FS700 Footage in 200fps and some thoughts

You probably don't need another 'DP' wading in here, but what the hell...

Personally I'm somewhat between Oron's position and everyone else. One critical thing that everyone else has overlooked is that Oron indicates he was shooting Slog2 in AVCHD (or at least 8bit) and the camera really doesn't perform at it's best there.

Against a C300 - the C300 will generally produce more pleasing results, when shooting people. The colorimetry Canon utilises in both the C300 and 5D favours pleasing skin tones, while Sony is (supposedly) producing more 'accurate' colours (but these are not always too flattering). However the FS700 does genuinely have a touch more DR (at least half a stop, possibly 1 & 1/2), but you're generally not able to utilise it in 8bit (unless you like the low con Slog2 look). The FS700 is also better in low light (even without a speed booster) - the C300 is good, but the FS700 chip is insanely clean (despite the smaller sensor sites).

But that's AVCHD. Using the O7Q is a different matter. Shooting 4KtoHD Slog2 and using an ACES workflow I'd say the FS700 blows the C300 out the water. The extra DR gives a genuinely more filmic look, especially by controlling highlights and the 4K downscale makes it sharper, the 10bit colour gives you more latitude to colour correct (the C300 being 8 bit don't forget). But, Oron wasn't talking about 4KtoHD, as far as I can tell.

As for my 'go to' docco camera? In all honesty the FS700, C300 and Scarlet are equally as terrible as each other IMO. The Scarlet probably being the worst, due to it's unreliability, low-res viewfinder and hoodless monitor (both making focussing a nightmare), awful ergonomics, relatively poor low light performance and impractical (in terms of post and data rate) Raw codec. Likewise the C300 and FS700 have terrible ergonomics but they are at least reliable. Without the O7Q the C300 wins. With the O7Q it's the FS700 because it is better in low light and produces nicer, more flexible images (and the option of 4K and high speed makes it more flexible). The major downside being it's fragility as a system.

If I had to pick a camera, I'd probably go with an f900 in all honesty. S35mm is such a stupid frame size for docco work, as Oron indicates, due to the challenge of keeping unpredictable subjects in focus and the lack of long range, lightweight zooms. I'd say BM have been kind of smart offering a B4 sensor option with the Ursa. If I was forced to go S35 I'd pick an Alexa with a Cabrio 19-90 (but I'd struggle to convince the producer to pay for it). Those extra stops of DR (14!) plus great lowlight performance make a big difference. Although 90mm is still too short for docco work.

Oron's 100% right about the lenses. Stills zooms are god awful for docco work. Personally I end up using the kit zoom at f6.3 all the time (to avoid the exposure drop and to help focus) because 18-200mm is a workable range - but the servo focus, extending design and reverse zoom all do my head in. I'd kill for a half decent par focal, manual focus, internal zoom, lightweight lens with a fixed aperture (even a slow one: 5.6 would be fine). The Angeniuex 20-200 has the range but weighs an effing ton and costs a fortune!
 
oron cohen said:
Sounds great, but lets wait to see the price? or did they announced it already? :-) I actually see this as a good opening for new companies, the same thing that happened with BMD or Digital Bolex for cameras should happen in the lens market, we need new players! even though I rent equipment, its very hard to convince a producer why you can't just take a 24-105 or 24-70 mark II instead of a cine zoom, the cine zoom cost per a day what the two still zooms will cost for the week :-)
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Yeah, no price yet. Heck it isn't even a real lens yet, they just had a 3-d printout.... I don't even think the focal length markings on the mock-up matched the specs they were presented. But it was shown on the new a7s at NAB, so I'm hoping that it will be priced on the cheaper side when it does become a reality. (and no pillow effect pls Sony.)

