Snowfun

I've been using one of these £12 Rocketek combined USB3 CFast and SATA readers..
The drives show up independently in your file manager so you can easily copy media between them too.

The Sandisk Ultra3D is a good low cost alternative and ticks all the boxes on the Ninja V tested and approved compatibility chart.
https://www.atomos.com/drives
 

If you want raw, it’s the ninja and only pro res raw. The BM recorders will do 10bit 422

Was that your first ever selfie? 

Why the hostility towards PB? 
As far as I can tell (my camera won’t be delivered until September) he presents a reasonable and balanced opinion. And he states it is an opinion, that he was paid for the two short films and on no account should one buy an A7Siii based on his review....
He certainly isn’t a “shill”. 
 

Say what you will about Phillip Bloom but I found his hour plus piece on the A7SIII to be quite enjoyable. Well enjoyed over a cup of fine coffee as I did. I do take his review for what it’s worth as again he is paid and he does have access to nice and expensive Sony glass (of which I do not). For those of us who casually shoot and can’t afford the $3500 body, surely there will be a trickle down of some of these features to the a6XXX line at some point right?

Both Undone and Bloom are the best IMO. I always look forward to their reviews. I did learn a few new tidbits from Bloom's review of the A7SIII that are important to my style of work (wildlife):
Animal eye detect autofocus does not work in video (stills only). Philip has started a petition on this, here's the link if you want to sign this. Tracking autofocus does not work while using Clear Image Zoom. Tracking autofocus does not work while using an external monitor. Punch-in does not work (manual focus) while recording. Clear image zoom works to 1.5x. Lot's of positives with the A7SIII but there are negatives too. I wish this camera had Canon's autofocus capabilities. With that stated, I'd much rather deal with these issues than a camera that can't recover from overheating until hours later, has line skipping in 120p 4k and humongous file sizes.

All good.
A lot of his concerns could be addressed with a FW update. I do hope more of the touchscreen functionality with an external monitor and  eye-animal video AF becomes a reality. Very glad to see there's no AF limitations with a monitor or recorder though as I plan to use the Ninja V a lot. They could take care of the NR as well and just give us the option to turn it off. But it looks like the workaround is just to record high ISO externally for now.
I have far less overheating concerns with the a7s3 compared to the R5, and his test makes me feel even better. It does overheat, but it really need to be pushed and it still can recover very quickly unlike the Canon. For the way I shoot I don't have any concerns - especially since its use for me as a stills camera will be very limited. But that face/eye tracking when people walk behind trees and such is awesome. It really sticks to your subject well.
Chris
 

Why the hostility towards PB? 
As far as I can tell (my camera won’t be delivered until September) he presents a reasonable and balanced opinion. And he states it is an opinion, that he was paid for the two short films and on no account should one buy an A7Siii based on his review....
He certainly isn’t a “shill”. 
 

I went with an A7Siii plus the 24mm 1.4 GM as my low light solution. Unlikely to replace my P4k for anything else. Delivery in September I think. 

I film the aurora borealis so everything else is secondary to low light performance. I have used a P4k at iso 25k and 6fps 360 degrees and the images are good but they are timelapse and in that sense inferior to those from my A7S (which I stupidly sold anticipating the A7S3 last year). 
 
  (P4K)
 
(A7S)
Yes, I’d like to improve 101 things about the Sony but if it still has the best low light performance then those things can be overlooked. 

What's your name? Resume? 
I really do think @Andrew Reid should require people that talk like this to use their real names so we can judge how much credibility we should give what they say. It's way too easy (and common on here) to hide behind "working in the industry" when people disagree with you when you're anonymous 

