I was recently invited to talk about 4K at a Sony event in Myanmar. Rather than just standing up and talking I always like to use practical demonstrations of the things I am talking about. So for this particular workshop I decided to go to one of the local landmarks the day before the event, shoot it in 4K, edit that footage and then grade it in order to produce a short 4K film. The object being to prove that Sony’s 4K raw is not something to be afraid of. It’s actually quite manageable to work with, even with just a laptop.

Having just flown in to Myanmar from a workshop in Vietnam, I was travelling light in order to keep my excess baggage charges to a minimum and to avoid too much aggravation at customs. In total I had about 35kg of luggage including enough clothes for two weeks on the road.

My very minimal equipment for this mini project comprised of a Sony PMW-F5 camera with AXS-R5 recorder. I used an MTF FZ to Nikon lens adapter and a Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 DSLR lens. The tripod was the excellent Miller Solo with a Compass 15 head. Power came from a couple of Lith 150Wh batteries. A really basic shooting kit but one that can produce remarkably good results. The weakest part of the kit is the lens, I really could have done with a wider lens and the Sigma is prone to flare, so I’m open to suggestions for a better budget zoom lens.

The shoot was surprisingly easy. I’ve heard many stories of Myanmar (Burma) being a closed country, but I had no issues shooting at the temple or around the city of Yangon other than curious onlookers as a large camera like the F5 is a rare sight for the locals.

I shot in 4K raw, I love the post production flexibility that the raw footage brings. In order to keep image noise to a minimum and also to keep exposure easy I used a MLUT  (Lut 2) and 640 EI ISO. I know that when I shoot at 640 EI and use 100% zebras that I can expose nice and bright in the viewfinder and just keep an eye out for zebras just starting to appear. With the F5 at 640 EI, 100% zebras will show just a little before clipping, so as long as you only have the very tiniest amount of zebra on your brightest highlights your exposure will be fine, nice and bright but not clipped.

During the day I spent a couple of hours at the temple and then another hour at the temple in the evening. In the YouTube video you will also see a time-lapse shot. This was done after the workshop and was not included in the original edit.

Once back at the hotel the first stage was to transfer everything from the AXS card to a hard drive. For my travel shoots I use Seagate 2TB USB 3 drives. These are 3.5″ drives so require mains power, 2.5″ drives are not really fast enough for 4K raw editing. My hotel bedroom had one power socket on one side of the room and another on the other side of the room. So with the AXS-CR1 card reader plugged into one and the hard drive into the other I had to sit on the floor in the middle of the room with my laptop running on it’s battery while I transferred the files, about an hours worth of clips. This took about 40 minutes.

Once the clips were on the hard drive I could begin the edit. I could have used the XDCAM HD files from the camera as proxies for the edit, but I find it just as easy to use the raw files. My laptop is an off-the-shelf 15″ Retina MacBook Pro with 8GB of ram. I use Adobe Premiere CC with Sony’s raw plugin for the edit. One thing I have found necessary is to re-boot the computer before editing the raw files. I find Premiere more stable if I do this.

To edit Sony’s 4K raw I use one of the Sony 4K raw presets that get installed when you add the Sony raw plugin. The other thing I have to do is to drop the resolution of the clip viewer and timeline viewer windows to 1/4. This really isn’t a big deal as 1/4 of 4K is HD and when just using the laptops screen I’m not viewing the small viewer windows at a very high resolution anyway. Editing the 4K raw is smooth and painless. Dissolves and effects can be a little jumpy as you try to pull 2 streams of 4K of the single hard drive, but for cuts only or a simple edit it’s really not a problem.

Once I’m happy with the picture cut I export an AAF file from Adobe Premiere. I then close Premiere and start DaVinci Resolve. I use the full paid version as I often want to export in 4K. The free Lite version will happily edit and grade Sony’s 4K raw, but you can only export at up to HD resolution.

