Sony F55 Camera Test,
My Assessments
By Jendra Jarnagin,
June 8, 2013
I usually use this space for announcements about projects I
am shooting or screenings of films I have shot.
But I have had so much interest in my camera tests for the new Sony F55,
that I wanted to share my results publicly.
I am shooting a hilarious comedy feature called “A Bet’s A
Bet” in Rhode Island, where I grew up, and 2/3 of the film is being shot within
2 miles of my dad’s house, and the rest within 10 miles. It is my first opportunity to use the new
Sony F55, so of course I shot some tests to learn the ins and outs of what
settings to use and how I want to expose it, etc.
Disclaimers:
I tested what formats were available at the time, June
2013. New firmware with new options is
imminent, but that is being released while we are in production, so I am
sticking with what the camera can do today.
Because I am swamped with pre-production for this film, I don’t have
time to get my videos uploaded anywhere to share. Besides, I believe watching someone else’s
tests, with online video compression, doesn’t tell you anything anyway. So instead, here are my own written assessments.
I have spoken below about editing proxies, etc. I want to note that FCP X can edit 4K XAVC
natively, and Premiere will soon, but for what we are using right now, the
proxy solution is our preferred workflow, but you have other options.
Since I go into production the day after tomorrow, forgive
my lack of responsiveness for comments and questions.
 |
| Ungraded SLOG 2 image from F55 test, featuring actress Danielle Guldin, who plays Ellen |
What I Tested:
I shot over and under exposure tests, gain tests (including
in-camera noise suppression settings) and codec and resolution comparison
tests. I also shot some filter tests to
decide which ones I liked best for this camera and this project. I shot the test at Adorama (thanks to Henry
Bornstein) and projected the test at Goldcrest’s DI Theater with colorist John
Dowdell using a Quantel Pablo IQ and a 2K projector. (Thanks to Mark Doyle.)
I shot everything in Slog2/S-Gamut.
Things I didn’t test
and why:
Some things that are exciting about this camera, I didn’t
test because I am already familiar. I
know what a global shutter looks like.
And I am a huge fan of the extended color gamut of the F65 and F55. For the movie I shot on F65, I have never
seen colors like that come out of an electronic camera before, namely the
tertiary colors: purples, red-oranges, and yellow-greens. And the 16 bit color depth of skin tones blew
me away. In the side-by-side comparisons
I saw projected that the ASC & PGA did (that I participated in as Behind
the Scenes stills photographer) it was the first time that I saw skin tones
that looked as good as film. It was a
subtle but a powerful thing when you saw all the subtle distinctions in the
color texture of a human face.
Codec Test:
My first order of business was to decide what codec to
shoot. I was biased when I heard that
the new XAVC was a long GOP h.264 type codec.
I have had such bad experience trying to grade h.264 DSLR footage, and
remember nasty temporal artifacts when we first started seeing Long GOP codecs
in cameras. I need to adjust my thinking
about this, because this codec turned out to be quite robust. I was also concerned that the 4K XAVC has
such a low data rate for 4K that I was worried about compromises with
compression artifacts to get it there. I
wondered if the less compressed HD XAVC might be a better choice. (Whereas HD SR codec would be even better
once it is available in a future firmware release.) 4K RAW isn’t an option in
terms of amount of data for this low budget indie to handle, especially since
we are shooting 2 cameras much of the time.
We just can’t afford that many hard drives… So I did some tests designed
to stress the codec and I couldn’t break it.
I was pleasantly surprised and ended up choosing to shoot 4K XAVC for
this film.
I shot an assortment of different shaped flowers and
greenery, (which was probably the ugliest bouquet I ever bought) with a fan
blowing on them, in the background of a wide shot, and also in close up. I also shot the front page of the NY Times, that
has a variety of font sizes on the same page, starting far away, and walking
closer to camera, and then rotating the newspaper slow and then fast. (Thank you to Mitch Gross from Abel for that idea.) I compared the 4K RAW, 4K XAVC, and HD
XAVC. We were looking for any weirdness
around the edges of the areas of fine detail.
Surprisingly, we couldn’t see any differences at all, even when zoomed
in on the screen.
Resolution:
I had heard that the HD coming out of the camera was so
sharp, that it looked as good as the 4K.
“Yeah, yeah sure,” I thought, “to the untrained eye, viewing on a laptop
in a non apples-to-apples situation, “yadda yadda yadda… But the thing that surprised me the most out
of this entire test experience was that I actually agree that the HD looks just
as good as the 4K! Myself, John Dowdell,
and Tim Spitzer, (managing director at Goldcrest) surprisingly couldn’t tell
the difference when we cycled back and forth between the HD & 4K XAVC . We stuck our noses up to the screen, we
zoomed in 200% (and more) on the image, we went back and forth with the slate
framed out and lost track of which was which.
Again, we were looking at a 2K projector, but this project (and MOST
projects) will finish in 2K or HD. I
imagine you could see a difference on a 4K projector. But we couldn’t. So my conclusion is that the downsampling is
so good in-camera, it looks as good as the 4K.
My decision to shoot this movie on 4K was very carefully considered and for
the following reasons:
A)
For re-framing in post (which I used to be
offended by someone else re-composing my shots, but have seen editors work
magic and save some scenes this way, so I am open to it, especially for a
comedy.)
B)
To future proof the film. I have high hopes this is going to be a big
indie hit. What if there was only a
standard def copy of Animal House and they couldn’t re-master the
re-release?
