I decided to try shooting a commercial following a coffee with director / DP Joe Murray (who, oddly enough, shoots a lot of car commercials). Joe shoots car spots with the RED EPIC: “it shoots 4K, and that lets us stabilize in post, push in, reframe… it’s all stabilized; I don’t care what head we had, if we used an Ultimate Arm, whatever, everything gets fixed in post.” A raw-capable FS700 might be just the ticket for a car spot: raw files for trouble-free grading, free from annoying compression artifacts; 4K for stabilization / respositioning; slo-mo for, well, slo-mo. Whether you’d use an FS700 for such a thing in the real world or not, the framework of a car spot gave us justification to try out all the bells ‘n’ whistles the upgraded FS700 offers.
I was very enthusiastic. Art, somewhat less so…
Nonetheless he gamely pitched in, with the caveat that no one should look at the resulting clips as an example of how he would light and shoot a real car spot, given the necessary time and support. Think of what we did as a sort of live-action animatic or a visual sketch, not a finished spot.
Art actually allowed me to use the camera a couple of times… I feel all growed up! (grin)
Sony sent us the Metabones EOS adapter, and most of the time we used Canon stills glass. [Sony tells me there’s a promo on: buy an FS100 or FS700 through the end of August 2013, they’ll throw in a Metabones adapter for free.] Here I’ve got the 70-200 f/2.8 EF-L II; we also used the 16-35 and 24-70 f/2.8 lenses. They worked just fine; the Metabones adapter let us control iris from the camera, and the adapter conveyed aperture and focus data back to the camera, where it appeared in the LCD and the f-stop was saved as part of each clip’s metadata.
Mostly, though, I was the deck-minder / data wrangler, so this was my view of the shoot.
It’s fun to “239.76fps” on the readout.
Nothing but the best: our rented slider sits on a 30-year-old toolbox and a 20-year-old Pelican case.
On location with the elegantly-attired Devin Baker, his new Subaru, and canine assistants. Note the deck and monitor the foreground.
Our driving setup: Nikon 35mm f/2 D lens on a cheap-as-chips “Fotasy” adapter (under $30 on Amazon, and worth every penny). Camera hard-mounted on Bogen 3066 head, aimed straight out the back of my Honda Insight.
With the hatch closed, the camera was as low to the ground as we could get it without hiring Rick Weber’s camera sidecar, getting insurance, a film permit, CHP supervision, 72 hours advance notice, etc. The Insight’s stiff suspension also made for a bouncy ride… so stabilization in post was definitely needed.
Art sat in the front seat with the deck in his lap (for a change, grin), and he triggered recording from the deck.
We also configured the camera for handheld work using a Zacuto Z-finder EVF on an articulated arm, and another low-budget rail rig ($150 in Amazon) on which we relocated the camera’s handgrip.
While we didn’t have the time to put together a complete spot, we did collect a few “typical car spot” shots. Here’s some of what we did, and how we did it: FS700 Spot Test
The FS700 helped us get this done with its selection of capabilities (4K for stabilization / repositioning; slo-mo for obvious reasons; a flexible lens mount letting us use my Nikon primes and Canon zooms; raw recording for uncompromised capture quality and flexibility in the grade) in a way that wasn’t really possible with any other camera at this price point. Yes, there are better 4K cameras; yes, there are higher-frame-rate slo-mo cameras; yes, there are cheaper cameras with large sensors and “the 4Ks”; but there aren’t any other cameras out there that offer all the features of the FS700 at a comparable price. “Jack of all trades, master of none”? Perhaps, but sometimes a capable, flexible generalist is more valuable than a narrow specialist.
A few additional points:
- Existing FS700s need modifications to output raw; it’s a fairly cheap procedure done at a Sony Service Center.
