It’s that time of year again where for those of us that live in the more northern parts of Northern Hemisphere the weather really starts to turn cold. So, once again I have updated my guide to filming in the cold which can be found by clicking here.
I will be off to Norway again in January to shoot the Northern lights, something I do every lear and over the years I’ve worked in temperatures down to -45c.
Once again Sony is inviting entries for the Future Film Maker awards. This film contest is aimed at aspiring film makers and includes categories for fiction, non fiction, student films, animation the environment and future formats.
The top 30 entrants will be flown to Los Angeles and to the historic Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, California, where they will gain exclusive access to experts and unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the industry. Winners additionally receive cash prizes and a range of Sony Digital Imaging equipment. There is a gala black tie awards ceremony at the Cary Grant Theatre in Sony’s Culver City studios on the 30th of May 2024.
Entries must be in by the 15th of February 2024, so now is the time to think about entering your film. Entries are welcome from anywhere in the world, big or small. Don’t be afraid to enter your work.
Click here for more information.
A lot of people like to shoot anamorphic with the FX3 or FX6. And they do get great looking images. The best example of this most recently is the blockbuster movie “The Creator” which was shot with an FX3 using 2x anamorphic lenses.
But there are a couple of things to consider with Anamorphic.
The first is what aspect ratios does the sensor support and what is the aspect ratio you want to deliver. The FX3 is always either 16:9 or 17:9 so that means that if you want you final output to have that classic 2.39:1 (2.40:1) aspect ratio then you need to use a 1.3x anamorphic while shooting 16:9 as a 1.3x lens as this will allow you to use the full sensor.
If you use a 1.6x lens and do not crop the sides of the image in post you will have a much narrower 2.8:1 aspect ratio. 1.6x lenses work best with 3:2 sensors. With a 2x anamorphic lens you would end up with an extremely narrow 3.5:1 aspect ratio unless you do some serious side cropping – which will reduce the horizontal resolution of the final image. If you use a classic 2x anamorphic lens designed for 35mm film you will almost certainly have a noticeable vignette on either side of the frame as these lenses are designed for the narrow but tall frame of 35mm film. You are going to need to remove this vignette by cropping. If you only deliver in HD this may not be an issue, but for 4K delivery it means your footage is no longer really 4K. As a side note it is interesting that for “The Creator” this is exactly how they shot, using 2x anamorphics. But I am led to believe that extensive use of AI was made when scaling the image in post. If you do need to crop the image the FX9 has a bit of an advantage as the sensor operates at 6K in full frame, so the 4K recordings have higher resolution than the recordings from the FX3 or FX6 (remember a bayer sensor on actually resolves at about 75% of the pixel count, so a 4K sensor delivers a 3K image while a 6K sensor delivers a 4K image). Burano will be a good camera to use as even after you crop in to the 8K (pixel) image what is left will still be around 6K of pixels and full 4K resolution.
Then the other is de-squeeze. It can be quite challenging to focus if you have the wrong de-squeeze and if the collimation of the lens is off you may not notice that the horizontal and vertical focus points are different , so shots may not be as sharp as they should be. You could always use an external monitor with the de-squeeze you need.
So, depending on how you look at it the only lenses that might be considered to be “fully compatible” will be full frame 1.33x anamorphics as these will give the classic 2.40:1 aspect ratio without cropping and the camera supports 1.33x de-squeeze. But these are not common. Any other anamorphic squeeze ratio will require some post work. Classic 2x anamorphics were designed for super 35mm open gate 4:3 sensors and when used like this they still needed a slight side crop for 2.39:1. Use them on a FF 16:9 sensor and you will need to make a big side crop. For Full Frame anamorphic lenses these days it is common to use a 6:5 scan which is more square than 4:3 and the side crop is no longer needed. Additionally for FF, 1.8x squeeze is becoming very common and designed specifically to work with a FF 6:5 sensor. But – sadly the FX3 doesn’t really have a scan mode tall enough to fully take advantage of modern FF anamorphics. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them, it’s just not an ideal situation.
This is another one from Social Media and it the same question gets asked a lot. The short answer is…………
NO.
Even with Sony’s earlier S-Log3 cameras you didn’t need to ALWAYS over expose. When shooting a very bright well lit scene you could get great results without shooting extra bright. But the previous generations of Sony cameras (FS5/FS7/F5/F55 etc) were much more noisy than the current cameras. So, to get a reasonably noise free image it was normal to expose a bit brighter than the base Sony recommendation, my own preference was to shoot between 1 and 1.5 stops brighter than the Sony recommended levels (click here for the F5/F55, here for the FS7 and here for the FS5).