So, with all this talk about 8k RAW, it's got me thinking, and I'm contemplating going back to 1080p.
I've been thinking about all these cameras with high resolutions and ferocious data rates, and why they don't implement higher bitrates and bit-depths on the lower resolution modes.  
Noam Kroll just shot a low budget feature in 2K Prores HQ on his Alexa Classic.  In 4:3 no less!  https://noamkroll.com/playing-against-filmmaking-trends-on-our-feature-with-arri-alexa-classic-2k-prores-hq-43-aspect-ratio/
His pipeline was RAW -> Prores HQ -> storage.  Prores HQ in 1080 is around 176Mbps, is All-I, and is 10-bit.  It sounds lovely.  Uncompressed 1080 10-bit is a whopping 1490Mbps, so the 176Mbps of HQ is quite a saving of data rates.  
But what do I actually want?
So I made a list:
I want more bit-depth than 10-bit
10-bit is fine if you're on a controlled set or have time to get your WB broadly right in camera, but for some of the horrendous situations I find myself in, having more bit-depth would help (remember how with RAW you can WB in post - well, bit depth is what enables that) I want high bit-rates for a good quality image
A good quality image means that every portion of the screen gets a decent amount of data, so this is about bit-rate.  It's not about resolution, because a 100Mbps 4K file will still have half the data available for each square cm of the screen than a 200Mbps 1080 file I want files that are easy to edit in post
It doesn't matter if my 8K smartphone files are only 100Mbps, the computer still has to decode, process, display, and encode 16 times as many pixels as 1080 So, do I want 1080p RAW?
Yes, and no.  RAW has great bit-depth, much larger bit-rates than I care for, but also isn't the best that 1080 can get because it is lower resolution after debayering.  Do I want 2.5K RAW?  Maybe.  Problem is that RAW and IBIS are very rarely found together.  What I really want is some kind of compressed, but not too compressed, intermediary file.  
What I really want is 1080 Prores 4444 (which is 264Mbps) or Prores 4444 XQ (which is 396Mbps), because these are 12-bit.  12-bit would do me very nicely.
So, what do we get from the manufacturers?  We get ridiculous bitrates on the higher resolutions, and paltry token efforts on the lower ones.  My XC10 is a classic case - 305Mbps 4K but 35Mbps 1080p.  The 4K has 2.5 times the amount of data per pixel than the 1080p, and 10 times the amount of data per square cm of screen.
But I have a GH5, which is one of the exceptions, as Panasonic went for the jugular on the lower resolution modes as well as the higher ones, and so I'm down to the three "best" modes that will work on a UHS-I SD card:
5K 4:3 200Mbps Long-GOP h265 4K 16:9 150Mbps Long-GOP h264 1080p 16:9 200Mbps All-I h264 So I shot a test.  That test showed me that the 5K mode is far superior, even on a 1080p timeline, but uploaded to YT is a different story.  Considering I have partnered with YT for distribution share my videos on YT, that's what my friends and family end up seeing.
This lead me to the question about what is actually visible after it's been minced by YT?
Luckily I had done a previous test where I took an 8K RAW file, and rendered out various resolution Prores HQ intermediaries, then exported each of them from a 4K timeline.  That video is here:
So, I downloaded the above video in 4K, 2K, and 1080p resolutions, took screen grabs, and put them side-by-side for comparison.  Here they are - you're welcome.



So, what can I see in these images?
The 4K download is better than the 2K, which is better than the 1080p.  This is hardly news, each of these is more than double the bit-rate of the next one and they're all using the same compression algorithm, that's how mathematics works. Watching in 4K each lower resolution is subtly worse than the previous, except for 1.2k (720p) which is way worse.  That's to be expected, 2k - 1.2k is a bigger percentage drop than the other resolutions.  However, things don't get "bad" until in the 2.5k - 1.2k range, depending on your tolerance for IQ. Moving to the other extreme, watching in 1080 they are all very similar, except for the 1.2k version, which is interesting. Some of these grabs also have a lower resolution one looking better than the higher one next to it.  That's not an accident on my part (I checked), it really is like that.  As the original video has the resolutions all in sequence in the one video, I suspect that the frame I chose was differing distances from the previous keyframe in the stream, so that will introduce some variation. So, what does this mean?
Well, firstly, no point shooting in 8K RAW if your viewers are watching in 1080p on YT.  I doubt that's news to anyone, but maybe it is to some R5 pre-orders lol.
More importantly, if your audience is watching in 1080 then they're not going to notice if you used 2K intermediaries or 3.2k ones.
How can we apply this to our situations?
This is more complex.  In this pipeline we had 8K RAW -> X Prores -> timeline.  This meant that the Prores was by far the weakest link, and Prores HQ is pretty high-bitrate compared to most consumer formats.  1080 Prores HQ is 176Mbps, but UHD Prores HQ is 707Mbps.  I don't know of any cameras that shoot h264 in anything even approaching those data rates for those resolutions, so good luck with that.  
If you're shooting 4K 100Mbps h264 then that's the same bitrate per square pixel of screen as 1.4K Prores HQ, which is pretty darn close to that 1.2k that looks awful in all the above.  
Obviously if your viewers are watching in 4K then it's worth shooting in the highest bit-rate you can find.
What does this mean for me?  Not sure yet, I need to do more tests on the GH5 modes, and I need to think more about things like tracking and stabilisation which can use extra resolution in the edit.
But I won't rule out going back to 1080p.

