F3 arrived? Post it up here!

TimurCivan

TimurCivan

Director of Photography
Staff member
Just picked up my F3.

Its gorgeous. Unpacked just now. Hooked up a cooke 100mm panchro.
The lattitude is absurd.

More to come later. :)

**** camera is set to 3200 iso and my mouth is on the floor. Hooked up to my 60" sony xbr2 tv. Grainless. Its grainless. Its scary.
 
Super jealous Timur. You live in such a great testing ground for cameras. I think I'm going to head back to NYC in the next couple months for some creative inspiration.

Gotta get my hands on a F3 to play around with,

Kegan
 
Its gorgeous. Unpacked just now. Hooked up a cooke 100mm panchro.
The lattitude is absurd.

More to come later. :)

**** camera is set to 3200 iso and my mouth is on the floor. Hooked up to my 60" sony xbr2 tv. Grainless. Its grainless. Its scary.
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Hearing this from you....is SCARY to me. I can't WAIT to see your upcoming comments/tests/footy! Lead the way Timur!
 
I made a mistake. What i thought was 3200 ISO was actually 1600 ISO..... But still, if thats the performace at 1600, 3200 is more than acceptable.

@ 1600(+12DB) it looks like an EX1 @ 0db

According to DIT/Cameratech extraordinaire Tom Wong, 0dB is 400 ISO. I thought 0dB was 800 ISO.

The menu's are extensive and deep. Like the EX3, but with more control. Its power efficient too, ive had it sitting here with one Switronix 90wh battery running a Small HD monitor and the camera for over 2 hours now, and i still have 14.3 volts left. The camera is a 12v camera, so ive still got a ways to go.

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Ive got a full Zacuto kit supporting the camera. The f3 is quite light, and it feels airy, despite being rigid and robustly built. The build quality is nice, with a few small gripes. The SXS card door is a chisy piece of plastic that doesn't even snap into place, it just sort of lays there. meh. didnt like that, especially for the price. However, aside from that..... its all pretty incredible.

The Image quality is organic, razor sharp, and grain less. Grain less and organic are tough to have together at the same time. Grain less images, like the 5d MKII @ at 160 ISO looks plastic and sterile. Some how the sony circuitry pulls it off with flying colors. Someone at sony is REALLY listening to what the consumer wants. Ive been dreaming of this camera for 6 years. Seriously, the last time i was moved by image quality like this i was looking at the live tap on an Alexa.

EDIT:

So -3 dB is 280 ISO. This is a nice workable stop outdoors. Though i have a strong feeling that you will be sacrificing the highlights, like in a RED. I think the 800 ISO is the sweet spot for Noise/DR. This is roughly based on the crudest of testing and initial hypothesis. I havent put anything through its paces yet.

Some good news. My Cookes are as awesome as i hoped they would be. I had no doubts, but they are simply put small S4's. They contribute alot i feel to the organic nature of the images im seeing. As i have no other glass, i cant really make a comment. I am planning to shoot some stuff on sunday that will hlp me get an idea of how to expose this camera. I will say this out of the box the rendition of highlights are exceptional. This camera NEEDS an external 10bit Recorder. The live tap is so beautiful in its 10bit uncompressed glory. I wonder how the XD cam will hold up. :) I pointed the camera at a chandelier, and it exposed the clear lightbulbs. Thats a tough feat for a camera. It really represents light to dark in a beautiful way.


EDIT***

More amazing surprises. I just had my mind blown. Tom Wong was playing with the camera before we packed it away earlier tonight. I get home, hook it up VIA HDMI to my 46" 1080p Plasma, and turn on the camera. The image is stunning. Crisp, grain less and full of lush tones. I say to myself, it looks good here, let me blast the ISO up and see how it is when it falls apart, i click the gain switch to "H", wait the switch wont move.... why because it was ALREADY on "H"...... at 3200 ISO!!!!!!!!!! 3200 ISO is so good, i would literally shoot my next project on it, not tell anyone its at 3200, and i think, not only would people not notice anything wrong, i thin they would comfortably respond to how good it looks. Its that good.....

