Sony A7sIII - My Extended Review

[Music] [Music] i'm brandon lee welcome to my review of the sony a7s iii so i'm shooting this review entirely on the sony a7 s3 starting with what you're seeing right now so the entire review is going to be sample footage right now we're in 4k 24p all intro mode this is the highest quality mode that the camera offers and i have face tracking enabled so you're seeing it track my face as i walk through the room so this is pretty much what you would get if you just set up the camera in standard mode all picture profiles off and let it run and this is how it looks when you punch in on your subject to 200 to get a 1080p image out of that 4k original image it's still very very sharp so i started off this review in standard color mode for a reason and that's because this is the best color that i got out of sony a7s iii after several weeks of testing with s-log and cine 4 city 2 sydney 1 all the other color modes now this could come down to just my own color grading limitations i'm not sure but what i really like about standard is that i'm pretty happy with the way the colors look without any grading whatsoever so then if i decide to do grading on top of it then i'm just sweetening what's already looking good to me whereas with the s-log modes i have to do some work to get it back to looking normal before i start putting the look on top of it and making it look awesome and the difference between shooting standard color on the a7s iii versus the a7 3 and the other previous sony mirrorless is that this is 10 bit footage which means i have a whole lot more grading opportunities even though i'm not shooting in a log format and one more thing i want to mention real quick is that this is not going to be a lab test kind of review i'm not gerald undone i can't do those kinds of reviews so i'm just going to take it out and get some footage in the real world filming myself and filming some b-roll the area around me and show you how it looks under various situations with various settings so if that's what you're here for then cool let's go ahead and get started quick ethic statement i did a paid collaboration with sony to make a short film with the a7s3 it's called crossroads and you can see it on my channel but this review is not paid this is an unbiased review [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] the sony mirrorless cameras have had pdaf autofocus for a while now which is their phase detection autofocus and it's always been good but on the a7s iii it's enhanced with additional features like touch to track and enhanced face and eye recognition so basically it intelligently chooses whether it's going to track the subject as a whole or the face or the eye so as a concept that sounds really good but how does it work in real life well you can judge for yourself if you think that it works well or not [Music] my personal feeling is that the autofocus was great overall very very usable especially under unchallenging circumstances such as a seated interview for shots that were more complex or had more movement i found it to be a little less predictable in the results [Music] so maybe take one would be perfectly in focus but then take two would just be a little bit soft at one point sometimes i prefer to switch to manual focus and just try to stay the same distance from my subject rather than letting it track constantly especially if the subject was passing behind a foreground obstruction because once the autofocus loses the subject it takes a minute for it to refine it and in super super low light especially in low contrast scenarios the autofocus will hunt it will have trouble following a subject especially if the subject is changing distance from camera rapidly but don't let me give you the impression that this autofocus is anything less than amazing it's still by far the best autofocus system that i've ever used and in favorable circumstances you'll be blown away by what it's able to track but no autofocus system is perfect so i just wanted to warn you of some of the caveats sony's mirrorless cameras have always had a rolling shutter problem the a6300 was probably the worst of them and i just dealt with it in the past and i tried to avoid filming out of moving vehicles with a long lens or filming handheld that was too shaky but now with the a7s3 i can honestly say that rolling shutter is not a problem anymore so as you can see in this footage straight lines stay straight and when i shoot handheld footage that's shaky the subject doesn't become distorted or squashed so i think there's not really a whole lot more to say about rolling shutter because it's basically just fixed it's one more worry i can cross off my list when i'm shooting [Music] the a7s3 records 4k footage at 120p and you're seeing quality right here it's basically the same quality as the 24p it's 10 bit it's 422 the autofocus still works the face detection still works so basically shooting 120p is just as good as shooting 24p there's no real compromises you have to make here which is great there is a tiny tiny bit of a crop i guess it's about 1.1 x but i didn't even notice it when i was shooting so i don't think it's really worth worrying about however the one caveat to shooting at 120p is that you will probably have to transcode your footage in post in order for it to play smoothly because the recording format for 120p is a lot more compressed than it is for 24p 30p or 60p here's a screen recording of how 120p footage plays back in final cut without transcoding it's pretty choppy and now here's how it plays back after i've transcoded it to prores so if