Recently I've been doing
more tests with the a1 and the a7S III from Sony based on some interesting
results I discovered while doing my initial
review of the a1. And today I'd like
to share them with you. Let's get Undone! [offbeat music] ♪ Gerald Undone ♪ ♪ He's crazy ♪ What's happening, everybody?!
I'm Gerald Undone and all my dreams
are in false colour. So today's video is going
to be mostly unscripted, because I know from
the comments, that you guys like the
occasional conversational video. Now regarding disclosure,
this a1 here is still a loaner from Sony.
I was able to convince them to let me borrow the camera
again based on these tests that I wanted to do.
But this video is not sponsored or endorsed by Sony, and they
don't get to preview it before it's posted. This video
does have a sponsor though, and that's Storyblocks.
And in fact, let's get the sponsor message done with
first, because I do want to take a minute to thank Storyblocks
for sponsoring this video. Normally I try to integrate
them in the video in creative ways, but the truth
is, they make it possible for me to spend the time required
to do the type of testing that I'm going to share
with you in today's video. So, I'm very appreciative
of them. And I also really like
their platform. They have an impressive
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so you can use them as much as you want,
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link in the description below. I also want to thank
Camera Canada for lending me the battery grip
that I used for some of these tests. They
came in clutch on short notice and they're a great store,
and my go to camera retailer here in Canada. OK, now speaking of that grip,
let's talk about what it can do for the a1
when it comes to 8K video. So, the grip in question
is the VG-C4EM vertical grip, battery grip from Sony,
and this is the latest gen one so it's for, you know,
a7R IV, a7S III, and, of course, now the a1.
It's got the new, sort of, AF-ON and joystick button
and all that kind of stuff. Um, anyway, so,
I've got my notes here that I'm going
to go over with you, and in the 8K... in the 8K
section video recording for the a1, my review,
I mentioned that I'm able to get about 80-90
minutes on a single battery. And that's based on, sort of,
a combination of things. It overheats around that
80-90 minute mark. One battery dies around
80-90 minutes. And if you're using, like,
a 128GB SD card, you'll probably get
about 80-90 minutes. So, it's kind of, like,
it's well balanced in that way. But that is, sort of,
the upper limit for having a single battery in there. But
when I use a dummy battery... in my a1 video I showed you guys
that I used a, you know, FZ100 style dummy battery,
and on the other end you could run this to
a V-Mount battery, or you could run it to mains
power if you wanted as well. And when I did that there was
seemingly no limit regarding-- Obviously, there's no limit
for battery power, and there was no limit
with the overheating either. I think I ran it, like,
three and a half hours or close to four hours
and then I just stopped, because, like, "OK, I'm bored." I think I'm going to stop here
because I've been recording for three hours
and 12 minutes at 8K 24p and there's not even a heat
warning, and that's recording using a dummy battery.
Now, obviously, you do have to relay record SD card, SD card,
over, and over again and be swapping them
in and out, which you can do. When it's writing to one
you put in two, and so on. And you can do that for
a little bit cheaper because you can get away
with just V60 cards. So, I was doing it
with these 128GB, uh, Sony TOUGH-M, which are
the V60 cards, and it was fine. You could do 8K all the way up
to their 400mb codec and just keep swapping
these in and out. And you can do that
essentially unlimited on dummy battery power.
But that brought up the question of
"What about the grip?" Because this grip,
in case you didn't know-- let me unscrew it for you... Is sort of a dummy battery,
like this is not a real battery. So, it goes into
the camera first and then you screw it down... and that takes the battery
out of the actual body of the camera.
So, the question was, "How is that gonna affect heat?" Regarding power
inside of the grip, you use the same batteries.
Two. You put two FZ100 batteries in there.
You know what I never tested? Let's actually do it
right now on the video, is can you run it
with just one? So, you can. You can actually turn it on
with just one battery. Which is actually going
to be an important update regarding USB charging that
I want to mention later on. But anyways, so,
you put two batteries in here and you effectively get
double the run time, which makes sense, but,
how does it affect heating? So, I did a bunch of rundown
tests. If I were to give a quick review of
the grip, by the way, I think it's fine. I don't
really use vertical grips a lot for what I do, but if
you were to, it's got the same great joystick,
good AF-ON button... if you like the buttons on
the grip of the a7S III, a1, you'll like the vertical grip
as well. Uh, anyway, OK. So, let me tell you
about the results. So, when I did the rundown test
with the vertical grip I got two hours
and 45 minutes on average, I ran it three times,
two hours and 45 minutes, which is actually pretty close to exactly double
in every regard. The battery life
was close to double, because you get about 80-90
minutes, and it didn't... one time I got the overheat
temperature warning thing to come on, but for
the most part I didn't. But it does get very hot,
just so you know. Much hotter than
the dummy battery does. So, it seems like,
sort of, an in-between step. It lasts longer, and better,
and doesn't overheat as much as putting a battery inside,
but it's not quite as good as a dummy battery. And there
could be a few reasons for that. Maybe because this is
touching right on the bottom, maybe because
the heat source is close, but it does get quite hot.