HOWEVER:
I only made this choice after confirming the staff editor at
the production company could conform it internally (from the HD edited proxies
back to the 4K original) before sending it off for finishing. I didn’t want to cost the production company
the extra money of a conform at the color correction facility. If the answer had been no, that there was no
one to do that without substantial extra cost, I would have comfortably chosen
to shoot in HD, which would forego the need to edit proxy material. (See my note in the disclaimer section above,
that working in proxy is OUR workflow and doesn’t have to be your workflow.)
Dynamic Range:
I agree with Sony’s assessment of 14 stops Dynamic
Range. Set at native ISO 1250, I read recoverable
detail at 5.5 stops over exposure and 7.5 stops under. Of course, dynamic range is subjective, as to
how much noise are you willing to tolerate in your shadows before you don’t
consider it usable image information and you want to crush it into solid black
when it gets ugly, but I would say, as long as you leave those last 2 stops of
shadow detail pretty dark, you can still make out some detail there.
Post Processing
Problem:
I did have an unfortunate error in my test. There was something wrong with the way the
RAW files got processed. Goldcrest is
talking to Sony’s engineers about getting to the bottom of what went
wrong. At 6 stops underexposed, the RAW
showed no more detail, and the XAVC did.
In fact at 7 and 8 stops under there was detail in the XAVC and not the
RAW. I immediately called in their tech
people and called Dhanendra Patel at Sony, because that doesn’t make
sense. RAW would have as much, if not
more readable detail in the shadows. The
XAVC material was processed through Resolve and we saw the extra shadow
details. The RAW was processed at the
default settings of Sony’s RAW viewer software.
We don’t want people to think the camera has less range than it does, so
this investigation and follow up testing is still underway. I will update here when I find out what’s up.
Because of this issue, I couldn’t tell if the RAW has more
usable range than the XAVC. I compared the
RAW and XAVC 4K shots that were 5 stops under exposed and graded up and they
looked the same to me. The
characteristic of the noise (which we pushed hard for the purpose of judging
it) looked the same.
Noise and Gain:
I wouldn’t hesitate to intercut material shot 1 stop pushed
(2500 ISO) with normal 1250 ISO footage.
And I totally wouldn’t mind shooting a whole scene at 5000 ISO. (Seriously, 5000 ISO!!!!) It has a look to it, in terms of seeing some
noise, so I wouldn’t mix it within the same scene as material shot with ISO
1250, but I don’t find the noise objectionable at all. When I went one more stop to 10,000 ISO, it
was CONSIDERABLY more noisy than at 5000.
A very big difference, compared to the other one stop changes. It was definitively quite noisy and I
wouldn’t want to shoot it for a narrative movie.
Noise Supression
Settings:
I tested the camera’s internal Noise Supression settings at
10,000 ISO. When set to low & mid, I
didn’t see much happening. Which I am
told is an improvement in the last firmware update, because people previously
found it to be too aggressive and softened details in the image. The High setting definitely improved the
noise somewhat, but not to the degree that it would have me choose to shoot
10,000 ISO. I would rather leave it off,
and have a finer degree of control with post Noise Reduction tools. But if I was shooting something with fast
turnaround and no color correction, like a documentary, I would go ahead and use
it at High.
Filters:
This is totally subjective.
I prefer using diffusion filters in camera. I like the optical alchemy of it vs. the
electronic image manipulation. It feels
more organic to me.
I consider it should be irrelevant to anyone else what my
personal taste is in this situation, but in case anyone cares, I liked the
Black Diffusion FX. At least in this
lighting set up, this lens, this actress, this frame size, for this movie,
etc. I still liked my favorite Schneider
Classic Softs (which along with Tiffen Soft FX I call the “invisible filter,”
the idea being you explicitly can’t tell you are using filtration.) I’ll carry a variety of diffusion filters for
a variety of people & situations.
But the BDFX I just liked on this
camera. It’s usually not my favorite
one. It’s my least favorite filter when
shooting film for example. And on Alexa,
because of its inherent softness (which I LIKE, don’t get me wrong!) I find all
the diffusion filters look remarkably similar to one another with very little
to distinguish the flavor of each.
Ease of use:
There are lots of good cameras out there that make great
images, and that I am happy to use. I am
always a believer in “the right tool for the job” and despite some close vendor
relationships I have had over the years, I remain philosophically format
agnostic. But it always drives me crazy
when you have to put a million attachments and rails and brackets and
doo-hickeys to make the camera into something to shoot with. That’s a HUGE turn off for me. I want a camera that’s shaped like a
camera. And Sony has finally given us
that with the F55 and F5. And so far, I
really like the OLED viewfinder. Another
plus is how versatile the camera is with the choices of resolutions and
codecs. I decided to shoot 4K XAVC for
this film, and part of that decision was the convenience of the simultaneous HD
recording. It can record HD XDCAM 50Mbps
at the same time ON THE SAME CARD. No
need to rent an external recorder, no need to transcode dailies! How smart is that?!
Conclusion:
Prior to this camera, I felt the Sony F65 made the best
images, and that the Arri Alexa was the best all around camera to use, when all
things were considered. (In other words, in many production situations, the tradeoffs of using the F65 were not worth the increase in image quality when so many other cameras look so good.) I so far feel like this camera is the best of
both worlds, with serious plusses and so far no minuses that I can find or
think of. I expect seriously fast
adoption of this camera as the new professional camera of choice.
And just so you don’t think I’m strictly a Sony convert, I’m
still excited about Panavision and Arri’s upcoming cameras and RED’s new Dragon
sensor!
For more information about me, please visit my website.
www.floatingcamera.com
