So here they are the new F5 and F55 cameras as well as the ASX-R5 raw recorder and a new 100 Mb/s XAVC codec. On top of that there is also a completely new range of 6 PL mount lenses from 20mm to 135mm. The cameras are modular, with various viewfinder and shoulder mount options. The shoot HD, 2K and 4K 16bit raw. The key difference between the F5 and F55 is that the F55 has a global shutter so no more rolling shutter artefacts. In addition the F55 can shoot at up to 240fps while the F5 is limited to 120fps. It may be that the sensors are different in the F5 and F55 as the F55 sensor has the same type of colour filter arrangement as the F65. In both cases dynamic range is in excess of 14 stops.
http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-highend/
I’m not going to list all the really exciting features here, follow the link above for that. But these cameras are a radical departure from what Sony normally do. These cameras are designed to be future proof certainly for the next 4 or 5 years. You buy the body of your choice, add your preferred OLED viewfinder and then add the options you need as you go. Built in recording is 422 XDCAM HD or a new AVC Intra codec which Sony is calling XAVC. XAVC is a 100 Mb/s 10 bit codec, so this means that internal log recording is now viable as well as a future internal 2K option (upto 120fps). In addition there will be a future internal option for SR recording at upto 444 RGB, 440Mb/s. The F5 will be able to record upto 120fps using next generation SxS cards called SxS Pro+ while the F55 will go upto 240fps and record 4K raw internally.
Its worth noting that these new cameras do not replace the F3. The F3 will continue in Sonys product line up sitting below these new models as a high quality but lower cost option.
My video camera operators are unfamiliar with contrast ratios, mid grey and white cards. With older restricted dynamic range video cameras you simply looked in the viewfinder and if the picture looked right, then it was right. Simples.
But now with extended range gammas, log curves and linear raw recording things are much more difficult as sometimes the image your looking at in the viewfinder is very different to the way the image will look after post production. This makes judging exposure harder. As a result you often need to resort to extra tools to help and one of the most common tools is the grey card and white card. A grey card should reflect 18% of the light that falls on it. A good white card will reflect 90% of the light falling on it. If you view a white, grey and black card side by side the 18% grey card will appear to your eye to be half way between the white and black card, so it’s know as “middle grey”.
The important thing to note is that we are not looking at finite values here. We are looking at ratios. The grey card reflects 18% of the light falling on the scene. The white card reflects 90% of the light, so the white card is always reflecting 500% more light than the grey card. It doesn’t matter how bright or dark the scene, the white card will always be 500% brighter than the grey card.
Another ratio is the f-stop. An exposure increase of one stop is a doubling of the light or 100% more. if you add another stop then that’s another doubling, so thats another 200% (total 300%), double it again and we add a further 400% (total 700%). From this we can deduce that if white is 500% brighter than mid grey, then white will be 2.5 stops brighter than mid grey, no matter how bright the total scene illumination. These are ratios, so the light level doesn’t matter, the ratio between the two remains constant.
This can be a difficult concept to grasp as it’s about ratios. Also remember we are looking at light reflected from cards with a know reflectance. We are not including direct light sources like a bright sky or a lamp that can be many stops brighter than the white card.
If you using S-Log then the normal exposure for middle grey is 38% of the way up the S-Log curve. Because the curve is not linear and compressed (squashed) a white card will be at 68% on the S-Log curve, not 90%. It doesn’t matter how bright or dark the scene that’s where the fixed reflection ratio of 500% or 2.5 stops between grey and white cause the levels to fall when you expose correctly using S-Log.
I’ve had one of Samyang’s 14mm f2.8 photo lenses for some time and it really is a fantastic lens. It’s one of my favourites for shooting the Northern Lights as it nice and wide and pretty fast for such a wide lens. In addition it stays nice and sharp even when wide open. When I heard that Samyang were bringing out a range of budget cine lenses with integrated 0.8 mod pitch gears it was music to my ears as I have been looking for some decent cine lenses for a long time, but didn’t want to fork out a small fortune on expensive PL glass.
Samyang 35mmT1.5 Cine Lens
Up to now, for my own projects, I have been using a mix of Nikon fit and Canon fit DSLR lenses. Mostly Sigma Nikon fit lenses as these focus the “right” way and have manual aperture rings. For my larger budget commercial projects I then hire in PL glass to suit the project.
The Samyang’s arrived nicely packed in decent looking boxes and each lens comes with a soft carry pouch. There’s the usual petal shaped lens hood and lens caps. The lenses I chose have the Canon EF-S mount, but you can also get them with a Nikon mount. Because they have proper manual iris rings there is no problem using these lenses on cameras like the Sony PMW-F3 where you don’t have electronic iris control.
