FX6: Geese, Swans, and Ducks

Doug Jensen

Doug Jensen

Carbonite Member
This is additional 4K wildlife test footage that I shot with my FX6 and Sony's 200-600mm f/5.6 and 100-400 f/4.5 lenses. Most of the footage was shot at 120 fps using S-Cinetone and final grading in Resolve.

 
Did you shoot wide open? From 2.38 it seems different, it is the part I like most, more depth, (not depth of field).
 
Yes, most of this video was shot with the lens wide open as that is my default shooting mode. However, there may be a shot or two where I had to stop-down to get the exposure I wanted. As much as I love the variable ND, there is still a 2-stop difference between OFF and ON, so sometimes it is necessary to stop-down a little bit when 2-stops of ND is too much ND. If you had a specific shot(s) in mind, I'd be more than happy to check the metadata to see what the f-stop was.
 
The 200-600 ramps to like 6.3 I believe. I just leave it at 6.3 when it’s sunny to avoid losing light when I need to zoom in quickly.
 
Newsguy said:
The 200-600 ramps to like 6.3 I believe. I just leave it at 6.3 when it’s sunny to avoid losing light when I need to zoom in quickly.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is exactly what I do too, but that is a different issue from what I was talking about in my earlier post. As anyone who has a Sony camera with built-in ND filters knows, 2-stops is the least amount of ND so there is a substantial gap between no ND and the minimum ND that has it's challenges when you don't really want to stop the lens down. On the FX6 you can jump up to the HIGH sensitivity mode and then use ND filtration to bring the exposure back down, but the HIGH mode is not as clean as the LOW mode so I try not to use it unless absolutely needed.

As I demonstrate in my FX6 master class, adding up to 12dB of gain in the LOW mode is usually cleaner than the HIGH mode at 0dB.
 
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Great tip Doug. I actually had this very issue happen to me recently. I was shooting a stand up and in order to have the aperture where I wanted it, I had to go to high base and ND to get the correct exposure. Unfortunately when I got back to color grade the shot, there was a lot of black in the frame and it was visibly noisy. It was easy to clean up with neat video, but took forever to render out. Next time I’ll go to the lowest ND and see if adding some gain will get me there to avoid having to use neat video.
 
Just elaborate on this topic:

1) 0dB in the HIGH mode is about the same sensitivity as .+24db in the LOW mode

2) 0dB in the LOW mode is basically the same exposure as 0dB in the HIGH mode and the ND filter set to 1/16th.

3) The LOW mode is cleaner up to around 14dB of Gain than the HIGH mode is at 0dB. So if you find yourself shooting outdoors in low light or a location indoors where you can't add any lights, my advice is to go ahead and increase the Gain in the LOW mode up to 12 to 14dB , and if that still isn't enough to get a proper exposure, then go ahead and jump to the HIGH mode.
 
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