Sold my FS7 today

[Ben Scott]

I am 100% done with posting footage or clips on here after the way people have responded in the past, but I have zero issue with the FX6/A7sIII sensor and Slg3/Sgamut3.cine.

I made a LUT based on the S709 LUT with slightly lifted blacks and slightly reduced saturation which I use for monitoring and I couldn't be happier.

[Ben Scott]

Hey - Hang On Ben... I'm still using mine regularly - don't bury it yet... I'm not ready to "upgrade" for it's replacement just yet. (unless one considers the A7sIII an "upgrade").

I do find the "color science upgrade" since the first FS7 (which I guess the Fs5, FX9, FX6 & A7sIII all "got") - a rather thin one. Not saying that Sony didn't tweak it's colors a bit... but IMO - it was such a small tweak - that I giggle everytime I read how much better the colors are now. (two nodes on a hue vs sat curve in the edit does just the same).

Oh plenty of life in the old dog yet, but it HAS been discontinued which was what my RIP referred to.

Not sure if the colour science has been tweaked or the newer sensors are just capable of more pleasing toe/shoulder rolloff.

[scorsesefan]

Abe, I absolutely love Slg3/Sgamut3.cine coming off the a7siii. Such rich and vibrant colors are in there. But color is such a subjective thing. Our brains interpret them in a multitude of ways... I was thinking of your auction house work. I would think you'd use the fs7 for that? Not just for client perception, but IMO the fs7 has a somewhat neutral color to it....

[morgan_moore]

So Ive moved to my C200 and R6.
I could sell the FS7 - its probably worth very little being well used.

And the more I dont have to rely on the FS7 the better it becomes. The FS7 was a pain to get moving focus, too heavy for a gimbal.. etc

Need a camera to chuck on a car bonnet..? FS7! ND fix the focus using punch in on the no batteries monitor.
Wide from the back of a show.. again no focus pulling the little monitor is fine

Unlike a DSLR its got ND, its got a hole for mains power .. its got a screen you can see from the front.

it does 50p4k, its got XLR

I mean soon Ill be doing an interview - ill use the R6 and its face track.. but the audio and wide? Ill do them with the FS7.

The FS7 is so so so much better in many situations than the little cameras that forgot ND XLR shutter angle and infinite record times.

Oh and there is my mirrorbox/autocue which is fast to set with a dedicated camera.

[Publimix]

You think XLR is a must? much better than mini jack? (in my case very short cables, receiver on camera.)

[ahalpert]

Abe, I absolutely love Slg3/Sgamut3.cine coming off the a7siii. Such rich and vibrant colors are in there. But color is such a subjective thing. Our brains interpret them in a multitude of ways... I was thinking of your auction house work. I would think you'd use the fs7 for that? Not just for client perception, but IMO the fs7 has a somewhat neutral color to it....

I think the colors of a7siii are rich and thick. most of the time I shoot slog3, I am sending it to other people to grade. But there was one time I remember that I shot and graded slog3 where the bright reds came off really sickly looking and not as they had in reality, I'll post the example later. And I saw some samples of slog3 I shot recently that the client sent me to express appreciation, and I thought there was some green in the midtones of the skin.

The auction house owns an FS7 and A7SII and I use their FS7 for interviews etc. I use my A7SIII and gimbal for gimbal stuff. I guess the FS7 is neutral... sometimes it seems inaccurate to me, especially in the reds. And I think that the interviews they shoot on the C300mk2 look better. As an editor for them, I receive both FS7 and C300mk2 stuff that is shot similarly.

With "movie" color on the A7SIII, I feel like I can look through the EVF and then pull my eye out and the scene looks exactly the same. I think the A7SIII is plenty neutral?

[scorsesefan]

I haven't noticed any color issues with the a7siii. According to Alister C the big improvements from the fs7 to the new cinema line are in the red channel... I'll have to try out "movie" mode on the A7SIii

[Ben Scott]

I think the colors of a7siii are rich and thick. most of the time I shoot slog3, I am sending it to other people to grade. But there was one time I remember that I shot and graded slog3 where the bright reds came off really sickly looking and not as they had in reality, I'll post the example later. And I saw some samples of slog3 I shot recently that the client sent me to express appreciation, and I thought there was some green in the midtones of the skin.