Like, if you touch it here, or in here where the grip is,
or even underneath-- like, if you pop the screen
out and you touch it behind the screen,
it gets really hot there. Which, by the way, means you
have to have the screen out. If you run this thing
for, like, two hours, and then you close the screen,
it will shut down to heat within, like, 20 seconds.
It's crazy. It just immediately goes,
like, temperature warning and then shuts down.
So, all these tests are only relevant
with the screen out. And if ever you're doing
some kind of hot rundown make sure the screen is out
and that you set the camera to the high temperature shutoff. But when you do run it like that it's not for
hand-holding anymore. Now it's for, like, tripod use
because-- you're not going to burn yourself
by just touching it, but I think if you held it
for a really long time you could get those, those long
duration low temperature burns which is probably why I often
get asked questions of "Why would Sony allow you
to have a high heat option?" And I think it's based on that. If you keep it on the standard
heat shutoff setting, that's good for
hand-holding the camera. If you put it on high,
that's better for tripods and that kind of thing
where you're not... where there's not
as much of a concern for low temperature burns.
Anyway, keep the screen away, put the grip on, put a couple
batteries in there, and yeah, you can get...
not quite three hours 'cause the batteries won't last
that long, but close to it. And it also still works out
with the 128GB card thing. Remember, I was saying that
one battery is worth about one 128GB card?
So if I put two in there... Right around the same time
that the battery only had a few percentage left, there was only a few minutes
left on the second card after it switched. This was at
room temperature environment, by the way, but if you want,
sort of, just a... "What can I do with 8K
as simply as possible?" You could get the a1,
you could get the vertical grip, and if you get two 128GB
V60 cards, pop them in there, and you could basically
just run it all down. You run down your batteries
and your cards. You'll get about
two hours and 40 minutes, and then that's that.
And that's pretty good for 8K. Like, that's
a pretty great result. I can't say in the hot sun
that you're gonna get the same results.
You probably won't. But the camera does recover
quickly too, which is great. OK, so the USB thing, which is
what I wanted to mention. When I did my initial a1 review,
the only time that I got worse overheating performance is when I used USB-C because
there's power delivery in the last three cameras,
I think, from Sony all have power delivery,
or at least the last two. So, if you stick something
in the USB-C you can charge the battery, yes. Um, and this is without
the grip as well. And, uh, you can also
actively power it where it only loses, like,
a percent or two an hour. So, you could run it
essentially indefinitely. But when shooting 8K I found
that I was only getting 40 to 50 minutes of runtime
instead of the regular 80-90 minutes
which made me think that this active powering
charging thing was heating up that battery inside
the camera even more. However, when using the grip,
it's better. So, you can still...
this is actually kind of great, is when you have
the grip installed and you charge it
this way over USB-C, you don't plug it into the
grip. There is no USB-C port on the grip, but you actually
still charge the two batteries inside of the grip
just from this one cable, so it's actually
a really convenient way to charge both batteries
because you don't have to take them out and put them
into two separate chargers, you can just charge
the whole unit like this. But what about overheating?
It didn't seem to as much. I was able to run this for...
I think I ran it for three hours and fifteen,
or three hours and a half. Just to basically see
"Do I get more than the two hours and 40 minutes
or does it overheat faster?" And it did not overheat faster. I got greater than I did
of running two batteries by just having USB-C. Maybe it
would have run for longer. Again, it was quite hot though. This time I am keeping it
charged with USB power delivery. And so far I'm at
three hours and 15 minutes with no overheat warning yet. But it is very,
very hot to the touch. So, what that tells me is that
by having the grip installed that the, the flow now...
is because it's charging, sort of, through the dummy
battery and into the grip it's not putting
the heat into the body like if you were charging
the battery inside the camera. Which means that there might
be a little trick here 'cause as we just tested
on video you can run it with only one battery
inside, so maybe the most economical solution
because you do have to provide the batteries
for the grip, it doesn't come with two batteries,
but your camera comes with one. So, you could get the grip
and just put the one battery from the camera inside the
grip, thus removing the battery from the body
and putting it in the grip, and then connect to a USB-C cord and effectively run the camera for a really long time
like that. Basically getting similar
results to what you would get from a dummy battery,
but just hotter. I think this would be
a warmer option. The dummy battery in
the camera never gets to hot. If you're going
to run mains power the dummy battery
is the best option because you don't need
to spend the extra money on a V-Mount battery
or something like that. But if you were thinking,
"How much for the rig, and the V-Mount,
and then the dummy battery?" That can add up
and this might be the cheaper solution
at that point... but if you're going
to go to mains I would just go with
the dummy battery. But anyway, this works
and it works for charging and it works for running
longer than three hours. Again, in
a room temperature environment. OK, so that's my little
overheating update there. But I'm really impressed with
the 8K runtime that I can get on this camera,
especially considering, again, that you can do it
with just V60 cards. That's... that's probably
the biggest difference there. But let's talk a little bit
about some other options regarding recording.