The latest cameras (FX30, FX3, FX6, FX9 etc) are not nearly as noisy, so for most shots you don’t need to expose extra bright, just expose well (by this I mean exposing correctly for the scene being shot). This doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t expose brighter or darker if you understand how to use a brighter/darker exposure to shift your overall range up and down, perhaps exposing brighter when you want more shadow information and les noise at the expense of some highlight range or exposing darker when you must have more highlight information but can live with a bit more noise and less shadow range.
What I would say is that exposure consistency is very important. If you constantly expose to the right so every shot is near to clipping then your exposure becomes driven by the highlights in the shot rather than the all important mid range where faces, skin tones, plants and foliage etc live. As the gap between highlights and the mids varies greatly exposure based on highlights tends to result in footage where the mid range is up and down and all over the place from shot to shot and this makes grading more challenging as every shot needs a unique grade. Base the exposure on the mid range and shot to shot you will be more consistent and grading will be easier.
This is where the CineEI function really comes into its own as by choosing the most appropriate EI for the type of scene you are shooting and the level of noise you are comfortable with and basing the exposure off the image via the built in LUT will help with consistency (you could even use a light meter set to the ISO that matches the EI setting). Lower EI for scenes where you need more shadow range or less noise, higher EI for scenes where you must have a greater highlight range. And there is no -“One Fits All” setting, it depends on what you are shooting. This is the real skill, using the most appropriate exposure for the scene you are shooting (see here for CineEI with the FX6 and with the FX9)
So how do you get that skill? Experiment for yourself. No one was born knowing exactly how to expose Log, it is a skill learnt through practice and experimentation, making mistakes and learning from them. In addition different people and different clients will be happy with different noise levels. There is no right or wrong amount of noise. Footage with no noise often looks very sterile and lifeless, but that might be what is needed for a corporate shoot. A small to medium amount of noise can look great if you want a more film like look. A large amount of noise might give a grungy look for a music video. Grading also plays a part here as how much contrast you push into the grade alters the way the noise looks and how pleasing or objectionable it might be.
All anyone on here can do is provide some guidance, but really you need to determine what works for you, so go out and shoot at different EI’s or ISO’s, different brightness levels, slate each shot so you know what you did. Then grade it, look at it on a decent sized monitor and pick the exposure that works for you and the kinds of things you shoot – but then also remember different scenes may need a different approach.
The last leg of CVP’s 2023 production technology showcase roadshow opens tomorrow in Bristol. I will be there on Friday to give a presentation on the Sony Burano and the rest of the Cinema Line. For more details see; https://cvp.com/events/production-technology-showcase-bristol-2023
So this came up on social media. Someone had been playing with some sample raw footage provided by a camera manufacturer and he/she was concerned because he felt that this manufacturer supplied footage graded much better than his/her own Sony XAVC-I footage.
There is a lot to a situation like this, but very often the issue isn’t that the other footage was raw while his/her own footage was XAVC-I S-Log. Raw doesn’t normally have more colour or more DR than log. The colour range and the shadow range won’t be significantly different as that tends to be limited by the cameras sensor rather than the recording codec. But what you might have if the raw is 12 bit or greater is a larger bit depth or less compression. Perhaps a bit of both and that can sometimes give some extra precision or finer gradations as well as a bit less noise (although compression can reduce noise). This may come into play when you really start to push and pull the footage very hard in the grade, but generally, if you can’t get the image you want out of 10 bit XAVC-I, 12 bit raw isn’t going to help you. Raw might make it a bit quicker to get to where you want to be and I do love working with the 16 bit X-OCN (raw) from Venice and Burano, but I have never really felt that XAVC S-Log3 is lacking. Even a deeper bit depth might not be all it seems. The sensors in most video cameras under $20K only have 12 bit analog to digital converters and that tends to be the main image quality bottleneck (and this where Venice really shines with its 14 bit A2D).
Sony’s XAVC-I S-log3 grades really well, really, really well. A big issue however is the reliance on LUTs. 3D LUTs divide the image up into 33x or 65x adjustment bands and then it is down to the grading software to interpolate between each band. This can introduce artefacts into the image.
