FS700 and Samurai Blade

John Foundas

John Foundas

Well-known member
Not quite ready to take on the 7Q, but was looking the the Atomos Samurai Blade.
I'm aware that recording Prores will help in post with CC/grading etc...

However, will there be a noticeable increase in picture quality compared to the avchd 24mb/s that comes out of the camera in general?

Thank you in advance...
 
If you getting everything right at the point of pressing record, then I doubt very much you'll notice the difference... But try and make any adjustments, grading, exposure etc, you'll see benefits of ProRes over the internal AVCHD

Although the samurai is only going to give you limited recording, just standard rate 25 or 30p, so anything 50p/60p upwards would still be AVCHD.

Why not get the 7q as a midway step, you'll gain access to 50p/60p record straight out of the box (and so can get uncompressed HFR when the camera dumps the buffer to card), you can always add the FS700 raw component at a later date.
 
Stuart Keasley said:
Why not get the 7q as a midway step, you'll gain access to 50p/60p record straight out of the box (and so can get uncompressed HFR when the camera dumps the buffer to card), you can always add the FS700 raw component at a later date.
Click to expand...

In trying to dissect all the info about the 7q, bit confusing with all the plans, activations and add-ons etc...I do mostly doc/corp stuff. Quick on the fly, small crew stuff. The 7q seems very bulky an cumbersome. I already have issues with the fs700, form factor and external monitors.
 
Basically, there will not be a noticeable increase in picture quality unless you have specifically found AVCHD lacking for your purposes. I would expect the main difference you will see is that in a prores recording the noise structure will be better preserved, and your footage may seem a bit noisier but truer to the images your camera is putting out, but you will not likely see this difference without pixel peeping. Prores does give you about 10x more data size per second of footage, so it will be a truer recording, but AVCHD is quite good at capturing the important stuff to the extent that I'd be surprised if a layperson could tell the difference. If your applications are VFX or grading heavy, you will likely notice the difference in post when digging in shadows or really pushing your footage around. Whether or not it has a big impact on your final product will really depend a lot on your needs and preferences.

Frankly I'd say I never had much use for an less compressed version of my FS700 footage that still looks otherwise identical to the AVCHD it records. The 7Q on the other hand, promises to give us a higher resolution (or better scaled 1080p), better color, better processed version of our images, which is an order of magnitude more important to me than just less compression. The main problems I have with the FS700 are the unavoidable edge and highlight issues that occur in certain situations, and those will only be fixed with the 7Q or other RAW-originated recording.

Then again if you don't notice the edge and highlight issues and you find yourself really noticing compression artifacts but are otherwise happy with the images, the Atomos Blade might be a good solution.
 
I used the Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 external recorder for transportation shoots now for a while - if you have fast motion shoots the internal avchd breaks with its 24mbit/s, so you avoid this compression artifacts using a external recorder.
If you compare the scaled 1080p Odyssey 7Q (422 10bit ProRes/ 12bit DNG) footage with other external recorder solutions ("8"bit 422 ProRes) it turns the FS700 into a complete different camera with a great sensor (as Noah said, you skip the bad internal processing).
I would wait the next (two) week(s) when the Odyssey 7Q is able to record 10bit ProRes 1080p and check the some side-by-side tests.
 
I noticed a significant difference even when not making much adjustments in post. In one part, the monitor is significantly better than the onboard so I tend to get a much nicer exposure. And then I find the compression a lot more pleasing but as others have stated, it's marginal and I only noticed from side-by-side comparison.
 
" will there be a noticeable increase in picture quality compared to the avchd 24mb/s that comes out of the camera in general?"

Agreed that the preferable production workflow is to have your scene well exposed and lit properly. The Atomos Sumurai Blade does have a great monitor and peaking function.
Hoverver, the significant value in the Samurai Blade, especially with the FS700 is in post production because it records in ProRes. This my friends, is an amazing codec. If in fact, your shots are or aren't what you intended, the codec performs wonderfully when grading your shots in post. It's not that the FS700's AVCHD is horrible, but once you go ProRes you won't want to shoot in anything lesser. We also use the Samurai Blade with our Blackmagic cameras (that alread have ProRes) for longer recording.

4K is, of course another issue. But frankly, we're nowhere nearing using 4K in a way that is viable for our production workflow and distribution yet. I suspect though, if ProRes makes its way into 4K...no one will be looking back at AVCHD.

I'm sure the folks with the Odyssey will be happy when ProRes makes its way to CD.
 
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