Initially I set my project setting to HD as this gives smoother playback. I then open the AAF file that I saved in Premiere. Resolve will ask for a location to search for the clips, so just navigate to the parent folder of the directory where your clips are stored and click “search”. After a short wait your Premiere edit will open in a timeline in Resolve. Now you can go to the “Color” room in Resolve to grade your footage. If your using a low power system like a laptop you may want to go to the project settings and under the raw settings, choose “Sony Raw” and set the De-Bayer to half or quarter. This will help make playback smoother and faster but sacrifices a little image quality. Don’t worry though, we can force Resolve to do a full resolution De-Bayer when we are ready to export the graded clips.

I’m not going to teach you how to grade here. I’m not a colourist, fortunately resolve is pretty straight forward and I can now quickly create a look, save that look and apply it to multiple clips and then go back and tweak and refine the grade where needed, perhaps adding secondary corrections here and there. For the Shwe Dagon video there were only a couple of shots where I used secondaries, these included shots with dark interiors. The overall grade was pretty straight forward.

Once I was happy with the look of the shots I went to the project settings and changed the project resolution back to 4K.  I then used the “deliver” room in Resolve to export the clips. To keep life simple I exported the grade as individual clips with the same file names as the original clips using 4K ProRes HQ to a new folder on my USB 3 hard drive. I also check the “force full resolution debayer” check box to make sure that the quality of the renders is as good as it can be. Rendering the files from Resolve on my MacBook is not a real time process. I get around 5 frames per second, so a minute of footage takes about 5 or 6 minutes. The Shwe Dagon video is a little over 4 minutes so rendering out the graded shots took about half an hour.

Once the render in resolve is completed I then exit Resolve and go back to Premiere. In between I re-boot the laptop. Back in the original edit project I simply import the resolve render files and swap the raw clips in the timeline with the graded clips. I then add any titles or other effects in Premiere before finally exporting the finished piece in the codecs I need using Adobe’s media encoder. For YouTube I export the clips as 4K .mp4 files with a bit rate of 50-75Mb/s.

It really is possible to edit and grade Sony’s 4K raw on a laptop. It’s not particularly painful to do. I wouldn’t want to do a long or complex project this way, but for short simple projects it’s really not a big deal. If you get a BlackMagic thunderbolt MiniMonitor box you can use any HDMI equipped TV as an external monitor. Sony’s 4K raw is easy to work with, the biggest headache is simply the size of the files. At 500GB per hour at 24/25fps there’s a lot of data to manage, but this is no more than uncompressed RGB HD. In the office I have a workstation with a pair of NVIDIA GTX570 graphics cards, these graphics cards give me enough video processing power to work with 4K raw at full resolution in real time.

I’m currently sitting in the airport lounge at Bangkok airport, on my way to Taiwan for a training event tomorrow (teaching local camera operators to become trainers). So I thought I’d take a few minutes to catch up on things.

The big news is the release of the firmware version 2.0 for Sony’s F5 and F55 cameras. All I can say is wow! A huge number of new features, way to many to list here. Of course the biggie is 240fps super slow-mo 2K raw. Also we get XAVC high speed at up to 120fps (eventually this will go up to 180 fps). There’s the ability to use XQD media which is a fair bit cheaper than SxS and a great new focus tool. The focus assist mode provides you with a “sharpness” bar graph that you can use to check the focus of objects in the center of the field of view. It’s much more precise than peaking and a really great tool to have on a 4K camera. For exposure there is now a very clear waveform monitor display as well as a histogram. If you have the OLED EVF then there is also the addition of false color (although the EVF has to go back to Sony for an update to enable this).

The Audio control button for the side LCD now works and you get easy, direct access to all the major audio functions. In addition you can now change the EI gain from the side LCD. All 4 HDSDI outs now work together giving you two clean HDSDI outs plus two with overlays. Furthermore S-Log2 has been added as a new Look Up Table when shootin in EI mode (don’t forget  you also get S-Log2 out of the AUX HDSDI on the R5 anyway, one way of having 709 + S-Log together). You can also now get standard definition out of SDI 3/4 and the Test out.

