A7s video went viral this week

Often when someone uses "went viral" these days, they kinda mean, you can watch it online now..
I´m glad this wasn't the case;)
Great job, this looked good!
Any insight on why you chose the A7s and how it performed on set?
 
Spartacus said:
Often when someone uses "went viral" these days, they kinda mean, you can watch it online now..
I´m glad this wasn't the case;)
Great job, this looked good!
Any insight on why you chose the A7s and how it performed on set?
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Thanks Spartacus! I chose the A7s because I already own it, haha! I used to shoot everything on my 5DmarkII but switched 5 months ago and I must say it's been great! I make a living primarily off of doing dance videos, which usually require me to work very quickly, and the A7s allows me to do just that. My single favorite feature of the A7s is the ability to switch from full frame to crop mode. On this shoot I used a 24-70mm Tamron lens, which I set to 28mm and balanced my Glidecam one time at the beginning of the shoot. The crop mode feature allowed me to not have to re-balance the Glidecam (pain in the ass) and be able to quickly switch from 28mm to ~44mm just by switching a setting. It would be nice to be able to set a dedicated button for this instead of going through the menus, but it's good enough as it is. Switching over to slider shots (I would use the full range from 24mm to 70mm) and back to Glidecam was fairly painless too... I would just set it back to 28mm for Glidecam. Another awesome thing is that I knew I wouldn't have enough time on set to use my wireless follow focus, which was totally fine as I was able to get deep enough depth of field by setting it to ~F6-F7 for most shots and changing the focus to work with my style of Glidecam movement for a particular take. The only way to accomplish this was to set ISO to around 4000, which was not possible before with the Canon 5D due to extreme noise. On the A7s (Picture Profile 5, Pro Color) the noise is negligible until around 6400 ISO. Long story short (I didn't expect to write an A7s review here) I love the camera... it allowed me to shoot a lot of takes very quickly with minimal lighting. For these types of shoots, I'll take that over 4k any day. If only it had a better button/menu system for quicker access to certain settings. A7s 2 perhaps?
 
mjfan said:
what were your sony a7s settings? great job!
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Thanks mjfan!

PP5 with Pro Color and everything else default. 24fps (1/80 shutter speed) for everything except the freestyle cypher scene, which I shot at 60fps. I just responded to Spartacus post with a bunch of other info. Hope you find it helpful!
 
Congratulations! Watched this before you posted it was on an a7s. I honestly figured it was on an epic... Something about it felt like red... That's impressive. Good work on set and good work in post.
 
Yay!

A video WORTH the ten million hits!

Everybody involved should give each other a major pat on the back.

EARNED!
 
caseywilsondp said:
Congratulations! Watched this before you posted it was on an a7s. I honestly figured it was on an epic... Something about it felt like red... That's impressive. Good work on set and good work in post.
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Whoah that's a huge compliment! Thank you! Shooting on Red would have been nice... but the shoot would probably had been a few hours longer. Since all the talent was there as a favor to Alyson (some of the OG breakers are in their late 30's and 40's), we had to get them in and out as fast as humanly possible.
 
timmilgram said:
It would be nice to be able to set a dedicated button for this instead of going through the menus
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I see people mention this all the time, menu diving for the crop mode to get the extra reach. But nobody ever mentions the easier, better way to do this. If you set the zoom function to "clear image zoom" (I'm sure you have it on "optical only"), and then assign a custom button to "zoom", hit that button and then use left and right on the dial, and what you get is a variable crop on the sensor up to a native pixel for pixel 1920x1080 window on the sensor. The advantage is that it's a variable and essentially lossless "digital" zoom (you obviously lose the light gathering of the sensor area that has been cropped out, but that's happening anyway in the normal crop mode) and available without menu diving and even while recording. Only works for 1080p recording obviously.
 
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Matt Filmic said:
Very true, great work mate. With the slow down footage was that just 60fps?
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Thanks man! Sure was. Slowed down to 40% speed for those moments. Personally least happy with the way that scene looks but its probably due to not having enough lights, and my somewhat limited color grading knowledge. Also getting the feeling that 60fps on this camera suffers from image quality loss of some sort. 24p uses 4k and processes down to 1080p, while 60p just records at 1080p?? Anyone know?

bezerk55 said:
I see people mention this all the time, menu diving for the crop mode to get the extra reach. But nobody ever mentions the easier, better way to do this. If you set the zoom function to "clear image zoom" (I'm sure you have it on "optical only"), and then assign a custom button to "zoom", hit that button and then use left and right on the dial, and what you get is a variable crop on the sensor up to a native pixel for pixel 1920x1080 window on the sensor. The advantage is that it's a variable and essentially lossless "digital" zoom (you obviously lose the light gathering of the sensor area that has been cropped out, but that's happening anyway in the normal crop mode) and available without menu diving and even while recording. Only works for 1080p recording obviously.
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That's actually really good idea! But the only nuance there is that when *not* on the Glidecam (aka I'm handheld, on the slider, tripod, etc) I would then have to go into the menus to switch between the zoom function settings so that I can zoom to check focus without that being what's actually recorded. Or am I not fully getting the process?
 
Very, very cool. Congrats to you, and to the dancers: everybody made a great job.

(I know how good a job you all did because I've shot similar stuff and it's nowhere close to this level of awesomeness, haha)
 
Timmy,

Fantastic Video!

I worked with Bill Fishman for awhile, he did a lot of Music videos for MTV, I turned down some work from him, one of them being a music video for Big Sean , whom I didn't know who he was 3 years ago. Anyways, PM me some contact of yours so I can turn some Music Video work to you just in case they come knocking on my door again.
 
I think the check focus function you are talking about is "focus magnify" or "focus settings" (mapped to C1 by default I believe), which is entirely separate to the zoom function I mentioned.

60p seems to line-skip from what I've read and seen. Probably just every other line, that's just a guess, but makes sense that if it can do a full pixel sensor readout at 30p, then to get 60p it would have to skip half the lines.
 
bezerk55 said:
I think the check focus function you are talking about is "focus magnify" or "focus settings" (mapped to C1 by default I believe), which is entirely separate to the zoom function I mentioned.

60p seems to line-skip from what I've read and seen. Probably just every other line, that's just a guess, but makes sense that if it can do a full pixel sensor readout at 30p, then to get 60p it would have to skip half the lines.
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Ohhhh so sorry! I see what you're saying. Will definitely try it out!
 
JoeJITSU said:
Timmy,

Fantastic Video!

I worked with Bill Fishman for awhile, he did a lot of Music videos for MTV, I turned down some work from him, one of them being a music video for Big Sean , whom I didn't know who he was 3 years ago. Anyways, PM me some contact of yours so I can turn some Music Video work to you just in case they come knocking on my door again.
Click to expand...


PM'd!!
 
timmilgram said:
Thanks mjfan!

PP5 with Pro Color and everything else default. 24fps (1/80 shutter speed) for everything except the freestyle cypher scene, which I shot at 60fps. I just responded to Spartacus post with a bunch of other info. Hope you find it helpful!
Click to expand...

Yes I love that Pro Color that I have been seeing a lot of.

Now you say 1/80, You didn't go with the 1/50, I am guessing you wanted the footage more crisp?
 
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