The 24mm Samyang on my F3
Out of the box the lenses really look the part. The black finish is very nice and there is an attractive red metal ring around the camera body giving them a quite classy look. One thing though is that there is a lot of plastic in these lenses. The lens mount is metal and it appears that the core of the lens body is metal, but it appears to be shrouded in plastic. Certainly the iris and focus rings are plastic and front shroud around the lens is plastic, but it does appear to be a good quality plastic. The large amount of plastic does make the lenses feel cheaper than a decent PL mount lens but it’s no worse than the plastic Sony PL mount lenses that cost 8 times as much and you do have to remember that these lenses are really well priced, really, really well priced.
F3 and 24mm Samyang
The 0.8 mod pitch gears are nice and proud from the lens body and I had no issues using them with my Genus follow focus controls. There is no click stop on the iris ring as there would be on a conventional DSLR lenses and the movement of the iris ring is very smooth and has just the right amount of resistance for smooth aperture changes during a shot. The iris scale, marked in T-Stops is clear and easy to read and the travel reasonable. You don’t get as much travel as many PL mount lenses, but there is plenty of travel and getting an accurate exposure is easy. Having T-stops is great as you can change lenses and your exposure will remain constant because T-stops are the lenses f-stop plus any other light losses in the lens, making exposure more accurate and consistent from lens to lens.
Frame grab from the 35mm lens. Click to enlarge.
The focus rings on both the 24mm and 35mm lenses rotate through about 160 degrees. This is a lot compared to most other modern DSLR lenses. My Sigma 20mm f1.8 lens only rotates about 90 degrees and my 24-70mm lens only rotates about 45 degrees. This extra throw on the focus ring really helps with accurate and precise focus and makes these lenses a pleasure to use. The focus scale is in both feet and m. I do find the brown “ft” scale a little hard to see, especially in low light, but this is a minor complaint.
Super shallow DoF from the 35mm T1.5 Samyang. Click to enlarge.
So overall these lenses are really nice to use compared to most other DSLR lenses, in fact I would say they are pretty close to many much more expensive PL lenses. But handling is one thing, what about the image quality? Well I wasn’t disappointed. Both lenses perform very well. Edge to edge sharpness is very good, contrast is very good, these lenses produce lovely crisp images with very good neutral colour. I didn’t test them with charts. Instead I used them (and am continuing to use them) on a range of shoots in Hong Kong and the UK and compared them with some of my other lenses out in the field. Image wise the 24mm produces an image very similar to my 20mm Sigma, if anything I feel the Samyang is the sharper of the two, even when wide open.
The 35mm Samyang performs at least as well as my favourite 35mm f1.8 Nikkor. My only small concerns are that the 24mm softens a little at T1.5 (the 35mm also softens a little but not quite as bad) and that both lenses do suffer from a bit more lens flare in some situations than my Nikkor’s. I suspect the coatings used on the Samyang’s may not be quite as good as those on the Nikkor’s but by using a deeper lens hood, matte box or flag to stop strong light sources from shining directly into the lens this flare can easily be controlled or eliminated. If you have a strong light source coming into the lens slightly off axis the lens flare exhibits itself as a slight raising of black levels and as a result a reduction in contrast. Most lenses suffer from some flare and this isn’t a deal breaker provided you are aware of it.
Lots of crisp detail from the 35mm, even on a dull day.
I really like these lenses. Not just because they are cheap, but because they perform very well and they really handle like baby PL mount lenses. I think you have to see them to believe them because the images are really very sharp. I’d much rather use these than most conventional DSLR lenses on my video cameras. The Samyang 24mm T1.5 is an excellent wide angle lens for video applications. The 35mm is a great “standard” lens and will probably be my “go-to” lens for most shoots. The field of view you get from a 35mm lens on a Super 35mm video camera is very close to our own human field of view, so your shots look very natural and true to life. At T1.5 these are fast lenses so achieving a very shallow depth of field is easy. I probably wouldn’t use the 24mm at T1.5 unless I really needed to, but at T2 the image starts to sharpen up nicely. As well as the 24mm and 35mm lenses Samyang have 8mm T3.8 and a 14mm T3.1mm cine lenses and an 85mm T1.5 lens will be coming at the end of the year. All they really need is to add a 50mm to create a really complete lens set.
Initially I approached Samyang UK and asked for the loan of the 24mm and 35mm lenses for review. After using them I decided to buy them, so now I’m the happy owner of the Samyang 24mm and 35mm Cine lens. All I need to do now is sell of some of my other Canon and Nikon lenses so that I can get the 8, 14 and 85mm Samyang Cine lenses. They also do an interesting 24mm tilt-shift lens!
