FS7: New Sony F7 XDCAM 4K Super 35mm Camcorder

That's precisely the reason why I'm buying one to be honest. Same sensor and quality as the F5 but in a one-man band run n' gun configuration.

It may well be I end up preferring what I could get out of my Red, but I am pretty sure I can monetize this investment a lot quicker. Until the Gruntmaster 6001, obviously.
 
Ben Scott said:
That's precisely the reason why I'm buying one to be honest. Same sensor and quality as the F5 but in a one-man band run n' gun configuration.

It may well be I end up preferring what I could get out of my Red, but I am pretty sure I can monetize this investment a lot quicker. Until the Gruntmaster 6001, obviously.
Click to expand...

Naw. There's going to be a GruntMaster 6000R, but the next full model release is the GruntMaster 9000. After that the numbers get too big, so the third full model is the Gruntmaster Unity.
 
Anybody want to buy a 5 day old FS7 (with no scratches) ?

Need to sell in order to fund the new Gruntmaster 6K.
 
RatLabProductions said:
You mean the URSA? Lots of grunt required! :p
Click to expand...
Nope. I one man band URSA handheld all day. Doing it right now (in between setups).

=P I guess it just requires doing versus imagining.

-- ^ from my phone

I've used the F3, FS100/700 (700 more), and F5 and I could not get these cameras to produce solid skin but I also hadn't worked with them extensively before hand. The A7S I felt got a lot closer to my own preferences (which are likely not what everyone else likes).

sk01.png

sk02.png

sk03.png

sk04.png

sk05.png


I'm not saying that this is anything to strive toward for anyone else, but if I could get this consistently out of the FS7 and motion cadence looked similar to A7S or better, then I don't see a reason not to own the camera.
 
Last edited:
To be honest Kholi, you could fairly easily get skin tones as good on the FS700 + 7Q SLog in just a few minutes. Personally, I felt that the samples I posted from the 7Q were as nice for skin tones and that was a breeze to do. But different strokes for different folks as everyone likes different looks for skin tones.

As for the whole motion debate, I could see a bit of the motion stutter thing on the FS100, but it definately changed on the FS700 IMO. It was just smoother. I've shot a lot of client gigs on the FS700 and never has anyone complained about the motion.

Edit: Sorry if I sound like a Sony Nazi, but I've been getting tons of great results from the camera. I guess I feel I'm getting a different look that all the people who relentlessly complain about the "video" look; and yeah... miss-information definitely hurts your gig prospects as a DP.
 
Last edited:
In the old days when some of you were in nickers it was true that Sony flesh seemed stuck between orange and magenta and couldn't get a real brown. Only Ikegami could get brown and that lasted somewhat through the the heyday of Pansonic as well. However I just haven't noticed it at all in years . Maybe it is still true to a tiny bit but I wonder since you guys don't seem to use Sony's very much - maybe you don't know how to use it. I frequently do alter the green - magenta offset to make faces look best to me., but I do that on Canon's too.

Do you use the standard Matrix? I worked out my own and am often struck that the moniter looks exactly like real life.

Oddly the last few times I used a C300 or a 5D I felt the flesh tones were yellow and I needed to add magenta.

Motion stutter is another issue entirely. i have a friend who had a Panny HVX200 and complained that Sony Ex-1 had terrible motion studded in 24P. Finally I compared them and they were both the same but the Panny was so soft that it hid the studder.

On the other hand I shot some footage of boat models with lots of rigging detail and thin verticals on a flat background on the F3 last year in 24P and damn - for the life of me I thought the shudder was horrible no matter what I did (tried every combination of detail, shutter speed , interlace etc.) Client didn't see it at all fortunately even when I pointed it out! That was also weird to me. Still a mystery - could have been a monitor issue though . Saw it on both Flanders and TV Logic. Still gives me nightmares.

Here's a question . On all those big shoot outs that Zacuto ran between the cameras a few years ago - I never noticed nor did anyone comment on flesh tones being different.

Lenny
 
Last edited:
Lenilenapi said:
In the old days when some of you were in nickers it was true that Sony flesh seemed stuck between orange and magenta and couldn't get a real brown. Only Ikegami could get brown and that lasted somewhat through the the heyday of Pansonic as well. However I just haven't noticed it at all in years . Maybe it is still true to a tiny bit but I wonder since you guys don't seem to use Sony's very much - maybe you don't know how to use it. I frequently do alter the green - magenta offset to make faces look best to me., but I do that on Canon's too.

Here's a question . On all those big shoot outs that Zacuto ran between the cameras a few years ago - I never noticed nor did anyone comment on flesh tones being different.

Lenny
Click to expand...

To me at least, you get a nicer out of the box look with say... Canons and Black Magic because they have a very defined look that looks very pleasing. S-Log definitely takes more work to make look nice, but it's still easy to get good looks and you have a more neutral base to begin with, which is more ideal for me since I like to grade everything.

