For the first time on this channel,
I’m filming this video in 8K and today I want to tell you
a bit about the process that led me here.
Let’s get undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What’s happening, everybody?! I’m Gerald Undone
and no hamsters were harmed in the making of this video.
And now, for some less absurd disclosures,
there will be some gear that I talk about from Kondor Blue
during this video, which was provided to me for free.
They didn't sponsor this video,
but I do have an upcoming project with them
that I'm really excited to share with you soon.
Just wanted to let you know about my relationship there.
This video does have a sponsor though and that’s Storyblocks.
Now originally I had planned to make sort of, one larger,
dedicated video on this topic, but because there’s a lot
of moving parts and because certain aspects
are more time consuming than the rest, turned out
that I didn't really know when I was going to make that video
so I decided instead to make this on as sort of an update
along the way. This is brought on by that post
you might've seen where I said that the Sony a1
was my new favorite camera, and I found myself using it
a lot more than Sony a7S III for video.
And obviously I was using it all the time for photos.
So just kind of like my one
workhorse camera, which is funny because in the a1 video
I said that I thought that I would rather have an a7S III
and an a7R IV for photos.
Well, since then I've actually sold my a7R IV.
I still have two a7S III's,
but I keep going to the a1 for video.
So this video is going to be kind of an explanation
of the different steps that I took to convert that,
because right now you're watching this video
on the Sony a1 and I'm shooting at an 8K, sort of.
Well, I am, but I'm doing both.
And that's going to be a big component of this video.
Got some notes here that I want to go over.
Another thing that I want to accomplish,
which is when Kondor Blue is going to come in,
is a couple of years ago, I made a video
on the original Sony a7 III,
how you could use this kind of like a quick change
photo-to-video hybrid video rig.
And so I want to do that with an a1.
So I want two a1's. I want my main a1 here.
And I'm still waiting on another one, which I don't have yet,
hence the moving parts and time consuming thing.
And then I'm going to make that second a1 my B camera
for this kind of video
so that they match perfectly, but also my photo camera.
So I want to make a quick change rig.
So we're going to build one of those out today.
But first, I want to talk a little bit more
about the 8K and 4K thing,
which I touched on a little bit
in one of my Sony a1 videos earlier.
So something I noticed when I tried to show you guys
the difference between a camera that has
oversampling or we compare 6k to 4K
or just small resolution differences,
that sometimes, it can be difficult to see
exactly what's going on, especially when we talk
about line-skipping versus pixel-binning.
They're just-- especially when it goes through YouTube,
there's just a lot of little difficulties
to really demonstrate everything.
Well, earlier, a couple of weeks ago,
I found a way, I think
really demonstrate this well, which is also kind of
what led me to decide how I want to shoot with the a1.
So what I was able to do, I have-- I have an image here
that I'm gonna show you. This is how I recorded this image.
Now, this was-- the idea here is this is
a chart that's usually used for chroma subsampling.
But I found that if I put it on my screen,
my actual monitor, and then positioned the camera
just close enough so that we can just start to get
that screen door effect where you can see the pixels.
And then I film that it revealed everything,
whether you've got line-skipping,
how the chroma subsampling is working,
the resolution, just all kinds of stuff.
And this is what the image looked like originally.
Now, I took a bunch of shots that I've cropped in
on them so you can see them better because admittedly
still, when completely zoomed out
and put through YouTube, it's still hard to see.
But when we punch in to a four times crop,
I was using this bottom section here to see how those
blue letters on red and red letters on blue,
that showed the problem really well.
And I'm actually curious to see what this
video itself is going to look like on YouTube.
Anyway. So if we move forward an image,
this one here is the a7S III's 4K,
it's captured externally, but it's the same as the internal.
Now if we look at the a1's 4K,
so when you do the straight sort of line-skipped 4K
that the a1 has because it's taking
such a high resolution sensor
and line-skipping it down to 4K, you get this,
which looks worse and we can see a few things going on here.
First of all, we can see that it's sort of blurier overall
and we can actually see the line skipping in action if we look.
Do you see how the-- the lines here,
they're not all the same and they shift colours?
And if we punch in on some of the letters, you can actually
sort of see the line-skipping because
you see how the letters are aliased?
They're offset and have jaggies
almost like there's, like, a wobble to them?
That's what the line-skipping is doing.
Now the next image is quite compelling. And this was the one
that kind of blew me away when I showed it.
This is what the 8K out of that camera looks like.
You see how it's just night and day?
Every single pixel-- Let me punch back in.
You can see every single little pixel like a Lite-Brite.
