolve Colour Management.

Cool, Resolve is the most powerful with really serious adjustments.  

Probably the biggest priority in all this is not breaking the image, so I suggest not trying to use any qualifiers or even any of the Hue Vs curves.  Beyond just normal grading by adjusting WB/contrast/sat couple of tricks come to mind:

• If you increase the saturation and then shift the WB warmer then you can keep the blues roughly where they are but make the neutral and warmer areas much more warm, which will give your skin tones a bit more separation.
• Use the 3x3 matrix and adjust your WB by adding some of your blue channel (which you have a lot of!) into the Red channel (and a little into the Green too).  By putting more of these in you'll push the image warmer, and by adjusting the ratio of red to green you can control where the skin tones end up (which is the most important thing).  The goal isn't to make neutral skin tones of course, but probably to create some more variation in the colours in the image.  You might have to add saturation after this 3x3 as it will lower the overall perceived saturation, and keeping the strong blues will probably look really good.

If you run into any more serious issues let me know, this is just scratching the surface of what is possible.

[bjohn]

12 minutes ago, kye said:

Probably the biggest priority in all this is not breaking the image, so I suggest not trying to use any qualifiers or even any of the Hue Vs curves.

I only have experience grading footage from the Blackmagic OG Pocket and BMMCC, either ProRes HQ or compressed raw, and the 8-bit Sony H265 is new territory for me; I barely touched it as I assumed I'd have very little latitude compared with what I'm used to. But I can push it more than I thought so I'll spend some time experimenting with the strategies you described.

For next time, I'm on the fence about what to use. I might have been able to get by with my two Micro Cinema Cameras as long as I stayed near the stage where the lighting was good, and in daylight I much prefer them over the Sony for video. Having two cameras would make my job easier: I can set one up on a tripod and aim it at the dancers, and use the other on a monopod or steadicam for the musicians so I can make more cuts between them. But the nice thing about traditional music is that it's repetitive, so I was able to simulate two-camera work just by grabbing footage from later in the clip where the tune repeated.

If I end up doing more of this I may consider getting a Sigma fp, which would allow me to use all the lenses I use on my Sony (all are adapted, no e-mount) with the added cost of a few adaptors, or else the BMD Pocket 4K or one of the Panasonic MFT cameras, as my video/cinema lenses are all MFT or PL mount.

[kye]

16 hours ago, bjohn said:

I only have experience grading footage from the Blackmagic OG Pocket and BMMCC, either ProRes HQ or compressed raw, and the 8-bit Sony H265 is new territory for me; I barely touched it as I assumed I'd have very little latitude compared with what I'm used to. But I can push it more than I thought so I'll spend some time experimenting with the strategies you described.

For next time, I'm on the fence about what to use. I might have been able to get by with my two Micro Cinema Cameras as long as I stayed near the stage where the lighting was good, and in daylight I much prefer them over the Sony for video. Having two cameras would make my job easier: I can set one up on a tripod and aim it at the dancers, and use the other on a monopod or steadicam for the musicians so I can make more cuts between them. But the nice thing about traditional music is that it's repetitive, so I was able to simulate two-camera work just by grabbing footage from later in the clip where the tune repeated.

If I end up doing more of this I may consider getting a Sigma fp, which would allow me to use all the lenses I use on my Sony (all are adapted, no e-mount) with the added cost of a few adaptors, or else the BMD Pocket 4K or one of the Panasonic MFT cameras, as my video/cinema lenses are all MFT or PL mount.

I recently posted about the benefits of trying to push your image as much as possible in this thread, and I this is a good strategy for you here.

I'd suggest:

• Shoot a side-by-side test between the Sony and the BM cameras in increasingly low lighting conditions so you can see how far each is capable of going into low-light conditions
• Grade the side-by-side footage as hard as you can, pushing as much contrast, saturation, and pushing and pulling it as hard as you can
• Grade each to match the other, seeing what is practical in matching them, and this will also reveal the little nuances of each of them that won't be obvious when you're just grading creatively

This will enable you to understand the relative strengths of each, will push you to learn more about colour grading (over the years I've been able to learn how to push things further and further, which gives me more freedom in post to create whatever looks I want).  

The Sigma FP is a great camera, if a little finicky to use and with brutal data-rates for the RAW codecs.  I was seriously considering it for some time and the low-light is quite impressive.

[bjohn]

I got asked to do video (and photos) again at this event this coming summer, and since I really don't like shooting video on my Sony I decided to test the limits of my Blackmagic OG Pocket (which by extension would test the limits of my two BMMCCs) by bringing it to a very dark jazz club where I frequently take photos for some young musicians in town. When I shoot photos at this place they are usually at ISO 16,000 or 20,000, far beyond the limits of the OG BMPCC. But I did some test shots in our basement and it seemed like I might be able to get something. I used the lowest frame rate (23.976), set the shutter angle to 270 degrees, shot CDNG raw, and set the ISO to 1,600 for exposure purposes. I already had white balance readings from the photos I'd taken there previously, so I set that in advance. I used my SLR Magic 10mm Hyperprime, wide open, where it is quite soft and dreamy, and for kicks I added a star filter.