For the DiT’s out there there is now a user gamma page where you can roll your own gamma curve, although I have not had time to play with this function yet.

All in all this is a massive update for these cameras and really transforms the camera (not that is was bad before hand). All I need now is to get the new 2K Optical Low Pass Filter. You can download the update files from here:

PMW-F55 V2 Update.

PMW-F5 V2 Update.

AXS-R5 V2 Update.

Do note that you must do an “All Reset” immediately after the update and this update cannot be rolled back!

Last week I was in Yangon, Myanmar running some short half day workshops on Sony cameras. We had about 200 people through the workshops over a couple of days. In between I was able to go out and shoot the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in 4K. It’s a beautiful place, covered in gold bars that sparkle in the sun and diamonds that refract the light from the lights at night into a myriad of colors. I did a quick edit in Myanmar to show at the workshops, but as soon as I get home I’ll finish it off and get it up on to YouTube in 4K. It looks fantastic. A big thank you from me to the team at TMW Enterprises for looking after me so well.

Before that I was in Vietnam running a 3 day workshop for Saigon Film School. What a great bunch. Had a really good time and the 3 short films that the students produced over the course of the workshop all look great. Nice to see such enthusiasm and nice to see many of the techniques I taught put to good use in the films. I hope to go back in the new year to do something even bigger, but only if the faculty staff promise not to get me quite so drunk with “bottoms up” giant glasses of wine at the after school party.

Coming up: I’m preparing some articles on the difference between “Scene Referred” and “Display Referred” shooting and workflows. This is very relevant to anyone shooting raw or looking at implementing an ACES workflow. Also a back to basics tutorial on getting the very best from a lens, whether thats a built in zoom or a prime lens. These should go online in the next week. After that I have a big TV commercial shoot.

Just a brief update from IBC. Firmware version 2.0 will be released at the end of September and will include the high speed raw shooting modes, 2K at up to 240fps. In addition there will be the addition of waveform, vectorscope and histogram.

The Audio button and File bottom on the side panel will be become active. The audio button adding 2 pages of Audio control functions including quick switching for each channel between manual and auto as well as manual level control via the large menu knob. The file button gives quick access to load and save a number of “all files” so you can quickly switch between different camera setups.

Further new features are full support for the Fujinon Cabrio lens (the lens will need a firmware update too) with zoom control and rec start/stop. Support for Sony’s new LA-FZB1 (5000 Euro approx) and FZB2 (9000 Euro approx) lens adapters for B4 lenses.

This is a very significant update for the cameras and includes a lot of other smaller new features.

When shooting 2K the camera uses the full sensor, but it is read in a different way, one that create larger “virtual” pixels (my words, not Sony’s). This means that as the sensor is now operating as a 2K sensor that the factory fitted 4K optical low pass filter (OLPF) is not optimum for controlling aliasing and moire. Sony will be offering (for sale) a drop in replacement 2K OLPF. The 2K OLPF will control aliasing and moire at 2K as well as providing a softer look at 4K for those wanting this. It is almost essential for the 2K high speed modes and gives a smoother look at 4K that works well for beauty, cosmetic, period drama and similar projects. I could not get a price for the 2K OLPF but I have been assured that it will be affordable (even for me and my small budget).

Version 3 Firmware will be released at the end of year, probably a little after Christmas. Version 3 will add the compressed XAVC high speed modes as well as a new feature which is a 2K super 16mm crop mode. The S16 crop mode will allow you to use S16 PL mount lenses or B4 zoom lenses using the MTF FZ-B4 adapter without the 2x extender and only a 0.3 stop light loss. Also included will be AES/EBU digital audio and other features not listed here.

IBC is still in full swing and I’m very busy at the show, but I managed to spend a bit of time with the Z100 today. I was able to compare it with some of the other cameras on the camera set for comparison, but this is a very crude first look at a camera running beta firmware and picture settings. So it may not 100% represent the final product, but I do expect it to be pretty close.