This thing is ridiculous. Just ridiculous....

I know i know you guys want images..... Honestly, im for the most part computer illiterate, and i cant figure out how to import the XDcam footage into vegas or premiere just yet. :/


A bunch more info here: http://timurcivan.blogspot.com/
 
The PL is rock solid. it can be colimated with a built in adjustment. Though its accurate from the factory. :)
 
I'm getting a hands on with one of these in about 2 weeks, but this is like stirring the kids up on Christmas Eve and then telling them to go to bed.
 
nugat said:
Does the PL mount adapter need/support shimming?
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you can adjust the backfocus on the camera too with some allen wrenches, similar to an R1 if something goes wonky. I played with the camera for a couple hours. the feature set feel about 90% cine alta, 10% prosumer. the menu system is so deep, I think they ported it from a f35, I gotta dig up a f35 manual to see if it has any info on what half the stuff does. You can literally paint box your image with individual RGB channels in a variety of different ways. Think hvx200 scene file on absolute crack. I'd love to if there is a way to have separate software on a computer to build luts and load them on the camera...

you are limited to the preset ISO's in the camera, but I get the feeling the camera is optimized for those ISO's and works best there, hence the high iso performance it has.

funny enough, my favorite feature of the night was something they ported from the ex3. the s&q button/knob on the side. push it, press execute. you're in high speed, and you can dial in your FPS with the knob before you start rolling. press it in again, hit execute, you're back in standard speed. You wouldn't believe the amount of times a music director is screaming for high speed and you are spending time digging through menus. (don't work with ex3 much... when i say much i mean never :) )

but Ill let Timur finish up the talking. I'm gonna go geek out again later this weekend.
 
Oh Timur! So glad to see one of these in your hands! Looking forward to footage.

I completely concur, the image processing/DSP dept. at Sony is a place of true artistry!!
 
I'm very happy with mine as well - one small quibble I'd add to those mentioned already - the microphone mount is awful, flimsy, and worthless. Within an hour or two of running and gunning I'd managed to nearly knock it loose. Worse, is that when you remove it, you can actually see a circuit board - it's open to the inside of the camera.

What I've had to do is use a hot shoe mounted microphone holder, and tape off the spot where the Sony mic holder was.

I also agree with Timur, the back door is so flimsy and cheesy, just feels cheap.

But... the image quality is knocking my socks off. Just last night I was shooting EPK footage for a musician. She was performing in a dimly lit venue, and I was shooting at 0db, 6db, and 18db depending on angles, etc. 6db, to my eye - looks like at EX1 at 0db. 18 looks like an EX1 around 9db maybe. I'm interested to see if the 18db footage can be cleaned up with Neat Video.

For the purposes of the EPK, it's very useable as is - but definitely curious to see if it can be improved.
 
Hmm, see I can't tell the difference between the iso... they all look the same just brighter....
 
Timur, have you done playback on a pixel to pixel 1920x1080 display?

The noise is there - but it's very minimal compared to the other cameras I've worked with.

In many cases, I think the viewing audience at large would never notice.

Incredible camera.
 
Viddovation said:
I'm interested to see if the 18db footage can be cleaned up with Neat Video.
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Sacre! Keep that grain in there man!!!

What's great about Sony's compression is that it somehow respects the grain and keeps it intact.... making the high gain work look like nice grainy film scans. At least in my opinion..

Sorry I've been really getting into high gain and high grain on uncompressed systems in the last few days and I'm going to defend it wherever I can!

Grain on the dslrs looks like complete ***, and we all know why, but somehow Sony's god-like imaging department has managed to preserve all that fuzzy, form dissolving goodness! Another feather in their beautiful cap!!

Here's some grain from my old DVX andromeda... at 12db - how could you not fall in love with how ugly and rough a grainy uncompressed high gain capture is...

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Sorry if this is a slight derail TImur, feel free to delete if you want...
 
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