A7III Video Frustrations

[budboy65]

Hello All,

Thanks in advance for your help on this.

To start, I've been a sony user for a while now and up until recently thought I mastered my A7rii. I recently upgraded my system to the A7iii and having a great deal of buyer remorse. My primary reason for the upgrade is that the rii didn't perform as well in low light as everyone knows. Even the riii has the same issue and as I shoot a lot of interiors of homes, aircraft and luxury yachts, there are always very dark shadows. Having said that, between a Rokinon 12mm T2.2 lens. shooting slog2, premiere pro and neat video, I have been able to create some very nice video.

With the A7iii, this is not the case. I am getting a lot of artifacts and color distortion in the footage. At first I thought maybe the lens, so I put on a Sony 16-35mm f2.8 lens (in Canada, plus$3000 lens) and I get the same issue. I've tried a Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 and again the exact same problem as the 12mm. 

If I set the scene, right now the test is in a newly renovated kitchen. White walls, and main cabinets are white. The island is a very dark almost black blue. In the corners of the white I get color variations and on the blue island you can actually see chunking almost really back banding with square blocks. The Stainless steel refrigerator is the same as on a bright day, you can actually see with the eye, almost a rainbow effect.

And it's not just slog2. I've wanted to shorten my workflow, so I have tried Cine 4 and the new HLG specifically HLG2 and I get the exact same results. I've reset my camera twice and am on v3.0 of the firmware.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciate.

Robert

[VTC]

What ISO you shooting? Granted I have an elderly 7Sii which is behind tech wise of the 7iii but I rarely shoot above 5000 rolling LOG2 and this is on night shoots.

The other thing is cinematographers are always stressing shadow details and realistically that's a bunch of crap. The only ones peering into the shadows are photographers. Pedestrian viewers aren't looking there and if they are then you've got serious problems framing your subject. Face it... When there are two people in the scene interacting the viewer isn't looking past them to learn the brand of crackers that's next to the sink in the poorly lit background. They're drawn to people. To action. To faces. Not to shadows.

So back to your problem... Some frame grabs would be helpful.

Edited May 4, 2019 by VTC

[budboy65]

I’ll try to get some screen shots and post them. The noise is pretty noticeable especially when it a luxury home tour. To answer your question about ISO, since slog starts at 800 it starts showing up at the level. Gets worse at 1600, 3200 and really bad at around 5000. The issue more so is if I want sharp video on the Rokinon lens I have to set the it at T8 which means I have to bump the iso. Funny enough I tested Josh Yeo’s (YouTube - MakeArtNow) settings last night. These were specific settings he tested that made a lot of adjustment on a specific profile and I could actually pump the iso to over 25600 and 32000 and there was little noise, but it’s not good for daylight. 

So the issue really is that for run and gun style shooting that I do, I can’t take a chance when the sun comes out or the sun goes away and screws up the video due to a specific profile or settings within a specific profile. So just to be clear the a7rii shooting slog2 and the exact slog2 settings in the a7iii do not produce the same quality video. The a7rii is actually better and I thought the a7iii was supposed to be better. 

[budboy65]

I've had a chance to reproduce the issue. If this was video, you'd see the artifacts. Here you see noise. This is the worse I've seen shot at ISO 125 HLG3 settings.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!