FS7: First Long Walkabout with the Sony FS7

Ebrahim Saadawi said:
So that's all your criticism, all you have to offer?

''Why are you showing this among professionals?'',
''You're brilliant in making it look like a home DV camera''
''No audience for this''
''I could shoot it better than you with an Iphone''

You guys are enjoying this, aren't you? I can see you. You get a that little rush of egotism and self-grandeur when giving destructive criticism behind your LCDs, like 6 year olds in a school yard.

I'll tell you this, giving constructive criticism gives an even higher sense of well-being.

Be a man and say what he should do to improve it, show us how it's done, point out a hundred mistakes, analyze and critique each single frame, otherwise it's just as I said, destructive to the entire community, it gets people frightened to share.

Please no one be afraid to share his/her work based on such little childish behavior.

Post anything you shoot, absolutely anything, there are thousands of people here who are willing to watch and help you.

_____________________

Anyhow, To OP, thanks for the write-up about usage of the FS7.

My take on the video is that if I had shot this I would get closer to the action and point upwards, gets a burning sky of colors surrounding the camera as opposed to a far away dark look of the sky with few lights going up. I would also use a lower frame rate, I think this is too slow for fireworks and takes the edge off.
Click to expand...
i don't think i really commented on the footage? i guess i missed the point that this was a camera test....i think we all have shot plenty of camera tests that aren't meant to be held to "citizen kane" standards....but i don't upload them to youtube and worry about the upload quality....and i have been in the position many times when i would have loved to see any kind of footage from a specific camera but in this case, i don't see how this tested the camera or showed me anything about it...
and honestly don't understand why anyone would load up their camera with external recorder and matte box to shoot this footage...whenever i shoot in public i try to make my rig as small as possible to look as much as a tourist as possible....that way you get hassled less...
if the goal of this was to see the difference between internal codec and shogun recorded pro res, i would like to see that but again, i don't think the scenes shown and light situations would really make for a great comparison....and again, i don't think we would see much difference on youtube anyway....
 
Many locations in the USA do not allow any camera equipment (or G&E) to touch the ground unless there's a Film Permit. Not sure how the TV Crews get away with it, but assume they have some sort of special regulations.

It's always fun to shoot somewhere without these restrictions (or at least where they're not enforced). Usually these locations are a bit more rural, but Detroit comes to mind as one of the cities that's extremely production friendly. Coming from LA, where everything film related seems to be regulated, it feels liberating to shoot in places like Detroit.
 
Let's all not forget that Basspig's eyes are very sensitive to any, even the slightest lens errors (as learned in another thread). Lenses that for most of us would normally work just fine are not good for him. The only reason we can use them is because we can't see the errors that are so obvious to him (especially chromatic aberration). I'm sure he spent all his energy making sure he nails it in that regard, that's why he forgot about taking care of everything else.
 
mainstreetprod said:


Basspig- just wondered if you have looked into a better video card? I just set up an older Mac Pro ( 2009 4 core) for my daughter to color grade our feature, and it's doing a decent job of handling the 4K footage. The video card is a GTX 580.
Click to expand...

the video card which I am using is the NVIDIA GTX 680 with 4 megabytes of VRAM. The problem is that when playing back xavc footage, its only using 2 to 5 percent of the GPU according to GPU-z. The bottleneck is the q 6600 processor. The motherboard is already maxed out at 8 gigabytes of RAM. I need a whole new system.
 
basspig said:
the video card which I am using is the NVIDIA GTX 680 with 4 megabytes of VRAM. The problem is that when playing back xavc footage, its only using 2 to 5 percent of the GPU according to GPU-z. The bottleneck is the q 6600 processor. The motherboard is already maxed out at 8 gigabytes of RAM. I need a whole new system.
Click to expand...


What happens when you reduce the resolution of the timeline? Help any?
 
Tried that very early in testing. Imperceptable difference, even at 1/8th resolution. The bottleneck is not the graphics card. Out of Maya 2015, it will play 4K animation sequence at 24fps on the 4K monitor. GPU is at 53% utilization with that 3D animation.
 
Mark,

Sorry love, but it's no good talking about your PC and the fact you have supposed edit issues when your camera work is just hopeless. Forget the injest and edit. Are you really serious about calling this work cinematic and "pro video" or what not in which ever form you spell it?

