Sony has announced the forthcoming Alpha 7 IV for $2500 arriving in December

Sony has announced it’s new Alpha 7 IV camera with 33 Megapixel Full Frame Image Sensor and 4K Video at 60 FPS in 10 Bit 4:2:2 vs 4K 30 in 8 bit for the mark III.

The 4K at up to 30 FPS uses the entire 7K Width of the Sensor, which 4K 60 FPS uses a 1.5x crop, which uses 4.6K and can use SD UHS II cards except one setting which needs a CFExpress Type A card. And it can record for more than hour without overheating!

The one big video issue is that unlike the III you can’t do 16 Bit RAW Video to an external recorder, in fact their is now RAW video, which is very unfortunate.

Still I would love this camera, but the video capabilities of the BlackMagic 6K Pro are superior, but it doesn’t have the still capabilities of this camera. My current still camera is non full frame DSLR the Canon 60 D, so I have lenses that would work for the Blackmagic, but this would be an amazing replacement.

Sony has announced the Cinema Camera FX3

 

Sony has announced the new FX3 Camera in the Cinema Line that has had more leaks of late than you can shake a stick at.

This is basically the video version of the Full Frame Sony A7s III. It has the same sensor and 4K capabilities, with more of a video focus, and places to mount external devices built in. And it is $3898.00 at B&H.

Impressive, though I would still go for the Blackmagic Design 6K Pro, but that has more to do with price, color space and the fact that I have EF lenses.

Consumer Video Cameras hit 4K for under $1000

Both Sony and Panasonic have announced consumer 4K cameras for under $1000. Sony has announced the FDR-AX33 for $999 (you can read about it at Cinescopophilia) and Panasonic has announced the $899 HC-VX870 and it’s strange double shooting HC-WX970 for $999 (You can also read about it at Cinescopophilia).
This blows my mind. This is reaching back to the DV revolution. Not that most people need 4K, but as an editor 4K seems like such an opportunity. Just shoot a little wider and to be able to push in and still have full 1080 resolution is mind-blowing to me. And the ability to have 4K footage to do image stabilization (now that Premiere Pro has such good built in Image Stabilization) will really change things.
Now of course these are consumer cameras, with consumer compression (though Sony does mention 100MB compression) and consumer lenses, but still for grabbing quick b-roll shots these would be amazing.
I don’t think 4K will take off at home any time soon. The TV’s are still too expensive, and since most content is 1080, it will actually look worse on a 4k screen than a 1080 screen. And until they figure out how to broadcast in 4K easily (and my TV already shows how bad the compression looks on many shows in 1080!) or a disc based format for 4K it will not take off! I mean Netflix’s 4K compression is around 15 mb per second, which is about half of what a blu-ray is (sure it is probably newer and better compression, but still you are losing a huge amount of data there). And a disc format would always be superior just for bandwidth considerations.
4K excited me for what it could mean for 1080.
Of course this all depends on DP’s as I have had 5K footage for a 1080 broadcast that was shot so extreme close up that it was useless to me to push in or for it to be  5K at all, but the possibilities do exist.

Sony adding a paid upgrade to ProRES and DNxHD for the F5 and F55

NonLinear Post has the news.

This is so exciting as Sony has always loved their proprietary formats, even proprietary media, and for them to be opening up their amazing cameras to ProRES and DNxHD even with a paid upgrade is huge. Especially with the F55 which has a Global Electronic Shutter, which gets rid of the rolling shutter problem of CMOS image sensors!

And it has beautiful image quality.

Metabones Speed Booster for Lenses

Saw this at filmmaker IQ. Sounds like Magic, but it adapts Canon EOS lenses to APS-C, and because it uses all the light and the whole frame it is actually added a stop of light and making it sharper. Almost magic!

Too bad they don’t have it for EOS to EOS for ES lens to APS-C instead of for SONY NEX.

You can pre-order from Metabones.

Sony announced 4K CineAlta cameras, F5 and F55 with Super 35mm Sensor

SonyPro_F5-F55_group

This is all over the web, at Cinescopophilia, Vincent Laforet’s blog and Cinema 5D among others. And Cinescopophilia has more on the F55 and F5. They have identical bodies and 4K senrors, but the F5 is going up against the Canon C500 with 1080p/2k recording up to 120FPS (as a free upgrade, it ships at 60FPS) or 120FPS to an outboard recorder for the F5 and internally for the F55, and even do 1080p or 2K at 240 FPS internally. Wow!

These use XAVC, which is 4:2:2 10 Bit at 100Mbps to 300Mbps for 4K. Exciting, though they haven’t priced the cameras as of yet.