And those lines are completely straight now.
There's no jaggies.
It's not blurry at all.
And every single one of these vertical bars
looks identical and is perfect.
But now let's look at what happens if you do the process
that I mentioned in a previous video where
we keep the camera on 8K
so you could record 8K to the SD card.
But now the HDMI port is being recorded
to a Ninja V and it's not being set to 4K external
because that would be 4K only
and you couldn't record in memory card.
So the camera's still in 8K mode and we're getting sort of
an oversampled image recorded to the Ninja V,
and I can sort of prove this more convincingly than
I could in my previous video.
Look at this image.
Not as good as the 8K. I'll admit it.
And if we flip back and forth,
there's definitely something going on here in the blue
where it's not quite as precise as the 8K.
But if we compare this image here, this oversampled 4K,
to the Ninja V, and we compare it to the regular line-skipped
4K, there is a huge difference, as you can see.
Let me just flip back and forth again.
It is dramatic.
So this made me realize,
OK, well, I have a couple of options then,
because shooting 8K isn't exactly--
probably the best method
using these mirrorless cameras, in my opinion,
for this kind of setup.
Just like I said with the Canon R5,
it's OK for shooting some clips, but to do,
you know, long form things and you have to
edit it and everything else. And you know what?
Let's take a minute to talk about editing performance.
So this amazing looking 8K image
on the a1 edits okay, and I think part of this
is because it's 8K 4:2:0. So the-- the GPU is able to
accelerate that a little bit. Maybe I'll put
a little video up on the screen right now
showing you some scrubbing differences.
The-- it's not bad. It's workable.
I think if you added a couple layers of that,
it would probably get bogged down.
And I have a pretty high-end machine,
but there's no comparison to this 4K recorded
on the Ninja V from the 8K sort of oversampled image,
this one edits perfectly smooth, like instantaneous,
like you would expect from any kind of mezzanine codec.
This was in DNx, but it doesn't matter
if you do DNx or ProRes, super smooth.
So we're getting significant editing advantages
using this method.
I also did another test, which was to see
if you take the 8K actual footage and you have
an 8K timeline and then you export it to 4K using Resolve
versus if you have a 4K timeline and you drop 8K footage
onto that timeline and then export that as a 4K export,
because even though I'm shooting in 8K,
I'm still rendering it out in 4K and uploading in 4K,
so I want to know, is there a better quality
to an 8K timeline and export in 4K or to use a 4K timeline
and just drop in 8K clips and export it?
And I did maybe eight different tests of these with different
combinations and in each case they looked identical.
So at least when using Resolve, assuming that your scaling
doesn't change when you change timelines.
I don't really see a difference between an 8K timeline
and a 4K timeline with 8K footage
if they're both being rendered out the same at 4K.
Let's talk more about why did I bother switching
sort of my entire A-roll setup to the a1 for this.
Because it's more than just obviously "I want the image
to be a little bit sharper" because it is sharper,
but there's a few other benefits. Previously I talked
about that the noise performance is better.
Basically the noise becomes finer when you shoot in 8K.
So even if the noise was the same, there's smaller
little bits of noise and it becomes harder to see.
And when you upload to YouTube the bigger blocks of noise,
when compression hits it, it becomes
more messy and artifacty.
But when it's smaller,
sort of like dithery, finer points of noise,
the compression doesn't hit it as bad.
So you actually get sort of a better overall
compressed YouTube video as well, which is kind of handy.
Also, when it comes to noise from exposure,
there are some differences.
Now, I love the a7S III and I know this video--
Little sidebar. I know it could be kind of frustrating from
those comments where it's like "Aw, Gerald's switching to a1?
He just told me to get the a7S III",
this whole set up probably isn't very practical for most people,
-but I figured-- -[distant rattling]
It's much more expensive than the a7S III
and the improvements are kind of marginal,
but I can do this, I have access to this gear so I can do
these kinds of experiments for fun and you can watch them.
And it's a lot easier than you doing these experiments
yourself, both monetarily and access to gear and everything.
So I'm just doing this basically for your entertainment
and also to test things out.
I do realize it's not as practical
and the a7S III is still probably
a much better value package overall for video
unless you really need 8K. But yeah, finer noise.
And then there's an exposure element
to this as well. The a7S III, as much as I love it,
has sort of a one weak spot for--
for noise, which is before you hit
that 12,800 point, but after you cross that like 3200 point.
So ISO 6400, for example, is pretty sloppy
on this camera, but it's great on the a1.
