Sony A7SIII = $3500, 10-bit 4K120p internal, 16-bit 4K60p RAW out

I feel like Sony never made the silver top cameras before because they had their own style going with the nice silver they used for their own non-black versions when they started making mirrorless cameras.

Everyone else's silver was the same color for those two-tone cameras above.

Silver.jpg
 
Bruno Maes shared some Prores raw from the camera on a FB group. Hope he doesn't mind me sharing the link:

https://wetransfer.com/downloads/08...WegOldOy5MEzkPkp-DuKlNtcuiwTVpAEhnT-M4vimVRGg

I tried the shots in Premiere - weird colourspace, highlight roll-off terrible, channel clipping - awful. So I installed Assimilate Scratch to access the raw properly. The difference is night and day. I'm still working it out but in Scratch it feels like real raw footage. When I turn off the LUT that it automatically put on you get good dynamic range, nice highlights, roll-off much better. The fire breather is a great image to test on because the rage is so huge. Hopefully I'll work out how to make it work in Premiere too.
I'd say the raw has the potential to look significantly better than the internal footage (as you'd hope).
 
There are weird buggy lines on the bottom in Scratch but you can see the PP rolloff issue below that.

000616.jpg000171.jpgScreen Shot 2020-09-17 at 10.03.19 am.jpg

The compression on the images here doesn't tell you much unfortunately.
 
Stu, for PP, I think it is interpreting the files as the wrong color space, so it just needs to be changed in the software. I haven't really used PP in years, so I'm not exactly sure where to do this. As Davinci Resolve user, I had to used Media Encoder to transcode the ProRes Raw to just basic ProRes files so that I could try grading them. While setting up the transcode, I noticed the files looked like what you have in your screengrab, so I changed it to from the rec 709 colorspace to the rec 2100 PQ colorspace and it fixed that. There was also a Rec 2020 HLG, which interpreted it better. I didn't really go back and forth to confirm what was correct as I just wanted quickly play around with grading the files for fun:

50351891981_8ab124c12d_o.jpg
[/url]SonyA7SIIIProResRawTest_1.1.1 by Teddy Dem, on Flickr[/IMG]

50351187943_843a2dacc5_o.jpg
[/url]SonyA7SIIIProResRawTest_1.2.1 by Teddy Dem, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
These workflow issues underline how nice it is that Blackmagic controls its whole pipeline now, from sensor design, to camera and codec, to editing and VFX
 
Samuel H said:
These workflow issues underline how nice it is that Blackmagic controls its whole pipeline now, from sensor design, to camera and codec, to editing and VFX
Click to expand...

True.

Although, I was browsing ideas on why RED footage has such an ugly default look in Davinci Resolve, and then I came across a tutorial where someone is using the RED workflow on their BMP6K footage. I thought that seemed silly. Seems to take away from the whole idea of integration. haha. The footage did end up looking nice though.
 
Samuel H said:
These workflow issues underline how nice it is that Blackmagic controls its whole pipeline now, from sensor design, to camera and codec, to editing and VFX
Click to expand...

VFX?
I really hate doing vfx shoot outside of resolve. Every time I rerender my clip on other programs afx/nuke or maya/3ds I had to restart resolve. It wont reload the clip. (Unlike premier will update instantly) :(
 
Samuel H said:
These workflow issues underline how nice it is that Blackmagic controls its whole pipeline now, from sensor design, to camera and codec, to editing and VFX
Click to expand...

I took a look at the files with FCPX. They look okay, like typical ProRes RAW, which is good. White balance and ISO adjustments aren't available yet for the A7SIII files so it is a little limited; hopefully that will come along soon. Sony and Atomos need to get aligned on that.

I also converted the clips to ProRes 4444 and looked at them in Resolve, and got nice results. I used Comperssor for the conversion, it is quite a bit faster than Media Encoder. And with Media Encoder you need to remember to switch to maximum depth and 2100 PQ.

I've worked quite a bit with the S1H ProRes RAW now, and in general could do about everything with 10 bit Log that I could do with 12 bit ProRes RAW. But it is nice to have for extreme situations. Also being able to adjust White Balance and ISO in FCPX is a big deal.
 
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James0b57 said:
True.

Although, I was browsing ideas on why RED footage has such an ugly default look in Davinci Resolve, and then I came across a tutorial where someone is using the RED workflow on their BMP6K footage. I thought that seemed silly. Seems to take away from the whole idea of integration. haha. The footage did end up looking nice though.
Click to expand...

Do you have a link to that?
 
Apparently the latest beta of Premiere has the option to convert ProRes Raw footage to the correct Log format. We should be able to work with Prores raw footage properly in PP soon.
 
Stuart Mannion said:
Apparently the latest beta of Premiere has the option to convert ProRes Raw footage to the correct Log format. We should be able to work with Prores raw footage properly in PP soon.
Click to expand...


Yes, even though Premiere has had Prores RAW support since May 2020 in version 14.2 (which also works in the current shipping version 14.4.0), the next version 14.5 will add built-in RAW-to-log conversion. You could edit ProRes RAW before, but this new feature will make it easier. The below video explains it:

https://youtu.be/PV4f2o5zjA0
 
Got my A7s iii. One nice feature of the new menu system is built in help. When you select an item, you can push the trash can button on the camera and get a description of what that item does. No need to go to the manual! Yeah!
 
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