We'd then key light the actors with a color-matched LED panel or small incandescent bounced off a white board or white cloth. It was a single location shoot, I was able to prep the location by putting a bank of incandescent's in the ceiling with chimera's. At one point, we rented a 5DMKIII because we needed to make absolutely certain there wouldn't be a dead pixel and it had a light leak which prevented us from using it. We had three 5DMKII's, ALL of them had dead pixel's and every time you'd do the reset, they would show up somewhere else. We had never-ending issues from max file size issues to lens shifting when doing focus or zoom changes. Like yourself, I had no choice, as the equipment was being supplied by one of the three DP's on the project. I spent more then a year shooting a feature on 5DMKII's and it was absolutely the worst experience I've ever had shooting a film. (and we're a low budget film, so using a Sony F55 and trucking in lots and lots of lighting equipment is not an option!) So while I think it is likely we'll stick with the director's original plan of using a BMCC EF, I feel I've at least got to investigate if A7s is a worthy alternative. I normally would never ever consider an A7s over a BMCC for shooting a narrative feature, but this film seems tailor made for the A7s, in that it is a vampire horror with a lot of it shot at night. So I wouldn't be so quick to talk them down, especially in the context of very low budget feature films), you might have missed the core point about my specific situation: this is a low budget film that will be shooting a lot in very low light. plenty of beautiful stuff can be, and has been, made with stills cameras such as the 5DmkII/GH2/NEX-5N/D800/etc. Tyler: while I agree in general with the rough gist of what you're saying (although.
Phil: it doesn't do S-log over HDMI? Well darn, that is a second strike against it! (first being that it is only 8 bit) I'd hesitate to go for the A7s unless you're sure you need it, especially if your decisionmaking has on any level been influenced by the idea that it's The New Hotness.
That said I have never failed to be impressed with the original Blackmagic Cinema Camera (less so with the 4K, but it's still nice) and it makes very nice pictures with lots of information in them. The A7s is very, very, very much more sensitive than the Blackmagic and this may be of use on something involving a lot of night work. Otherwise as far as I'm aware there are only two problems with it: the big chip is a pain on several levels, requiring exotic lenses to really work well, and the rolling shutter isn't great - although it's not great on the BMD camera either. The general feeling seems to be that this is a technical oversight on Sony's part rather than a deliberate decision to cripple the thing, but that may be wishful thinking and I'm not here to make excuses for them. The fact that the A7s won't - currently - put S-log out over its HDMI output is odd and slightly worrying. Latitude is what saves you in dark situations, because it will provide you with the ample color space and dynamic range to deal with fixing problems in post, where the Rec709 material, simply won't.īeing heavily involved in post production, I'd rather you showed up with original camera RAW files, rather then some hacked together Rec709 media which "looks" like Raw, but doesn't contain the proper data. This means, even if the sensors lowlight capability isn't the best, you can still get something out of the image as everything seen will be captured if exposed properly. The Blackmagic Cinema camera series, offers direct RAW capturing to solid state memory or SD card, depending on the camera. This means, whatever quality the imager actually has, is lost in translation. All of a sudden, you've just locked in whatever signal you have and are stuck working with it through post production. Sure, the camera has an uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 output, but once you hit an HDMI cable, you're stuck with Rec709 color space. This is very present with Sony's continuous devotion to AVCHD MPEG2 50Mbps being the highest codec available for internal video capture. The "video" capturing aspect is second to the still portion. Still cameras need to be still cameras first, that is why they were made. Here is the problem and I apologize if this sounds like a rant. It shoots acceptable stills, but video was no better then a standard Canon 5DMKIII, which in my view is horrible for the price. I was unfortunately very unimpressed with the output. We spent hours talking about the camera and he showed me lots of clips of what he was able to achieve with it so far. When I was on vacation earlier this year, I met up with some people trying to shoot a feature film with an A7S.