In fact, I would say the a1 either
matches or beats the a7S III at every ISO
up until 12,800 and then the a7S III kicks in.
So if you want super high,
low light stuff, the a7S III still wins.
But if you're somebody that operates more in that,
you know, 4000, 5000, 6000 ISO zone, the a1's actually better.
And that's exactly what had happened here.
I used to shoot my videos
with the a7S III at f/4, ISO 12,800.
I did that because based on the way that I want to do
the lighting, keep it kind of moody, that kind of thing.
But I still wanted to have enough depth of field
to keep the product sharp on the table.
I was finding that I wanted to stop down to like f/3,
f/2.8, f/3.2, somewhere in there.
But that was putting my ISO in that muddy zone of like 6400.
So I thought, well it's easy if I just go a whole 'nother stop
to 12,800 'cause that cleans up--
but then I had to stop down f/4 and I was finding
I wasn't getting as good of background separation
in that way obviously because now my depth of field
is probably too much, basically it was just
hard to find a perfect, sweet spot.
But the a1, when I was testing it
for my initial review for it, kind of offered that
because the a1 cleans up at ISO 4000,
which allowed me to set this shot you're looking at now.
This is f/2.2, ISO 4000.
I should probably stop down a little bit more
if I wanted to get more of the table.
You can see I'm pretty out of focus here,
but it does offer me better separation from the background.
And I think if we compare the two shots,
the f/2.2 ISO 4000, the a1,
versus the f/4, ISO 12,800 on the a7S III,
the a1 shot is more dynamic and I think maybe
a little bit more pleasing to look at
for this talking head presentation.
But there's also some other things to which you might notice
in that side-by-side, which is that the a1
I think is offering better skin tones.
I mentioned this in my original video that the a7S III in S-Log
has a little bit of a green problem.
And I've made videos on how to correct-- how to deal
with this and fix for it. And you can rotate the hue.
You can change your white balance, stuff like that.
The a1 basically has that fix already baked into it.
And I find that Sony has been doing this
for their last couple of cameras as well.
So that's their new attitude is they're less
green than they used to be, which is great.
Just means that I can shoot the a1
basically straight
and, like the skin tones where I had to do some corrections
on the a7S III.
Also try to take this quality bump a little bit further.
And I thought, well, if I'm doing a whole new set up,
let's pop a new lens on there, too.
And I put on the 35mm G Master,
the new one from Sony that I reviewed
in January, I think it was.
And I adore that lens from its quality.
I think it's probably the best
35mm in terms of image quality,
but it has that focus breathing problem.
And so I thought, well, I'm mostly stationary here,
so focus breathing shouldn't really be an issue.
And I was surprised to find out that it actually is.
I'm using the 35mm f/1.8, by the way. I stuck with that.
But if I lean back and forward,
you can see that the frame isn't moving at all.
With the G Master, even just moving this much
was causing the frame to breathe in and out,
which I found it looked distracting, especially if
you have elements in the frame that kind of come in and out of
the shot because they're right on the cusp.
So as much as I like the quality better,
the breathing kind of killed me on that.
So that 35mm G Master is going to be reserved
for photography, which I'm still okay with because I love it.
And for photography, the focus breathing doesn't really matter
that much for single shots.
You know, sequencing can matter,
but not for single shots, which is mostly what I do.
But yeah. So that's a practical focus breathing thing.
which is interesting, even doing this can cause it,
but the 35mm f/1.8 doesn't do that at all.
So we're still using 35mm f/1.8. Alright.
Now I'm still waiting on my other a1
to arrive, which is what I was going to use for the build out.
But since I don't have that one, I'm actually going to grab my
other a7S III that I'm not using at the moment because now
I'm using the a1 and we're going to build that out
and pretend it's an a1 just for the sake of demonstration.
But that one's already built out,
so I'll keep sort of switching back and forth to it
so you can see it in action on the a1 as well.
And you can see the setup that I'm doing for this video.
Now, this one here is my old a7S III rig.
I don't want to really call it old like, how old is it?
But this is the one that I was normally shooting,
the one that we're going to build out now.
But this one I was using SmallRig
and got the Ninja V mounted on top and it's decent.
It's treated me well. Got the Sigma 24-70mm on here.
It's a great little combo. So what am I gonna do
is set this one up as kind of a close up camera
that I can use when to show you the parts
and then we're going to do a little buildout.
Give me a second.
OK, so we've got our proxy camera here
and this is the a7S III,
and one other thing I want to say,
this video is kind of all over the place. I realize that.
I hope you guys are enjoying this kind
of like update style video.