This is some footage I shot in Hong Kong using a production PMW-200. The pictures are not graded but I did use a picture profile to get the vivid colours and deep blacks. The night shots were done with between +6 and +9db gain
Finally my Sony Action Cam arrived. I purchased the WiFi version so I can monitor the pictures on my iPhone or iPad when setting it up or maybe when using it as an impromptu pole-cam on the end of a microphone boom pole. I have not had a chance to do take an in depth look at the images yet, the weather here is pants, grey and misty and anything I shoot at the moment looks soft. Anyway, after charging up the camera using the supplied USB cable (there’s no charger, you have to use a laptop or get a USB power adapter) I decided to try to connect it to my iPhone.
The huge but terrible Action Cam manual.
First problem: The manual is…. err….. well…. how can I say this politely… it’s carp. It’s a huge sheet of paper with an almost incomprehensible flow chart of the menu options and a few brief paragraphs of text. Finally I found the bit that I needed however, the WiFi connection instructions. These comprehensive (not) instructions tell you to turn the WiFi on and connect to your device using the login details on a tiny sticker attached to the giant piece of paper.
OK, so I have a login and password, but what software do I use? Eventually I found a link to the software on one corner of the manual that tells you to use something called “Play Memories Home”. At first, assuming this was an app I did a search on the Apple store and found a Sony app called Play Memories and installed this on my phone. However this is some sort of media sharing app for your photos and has no way to connect to the camera. Next I followed the link to www.sony.net/pm which took me to a page where I could download a PC application, but still no iPhone app. By now I was getting somewhat frustrated, this should be really simple!
Anyway after some digging around I finally found the right app, it’s called Playmemories Mobile. Click here to go to the apple store. Even after you have installed the app things are not entirely obvious. You need to run the app on the phone, then turn on the camera. Press the Prev or Next buttons to fire up the camera and go to the setup menu, press next till you get to setup and then press the record button to select. then using prev/next go to RMOTE press record to select, and then set ON using prev/next. This turns on the WiFi. Now on the phone with the app running you will see a cryptic error message saying “Search the shooting device from the network settings of the terminal and set it”. This is telling you to go to the phones WiFi settings and search for a network with the same name as the SSID on the tiny sticker on the instruction sheet (I peeled my sticker off and stuck it on the side of the camera). Select the WiFi network and enter the supplied password. The phone should now connect to the camera, you won’t see the normal WiFi indication at the top of the phones screen. Go back to the Playmemory mobile app and you should now be able to see the live feed from the Action Cam.
What a palava! Now that I can get connected I’m pleased to say that the lag between the camera and iPhone is only minimal, about 1/3rd of a second and the image quality on the phone is plenty good enough for framing and camera setup, so I happy at last. But come on Sony, you really need to do a better job of the manual. There’s more information on EC and FCC directives on interference and battery disposal than there is on how to actually use the camera.
Movember is almost upon us. Whether you choose to grow a moustache in support of prostate and testicular cancer research or not, all that really counts is raising awareness of this these terrible cancers that affects 1 in 6 men. Many, many very generous manufacturers are support Philip’s Movember fund raising campaign with some great (and I do mean great) prizes. So go… now… and take a look at Philip’s Movember page. Grow a tache, make a film or simply make a donation. http://philipbloom.net/2012/10/18/movember2012/
Wow! I recently sent out the first ever site wide email to registered users of the forum. It’s an ad for some workshops I’m running. I put a lot of free time and effort into the blog and website. I know the vast majority of you appreciate the site and I get great feedback from most. But the response I’ve had from some people because I sent them one email is frankly astounding. One of the conditions of membership of the forum is agreement to receive very occasional emails. But some people think it’s out of order that I should send them an email. Come on people, the only reason anyone would sign up to the forum is to take advantage of the things on it, ask a question, download a picture profile etc. Yet some people think its unreasonable that in return for offering this free resource I should send out the occasional email. Well that’s fine by me. If you are not prepared to accept a few emails in return for access to a wealth of free help and advice them I’m more than happy to delete your account and bar you from the website.
The New F is more than just rumour. It actually exists and Sony will not only be sending out a press release on the 30th of October but also holding events where “it” will be guest of honour. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. All I can say that there’s some very cool stuff coming. If you are in the UK then there will be a launch event in London where #TheNewF will be on hand to pose for photographs and some hands on opportunities. I’ve already ordered my New F, go take a look and you’ll see why I placed an order. Sadly I can’t attend myself, I’ll be out of the country at the time. If you want to go and see what all the fuss is about you need to register to reserve a place as space is limited:
I have not tried this but have been sent some information from one of my Sony contacts (this is not endorsed by Sony). It appears to be a very similar adapter to the metabones adapter but with the addition of the ability to use the one push auto focus button on the camera to set the focus. You don’t get continuous auto focus and I have no idea if the adapter is any good, but at only $250 it’s got to be worth a try. You can find them on ebay but I have no other information at this time other than the video below.
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