I was there during the Sony F5/F55 presentation in Paris, here some cool features

[Valentin Paris]

Hi.


I went to the French Sony Presentation - and I discovered some amazing features on the sony F5/F55 :


- Very low power consumption : 25 watts for the camera - 15 watts for the raw recorder


- Therefore : very silent fans on the camera and the raw recorder. Very quiet. Hard to hear even your ear is at 5 cm from the camera body.


- When you go from 4k to 2K, the sensor is not cropped. The result is : A 50mm at 4k stay a 50mm at 2k. The downconversion is made inside the camera.


- You can record 2 streams at the same time. Exemple :


You can record at 4K raw and on the same time, at 4k xavc codec.


- There are two slots on the camera body, and it is hot swappable. Amazing.


- F5 is 2000 is native -and F55 is 1250 iso (because of the special anti rolling shutter).


- There are integrated high quality ND filters inside the camera. Very good. You don't absolutely need a matte box.




Anyway...Even with these cool features, I am pretty sure the RAW workflow will be a disaster and almost unusable (that's why it is possible to take some XAVC 4K on the same time).


Anyway, I still prefer my Red One M camera which has still and always incredible image quality. I can work with it like a worked with film (320 / 500 asa) - incredible workflow - So easy - I can edit in 4,5K natively with premiere or FCP. So nice.


I am not a fan of the low light race...


Soon, all the cinema camera will be night vision camera and you'll need lot of ND filters to use it by sunny day

 

[M Most]

Hi.

...Even with these cool features, I am pretty sure the RAW workflow will be a disaster and almost unusable (that's why it is possible to take some XAVC 4K on the same time).

Can I ask why you feel tht way?

 

[Valentin Paris]

Yes.


During the conference, I asked :


Will it be possible to edit in raw natively in premiere / fcp ?


They were desapointed about this question (because, the answer is NO.)


The guy said : it is absurd to edit in raw natively, it is exactly like to edit film with negatives..


I was laughing inside quietly...

The workflow is :

Sony : You take Raw and 2k XAVC on the same time, edit with 2K XAVC and finalise in 4K. You need to manage more data, you need lot of memory cards. Hum hum.

Red : shot and edit in Raw.

 

[NateWeaver]

Yes.


During the conference, I asked :


Will it be possible to edit in raw natively in premiere / fcp ?


They were desapointed about this question (because, the answer is NO.)

Yes it will be, because you can already do it in Premiere. I've seen it done. Premiere supports it now.

The only question becomes why would you want to if you can shoot proxies at the same time.

But I suspect most platforms will be able to cut with the raw, eventually.

 

[Valentin Paris]

Yes it will be, because you can already do it in Premiere. I've seen it done. Premiere supports it now.

The only question becomes why would you want to if you can shoot proxies at the same time.

But I suspect most platforms will be able to cut with the raw, eventually.

Strange, they said no...

Are you sure ? It was maybe 4K XAVC... Because they said no, another guy said : anyway a monster powerful PC is needed to do it...

Oh I forgot to say : at this time, you can't record 2K/4K XAVC with the F5/F55 until july.

 

[jake blackstone]

Yes.


During the conference, I asked :


Will it be possible to edit in raw natively in premiere / fcp ?


They were desapointed about this question (because, the answer is NO.)


The guy said : it is absurd to edit in raw natively, it is exactly like to edit film with negatives..


I was laughing inside quietly...

The workflow is :

Sony : You take Raw and 2k XAVC on the same time, edit with 2K XAVC and finalise in 4K. You need to manage more data, you need lot of memory cards. Hum hum.

Red : shot and edit in Raw.

Majority users edit Red using transcoded Prores of MXF. So, why is Red workflow better?
People still don't understand the difference between editing and finishing...

 

[Valentin Paris]

Majority users edit Red using transcoded Prores of MXF. So, why is Red workflow better?

In that way, it is not.

I find it is illogical to export in pro res of MXF red Raw when you can put the redcode files directly in the timeline...Why waste lot of time with transcoding ? For my last movie, I never transcode red raw, and it was a pleasure to edit in raw, no problem at all.

Anyway, I am waiting for the first users feedback on the work flow.

Wait and see.

But, i just want to add that : it is still too much expensive if you compare the specs for the money with the Epic.

Expect for the fan issue (I sold my red epic because the fan was too noisy for me), the Epic is better in any way : specs, internal raw...etc.

So, during the session, I felt : "RED" was the forbidden word for sony because they knew that they are late in terms of specs.

 

[Shawn Nelson]

Did the Red lawsuit come up at all?

 

[Tom.Wong]

and what were you editing on? comfortably on a big tower?

lot of editors have to edit on the road, lower end laptop with just a lacie rugged on them. when you have 10+ tb of r3d is that something you want to be lugging around? would it be safe to be carrying high quality master files with, or better off to have low quality proxies in case something happens and somebody digs up the footage?

facilities also don't just take in one thing at a time, they have limited sans storage, even when they are in the pedabytes, when multiple shows and movies comes in, all that r3d, or other master 4k material eats it up fast. it makes more sense to have something like dnxhd 36 where you can cram all that in a few hundred gigs to work with. saves on sans storage, saves on the bandwidth they need to access their sans.


for the at home user or boutique places editing native is great. but the bigger the show, the more complicated it gets. not to mention workflows for vfx, where working natively isn't ideal at all, and especially when you are going to multiple vendors to get the work done. sometimes it's faster to start working on proxies and scale up with higher res material at the end. there are a lot of gears to be accounted for, and there is a reason why even a movie like prometheus decided to do a 2.5k dpx workflow instead of a 5k r3d workflow.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Anyway...Even with these cool features, I am pretty sure the RAW workflow will be a disaster and almost unusable (that's why it is possible to take some XAVC 4K on the same time).

well ... you can render their 4K RAW to ProRes or DNxHD at 30fps in Colorfront Express with GPU debayer - I wouldn't exactly call that a "disaster". Image kicks the shit out of ARRI RAW from the Alexa IMO. I did not have time to test extensively - but I saw artifacts in the XAVC.