Some people simply skip doing a proper colourspace transform altogether and this may introduce twists into the gamma and colourspace which then makes it hard to get the colours or contrast they really want as it can be hard to bend the colours in a pleasing way without them going “weird”.
Colour managed workflows help to maintain the full range of the original content within the correct output colourspace without any unwanted twists and are often the best way to full realise the potential of the content you have shot.
Plus not all grading software is created equal. I was an Adobe Premiere user for years until I needed to do a lot more grading. When DaVinci Resolve became affordable I switched to Resolve for grading and have never looked back – after all it is a proper grading tool, not edit software with a bunch of plugins bolted on.
But as always the real key is how it was shot. Manufacturer supplied sample content is likely to have been shot very well and highly optimised, after all they want it to make their camera look as good as possible. When comparing footage from different sources you really do need to consider whether just how well it was shot. Was the most appropriate exposure index used for the type of scene. Was it shot at the best possible time of day for the best sun positioning. How much attention went in to things like the careful choice of the colours in the scene to provide pleasing colour contrast. How much time was spent with negative fill to bring down the shadow areas etc, what filtration was used to bleed off highlights or polarise the sky or windows. What lenses were used. All these things will have a massive impact on how gradeable the footage will be.
The Sony FX3 has won Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2023 – accessible film making award. The FX3 won the award because it was the main camera for the Hollywood blockbuster “The Creator”. The FX3 wasn’t a B camera, it was used to shoot the vast majority of the film (I believe there was also a small amount of FX9 footage).
And this wasn’t a Sony stunt. The director of this sci-Fi film Gareth Edwards chose the FX3 because he felt it was the best camera for the job. In various interviews Edwards has stated that one of the prime reasons for choosing the FX3 was its low light performance. The FX3 allowed him to shoot with real moonlight rather than bringing in complex and expensive lighting rigs. It allowed the DP Oren Soffer to move more freely with the actors as they could do more with the natural available light rather than artificial lights. This in turn led to them shooting longer takes which Edwards feels gives the film a more organic look.
For the film the FX3 was connected to an Atomos Ninja V and they recorded ProRes Raw.Of course – the film went through some extensive post production work and there is a lot that AI can now do to clean up an image or to rescale it. But, I think we are now at a stage where almost every cinema camera that is in the market today, from the FX30 to a Venice could be used to make a feature film and the audience is unlikely to be aware of whether you used a $3K camera or a $75K one. At the same time I do feel that there is a lot to be said for picking the right camera. A studio based film might be quicker and easier to shoot on a Venice. A location based film may benefit from a smaller and lighter package.
Whichever camera you choose, great story telling remains the main goal. Good lenses, lighting (or the use of the available light in a pleasing way) and composition are key elements in telling that story. Your skills as a film maker are more important than the camera you choose to use, but choosing the right camera can make the job easier. It’s a wonderful time to be a film maker.
I guess I must have missed this while I was on holiday but Sony have now announced a small wireless microphone kit that competes with the small digital wireless microphone kits from DJI and Hollyland etc. While not intended to replace the longer range professional wireless microphones such as the UW-P series these microphones offer a very compact system at a much lower price. Being digital they offer very high sound quality.
Many of us, myself included often use a Sony camera to shoot video blogs or simple productions where we all we need is a basic radio mic system and this is where look to be ideal. The receiver connects directly to the MI Shoe of any Sony camera with an MI Shoe, so there are no wires or cables to get in the way or to get lost. Then the small clip on transmitter with its built in microphone is worn by the subject.
The single channel system costs £320 GBP ($350 USD) and the dual channel with 2 transmitters around £420 GBP ($475 USD).
The transmitter and receiver come in a small charging case and a windscreen is included for the transmitters. If you don’t have an MI shoe equipped camera there is a 3.5mm audio cable to connect between the receiver and the camera, computer or other recording device.
I was recently involved as a technical advisor for the production of this short film by James Friend ASC BSC. James is best know for his work on “All Quiet On The Western Front” which won him an academy award for best cinematography.
This film is a homage to “Top Gun”. It was hot mostly with Sony Burano’s, but there is also some Venice 2 footage in it too. It was a bit of a gamble shooting it in the UK in October, but the weather gods were kind to us and we got some really great skies. Filming took place over 3 days, mostly in Somerset. The aircraft is a Yak-50 and it was flown by renowned aerobatic pilot Paul Bonhomme. If you follow the link to the Sony website you will find a lot more information about the production as well as a BTS film and the main film. Click here to go to the Sony website where you will find the video.