you want slow motion but you don't need 120p i would recommend shooting at 60p instead because the 60p footage plays back a lot smoother without transcoding so it's easier to edit with all right let's push that dynamic range indoors in non-log standard color mode that's what i'm in right now standard and i've exposed that this wall is just on the edge of overexposure it's at about 100 ire and my iso is at base it's iso 80. so let's see if i can keep everything within the proper exposure range same scene as log 3 i was able to raise the exposure a little bit without blowing out the highlights which means i should have more detail in the shadows okay just for grins i switched over to cine2 mode so i had to lower the exposure back down a bit to keep the wall from overexposing let's see how this compares standard mode of exposed as brightly as possible to keep that from blowing out over there and i'm in the shadows here so let's see if i can even out this exposure a bit in post okay we're back in slog3 we've got a very bright doorway there and it's very dark where i'm standing so let's see if this can be evened out in post [Music] the a7s iii is of course a great camera in low light but i wanted to test how it compares with the a7s2 so i brought out some of my old a7s ii footage so here's a moonlight shot from the a7s2 and the moonlight shot from the s3 i boosted up the saturation just a bit on the s3 to make the color match better now this isn't a fair fight because the a7s ii was shooting at f2 on my law 15 millimeter lens and the s3 was shooting at f 1.4 so it had over a full stop of light more which should translate into less noise [Music] here's a low iso a7s2 shot with shadow recovery and a low iso a7s 3 shot with the shadows recovered [Music] and here's an a7s2 shot at fairly high iso with the shadows lifted just to see what noise is underneath there and an a7s 3 shot with the shadows lifted as well once again this is not a perfectly fair fight because i don't know exactly what iso i was shooting at with the a7s2 i just wanted to see if their noise patterns are similar or if they're somehow different okay now we're in slog3 and i'm going to start cycling through the isos starting at 500. so this is iso 500 which is supposed to be the base iso iso 800 1600 thirty two hundred sixty four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred twenty five thousand six hundred fifty one thousand two hundred hundred two thousand four hundred two hundred four thousand eight hundred and four hundred nine thousand six hundred let's go ahead and open this window and see how bright it gets super bright standard mode this is picture profile off standard color let's start bumping it up 2000 2500 3200 four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred twenty five thousand six hundred fifty one thousand two hundred eighty thousand twelve uh sorry a hundred twenty eight thousand two hundred fifty six thousand and 409 600. the image from the a7s3 is really sharp and depending on your opinion that can be a good thing or that can be a bad thing so i'm going to do a quick test here to show how it looks unfiltered which is what you're seeing right now and with some filters applied so this is the 85 millimeter lens no filter at a 2.5 razor sharp now i've got my variable nd filter on there it's my hoya 1.5 to nine stop dnd and that probably affects the sharpness a tiny tiny bit now i've got a black pro-mist 1 8 on top of the variable nd and this is the normal filter stack that i'm usually shooting with black chromist and variable and d together now you're seeing the black satin one filter on top of the variable nd on the 85 millimeter lens we're still at f 2.5 this filter should have a strong softening effect on my skin without causing too much blooming of the highlights one more little test here i took all the filters off the camera but i applied a defocus effect in post this is the blur effect that simulates a slightly out of focus shot and i applied it at a one pixel strength so there's basically just one pixel of defocus going on in this shot and to my eye on my laptop this actually looked pretty decent it softened up the image just enough so it didn't have that hard video edge to it so this is defocus one pixel now you're seeing the tt artisan 35 millimeter f 1.4 lens wide open on the camera with the variable nd nothing else to soften it but this lens itself has a bit of a vintage type character to it so maybe the image is a little bit softer than it would be with a sony native lens [Music] at first glance there doesn't seem to be that much new with image stabilization on the a7s iii it still has the in-body image stabilization which does a pretty good job of removing the small shakes and jitters from your handheld footage and they've added intelligent active image stabilization which does help your static handheld shots to look more like they were shot on a tripod but it won't get rid of any big camera shake if you're walking or running with the camera like the kinds of shakes that tend to get through on a gimbal i was hoping intelligent active stabilization would get rid of those shakes but unfortunately it doesn't however there's a type of post stabilization that you can do with the a7s3 that's so exciting i'm gonna make a whole video about it separately it's just too much to go into here but basically it uses a gyroscope to give you the kind of stabilization that you would get with a gopro in hyper smooth mode in other words this is much stronger stabilization that you apply in post so stay tuned because i'm going to make a whole other video about