Hi everyone I apologize for missing a blog post last week but I was away in Atlanta visiting my sister and her family. If you read my blog post from a few weeks ago you may remember how I was investing in a video camera as the video side of my business was expanding and I needed to have a proper video camera in order to be able to do more jobs with a camera that has a lot more capability then my Sony A7II.
I did a lot of research on cinema cameras before I decided what to buy. I looked at Canon, Black Magic, Sony, Red and I decided on the Sony PXW-FS5. The main reason I went with Sony is that since I already own a Sony camera with Sony lenses I would be able to use those lenses on the new camera. Another main selling feature was the price point. At $6450.00 for the kit that I bought is the best value for the buck in terms of performance and features. Yes $6450 is a lot of money to spend but compared to the bigger brother to the FS5 the FS7 mark ii we are around $12K for that camera and even more for some of the other camera's
Another selling feature to this camera was the size. It is a very small compact camera which is perfect for run and gun style filming and is a great documentary camera which will become the main camera for my film I am doing on abandoned buildings. The body weighs in at just over two pounds so even with the lens and the handles on it I can easily handhold this for long periods of time.
The Sony FS5 is also filled with some unique features as well. The biggest feature in the built in variable ND filters. Now most cinema cameras have built in ND filters but this camera has a variable ND built in so you can gradually increase or decrease the amount of ND in very small increments. Other cameras have hard stops of ND.
Another great feature is clear image zoom. This allows up to an extra two times of zoom on any lens including primes. Sony has figured out the math to do a digital zoom without any degradation of the picture quality. This means that even prime lenses are now zoom lenses.
Super slow motion on this camera is really good to. I can do up to 240FPS super slo-mo in 1080 HD at 8 second bursts. It can go up to 960FPS but it is in SD and the picture is not usable.
I have been spending a lot of time playing with this camera and I have a lot to learn still with it. I have shot one video with it for the Peace Camera YouTube channel and I then shot a video about it that I will link below. I will see you all next week.