These are the kind of videos I actually really,
really like to make where
there's sort of nothing on the line.
I'm just experimenting with things I'm enjoying
and having fun and just sharing it with you.
But I know they can be a bit scattered.
There are a lot harder to,
like, make a thumbnail and title for and package
them for you. But I have the most fun with them.
So I hope you're having fun watching this too.
Tell you all about this stuff. Thanks to Kondor Blue again,
a lot of their stuff is great
and I've been really happy with it with my first
experiment, that camera up there.
And while I unpack this, I will tell you
about today's sponsor, Storyblocks.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where
you could really use some footage but shooting yourself
was either budgetary or logistically unfeasible?
Well, Storyblocks has you covered with an impressive
collection of stock footage covering a wide range
of subjects with unlimited downloads and 4K video.
They're also amply supplied with backgrounds,
overlays, after effects templates,
interface is easy to use and navigate.
And the clips are royalty free for both personal
and commercial use. So you can use them
as much as you want, wherever you want.
So if you think you could take advantage
of a fantastic library of quality stock footage
and effects, check out Storyblocks
using the link in the description below.
OK, so, got a bunch of Kondor Blue stuff here.
Now a couple of these things-- What I've got here,
this is the base rig for the Sony a-series stuff.
Some of these things don't come in the base rig.
Some of this stuff is extra.
But yeah, I mean, I'll put all the links,
and we should be able to figure this all out.
So is this shot useful? Kind of. I don't know.
Let's roll on this and see what happens. Where should we start?
Let's start with the actual cage aspect.
OK, so this is what it looks like when you get
the base rig kit there and you have to actually
assemble the cage yourself,
which I think is interesting.
And if you get the one for Sony,
the top handle comes with a little USB thing
and there's actually a record button on the top.
So you can use the record button on the top handle
to trigger recording on your camera.
The screws to attach the pieces are already
screwed into the sockets on each respective component.
Can you see that there?
And the correct size for that,
they provide an Allen key, but if you're the type
that likes to use your own, yeah, it's a 2mm.
So if you want to use your own...
Allen wrenches-- this part's pretty straightforward,
so I'll probably just blast through it so that you don't
have to watch me screw a bunch of things together.
[sped up sounds]
OK, so one of the main reasons
why I like this whole Kondor Blue base rig
is for that purpose of using our a1
as quick-changing from photo to video.
So it can be my video B-cam, but then also
my primary photo camera.
And for that they have a little
Arca plate that's held in place by this clamp.
And you attach this to the bottom of the camera, obviously.
And I also like that, even though there's only one screw,
these things grip on really tight
and don't rotate that much.
Now you can slide the camera in
and out of the rig using that Arca plate.
And if you have, you know,
an Arca tripod, whatever you like
to use for your photography,
well, then you can just, say this is all rigged
out for video, you can just slide it out.
And then put this on your tripod and leave
this whole thing set up here for your video rig.
Another thing you want to consider, though,
is that right here... Can you see that?
There's a screw there which is designed to go through
the islet for the strap, so when you put the camera in,
you can see that that islet lines up with that screw
and that will give you a second point of contact and stop
the camera from moving or wiggling.
I'm not-- I'm using it on that one,
but I'm not going to use it on this one
because again, I want the camera
to be able to come out of the rig quickly.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense if I bolt it down
in a bunch of different places.
Anyway, so that's the first part there.
And then we can use this thing
on the side to hold it in place.
Now, I found that these don't come very tight to begin with,
and the Allen key that they provide
doesn't actually fit in there.
But if you have a 3/32 Allen wrench,
then you can use that and put it right in this
screw right here, and then you can tighten
it up a little bit so that when you actually do...
clamp it down, it holds the camera really well in place.
OK, so this is the base rig part.
Obviously, each step of the way here
becomes more optional as we go.
But this one comes with the Manfrotto 501 plate
and it does have two-- a 3/8 and a 1/4-20.
And so we can screw that into the bottom
of our current setup here.
So now we're sort of stacking
quick release plates and now
this one on the bottom comes with
a dovetail if you want that, or you can attach your own...
again they have 2x 1/4-20 and one 3/8,
you can attach your own quick release plate
to the bottom just to go on your tripod.
Or you can use a dovetail if you'd like. And that's built in.
The top handle also comes with a rod
that you can use to go through there if you want.
The top handle's great by the way, it's got four 3/8
with locating pins and they come
with the 1/4-20, 3/8 adapters already in them,
ton of mounting points on the sides.
You've got a shoe on the back
and on the front and then more locating pins.
