A6300/A6500 Terrible video quality - What am I missing?

[newguy84]

Hi all,

I thought I would ask here as I have now had my Sony A6300 for 4-5 months now. I shoot a lot of video projects and I'm quite familiar with frame rates, lighting, aperture, shutter speeds and picture profiles etc.

I can't seem to get clean footage on this camera no matter what I do. I have tried various picture profiles, Cine2, Cine4, s-log2 over exposing properly etc and I always seem to have some amount of grain in the footage. Even in well lit scenario's at low ISO's etc. The footaqe I shoot looks clean on my external monitor but whenever I import the footage to FCPX it looks crap.

What am I missing? Will editing in Premiere make a difference?

I'm shooting with the Sigma 30mm f1.4, have a decent spec iMac for editing and use the latest version of FCPX. 

I have seen tons of amazing footage online that looks sharp and clear. Yet no matter what I do, I can't replicate it.

Please help lol

[jrm]

It could be the way FCPx is rendering it onscreen. You could try two things to test this:

1. Create "optimized" clips in FCP. Even if this doesn't clear up the grainy footage, it may make editing faster/smoother. Of course the tradeoff is the increased size of optimized clips.

2. Output something from the FCP timeline. Since things look good on an external monitor, I'm guessing the output will be just fine. 

Larry Jordan gives a good explanation here:  https://larryjordan.com/articles/fcp-7-why-images-display-poorly/   While the article is for FCP 7, the same general concepts should apply.

Apple also talks about reduced display quality when "better performance" is checked:  https://support.apple.com/kb/PH15848?locale=en_US