OK so I got a demo Fs5 from my good friends at VMI Video in Southern California. Well in short - Very cool!!!
I've got it for about 6 days to test out and put though it's paces in my typical work flows. Yesterday I shot a group of sit down interviews with it in 4K. Today I used it as a B camera to our F5 for a green screen segment. The director is going to do the final edit with both cameras but I looked at my footage in 2160@ 24p and it looks really nice. I was able to pull a key very quickly in PPro.
Tomorrow we are getting together at a local production company's stage and testing it against an F5 and an A7s. The plan is to use every lens, recorder and format we can with each camera and then compare to footage. So this will be an on-going series of posts for the next few weeks as I develop my impressions further.
Part 1:
The interviews went very well. I used the Fs5 as the A camera and my EX3 as the B camera. The EX3 was mostly to give me a backup as the Fs5 was new and I was new to it. I sent the same audio feed to both cameras and kept matched framing. I used the EX3 last year on this project and was sure it would work if I got pickled. The Fs5 did a fine job. I wanted to to be in 4K for re-framing in post. I got a little scare when I looked at the footage this morning; there was one interview where a short had a tight blue and white pattern that created a moire pattern and I didn't see it while we were shooting... The I thought about it, I am down resing the footage to 1080 on the fly and hadn't rendered it. I hit the big R button and then everything was fine. So one for OE....
That's it for now. I'll post some more info this weekend after the big camera day.
Part 2:
So we did the shoot out with the other cameras and it turned out pretty well. We set all three cameras up with the green screen. We tried Sony lenses and Canon L series lenses along with a pair of B4 ENG lenses - one SD and one HD. As for the B4 glass, we found very little difference to the eye when viewing on a 20" JVC broadcast LCD monitor.
The Sony lenses, a 24-70 ƒ4, a 16-35 ƒ4 and a 70-200 ƒ4 worked very nicely. Auto focus worked as expected and face tracking on the wider lenses was remarkably accurate. The Canon glass looked very sharp as well. The iris control through a Metbones Mk IV adapter was quite good. I was having a little trouble (probably OE again) getting the camera to use auto focus with the canon glass.
The kit 18-105 lens from the Fs5 worked on the A7s which was fun. But the zoom function was a little lacking with the A7s' remote. We tried a LANC remote via and adapter and it was still a little on the unhappy side.
More info soon... Stay tuned
Part 2:
So we did the shoot out with the other cameras and it turned out pretty well. We set all three cameras up with the green screen. We tried Sony lenses and Canon L series lenses along with a pair of B4 ENG lenses - one SD and one HD. As for the B4 glass, we found very little difference to the eye when viewing on a 20" JVC broadcast LCD monitor.
The Sony lenses, a 24-70 ƒ4, a 16-35 ƒ4 and a 70-200 ƒ4 worked very nicely. Auto focus worked as expected and face tracking on the wider lenses was remarkably accurate. The Canon glass looked very sharp as well. The iris control through a Metbones Mk IV adapter was quite good. I was having a little trouble (probably OE again) getting the camera to use auto focus with the canon glass.
The kit 18-105 lens from the Fs5 worked on the A7s which was fun. But the zoom function was a little lacking with the A7s' remote. We tried a LANC remote via and adapter and it was still a little on the unhappy side.
More info soon... Stay tuned
Until next time, good shooting and editing and grading,