Having played with the Z100 now, I have to say I am pleasantly impressed. It is not a sensitive as the PMW200 or an EX1, I estimate it’s about 1.5 stops less sensitive at 0db. But it is remarkably noise free with slightly less noise than a PMW-200 at 0db. Even at +9bd the (which brings it back up to similar sensitivity to a PMW-200/EX1 at 0db) the noise is not too bad. Fast pans at +9 or +12db will reveal some image smear due to the 3D noise reduction having to work harder, but it’s not too bad and usable for most applications.

I thought it would be worse than this. There must be a lot of noise reduction and processing taking place to produce this clean image, but overall the NR is very transparent and well executed. I estimate dynamic range at about 10 stops, maybe a little more but certainly nowhere near the 14 stops you can get from a camera like the F5 or FS700 in raw mode. .The PMW-300 on the Sony booth is showing more dynamic range than the Z100. I did expect this due to the small pixel size. The standard 709 gamma curve with knee works quite well. The Cinematone gammas don’t bring any more dynamic range as far as I can tell, but the highlight roll off is more pleasing and a little more natural looking with the Cinematone gammas.

My biggest reservation is focussing the camera with the built in viewfinder or LCD. The rear finder is really not up to the task of focussing for 4K. The LCD panel is better, but with no magnifier or monocular your going to have to have damn good close up eyesight to be able to use it for accurate focus at 4K. This is not an issue unique to this camera, as no camera I know of has a viewfinder better than 1080P and most are only 720P or 1/4HD (960×540 which is what I believe the Z100 is). But not having a magnifier makes this even worse than most. So, your almost certainly going to have to rely on autofocus to get the focus spot on in many situations. Fortunately the autofocus is fast and accurate. I think with these smaller cameras the use of autofocus will be common even for us old “I never use autofocus” operators, just as autofocus is now normal even for professional photographers. There is a good colored peaking function that works well and the deeper DoF from the small sensor does mean that focus errors are not quite as telling as on a large sensor camera. But even so the LCD, for me at least is far from ideal for good focus at 4K. I think your going to need to either add a 3rd part loupe or use and external finder such as the Alphatron with focus magnification.

Build quality is good, the camera feels very solid yet lightweight, even with a high capacity battery it is comfortably under 3kg. It uses the very common NP-F type batteries. Minor gripes are that the shoe on the handle in front of the LCD means that if you have a large light or radio mic attached to the shoe you can’t open and close the LCD panel.

The menu system is lifted straight from the PMW-F5 and F55 and most of the menu pages are very similar. Scene file settings are quite comprehensive and there is a lot of scope for fine tuning the pictures with matrix, detail and gamma settings. However as I said, no extended dynamic range Cinegammas or Hypergammas but you can adjust the knee and black gamma to fine tune your contrast range and dynamic range.

Overall, it’s better than I expected. The 4K images are sharp and clear, not overly sharpened and they look quite natural. At 0db the noise levels are very low and the image is quite clean, but sensitivity is lower than we expect from a modern HD camera (no big surprise). Dynamic range is also a little lower than you can get from a good 1/2″ camera but not significantly so. I think Sony have done a good job of squeezing as much as they can from this small size sensor with very small pixels. The 20x zoom seems to stay nice and sharp across the zoom range, even out in the corners. As an F5 owner there have been many occasions when I have longed for a sharp 20x zoom that I can use when shooting 4K. That’s probably something I’ll never be able to afford for my F5, but the Z100 opens up the possibility of having that wide zoom range and 4K. Providing the scene isn’t too dark or too contrasty the Z100 would allow me to get those shot for a lot, lot, lot less money than very big, very heavy PL mount zoom.

If your going to IBC and you have a FS700, take it with you. Sony are offering a drop in update service at IBC. Take your camera to the Sony booth and they will perform the FS700 V3 firmware update, while you wait and for free.