This is fun. You can get different lens cap covers.
Alright. I'll put it on for branding purposes.
So if you take off your Sony cap,
this is a Kondor Blue Sony cap that you can get.
They have them for all the different
mounts for cameras. So then it comes with rods.
So we're going to go ahead and put those through.
And because I'm not really doing anything on the front,
I'm going to move them all the way to the back.
They're locked down with a single
tightening point on the side. Now, this stuff is optional
by the way, this does not come with the base rig.
This was something that I was interested in myself.
This is Kondor Blue's V-Mount plate,
and we're going to slide that on the back here.
And it's different for this one, because this is
the a7S III, this has a flip out screen.
For the a1 you want to make sure
you give yourself enough clearance for
that sort of tilt out deployment screen.
So we'll put it here for now. That's fine.
Just going to tighten these down.
We've got a charging port,
I think is-- that's this one here.
And then we've also got a 15V AC port--
they're all DC barrels.
And then on this side we've got DTAP and then
we've got a combination of different outputs.
So we've got the-- a 12V, a 5V,
and then we've got a switchable 7.4 to 8.4V,
which is what I'm going to use for this one.
I'm going to plug this one into there and put the selector...
Plug in this barrel here
and then put the selector over to 8.4V.
And this is the one that's going to
go in our theoretical a1, and it would go in
right down here, and the advantage of using
a dummy battery, which already covered one of my videos,
is that it completely stops the a1
from overheating, at least in my test.
I didn't take it on desert. We're talking inside
room temperature, running it for a long time.
In fact, I've been running that camera
now for probably two, three hours, doing both internal
8K, switching the cards,
and then also external to the Ninja V.
And it has no problems whatsoever.
And I've done this a bunch of times.
Now I've heard some people say they've had issues
with dummy batteries in the past.
Generally, I always recommend buying premium ones.
In the past, I've had great success
with IndiPro Tools. They're the ones that I used
for my original a1 tests. But I've also been having
great success with Kondor Blue's dummy batteries.
This one is D-TAP to Sony L-series battery.
So we put that over here
on the D-TAP side and then that would go to our,
you know, monitor wherever that would be,
and then we'd run both of these things
with a V-Mount battery.
Now, something else that I like that I have with
that current setup is that it's great
to run things on battery power because that gives them
versatility and with this dummy battery going in there.
But the problem is that if this battery dies,
then the whole thing fails. So what I like is
that they also have this AC adapter
you can plug into that charging port
that I showed you a minute ago on the side here
and then plug this into the wall.
And that will give you-- that will
charge the battery when you're not using the camera
and it will give you some active powering capabilities.
If you use only the AC adapter and just the camera,
you can actually take the battery off like this
and the camera will still run via AC.
But I found that if you also turned on
the Ninja, then it sort of did more.
I don't know how many amps is this providing?
So this is outputting 19V at 3.42A, 65W max.
So that could be the problem.
I find that normally you need about five Amps to run
sort of a whole rig right out of the wall.
So it's not a perfect solution.
And I would suggest
a Kondor Blue if possible.
See if you can come up with a slightly more
powerful AC adapter, if that will work OK with
your V-Mount plates in order to make it so that you could
actively power a few devices at once or still charge
your V-Mount while in use, because right now that doesn't
seem to work if I fully load up the plate.
So that's my only real complaint there.
And then yeah, we could use this articulating arm,
you know, we could throw it on the side and put
the monitor on there and it works fine.
Basically though, this is what I'm trying
to do with the rig is be able to power
the camera and the monitor and everything off of this,
have a backup with power, and then I can still release this
clasp on the side and then push the little button in the back
and take my camera out.
And then I can go use this for photography
and it already has an Arca-Swiss plate on the bottom.
That's the idea for this.
But I'm waiting on the new a1.
Like I said before, I will make
another update video sort of showing you
the final results, let you know if I ran into any snags.
And then also talking about what am going to do with all
this other gear like this current a7S III
and my other a7 III, and some other gear that I'm going to do
a whole used gear extravaganza.
So make sure you stick around for that.
So, yeah, I've been really happy with this whole setup.
Thanks again to Kondor Blue, for supplying these
parts so I could test this out.
The test was a success.
I like them. Do not expect them back.
I'm going to keep them now and use them.
And I will definitely be showing you guys
the final build out when I get it done
and when I get that second a1.
And yeah, my final note here says end video somehow.
End of video.
But that's going to be it for me, I hope you found this video
entertaining or at least helpful, and if you did,
make sure you leave 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.