Agreed on the need for a cine-glass revolution. There aren't many producers that want to stick a 20-60k lens on a 3k-10k camera body :-)
 
Colinelves said:
As for my 'go to' docco camera? In all honesty the FS700, C300 and Scarlet are equally as terrible as each other IMO. The Scarlet probably being the worst, due to it's unreliability, low-res viewfinder and hoodless monitor (both making focussing a nightmare), awful ergonomics, relatively poor low light performance and impractical (in terms of post and data rate) Raw codec. Likewise the C300 and FS700 have terrible ergonomics but they are at least reliable. Without the O7Q the C300 wins. With the O7Q it's the FS700 because it is better in low light and produces nicer, more flexible images (and the option of 4K and high speed makes it more flexible). The major downside being it's fragility as a system.
Click to expand...

I shot a bunch of stuff for a broadcast documentary and we had to use the C300 to meet UK's broadcast spec. I was excited at first but ended up pretty let down with the camera overall. It has nice features but the big clunky LCD screen w/ XLR jacks was ridiculous. Taking it off meant I only had the little tiny EVF and a 1/8" audio input. On top of that, people rave about it for documentaries but (unless I just couldn't figure it out) you can't run a single XLR input to both channels with independent gain control. I do this ALL the time with the FS700 so I have one "normal" audio channel and one that is dialed back for safety (random loud noises, yelling, etc.). As far as I could tell on the C300, the gain knobs controls XLR input gain, and not the gain for L/R channels. Subtle difference but made a big difference for how I shoot doc. I asked my buddy who does production/post audio what his favorite cameras to work with are and he loves the FS700. He said the REDs can be a pain to interface with, but the FS700 usually has mounting points/shoes for a wireless hop, full XLR, independent channel gain, and lots of flexibility for routing inputs to the channels.

Additionally, and this could very well be something I just didn't know how to set up, but is there an easy way to change frame rates on the C300? The director would be like "oh, lets do 60fps for this" and since the C300 only does 60fps @ 720p, I would have to go into the menu and change the camera resolution to 720p and THEN change the frame rate to 60fps. So not only was it digging through menus, but it added extra steps. A single press of "S&Q" puts me into 60fps mode on the FS700. Give me that any day.

Whew, sorry for the long rant. The C300 has an excellent image but all of those other issues made me glad I saved $8k and bought the FS700 instead. And now that the 7Q is out, I've got the best of both worlds.
 
jshbckr said:
I shot a bunch of stuff for a broadcast documentary and we had to use the C300 to meet UK's broadcast spec. I was excited at first but ended up pretty let down with the camera overall. It has nice features but the big clunky LCD screen w/ XLR jacks was ridiculous. Taking it off meant I only had the little tiny EVF and a 1/8" audio input. On top of that, people rave about it for documentaries but (unless I just couldn't figure it out) you can't run a single XLR input to both channels with independent gain control. I do this ALL the time with the FS700 so I have one "normal" audio channel and one that is dialed back for safety (random loud noises, yelling, etc.). As far as I could tell on the C300, the gain knobs controls XLR input gain, and not the gain for L/R channels. Subtle difference but made a big difference for how I shoot doc. I asked my buddy who does production/post audio what his favorite cameras to work with are and he loves the FS700. He said the REDs can be a pain to interface with, but the FS700 usually has mounting points/shoes for a wireless hop, full XLR, independent channel gain, and lots of flexibility for routing inputs to the channels.

Additionally, and this could very well be something I just didn't know how to set up, but is there an easy way to change frame rates on the C300? The director would be like "oh, lets do 60fps for this" and since the C300 only does 60fps @ 720p, I would have to go into the menu and change the camera resolution to 720p and THEN change the frame rate to 60fps. So not only was it digging through menus, but it added extra steps. A single press of "S&Q" puts me into 60fps mode on the FS700. Give me that any day.