The auction house owns an FS7 and A7SII and I use their FS7 for interviews etc. I use my A7SIII and gimbal for gimbal stuff. I guess the FS7 is neutral... sometimes it seems inaccurate to me, especially in the reds. And I think that the interviews they shoot on the C300mk2 look better. As an editor for them, I receive both FS7 and C300mk2 stuff that is shot similarly.

With "movie" color on the A7SIII, I feel like I can look through the EVF and then pull my eye out and the scene looks exactly the same. I think the A7SIII is plenty neutral?

Why not shoot a chart with both cameras and compare the waveforms?

[morgan_moore]

You think XLR is a must? much better than mini jack? (in my case very short cables, receiver on camera.)

Well my mic sanken CS1 requires 48v power. As for the physical robust.. well XLR seems better but to be fair Ive never used minijack for critical audio.

I dont like receivers.. too many things to go wrong. minc - wire - camera thats what I like

If the C200 is tied up (on the gimbal) and I need to get some chatter.. well Im not reliant on the R6 when there is an FS7 knocking about. Yes I have a sound recorder buy the fs7 is a sound recorder that will do a second angle in any light level.. very handy.

Also even the 4k codec feels light compared to canon raw - I only have 45mins of card for that right now. We did some driving where (with no functional pre record) and me not knowing whats around the next corner long rolls were required - here the 7 beat the c200 too.

[Run&Gun]

You think XLR is a must? much better than mini jack? (in my case very short cables, receiver on camera.)

Yes. Now you can argue that it depends on the market you serve, but in my world, full-sized XLR’s rule the roost, so to speak. It’s what the vast majority of all of our audio equipment is based around.

Mini-XLR(TA3) has been gaining traction and is balanced, reasonably robust and has a locking connecting, but it’s still not ‘the standard’.

[Liam Hall]

All good things must come to an end. When the FS7 hit the market it there wasn't anything close to its price point with its feature set. Now, with so many cheap as chips cameras available, and as many people who have watched a couple of Philip Bloom videos and think they are Vittorio Storaro, market fragmentation has increased at pace.

Are full sized XLRs better than mini? Yes, of course they are. Is SDI better than HDMI? Yes, of course it is. Do Sony colours still suck? Yes, of course they do. Does any of that matter? Not in the least. Use the kit you are comfortable with that fits your clients needs.

We are now in the age of good enough. I know several DoPs questioning if we even need professional cameras anymore. Indeed, I just had a call from Sky TV complaining about my C500MKII file sizes. Unbelievable and quite sad, particularly considering the blood sweat and tears it took to capture that footage.

[Ben Scott]

Wish we could still like posts. Agree with all that. Except of course the kids won't even know who Storaro is

Your Canon is another level in terms of image quality. Depressing to hear that from Sky.

[scorsesefan]

Liam. Have you handled any of the footage from the Sony FX series or the A7SIII? The colors are quite good...

[NorBro]

He has a C500 Mark II so his vision has changed...most people don't go back to Sony after using Canon, ha.

___

When the FS7 hit the market it there wasn't anything close to its price point with its feature set.

P.S. The Blackmagic URSA was also released in 2014 and destroyed the FS7's IQ, but 90% wouldn't use BM in 2014 and YouTube wasn't like it is today, so no one knew.

[NorBro]

P.P.S. This is actually a funny fact about the URSA:

Blackmagic - coming from making really high-quality, pure-output hardware - simply never knew how to limit cameras.

Grant Petty wanted the highest-quality in everything and so they made the URSA have 4K/60p RAW and ProRes UHD 444XQ (in 2014!!) and there were zero cards on the market which could write that fast at the time (still months away).

So they ended up introducing a dual-card mode in FW that wrote alternate CinemaDNG frames on two cards.

Card 1 would have "1.DNG" and Card 2 would have "2.DNG"...

Card 1 would have "3.DNG" and Card 2 would have "4.DNG"...

ETC.

Then later you'd take one of the cards and copy-and-paste all of its frames into the other card's folder.

___

Could you imagine if you messed something up? LOL

Archaic workflow but Resolve recognized the files in the now one folder perfectly afterwards. (Of course the downside was no ProRes in this case.)

Eventually (and allegedly), RED had them end internal CinemaDNG a couple of years later, so it didn't matter and BRAW was born.