that feature alone i've accumulated a lot of gear over this pandemic so i wanted to put it to use by filming some test scenes of myself in a narrative style so in this section i'm going to show you some behind the scenes of how i set these shots up got the 50 millimeter zeiss f 1.4 lens on the a7s3 here this is my slider here this is the syrup magic carpet slider and on it i have the syrup genie pan tilt head and the linear head i'm able to control five feet of travel and i can pan tilt in any direction as i go across the travel of this slider so i trigger everything for the motion control with this iphone app i can control the linear movement the pan and the tilt so when that's all programmed and i hit play then i have a little delay on there and after that it starts moving all on its own across the track and this phone here is running the imaging edge app this is the remote control app from sony so i can see whatever i'm doing with very little delay so now i'm just going to pan it over like this and i'm framed up properly so i'm pretty lucky to have these west facing windows in this house because it gives beautiful sunset light that you're seeing right now but i did want to augment that a bit and fill in some shadows so i brought out my intellitech lc-160 this light is basically just a flat mat that you can fold however you want to create any shape of light that you want so i just clipped some diffusion on the front of the light as you see here and i have a nice soft box type of source without the bulk of normal soft [Music] box [Music] a7s3 on the genie rocking the 50 millimeter f 1.4 planer this is the intellitech light canon x100 and it's shining down through the french doors it's more of a hair light i guess [Music] so i've been watching a lot of those dark shows on netflix and i wanted to try to create that sort of vibe so the first step is to turn off the overhead lights in the entryway hallway we have one practical light the practical light is a light that's actually built into the architecture it's actually part of the scene and then one movie light behind it we are at 2800k four percent intensity i didn't want the film light to overpower the practical light because then it wouldn't look as natural so here is the intellitech lc 160 which is bouncing off of a brown bookcase which gives it a very warm character so i wanted just an indistinct indirect source to generally illuminate a tiny bit the room the lc160 is at 3000 k color temperature and only four percent intensity so i'm taking advantage here of the high iso capabilities of the a7 s3 because then i don't have to raise the overall level of the scene all i have to do is manage the contrast ratio of the scene [Music] [Music] my [Music] finally here's some shots i did on the siri 50 millimeter and 35 millimeter anamorphic lenses because i couldn't resist taking these out for a spin so now i'm testing the siri anamorphic lens on the a7 s3 lens aperture is wide open to f 1.8 150th of a shutter and i'm using a hoya variable nd filter to bring down the overall light intensity i'm further from the camera so the bokeh will be a little bit less behind me so it should look a little bit different from the previous shot so yeah this is just giving you another idea of how this 50 millimeter anamorphic 1.33 x lens looks on the a7s 3. now we're in s log 3. so let's see if this increases the dynamic range or otherwise improves the image and it'll take off my hat just for a little variation look at that hat hair isn't that great out of focus losing my shoe coming back in focus yeehaw [Music] these lenses aren't designed for full frame sensors but i figured i would probably get a pretty decent image with them on the a7 s3 anyway because this camera is so sharp the lenses do cover a larger image circle than advertised so by not cropping in all the way to aps-c i could keep some of the curvature and distortion on the edges of the frame which i feel actually adds to the character of the shot [Music] [Music] now [Music] so do i recommend the a7s3 yes i recommend it it has all the features i need it doesn't anything and even though not all the features are 100 perfect they're about as good as anything else on the market right now so especially for running gun shooters like me this camera is the one to get i used it for two months and it was completely reliable this is a camera that just gets out of the way and lets you stay creative okay that said i think it's important to remember that just because the new camera came out doesn't mean the old footage isn't any good anymore so if you can't afford the a7s 3 or if it's just not the right time for you to upgrade i don't see any need to rush out there and get the latest thing i'm just upgrading because my whole life revolves around filmmaking around videography so for me it's totally worth it to have the latest greatest camera as long as it does what i need it to do which the a7s3 does so i would say you definitely don't need to buy this camera to get great footage but if you do choose it then it won't let you down and that's my review of the sony a7s3 happy filmmaking [Music] so [Music] come on [Music] you

Channel: Brandon Li

Views: 510,433

Keywords: brandon li, unscripted studio, rungunshoot, cinematography, filmmaking, gimbal, zhiyun, dji, ronin, weebill, blackmagic, a7siii, a7iii, sony, a7s, a7sii, a7riii, a7riv, bmpcc, bmpcc6k, s1h, short film, x-t4, canon, r5, canon r5, r6, red, red komodo, zeiss, planar, travel film, travel video, a6300, a6400, a6500, a6600, g master, gm lens

Id: dFGwi6II3i8

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020