Whew, sorry for the long rant. The C300 has an excellent image but all of those other issues made me glad I saved $8k and bought the FS700 instead. And now that the 7Q is out, I've got the best of both worlds.
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One thing that is kind of funny to me, is that one of the oft repeated advantages of the C300 is
that the ergonomics of the FS700 'suck for handheld' and that you 'have to rig it up'. I've worked
on about 5 fairly decent sized productions in the last year, using C300's. Every single one of them
had the camera 'rigged up'. I have never once seen someone shooting with it 'plain'. Not saying it
doesn't happen, but I haven't seen it.
 
alaskacameradude said:
One thing that is kind of funny to me, is that one of the oft repeated advantages of the C300 is
that the ergonomics of the FS700 'suck for handheld' and that you 'have to rig it up'. I've worked
on about 5 fairly decent sized productions in the last year, using C300's. Every single one of them
had the camera 'rigged up'. I have never once seen someone shooting with it 'plain'. Not saying it
doesn't happen, but I haven't seen it.
Click to expand...

It's all very well to wail on the C300 - as I said before it is pretty crappy in many ways (the lack of slow mo, the ergonomics and the ganged audio controls being three reasons it's difficult to work with) but at the end of the day: it produces very flattering skin tones, requiring little in the way of grading and it is broadcast quality (to EBU standards) - the most important factor being the 'Canon look'. This is why it's became the defacto camera choice for productions too low budget to get an Alexa and too big to shoot on the 5D.

In contrast the basic FS700 profiles all need a little bit of fiddling to become their best and it's non-broadcast. The F3 is broadcast, and produces simply stunning images - in slog, but slog required grading!

At the end of the day if Sony really want to steal the crown back from Canon, they need to put more effort into the standard profiles on their cameras. As owner operators, or small productions, the FS700 is a great choice - because it is so flexible and produces amazing images for the price bracket - and the slow mo is fun.

But most productions can't be bothered with the extra hassle, they just want something that looks good out of the box - and Canon delivers that.
 
+1

I have to admit that sometimes I was leering a little jaleous at the C300 behause of the beautiful skin tones ooc.
 
There's no conflict. Due to the correct look from Sony you can tweak it to be pretty but it's not pretty by itself. I can compare my 5D3 and RX100. Both can be made to look like it was shot with the same camera.
 
Colinelves said:
It's all very well to wail on the C300 - as I said before it is pretty crappy in many ways (the lack of slow mo, the ergonomics and the ganged audio controls being three reasons it's difficult to work with) but at the end of the day: it produces very flattering skin tones, requiring little in the way of grading and it is broadcast quality (to EBU standards) - the most important factor being the 'Canon look'. This is why it's became the defacto camera choice for productions too low budget to get an Alexa and too big to shoot on the 5D.

In contrast the basic FS700 profiles all need a little bit of fiddling to become their best and it's non-broadcast. The F3 is broadcast, and produces simply stunning images - in slog, but slog required grading!

At the end of the day if Sony really want to steal the crown back from Canon, they need to put more effort into the standard profiles on their cameras. As owner operators, or small productions, the FS700 is a great choice - because it is so flexible and produces amazing images for the price bracket - and the slow mo is fun.

But most productions can't be bothered with the extra hassle, they just want something that looks good out of the box - and Canon delivers that.
Click to expand...

And that is why all five productions I am referring to chose the C300....
 
I'm bringing the 5D3 with me today to shoot reference stills for later skintone matching with the FS700 video. From comparing the 5D3 RAW video to the FS700- it's not just skintones looking better on the 5D3, the 5D3 is just more accurate with color overall (the slight warm bias is easy to cool if desired- still looks super accurate). The FS700 does weird things with color going from dark to light, so global color changes have different effects on the shot depending on element brightness. Perhaps CD with the 7Q can provide a 3D LUT which fixes this and provides the FS700 with accurate color from dark to bright.
 