I wanted a handheld look so I used a Zacuto Marauder Mini as a brace, along with a Zacuto viewfinder that provided additional stabilization as it allowed me to press the viewfinder against my face. What I didn't count on was that the viewfinder fogged up at one point and I could barely see with it so I had to take it off and just look at that little LCD screen; it was hard to see whether anything was in focus as focus peaking was barely visible. I shot some footage from the front during the sound check, and asked when that same song would come up during the set. Just before that song came up I went to the back of the performance space so I could shoot from behind the musicians. What I didn't count on was that the actual performance of that song was a bit faster than how they played it at the sound check, so I couldn't align the video shot from the front perfectly with the audio. For the audio I used a Sound Devices MixPre6 with a stereo pair of Line Audio CM3 mics.

I boosted the exposure by a couple of stops in Resolve, brought down the gain a little, adjusted contrast, saturation, and mid-tone detail, and that was it. The resulting footage was noisy, of course. For Instagram I didn't even bother with noise reduction as the noise wasn't very noticeable when viewed on a phone. For Vimeo I applied NR to each clip in Resolve, which softened the image quite a bit (and the shots of the drummer, who was completely in the dark, are too plastic-looking for my taste; I could have backed off the NR there). Overall, for a quick test I'm happy enough with this and I'll use my BMD cameras for the dance this summer; this jazz club is quite a bit darker than the hall where the dancers will be.

 

[kye]

2 hours ago, bjohn said:

I got asked to do video (and photos) again at this event this coming summer, and since I really don't like shooting video on my Sony I decided to test the limits of my Blackmagic OG Pocket (which by extension would test the limits of my two BMMCCs) by bringing it to a very dark jazz club where I frequently take photos for some young musicians in town. When I shoot photos at this place they are usually at ISO 16,000 or 20,000, far beyond the limits of the OG BMPCC. But I did some test shots in our basement and it seemed like I might be able to get something. I used the lowest frame rate (23.976), set the shutter angle to 270 degrees, shot CDNG raw, and set the ISO to 1,600 for exposure purposes. I already had white balance readings from the photos I'd taken there previously, so I set that in advance. I used my SLR Magic 10mm Hyperprime, wide open, where it is quite soft and dreamy, and for kicks I added a star filter.

I wanted a handheld look so I used a Zacuto Marauder Mini as a brace, along with a Zacuto viewfinder that provided additional stabilization as it allowed me to press the viewfinder against my face. What I didn't count on was that the viewfinder fogged up at one point and I could barely see with it so I had to take it off and just look at that little LCD screen; it was hard to see whether anything was in focus as focus peaking was barely visible. I shot some footage from the front during the sound check, and asked when that same song would come up during the set. Just before that song came up I went to the back of the performance space so I could shoot from behind the musicians. What I didn't count on was that the actual performance of that song was a bit faster than how they played it at the sound check, so I couldn't align the video shot from the front perfectly with the audio. For the audio I used a Sound Devices MixPre6 with a stereo pair of Line Audio CM3 mics.

I boosted the exposure by a couple of stops in Resolve, brought down the gain a little, adjusted contrast, saturation, and mid-tone detail, and that was it. The resulting footage was noisy, of course. For Instagram I didn't even bother with noise reduction as the noise wasn't very noticeable when viewed on a phone. For Vimeo I applied NR to each clip in Resolve, which softened the image quite a bit (and the shots of the drummer, who was completely in the dark, are too plastic-looking for my taste; I could have backed off the NR there). Overall, for a quick test I'm happy enough with this and I'll use my BMD cameras for the dance this summer; this jazz club is quite a bit darker than the hall where the dancers will be.

 

Nice work, especially given the challenging conditions!

The colours look nice though - in low light most colour rendering turns to muck but these colours are strong and pleasant.  You could have boosted the saturation and contrast IMHO, and even lowering the exposure to the point where the shadows are crushed would be fine.  Since the DR of cameras started climbing higher people became afraid to clip the blacks, even of things that probably looked black in real life, which is a shame as professional productions will do it and it creates a really strong look.

It might be worth doing some testing to see which combinations give the sharpest images.  For example, if you had a stop more light then would you be better off lowering the ISO to 800 and keeping the lens wide open, or stopping down a stop and leaving the ISO at 1600, or getting a brighter image in post?  What about if you have two more stops?  These are the kind of tests I wish I had done when I'm looking at my footage and wishing I'd done it differently.

[kye]

Also, if you've got some budget then the new BM Micro Studio Camera 4K has dual native ISO, which could radically improve the footage and lens options in conditions like these.

Also, also, if you have a few BM cameras, maybe hiding them around the place would give you a few more angles to work with in post?  If you don't have other fast lenses then maybe you could go down to 12fps with a 360 shutter to have a special effect angle with 1.5 or so more stops of exposure.  If such an angle was static then the extreme motion blur of the shot wouldn't be so disorientating.  

Music videos is a place where there's huge creative license, so don't be afraid to lean into the challenges and create a strong look 🙂 

[bjohn]

Thanks! I actually did try to crush the blacks, mainly to keep noise down but also because like you I see no reason to reveal detail in shadows that isn't helpful to the image or wasn't visible at the venue (and believe me, not much was visible..this place is really, really dark!).

And I do have my eye on the new Micro studio G2; I want to see if anything else is announced at NAB (unlikely but possible) before I pull the trigger, but it would be a nice addition. I'll try playing with boosting the saturation and contrast even more than I already did (I boosted saturation to 60 percent already; I'll try 70 or 75). Exposed at 1600 this was already quite underexposed and I had to boost exposure by at least 2-3 stops just to be able to see much in the footage.