Please, tell me how you arrive at this conclusion and how you expect to acquire business on the back of this?

Claire
 
Basspig never said that this was pro video work or that he was trying get work from this video. He called it a test. He didn't call it a commercial, documentary, short film, or best thing since sliced bread. He then further explained that Tripods were not allowed in the space so all the footage was handheld. He also decided to share his opinion of the camera after limited use. It is possible he thought that others might find this information and footage useful.

Instead of an interesting discussion some people decided to attack Basspig because his test footage wasn't up to their standards and his computer seems to slow. For the most part this site is typically devoid of this sort of internet bullshit. I would like to keep it that way.

Nobody has to like or agree with a post. But no one should be attacking someone for posting it.
 
The computer issue is in the research phase. I'm trying to decide whether to build a dual E5-2699 (18-cores x 2 CPUs) or if I can get by with a 12-core Xeon with only 128GB RAM and a Titan GPU with 12GB VRAM. XAVC has extraordinary CPU demands that I didn't encounter with UHD Prores files. I can go back over to CS6 and edit Prores pretty good, but I wanted this test to be 4K, so I could get the full effect of widescreen capabilities of DCI picture aspect. Since Atomos Shogun can't shoot 4K Prores, the only way to get DCI 4K images was to use XAVC footage right from the XQD card. My frame rates for playback went from 24 to 1-2fps, making it very hard to cut.

I hope that by fall, I'll have a system built that can handle XAVC competently. The motherboard I am looking at can support four Titan GPUs in 'crossfire' array, which should help with certain functions. 3072 GPU cores should help, but the main decoding of XAVC, so I read, is CPU-bound. So the more cores I can put to the task, the better. I do dread the day when I have four FS7's to cut for a concert video though. Will 36 cores be enough?
 
sk85 said:
Basspig never said that this was pro video work or that he was trying get work from this video. He called it a test. He didn't call it a commercial, documentary, short film, or best thing since sliced bread. He then further explained that Tripods were not allowed in the space so all the footage was handheld. He also decided to share his opinion of the camera after limited use. It is possible he thought that others might find this information and footage useful.

Instead of an interesting discussion some people decided to attack Basspig because his test footage wasn't up to their standards and his computer seems to slow. For the most part this site is typically devoid of this sort of internet bulls*%t. I would like to keep it that way.

Nobody has to like or agree with a post. But no one should be attacking someone for posting it.
Click to expand...

Just to qualify this in case you weren't aware, Basspig has a ton of posts all about seeing things in lenses nobody else can see and his technical analysis of equipment and subsequent strongly stated opinions - which has ended up flying in the face of a hell of a lot of professionals - has pretty much set him up for criticism when those videos were posted.

And then he called it cinematography, which set me off :)

Again, Basspig, you truly do not need such a beast of a machine to happily handle multiple 4k streams. I've outlined this a ton of times now. You say money is tight and then completely ignore that a £1,000 i7 / 32Gb Ram/ 980GTX equipped PC with a fast external raid would work wonders for you.
 
sk85 said:
Basspig never said that this was pro video work...
Click to expand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvBkFF-v2lc&feature=youtu.be

Then sir you and a-another who have thumbs-down my post clearly have not seen the opening scenes which claim in the title in the first 4 seconds of this supposed test "4K Video Presentation by MWHD Pro Video Production." There is a specific claim in the title that this is presented (that is represented by) MWHD Pro Video Production an organisation that produces professional video productions. Crikey, good job I didn't comment on the sound too... perhaps the poor sound is also due to the substandard LF response of the FS7 mic preamps.

If it's a test say it's a "Test", not a MWHD Pro Video Production of cinematic proportions (as in the second video).

I gladly remove myself from this silly thread.

Regards

:)

Claire
 
I didn't comment on the video for reasons that I think are obvious, but reading some of the comments in this thread I think a little context is needed:

From Basspig's website:

"On the visual side, we produce video with photographic quality that is unmatched in the industry.

There is Perfection. And there is everyone else."

Made me laugh at least...
 
