Sandman

I follow this site for a few years now and i became a member of this forum to share my view of the image quality of the a6000. Looking to samples and reading complaints about the image quality i see a repeating pattern of the "flat -3-3-3" settings mantra. It's wrong. Sony did something wrong too: their default " high iso noise reduction" destroys your low 100 iso footage to. Disable it. Before i get peck and feathered here as a fanboy of Sony: My advice and observations are valid for every hybrid camera thats capable of: - A live histogram, very important. - Settings for contrast, saturation,sharpness - Manual exposure. - Video output to a compressed format like avchd, avcx, mp4, mov, hdmi If a camera fits the above, a simplified view of the inner workings can be: - Photons reflected by your lovely family, cat or garden enters the camerasensor. - The sensor sends the data in RAW quality to the onboard processor(venus, expeed, bionz, digic etcetera). - The live histogram shows the results of your exposure, contrast and sharpness settings. - Press record, your movie is written as 8 or 10 bit to codec or hdmi if applicable The processor of your camera can be seen as the retarded brother of software like davinci resolve. If you always feed the retarded processor with outdated instructions like contrast -3, saturation -3, whitebalance cloudy and denoising on, the result can or will be a washed out, contrastless 8 bit mess. Post production can't help you here. The solution is in your LIVE HISTOGRAM. Use it, because it shows you what your stupid venus/digic/bionz processor is doing to your 8/10 bit signal. From left to right it shows the distribution of tones, From bottom to top the amount of the corresponding tone. When exposed correctly the histogram touches the leftside, rightside and may TOUCH the top, not a full blown hit. Lowering contrast moves the histogram up to a bumb in the middle, up the contrast and the histogram gets flatter in the middle. And flat and neutral is what we want, not? A6000 specific: Don't use negative contrast settings below zero. Especially in low light/ high iso. Believe me, you are better of with contrast +3 than -1 in lots of situations. If the histogram shows latitude your edit and correction software will show it too. And now something about the codec. The statement of mr. Reid that 24 frames at 24 mb/s gives you more information per frame than 50frames 26 mb/s is NOT true. This could be true only when using an all intra codec at minimal 6 times the filesize (at 50p) of avchd, regardless the brand of your camera. The codec of the a6000 uses 2 b frames, so every second frame is an intra frame. Film 50p with shutterspeed 1/50, throw it on a 25p timeline and you have 25 iframes with 180 degree shutterspeed on your timeline. Denoising and compression software for example performs much better now, and you minimised rolling shutter. If you want good enough 24p with 180 degrees shutterspeed from avchd there is only one possibility. Film 50p, as above on a 25p timeline and slow down to 24 during export. Your footage is then compatible with antique cinema projectors. Don't use for sport and reporter style shooting. Or, for the last drop of quality use an external recorder like an atomos or hyperdeck. Record in 24p, 25p or 30p avcd settings, set output hdmi to 50i or 60i. The pulldown function of the atomos or edit software converts this to 24/25/30p without loosing one bit of information. Hope this long-toothed explanation will help somebody to get better iq quality from his or hers camera. --------------- Sony a6000 specific settings. 50 or 60 fp. See above for 24,25 or 30p High iso noise reduction off, auto slow shutter off. Menu tab one, page 5 and 7. Even at 100 iso the "High ISO NR on" destroys your frame, stupid Sony! Zebras 100+ , menu tab 2 page 1. The camera is capable of 110 IRE, don't worry when the zebras are slightly visible during recording, you can recover highlights in post. Creative style settings, assign a button to it for contrast adjustments on the fly. Starting point neutral 00-3 Contrast is a dynamic setting, look to your histogram and dial it from 0 to 3. Never below 0. Sharpness always -3. Halos start at -2, be warned. Autofocus settings for reporters without a focuspuller. AF drive speed Normal. AF Track Duration high. Menu Tab 1, page 3 Now the post production. Lower the highlights to 100 iRE, so lower the highlights by 10% Slide the midtones as needed while looking to your waveform scope. Dial in sharpness, your editing software can do that a lot better than stupid image processors. Be happy.