I spent Sunday hiking around the Ramona Grasslands with a 50 pound camera slung over my shoulder. It was very lumberjack-ish and I have the bruises on my shoulders to prove it. It's too bad that no one makes a good heavy duty back sling for a cinema camera, sort of like a sword holder. I could have used it by mile 3.
The camera was essentially equipped the same as day one, however I got to use my full arsenal of Zeiss prime lenses. Now I understand why nature cinematographers use zoom lenses. Every time I would need to change lenses the little varmints I was trying film would disappear. They quickly and categorically became known in my mind as "those little bastards." Lucky for me there are lots of wild cows and bulls roaming free on the grasslands. Even they would get away from time to time, but mostly the bovine were curious as to why I was carrying around a great big funny looking contraption.
On this day the camera was powered with a Sony NP-970 battery. According to the user manual the camera supports the NP-770, which came with the demo unit, and the higher capacity NP-970. The problem I experienced was that the camera wouldn't recognize the battery charge capacity on the NP-970, but would on the NP-770. I had both batteries with me, but decided to see if this was a firmware bug or a true battery issue. Well... the NP-970 lasted me all day. Perhaps this is, or will be fixed with new firmware.
The other issue that came up continuously is that the camera would lose track of the shutter speed I had manually set. It also wouldn't keep track of individual shutter speeds based on normal, slow, or super slow motion mode. If you cycled through the different shooting modes and had 24p set to 1/48th (for instance) then when I went back to normal 24p mode the shutter speed would be 1/96, 1/100, 1/60...anything but 1/48th.(?) I also found that if I shut the camera off while in one of the slow motion modes that the shutter speed would come up incorrect for normal mode every time. To add to the frustration, the shutter speed would get reset to some other value when I went into slow motion modes. I lost a shot or two because of this need to keep resetting the shutter speed. Again, perhaps this is a matter of a firmware upgrade since this is Sony's demo camera.
Now I completely understand why people were psyched with the included ND filters. I used them all day. All I brought with me is a polarizer, a 2-stop grad ND, and a 1 stop ND. That's a much lighter load than bringing all eight of my filters! The grad pretty much lived in the matte box all day. The polarizer was used quite often too. It definitely helped tame the hazy skies. Every once in a while the mechanism that switched ND filters would get stuck mid-change, but that was always handled with a quick wiggle of the ND lever - Much, much, easier than switching out matte box filters! Excellent feature and a BIG advantage over the FS-100.
The video below is my edit of the Ramona Grasslands footage. Feel free to download the video from Vimeo for closer look at the graded footage without web streaming compression.
Cine4 gamma was used all day because I was mainly concerned with maintaining highlights, which the FS-700 did quite reasonably. With this gamma curve the camera has 5 stops before blowing out. Sometimes the camera couldn't handle the skies, even with a 2 stop grad ND and polarizer, but you can't expect more than 7 stops of highlight retention without a Red Epic in HDRx mode. There was only one shot that was less than acceptable because of the sky blowing out.
Speaking of exposure, I mainly used the optical extension tube and the on-camera LCD to judge exposure throughout the day. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Sometimes the best I could do was set the exposure between the histogram goal posts when I couldn't tell for sure. What I learned is that you can't always trust the on-camera LCD for correct exposure...however, and more importantly, the footage was grade-able to return the correct exposure as long as nothing was clipped. 70% of the shots in the above video have some sort of tweaking to their exposure. Can't tell which ones? Neither can I. This ability to recover exposure and grade footage is a huge advantage over DSLRs. When Sony provides the 12-bit 4k raw upgrade in April this camera will be even better! (albeit heavier too - my poor shoulders)
As far as compression goes, yes, the AVCHD low bit-rate compression did lose a lot of detail with all the natural brush around. In fact, all the footage *required* sharpening in post to bring back some form of detail. Footage without sharpening was noticeably soft. I'll get more into this in the next blog entry, but the codec leaves me a bit less than enthusiastic about the in camera codec quality. Sony should really consider an update that would allow us to shoot Prores HQ directly to the FMU. I also saw aliasing in the super slow motion shots again, such as the horse galloping up the hill. Another user confirmed that he experience aliasing in super slow motion on the FS-700 as well. So if you do use super slow motion shooting on the FS-700 the same rules apply as if you're shooting on a DSLR. Watch out for alias causing items in the shot.
Overall, I was mostly satisfied with my user experience. The controls are a bit fiddly and I did lose a shot or two while trying to adjust the camera (shutter speed wrong again - augh!), but I wouldn't call that my summation of my opinion here. The grade-ability of the footage made up for most of the user experience short comings. Like any camera, the FS-700 has it's own quirks and I'm sure I would produce technically better footage with a bit more experience.
The camera is back in the shop as of Monday morning, so feel free to stop by and check it out this month. Give Salvador or Mike a call if you'd like to demo or rent the camera yourself.
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