I remember seeing a 5dmkiii pp for the fs700. Might have been from ablecine or den Lennie or somewhere. Sometimes people just want that look. It will get nulled using 4k2hd in the 7q though. It could be used as a reference for a cd lut. I know some directors who would flip out if I gave them the option of 4k2hd cleanness and then pushed a button and it looked like the 5dmkiii look they are used to.
 
jcs said:
I'm bringing the 5D3 with me today to shoot reference stills for later skintone matching with the FS700 video. From comparing the 5D3 RAW video to the FS700- it's not just skintones looking better on the 5D3, the 5D3 is just more accurate with color overall (the slight warm bias is easy to cool if desired- still looks super accurate). The FS700 does weird things with color going from dark to light, so global color changes have different effects on the shot depending on element brightness. Perhaps CD with the 7Q can provide a 3D LUT which fixes this and provides the FS700 with accurate color from dark to bright.
Click to expand...

I think everyone just has their own opinion on what good skin tones are. JCS personally sent me links to several videos of the same woman shot in 5D3 RAW and non-7Q FS700 and I personally found the skin tones on the FS700 more to my liking. IMO, on the videos that JCS shot, the 5D3 skin tones and colors were really saturation and kind of artificial looking while the FS700 had a more under-stated look which I liked. And I'm honestly NOT being biased at all towards the FS700. I like what I like regardless of what I own and in those videos, I liked the FS700.

So yeah, one man's turd is another man's treasure.
 
gene_can_sing said:
I think everyone just has their own opinion on what good skin tones are. JCS personally sent me links to several videos of the same woman shot in 5D3 RAW and non-7Q FS700 and I personally found the skin tones on the FS700 more to my liking. IMO, on the videos that JCS shot, the 5D3 skin tones and colors were really saturation and kind of artificial looking while the FS700 had a more under-stated look which I liked. And I'm honestly NOT being biased at all towards the FS700. I like what I like regardless of what I own and in those videos, I liked the FS700.

So yeah, one man's turd is another man's treasure.
Click to expand...

I'm similar - I think the Canon look is a little garish.
 
LeoGrey said:
Two things :)

1) My apologies if you feel I insulted you in any way, that was truly not my intention. It also wasn't my intention to "imply" anything about you OR your experience. I made sure to mention it was only my opinion and in no way did I intend to come off as arrogant

2) Putting words in someone's mouth or twisting what they say is not a smart way to go about communicating your opinion. Neither is taking posts on a public forum personal. All I was simply saying was that(in my opinion) of the cameras you spoke of, none of them look any more "cinematic" then the other. I didn't mention anything about professionalism either, not sure where you got that from.

To make things a little more clear, I work both as a director and DP :) I don't own an fs700, c300 or a scarlet(but do enjoy the results I have gotten from all 3). I also don't "walk away" from DP's that have a camera preference. I walk away from the ones that make claims of one camera looking more "cinematic" then another. Of course choosing the camera is an integral part of the process, but it has little to do with the craft of filmmaking!

True in fact each camera renders light, color and detail differently, but it's more the choices we make with (X) camera that determines how "cinematic" it looks. (in my opinion)

A really good example is the tv series, breaking bad. Watching many episodes I thought to myself(wow, that looked incredible video'ish) and it's being shot with an ALEXA. So by your mindset, that camera doesn't look "cinematic". Wouldn't a better explanation be that due to the rigorous requirements of production not every scene could be setup and crafted to look beautiful? Maybe we are saying the same thing, although I definitely don't derive any of my knowledge from sites like zacuto or other review sites with an agenda.

ps: If Roger Deakin's shot a movie with an fs700(or even an iphone) it would probably STILL blow minds everywhere and dp's across the globe would be raving about how "cinematic" it looked =) Sorry, I had too!
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Hey,

Apology accepted! We still disagree about some very basic things, but everyone should have their own opinion.

it's just difficult for me sometimes to give an argument that in my surrounding is so basic like: "camera does matter", every professional DP or director or post production personal I ever worked with saw the importance of the camera u choose.

I for one don't think Deakins will get the same images out of an iPhone, not only for not having the IQ, but also because as a DOP you built a certain workflow in your work.

But just to make it clear, I think the FS700 is one of the best cameras for its price.
 