- 4K files take up a LOT of space, and pushing 4K DPXes around (or even ProRes4444 and/or the camera’s own raw files) takes time. I upgraded my MacBook Pro to deal with this job (Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, SSD, Nvidia GPU to make Resolve happy) and added lots of RAID storage, and it was just barely enough to cope with the deluge: you can’t have too much drive space, or too fast a connection to it, or too fast a GPU. One example: as I was copying our 11-minute 4K DPX beauty reel to a portable USB 3.0 hard drive to send to Sony, it occurred to me that it was taking twice as long for the clip to copy to the drive (2 hours) as it would take the drive to fly from San Jose to Los Angeles. Ouch!
- Yes, 4K is only 4x as much data as 2K/HD. But that’s still 4x as much data (and as much transfer time) as we’re used to dealing with in normal, 2K/HD production. It’s not a showstopper or a panic situation… as long as you plan for it and expect it.
- 4K focus is super-critical, and we can’t have a good field monitor with 4K 1:1 and focus assist soon enough. Even with the focus-mag mode on the camera’s LCD, we missed focus on a larger-than-usual number of shots (and no, I don’t blame it on using stills lenses; I know how to focus ’em, and even so, looking at the 4K in post I could see blown focus on shots that looked fine in the field).
- The FS700’s raw is “only” 12 bits, but it still made for very flexible, grading-friendly files. Even pushing contrast to the limit, there was never any sign of quantization or blocking (some mild compression is used to send the raw data to the recorder, but it was never visually apparent). The camera is noisier than an F55 or F65, but camera noise, not the raw file itself, was the limiting factor in how far we could push anything in post.
Again, Art Adams’ talk is, for the most part, here.
Disclosures / Disclaimers:
Sony hired Art Adams and me to test the raw FS700 and present our findings at Cine Gear Expo. Sony did not control or influence the content of our talk, or of this article. This article was written after the end of the Sony gig; doing so was not required nor suggested by Sony, and no additional material consideration comes my way from Sony for having written this.
Blackmagic Design lent me a full copy of DaVinci Resolve 9.1.3 so I could work on a 4K timeline; the disk and dongle have been returned to BlackMagic Design. Many thanks to BMD for their help!
Abel Cine kindly sent a runner over to Cine Gear Expo with a loaner Blackmagic Design HDMI-to-SDI mini Converter so that we could put our preso up on the big screen using my MacBook pro. Mad props to Abel Cine!
Aside from Sony’s hiring us to test the FS700 and present our findings, and provide transportation and lodging for us to attend the show, no company mentioned has paid us or provided other material compensation in return for a favorable mention. BMD sent the copy of Resolve at my request, which I returned after the show; Abel Cine loaned us the HDMI converter at Sony’s request, and it was returned to Abel Cine.
I rashly proposed the idea of a car spot, and DP Art Adams participated against his better judgement: he’s afraid folks will look at the test clips and compare them to a real car spot shot with a budget and a grip truck and lights and scrims and 12x12s and location scouts and proper set dressing and armies of minions to polish the car between takes. We didn’t have any of that: we had Devin and his car for a day, a rented slider, a piece of plywood, a 20-year-old Pelican case, and whatever lenses I had lying around. The car spot clips were done solely for camera-testing purposes; they do not represent the way Art Adams would compose, block, light, and photograph a car spot. Art does careful, excellent work; examples of how he really shoots things are here. I thank him for his help, and hope that he has not forever damaged his reputation in doing so!
About the Author
Adam Wilt is a software developer, engineering consultant, and freelance film & video tech. He’s had small jobs on big productions (PA, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Dir. Robert Wise), big jobs on small productions (DP, “Maelstrom”, Dir. Rob Nilsson), and has worked camera, sound, vfx, and editing gigs on shorts, PSAs, docs, music vids, and indie features. He started his website on the DV format, www.adamwilt.com/DV.html, about the same time Chris Hurd created the XL1 Watchdog, and participated in DVInfo.net’s 2006 “Texas Shootout”. He has written for DV Magazine and ProVideoCoalition.com, taught courses at DV Expo, and given presentations at NAB, IBC, and Cine Gear Expo. When he’s not doing contract engineering or working on apps like Cine Meter, he’s probably exploring new cameras, just because cameras are fun.
