Sony X70 looking very interesting

Josh Bass said:
How's your experience with the notorious "mushiness?"
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Well, you've seen my samples... I think they look pretty decent. (BTW download the originals, the streaming-compressed versions look WAY worse.)

I won't say they look perfectly non-mushy, particularly in foliage (which seems to be a major stress test for this), but Ive certainly seen MUCH worse. I think the water shots look pretty good. Overall for a camera at this price, I think the results are excellent.
 
Hi Chris, I just downloaded the clip you kindly uploaded to share of the footage of bay area there and I have top say I was really impressed! Think I'll pick one of these up now! You sold it to me. It's be a great little fella to have in the bag. Thanks again, Sparky x

cyvideo said:
A lot of discussion here on the X70 but obviously not many have seen footage from it. I gave it a pretty solid workout and was sufficiently happy with what came out of it to order one.

Bearing in mind that what I was aiming for was a ready rolled 'look' that requires very little or no grading. A quick shoot, edit and deliver set up in other words. To try and get that look I ended up modifying PP4 for my uses. The changes made were to keep the video in the 16-235 delivery range and to try and achieve a natural looking roll off to the highlights and minimise white clipping whilst at the same time being careful to not crush the black levels too much.

All my initial settings were done on the grey scale and color chip charts using a WFM and Vector. Final tweaks were done outside in the real world while still monitoring everything on the scopes. It’s all still a work in progress. At this point I think I can probably squeeze a little more out of the camera to suit what I’m after. I would probably end up with two or three PPs with variations to cover different scenarios. After two days with the camera I was impressed enough with it that I have just ordered one. I can definitely see some uses for it here.

After setting the camera up I shot some XAVC-L 50-mbit 4:2:2 10-bit at 50p with 100th shutter. I purposely chose a high contrast location where I knew I would have extreme whites in full blazing sun along with deep shadows plus some people around for some skin tone colors and exposures. What better place than a marina. Excuse some of the shaky shots at the long end as it was very windy. The modified PP4 settings are listed at the head of the clip. The clip can be downloaded here. Note: It's a 370MB download.

https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/t9yiwl

A couple of days later I had to cover a presser shooting on PDW XDCam. Then I did a dangerous thing. The dangerous thing was I gave the journo I was working with the X70. I only received mine the day before. Bare in mind this journo is totally not a cameraman. I said "Here, try and grab some overlay footage with this." I think a lot of you call it 'B' roll. Anyhow as the journo was a complete beginner I put the X70 on full auto running my modified PP4. The footage he shot was 1920 50i AVCHD as it had to go straight to the network after the shoot.

The venue was a total mixed light nightmare. Tungsten light with big picture windows with bright daylight and sunlight streaming in. Now bear in mind the the camera was in full auto mode with a totally inexperienced operator. The dangerous thing is that the footage he came back with was totally usable in most instances. Could do myself out of work if I'm not careful.

100MB download here if anyone wants to see how easy it is becoming for a neophyte to get reasonable footage.

www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/7m4ikj

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney
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AtticusLake said:
Well, you've seen my samples... I think they look pretty decent. (BTW download the originals, the streaming-compressed versions look WAY worse.)

I won't say they look perfectly non-mushy, particularly in foliage (which seems to be a major stress test for this), but Ive certainly seen MUCH worse. I think the water shots look pretty good. Overall for a camera at this price, I think the results are excellent.
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They look great, plus a very slight softness can be a good thing in the right circumstances. I heard the 4K upgrade is supposed to come out in Jan. Not very far away.
 
After watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mFBoo4jvKo a dozen times, I am expecting great built-in image stabiizaion (IS) from the camera. But,since the IS is lens-based (OSS) combined with electronic stabilization, I guess IS with the promised future 4K isn't going to be a trivial/easy job for Sony engineers. I know, this is pure speculation; still, what do you think/expect/anticipate?
 
Knowing a little about the lead times on this kind of product, I would guess that 4k was probably "working" a long time ago, and since then they've just been tweaking it and making it ready for prime time. So I would think that 4k is probably pretty well baked into the overall design. By this time, they'd better just be running the final passes of testing prior to release (and probably jamming in some last-minute bug fixes).

As to IS... I dunno, I guess 4k makes everything harder, but I suspect they have a handle on it. We'll see, anyhow.
 
Here is a few frame grabs I shot recently with the X70 - two from a hiphop music video and one from a green screen shoot - very impressed overall.
chris pic 1.jpgchris pic 2.jpgX70 chroma pic.jpgx70 chroma grab.jpg
 
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