Colinelves said:
You probably don't need another 'DP' wading in here, but what the hell...

Personally I'm somewhat between Oron's position and everyone else. One critical thing that everyone else has overlooked is that Oron indicates he was shooting Slog2 in AVCHD (or at least 8bit) and the camera really doesn't perform at it's best there.

Against a C300 - the C300 will generally produce more pleasing results, when shooting people. The colorimetry Canon utilises in both the C300 and 5D favours pleasing skin tones, while Sony is (supposedly) producing more 'accurate' colours (but these are not always too flattering). However the FS700 does genuinely have a touch more DR (at least half a stop, possibly 1 & 1/2), but you're generally not able to utilise it in 8bit (unless you like the low con Slog2 look). The FS700 is also better in low light (even without a speed booster) - the C300 is good, but the FS700 chip is insanely clean (despite the smaller sensor sites).

But that's AVCHD. Using the O7Q is a different matter. Shooting 4KtoHD Slog2 and using an ACES workflow I'd say the FS700 blows the C300 out the water. The extra DR gives a genuinely more filmic look, especially by controlling highlights and the 4K downscale makes it sharper, the 10bit colour gives you more latitude to colour correct (the C300 being 8 bit don't forget). But, Oron wasn't talking about 4KtoHD, as far as I can tell.

As for my 'go to' docco camera? In all honesty the FS700, C300 and Scarlet are equally as terrible as each other IMO. The Scarlet probably being the worst, due to it's unreliability, low-res viewfinder and hoodless monitor (both making focussing a nightmare), awful ergonomics, relatively poor low light performance and impractical (in terms of post and data rate) Raw codec. Likewise the C300 and FS700 have terrible ergonomics but they are at least reliable. Without the O7Q the C300 wins. With the O7Q it's the FS700 because it is better in low light and produces nicer, more flexible images (and the option of 4K and high speed makes it more flexible). The major downside being it's fragility as a system.

If I had to pick a camera, I'd probably go with an f900 in all honesty. S35mm is such a stupid frame size for docco work, as Oron indicates, due to the challenge of keeping unpredictable subjects in focus and the lack of long range, lightweight zooms. I'd say BM have been kind of smart offering a B4 sensor option with the Ursa. If I was forced to go S35 I'd pick an Alexa with a Cabrio 19-90 (but I'd struggle to convince the producer to pay for it). Those extra stops of DR (14!) plus great lowlight performance make a big difference. Although 90mm is still too short for docco work.

Oron's 100% right about the lenses. Stills zooms are god awful for docco work. Personally I end up using the kit zoom at f6.3 all the time (to avoid the exposure drop and to help focus) because 18-200mm is a workable range - but the servo focus, extending design and reverse zoom all do my head in. I'd kill for a half decent par focal, manual focus, internal zoom, lightweight lens with a fixed aperture (even a slow one: 5.6 would be fine). The Angeniuex 20-200 has the range but weighs an effing ton and costs a fortune!
Click to expand...
Hi Colin,

indeed some people overlooked I've shot the FS700 AVCHD! Also I fully agree C300, FS700 and Scarlet are all not that good for Doco work, and it all comes to personal preference here. I for one really like the Scarlet and managed to kit it in a way that was very comfortable for me (Mainly Vocas bits).

I would take an F900 any day though :-)
 
Sorenson said:
Yeah, no price yet. Heck it isn't even a real lens yet, they just had a 3-d printout.... I don't even think the focal length markings on the mock-up matched the specs they were presented. But it was shown on the new a7s at NAB, so I'm hoping that it will be priced on the cheaper side when it does become a reality. (and no pillow effect pls Sony.)

Agreed on the need for a cine-glass revolution. There aren't many producers that want to stick a 20-60k lens on a 3k-10k camera body :-)
Click to expand...
I really hope they'll give it good pricing, something in the range of 7-8K even 10-12K would be fine, as long as it's PL not Sony mount only.
 
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