I don't know what kind of visual displays most of you are using, but when I evaluate footage, I often do it sitting 8' from a 12' projection screen. Sure, it's hard to see CA when you're sitting 2-3X the screen width away from the screen. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. I see it from time to time in movies, and it annoys me. Especially the red component of it.

Audio is an area that I can lay claim too, with more than forty years designing, building and testing audio processors, stereo generators, and speaker systems. My expert experience was called upon by Ethan Winer, for his book The Audio Expert, chapter 16, on subwoofers.

I called out Sony on the HVR-V1U's deficient audio response. Meanwhile, a highly respected DP publicly excoriated my scientific tests, stating that I "knew little about video and even less about audio". But lab tests don't lie, and I've got the gear to measure things to hundredths of a dB.
ShopSept2013web.jpg

I guess no one hears these deficiencies because the most ubiquitous studio monitor is the Yamaha NS-10, which misses the bottom three octaves of bass/sub-bass. Our screening room is equipped with a 17,000 watt sound system capable of full output down to 8Hz. You can bet I can hear the difference between the FS7's mic pre and the one of the EX3.

Now, I realize most folks here enjoy camera test videos where the camera is locked off and we see the same shot of some object or person, over and over again with the focus pulling foreground to background, or the grading changed between shots. That's cool too. But I find it amusing how two individuals have devoted so much of their time to crapping all over this thread with their opinions. I'm having a ball showing this discussion to my associates and friends. We've been having some good laughs at how "the big guys" at DVX take time from shooting Hollywood's greatest films, to talk about Basspig's hand held test videos. Truth can be scorching in a world of evasions and lies.
 
I don't really know what is evasive or lying about bringing up that you tell a lot of experienced camera people they are wrong about things because of your lab tests or reading spec sheets, and then you post a video emblazoned with a statement about it being your 'cinematography' that most people would never show another soul.

I am am not having a dig at you just for fun, but rather because I think people on here could really help you if you let them. Being included in a chapter on subwoofers in a book about audio does not equate to knowing how to grab a shot, or how best to shoot hand held, or even how to pan properly. If you have limited or unstable movement because of a medical condition (I believe you mentioned this?) then either take steps to rectify the effect on the image (easy rig or similar) or sadly, don't market your video as being cinematography. Or be a DP and get someone else - some enthusiastic young whippersnapper - to operate for you. A client only cares about the end product and not the obstacles one faces to achieve it.
 
@Basspig, Does your screening room volume go up to 11 by any chance?

My guess is that people want to see the output from the FS7 in the hands of a competent user who has taken the time to produce an aesthetic image and providing the community with their experience. I'm not sure what flailing the camera round like a banshee and avoiding all accepted framing conventions does for a personal test or to enhance the street cred of someone who goes by the title of cinematographer? Maybe the camera was actually testing you?

I've only ever met one cinematographer, actually one of the world's best (Christopher Doyle), who modestly referred to himself as a camera operator. If I ever produce work as good as his maybe then I can call myself a camera operator until then I'm a hack like everyone else..
 
SpareWheel said:
Then sir you and a-another who have thumbs-down
Click to expand...

Not sure who you're referring to but the thumbs system is anonymous so you have no way to know who has voted - just gives an idea of general feeling on the forum towards a post without having to resort to personal attacks...that's the point of it. Stating that you have given something a thumbs down kind of gets away from that point and back into personal attack territory!
Steve
 
Just took a quick peek and as you say the video quality is quite good. If you are using Sony lenses, turn on the SteadiShot. It's your friend. I think it only works with Sony lenses but perhaps I'm wrong about that. Don't think I am but anything is possible.
And when you say Sony 28-105...do you mean 18-105? Didn't know Sony made a 28-105.
But the 18-105 is sweet and gives you a FOV of about 27-128. Decent enough if you can mange the stupidity of the Fly By Wire.
The 28-135 kit lens is not a run and gun lens. It has it place, though not with me.
 
This thread is pretty silly. Really.

On a side note...this is not directed at any specific person or field. If it be music, cinema...pottery....anything...I often find that truly great masters are the ones who never need to state anything about their ability. The ones who do....are almost always aspiring to be masters one day. Two clearly distinct differences.

I find it best to not let on about your depth of knowledge but let others discover it in time...and present it when its appropriate, and without ego.

Thats my zen for the day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top