So, if you are following me on Instagram or Twitter--
if you're not, you should, because I've been
posting stories there talking about this HDMI
scaling thing that I noticed. So, if I-- this is an a7S III,
and we're going to talk about this one in a minute--
but if I do something like this where I record externally
to the Ninja V I noticed something...
Well, OK, first of all, the reason why
I thought of this is because if you remember from
my a1 review I mentioned that when you're recording 4K,
it's a binned, pixel binned image. It's not
an oversampled 8K image. But what's interesting is that
you can set the camera to 8K and set the external
resolution differently. So, in all of the Sony cameras--
at least the last dozen Sony cameras, you can check
this if you have one yourself-- I'll put this up
on screen right now. But if you go into the menu... If you go into the regular
recording options you can set your camera
to 4K, or HD... Maybe you have
more options than that. On the a1 you've also got
the 8K option. But then if you go into
the yellow menu and you go down,
there's the "External Output" or HDMI output options,
and in there you can choose what resolution
the HDMI output port is putting out as well.
And normally you have an option, like 2160p, or 1080p.
So, basically that's saying, "Are you putting out 4K over
HDMI or 1080p over HDMI?" What's interesting about the a1 is that you have the option to
output 4320p, or 8K over HDMI as well as 2160p and 1080p. But you can set the camera,
the internal recording to 8K and it doesn't lock you out
of anything. So... what I was thinking was that, how is it possible that
they could both, like, read the sensor in two
different ways. They could read the 8K and
let you record 8K internally, but also simultaneously
pixel bin that down to 4K over HDMI? And I thought,
"That's not possible without, you know,
increasing the latency, or maybe the rolling shutter
would get worse or something," and it doesn't.
So that made me think that they weren't also binning
the image simultaneously when in 8K mode. So,
what I did is I did some shots. I did a shot at 8K. Then I did
a shot with the camera set to 4K and also the HDMI output
set to 4K. But then I did another one
where the camera was set to 8K to record 8K internally, but the HDMI output
was set to 4K. And I compared these shots.
Now, something to keep in mind is you don't actually have
to record internally. You're just setting
the internal resolution. And one thing that,
kind of, supports this is that if you have the
internal resolution set to 8K the battery life is worse
than if you have it set to 4K whether or not you record
internally or not, this is just
recording externally. Which sort of supports
what I'm saying that the sensor is obviously
being read at 8K regardless of whether
or not you're recording it internally or not.
So, when I compared these images the image that was recorded
with the camera set to 8K and the HDMI outputting 4K,
and recorded externally on a Ninja V,
that image was cleaner and looked more like
an 8K image than the image if you set
the camera to 4K and record externally 4K
to the Ninja. And you can see
this really clearly if you look at just the noise. The noise is finer and much
more, like, smaller particles that are, like, blended ones--
Particles? What am I talking about?
Smaller little dots. Smaller little pixels than,
like, merged ones. And there were some shots
where there was, like, detail where
I was looking at a texture and the texture almost just
blurred into nothing with the 4K over 4K, but when doing 8K
with a 4K output the texture came back.
So, I really do think that we're getting
an oversampled 8K image out of the 4K HDMI externally
if the camera is set to 8K mode.
And again, the only con here is that you're going
to get the battery life of an 8K recording
instead of the battery life of the 4K recording.
You're going to get, basically, an oversample
similar to Canon's 4K HQ mode on the Canon R5.
But instead of internal, this is an external 4KHQ.
And it does look better and you can record it
with a nicer codec that you can edit straight away,
so it's more efficient. It's probably
going to be the same-- I got a similar result to if I just oversampled the 8K
or down-sampled the 8K myself in post, but that does
require you to record 8K, and get SD cards,
and manage the media, and that kind of thing.
So, that's the best image, but this is a very, very,
very close second image-- er, second place image,
and it is better than just straight, "Set the
camera to 4K, output to 4K." Now, I know the next question
is gonna be, "What about other cameras?
And what about HD in 4K?" Like, so I took the a7S III,
for example. I did where the camera is set
to 4K and I recorded out to 4K. I also did it where the camera
is set to HD and I output to 4K. So, that made the 4K image on
the external recorder worse. So, if you set your internal
recording to HD and output 4K it looks worse than if you set
the internal to 4K and 4K. And if you do the reverse,
if you set the camera to 4K but your HDMI output is only HD, which people often do
with streaming, or maybe just want to record
really long-form stuff, so you need HD
recording externally, so you can record for,
like, ten hours, that HD will look better
if the camera is set to 4K than it will look if the camera
is set to HD and HD. Probably putting these up
on the screen while I'm talking about this, but it might be hard
for you to see on YouTube. If it's not really
translating well on YouTube, you just have to trust me,
it does look better. How much better?