I guess if you like the Black Magic look Kholi, you should just stick to BM since you get that look without any real effort.
 
Last edited:
Ben Scott said:
By the way, how are people finding recording times?
Click to expand...

I bought two 64GB XQD cards. I've only done one client job with the camera so far, in 1080p23.98. I used the XDCAM HD422 50Mbps codec. Each card was good for 137 minutes. I ended up using almost one full card.

I think the camera is going to be far more demanding in 4k, but for current 1080p delivery, it's pretty affordable.
 
*Field update*

I picked up my FS7 ten days ago, and for over a week now I've been flying around the US shooting an image film for a big multinational corporation. Seven flights in seven very long days and we've got four more to go. We've shot in extremely harsh conditions, in the cold, in the heat, in the wet, in dusty, dirty factories, in high wind and high humidity. So, it's fair to say I've given the camera a good work out.

We've shot 4K, HD and a broad range of frame rates using canon lenses with the Metabolise Ultra.

We've just had our first chance to review footage. In a word, the footage looks awesome. Not a word I use often...

I've found the camera very easy to use. Very easy to get the exposure I want and very easy to grade. I love shooting with the C300 and I love the full frame look from my 5D3. The FS7 though, blows these cameras out of the water and then some. Is it perfect? No. But, for my needs, it ticks all the right boxes.
 
16-35mm f2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8IS, 20mm f/2.8, 24mm mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4, 50mm mm f/1.2, 85mm f/1.2. The 50 and 85 don't work well with the metabones, but I'm using them wide open anyway so it's not so much of an issue. All the others work ok, some are more clunky than others when changing aperture.
 
Liam Hall said:
*Field update*

I picked up my FS7 ten days ago, and for over a week now I've been flying around the US shooting an image film for a big multinational corporation. Seven flights in seven very long days and we've got four more to go. We've shot in extremely harsh conditions, in the cold, in the heat, in the wet, in dusty, dirty factories, in high wind and high humidity. So, it's fair to say I've given the camera a good work out.

We've shot 4K, HD and a broad range of frame rates using canon lenses with the Metabolise Ultra.

We've just had our first chance to review footage. In a word, the footage looks awesome. Not a word I use often...

I've found the camera very easy to use. Very easy to get the exposure I want and very easy to grade. I love shooting with the C300 and I love the full frame look from my 5D3. The FS7 though, blows these cameras out of the water and then some. Is it perfect? No. But, for my needs, it ticks all the right boxes.
Click to expand...

You had much better luck than I did. I feel like this camera is very buggy right now.

First, couldn't get LUTs loaded for the life of me. Turns out, the camera was looking for a folder called "PMWF55_F5" instead of "FS7" (which is where it saves everything else). Oversight on Sony's part. Once I created this folder on the SD card, I could load LUTs.

Second, it appears that I randomly can't use MLUTs for Viewfinder or SDI. As far as I can tell there has been no rhyme or reason why the function greys out and says "cannot proceed" when I select it. I was in 4K 24p mode... couldn't use it. Switched to 1080p mode and VF MLUT was available, turned it on. Switched back to 4K 24p, LUT was working and the menu would allow me to toggle it on/off. I feel like this has happened with other menu items. So far "Cannot Proceed" has been incredibly frustrating for me because the camera isn't telling me whether or not I've enabled a function that limits to usage of something else. Another example of this is that I've gathered that the Waveform/Vector/Histogram can't be used while a LUT is being applied to the VF. I assigned Wave/Vector/Histogram to User 2 button and it doesn't even give the "Cannot Proceed" message when using a LUT. The button just doesn't do anything. This could be why a lot of people who have enabled the Rec709 LUT think their waveform is broken. Sony should really make this clear. Or better yet, make it so we can see the Slog3 waveform for exposure reassurance while viewing a Rec709 image.

Third, about 15minutes into a test shoot yesterday, the camera's image completely locked up. Here is a quick video:
http://d.pr/v/15esu
As you can see from the start, the interface is responding (white balance and ND messages pop up, audio meters and timecode are moving.) but the sensor image was frozen. I rebooted the camera about 5-6 times. I wish I would have gotten a video of the boot-up sequence, the image would flicker a bit (briefly showing both the Slog3 image as well as the LUT image) and would lock up somewhere in between there. Somehow, finally, it went away. Again, no rhyme or reason that I can put together as to why this would have happened.
I also tried to roll during the freeze, which resulted in clips that were unplayable through the camera's interface but appear to work fine on the computer (albeit, shot blindly due to the image being frozen).

Incredibly disconcerting. Glad to hear you had a better experience with the camera but right now I've got very mixed feelings. In over two years of using the FS700, I've shot snowy/jungle/dusty/wet/you-name-it environments and never had the camera crash or lock up. This honestly made me hesitant to rely on this camera 100% out of the gate.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top