Quite bold of BM to be releasing a new version of the ATEM Mini Pro when they have barely delivered any of the current one but here we are.
As the name suggests, this new one lets you do ISO recordings of each individual camera, audio track as well as the master tracks to a single USB drive.
It then saves your live cuts and all of those recordings (and other media such as overlays and titles etc) to a project that you import straight into DaVinci Resolve onto a timeline for further tweaking.
If you are using BM Pocket cameras then they can be recording BRAW internally at the same time and Resolve has a new function to swap these as the source tracks in that edit with a single click.
With the addition of the ISO tracks this is now some serious capability not just for straight live to air/net productions but also for anyone doing any multi-camera production that you would want to have post edit control of like a live performance recording, sports game, YouTube tutorial etc or even a low budget soap opera !
The developments that BM have been up to with the ATEM Mini series is probably not, on the surface, of that much interest to a lot of people on here but it is very innovative and is a real showcase of their end to end pipeline.
Using an ATEM Mini, the Pocket 4K/6K cameras are turned into fully fledged studio cameras with remote control of on board colour correction and automatic tally functions but without losing their ability to simultaneously still be recording BRAW cine formats internally.
So you can simultaneously do a live production in HD, use its built in encoder to stream live to the internet, hand off a USB stick with a video of the ready cut version to a client, record each individual track for easy post refinement of the mix and still retain the option to use 4K or 6K RAW master versions of those tracks to create a higher resolution finessed version with a single click.
A four camera system that can do all of that for a total of under £6K or £9K depending on whether you go with 4K or 6K is arguably as revolutionary as any of their camera releases.
I can also see it having a lot more applications in the "new normal" and offering some potential new opportunities to anyone who is already invested in Pocket4K/6K cameras.
The bonus is it is a new product launch that can be discussed without reference to thermometers and stop watches 😉 
 

The previous one couldnt even do 1080 100fps without a heavy crop. This one is doing 120fps at 4k with only slight crop. Plus it has AF, fully articulating screen and 10bit h265..... Some people are hard to please 😅

Thank you for your concern but I’ve managed to make the 8bit s-log from previous Sonys look just fine in DaVinci so I’m not really worried. If you can’t get a decent image out of the a7siii I don’t think the camera is to blame.
I suggest you get an Alexa LF and be done with it.

I’ve been filming the aurora for years in real time. It’s the “in 10 bit” I’m excited about!!!

I am not a Sony user, but I don't know what are the expectation for people. I mean this camera is better technically than any DSLR or mirrorless camera in term of specs for video. it's 12 megapixel will provide good 4k which is more than enough for 99.9% of shooting. It also permits such a camera to actually work and not overheat. With FF 10 bit and 422 internal until 120 fps, great DR to exceptional lowlight and autofocus, + it seems it has better ergonomics with flip screen and menu. I can't understand how anyone can be disappointing unless its out of budget for some. As a Nikon z6 user I am not interested in Sony's , I already have great color and ergonomics and supreme image quality. If the z6s had the spec like that or just 10 bit log internal with 60 fps 4k I would be in heaven. For me the as a hybrid shooter the 24 megapixel is more important, so I would not even mind a 1 to 5 minutes 120 fps 4k because who shoots 120 fps 4k for 30 minutes... Just derushing that is like 2.5 hours of 24p!!!

I don’t get all the negativity.
This is a very sensible camera from Sony as long as it doesn’t overheat and ruin a real world shoot. Everybody wanted a FF 4K60p 10-bit camera. We have it now. With excellent AF, ALL-I, log, no pixel binning in sight (!) and hopefully no overheating in practical terms.
Sure, the flip screen is low resolution and rubbish. The menus are straight out of kindergarden classroom. And its only 12MP. Who cares. It’s about the sausage in the end.
I hate to say it but Sony is probably going to be the company to give us that internal eND in a mirrorless body someday.

I honestly don't understand why people are feeling "very underwhelmed" by this camera, what do you expect? I feel the Canon R5 has seriously skewed expectations, but we know in the real world how this has burnt (sorry) potential buyers.
Who gives a monkey's if it doesn't have 8k?
No other camera in this price range does what this camera does. In some ways it's better than the FX9. Seems like the perfect video tool for those who don't want or can afford something bigger. 
Well done Sony! (and please, no hush-hush cripple hammers!!).

Who knows, maybe Sony will sell you a fridge to keep your Canon camera in?

In light of recent offerings I think that qualifies as “exceeds expectations”...
I’m excited by it. And will buy.

In light of recent offerings I think that qualifies as “exceeds expectations”...
I’m excited by it. And will buy.

In light of recent offerings I think that qualifies as “exceeds expectations”...
I’m excited by it. And will buy.