Below is a little compilation of 4K clips shot with the FS700. Shot over a couple of very nice summer days the shots really show the incredible dynamic range available when you shoot linear raw. Linear raw, also know as “linear light” or “scene referred” captures the light coming from the scene exactly as it is. That is without any gamma. Gamma mimics the way out own visual system works and is used to save data by compressing highlights. But the light in the real world is not actually like this, it’s linear (it’s just we don’t perceive it that way). Linear raw provides amazing contrast in both the shadows and highlights, so grades beautifully.

One issue however is that when your capturing such a big dynamic range (some of the shots have in excess of 12 stops) but showing it on conventional monitors that can only show at best 10 stops (about 8 stops for LCD, 10 for OLED) the image will look flat if you try to keep all of the original range. So sometimes, even though it might not actually be over exposed, you still need to allow your highlights to blow out for the pictur to look natural or real. I find grading shots with big dynamic ranges quite a challenge. The shots on the river with brilliant white boats under dark trees were tough to get right, but you can really see the dynamic range where I’ve been able to pull meaningful picture information out of the deepest shadows while still keeping clouds in the bright blue sky.

The 12 bit raw from the FS700 is remarkably good. I do feel that I have to be just a little bit more accurate with my exposure and grading with the FS700, but maybe that’s just psychological? The FS700 for some reason is a bit noisier than my F5, especially in the colours and shadows, probably due to the less than ideal use of only 12 bits rather than 16 bit, but it’s not something that concerns me, it’s still a highly useable image if you expose nice and bright.

Ergonomically the FS700 with IFR5/R5 for location or run and gun is a bit of a disaster which is a great shame. Mount the recorder on some extended rail contraption and you have a very long and very heavy camcorder and you can’t use the Sony viewfinder because the recorder is in the way. For my shoots I used an Alphatron EVF.

Exposure with the FS700 and raw is pretty straight forward. You can use S-Log2 in a picture profile to allow you to view the cameras full range, but the image will be very flat. Or you can use any of the other gammas (or a full blown picture profile) as a kind of fake Look Up Table to approximate various final looks. This all come out on the HDMI out and has no effect on the raw recording. At the same time you also get an additional HDSDI output on the AUX out of the R5, this is always S-Log2.

So here’s the clip. I’ll write more about working with raw and the FS700 after IBC when I’ve been able to get the latest news on the Convergent Design Odyssey, the other way to record 2K raw and 4K compressed from the FS700.

Select “Original” under the quality setting to see the clip in 4K.

I spent quite a bit of time last week shooting in 4K with a FS700 using Sony’s IFR5 adapter and R5 recorder. I have to say that the pictures are really amazing. The dynamic range is incredible and the resolution and clarity beautiful. I’ll be posting a clip in the next few days and you’ll be able to see the footage at IBC.

But, the ergonomics are terrible. Attach the IFR5 and R5 to the back of an FS700 with an extended rail system and you have one heck of a long and heavy camcorder. For studio or drama shoots this may well be fine, in fact you may end up using the recorder as a completely separate device in the video village. But for documentary or run and gun the camera becomes a real monster.

The alternative to the IFR5/R5 is the Convergent Design Odyssey. The Odyssey can’t do 4K raw but it can do very high quality 4K compressed as well as 2K raw and high speed. For many 4K compressed will be far more manageable than 4K raw. It’s only the size of a small monitor (in fact it IS a monitor, a very nice OLED monitor) so far, far easier to use with the FS700. Convergent Design have just posted some sample clips on their website, so if you want an idea of just how good this combo will be follow the link below.

http://www.convergent-design.com/Products/Odyssey7Q/Sony.aspx

So, IBC is just a few weeks away. I’m busy reviewing new products that I can’t talk about yet and I’ll be taking much more in depth looks at the new Sony PMW-300 and PMW-400. This week I’m doing some 4K and 2K test shots with my FS700 an IFR5 and R5 (it looks very, very good). Sony will once again have the ICE Bar where you can come and ask questions about Sony’s products along with 3rd party accessories, workflows or settings. I’ll be attending the ICE bar for much of the show. So watch this space. I’ll be able to talk a little about a couple of the new products a little before IBC.