Well, it looks the same way if you've ever upscaled
something before. There's a benefit. It looks
better when you downscale a higher resolution image.
It's never going to look better than the timeline resolution,
but it does look like a... a bit of a sharper image
went into it. And the noise performance
is better as well. So, even on the older Sony
cameras that only do 4K and HD, if you're somebody that tends
to record in HD externally, make sure you have
the camera set to 4K because you will get,
again, another, sort of, oversampling benefit from that. And I think this is going to
work on a lot of Sony cameras, or at least all the ones that
have those same HDMI options. I didn't test on everything. I tested on
three different bodies and it worked on all of them. But, you know,
I don't have every Sony camera to test right now. OK,
last thing I want to talk about is the S-Cinetone update which came out just
a few days ago for the a7S III. And the main thing is it's just
important to recognize, you know, I think there was
two or three videos where I complained saying
"Put S-Cinetone in the a7S III! You keep showing me
that it's possible, so do it!" So, now I just need to
publicly recognize they did it. Great job, Sony.
Appreciate you listening and, uh, adding it.
A lot of people wanted it and now it's there.
And great. But I will give you
some notes on S-Cinetone because I was asked about this
in the comments and on social. Uh, just some basic things.
S-Cinetone is really easy so don't
worry about it too much. But, uh, the native ISOs--
because, you know, on the a7S III it always
cleans up 4.33 stops higher. So, the two ISOs for that
would be ISO 100, that's your first base, and then if you get up
to ISO 2000 it switches over
and cleans up again. So, you're much better off
shooting at 2000 than at 1600, let's say.
But yeah, 100 and 2000. And the maximum zebra level
for S-Cinetone is 109+. So, if you use the lower limit
C2 or whatever for zebras set it to 109+.
And then regarding exposure, you expose it much more
naturally than S-Log. S-Cinetone is a much more, like, "what you see
is what you get" profile. So, look at it in camera and
expose it to look good in camera if you have a monitor
or whatever. And do that. But do protect your highlights. It's better to protect
your highlights with these
more Cinestyle profiles because they do a little bit
better in the shadows. You know, with S-Log
we're always trying to expose to the right so we can push it
down and clean out the shadows, and that still does work,
but the shadows are already a bit more
contrasty, and so you will see some of that
noise kind of hidden. So, you're better off
protecting your highlights and you can, kind of,
boost the shadows a little bit more than you
could with something like S-Log. But again, just expose it
to look natural in camera but protect your highlights.
You do have a bit more dynamic range than the standard
PP Off or Movie Gamma. So, you will have a little bit
more latitude on both ends, but the dynamic range
is definitely reduced compared to S-Log3.
You're looking at maybe one and a half
to two stops worse than S-Log3,
but better than PP Off. So, if you remember when I did
that big, like, 40 minute video that was, you know, looking at
all the picture profiles and that kind of thing, I said
that I wish that the a7S III had, sort of, a sweet spot,
because the Cine gammas are a nice balance
of dynamic range, but there's no colour profile
that matches those Cinegammas that I think looks great.
I don't like "Pro," and I don't like "Still,"
and that kind of thing. What I like is the, uh,
Creative Neutral Style, but you only get Creative
Neutral if you put PP Off, and PP Off has worse
dynamic range than Cine, so, like, there's no way
to combine those two, and I wish there was. That's,
kind of, what S-Cinetone is. Think if it kind of like
Creative Style Neutral mixed with the Cine gamma.
It's a great sweet spot for a fast turn around image.
Good accurate colour, a decent amount
of dynamic range, looks good right out of camera, you can see what you're doing
right out of camera, It's a really nice
balanced profile. If you want the best of the best you can
get out of the camera, it's still S-Log3
and it should still follow anything I've said before
about how to use S-Log3 and that's still what I shoot,
but S-Cinetone is there and it's, kind of,
a no-brainer now for if you want fast turnaround.
You don't have to worry about which gamma
with which profile. Just put it on "PP11," expose
it how it looks good on camera, and run with it. And I think
you'll have really good results. And that's everything
I wanted to discuss. Now I just need to come up
with some more excuses to give to Sony
to let me test the a1 further. Because I do not want
to give this camera back. It is... it's pretty great! But that's gonna be it for me.
I hope you found this video entertaining or at least
helpful. And if you did, make sure you leave
it the old thumbs up and consider subscribing
if you haven't already. But if you did not find this
video helpful or entertaining, try setting the playback
speed to 75%. Alright... I'm done.