 

[Mike P.]

40 watts total for 4k RAW/4k XAVC simultaneously... how many Wh are those new fandangled batteries? 60 (1.5hours)? That's pretty awesome. And the silence is awesome too... I feel like the rest of the stuff was already known....

How heavy of a codec is XAVC? Can you edit that natively already?

well ... you can render their 4K RAW to ProRes or DNxHD at 30fps in Colorfront Express with GPU debayer - I wouldn't exactly call that a "disaster". Image kicks the shit out of ARRI RAW from the Alexa IMO. I did not have time to test extensively - but I saw artifacts in the XAVC.

OH sweet JEBUS. How is that possible? Isn't it wavelet compression which can't use GPU (and if it's not, than how does Red think they can sue them?)

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

40 watts total for 4k RAW/4k XAVC simultaneously... how many Wh are those new fandangled batteries? 60 (1.5hours)? That's pretty awesome. And the silence is awesome too... I feel like the rest of the stuff was already known....

How heavy of a codec is XAVC? Can you edit that natively already?



OH sweet JEBUS. How is that possible? Isn't it wavelet compression which can't use GPU (and if it's not, than how does Red think they can sue them?)

It's about 500 Gigs an hour - so that's pretty "light" wavelet compression.

 

[Kristin Stewart]

I guess this thread will be deleted or closed soon ;-)

 

[M Most]

It's about 500 Gigs an hour - so that's pretty "light" wavelet compression.

Another way to put it is that Sony's Raw Lite codec is about the same data rate as Epic 5:1, so storage requirements are about the same. In fact, for most long form productions, the work path is basically the same, with the primary difference that with Sony's files you don't need a proprietary $4500 card to transcode in faster than real time.

In answer to the XAVC question, XAVC at 4K is approximately 220Mb/sec, essentially the same as Avid DNxHD220X and ProRes 422, both at HD size. And about 1/3 smaller than Prores 4444 (HD size). As Mark mentioned, systems such as Colorfront (both OSD and Express), MTI (Cortex), and Resolve handle both the Raw and XAVC files with no problem. And no unique hardware (other than a good GPU, of course).

 

[Antonio Ribeiro]

and what were you editing on? comfortably on a big tower?

lot of editors have to edit on the road, lower end laptop with just a lacie rugged on them. when you have 10+ tb of r3d is that something you want to be lugging around? would it be safe to be carrying high quality master files with, or better off to have low quality proxies in case something happens and somebody digs up the footage?

facilities also don't just take in one thing at a time, they have limited sans storage, even when they are in the pedabytes, when multiple shows and movies comes in, all that r3d, or other master 4k material eats it up fast. it makes more sense to have something like dnxhd 36 where you can cram all that in a few hundred gigs to work with. saves on sans storage, saves on the bandwidth they need to access their sans.


for the at home user or boutique places editing native is great. but the bigger the show, the more complicated it gets. not to mention workflows for vfx, where working natively isn't ideal at all, and especially when you are going to multiple vendors to get the work done. sometimes it's faster to start working on proxies and scale up with higher res material at the end. there are a lot of gears to be accounted for, and there is a reason why even a movie like prometheus decided to do a 2.5k dpx workflow instead of a 5k r3d workflow.

For safety and convenience, I always record my footage in both R3d and onto a Hyperdeck Shuttle. Funny enough, in low light situations, the ProRes files from the Hyperdeck actually look really good with ISO correction done on the fly and using the 5K the sensor of the Scarlet has to offer.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Another way to put it is that Sony's Raw Lite codec is about the same data rate as Epic 5:1, so storage requirements are about the same. In fact, for most long form productions, the work path is basically the same, with the primary difference that with Sony's files you don't need a proprietary $4500 card to transcode in faster than real time.

Not exactly.

Sony's "Raw Lite" is NOT available on the F55 - it's only on the F65. RAW from the F55 is TWICE the size as shooting 4K on the EPIC at 5:1. So ... storage requirements are really not "about" the same IMO.

 

[M Most]

Not exactly.

Sony's "Raw Lite" is NOT available on the F55 - it's only on the F65. RAW from the F55 is TWICE the size as shooting 4K on the EPIC at 5:1. So ... storage requirements are really not "about" the same IMO.

You're correct, I misspoke. Compression on the F55 is about 3.5:1, but frankly, having done a show using F65 recording Raw Lite, the data sizes on the F55 material I've tested haven't seemed that much heavier. And I agree, in the end, the storage requirements are about the same - meaning substantial. But in the interest of accuracy, I don't believe the F55 can do 4K Raw and 4K XAVC simultaneously. It can do 4K Raw and 2K or HD, though. And it can do 4K XAVC and 50Mb Mpeg4 HD simultaneously, and as far as I've been told, both on one card if one wants to do that.

I don't want to lose sight of the fact hat this is Red's board. And some of these comments are purely informational, under the guise of "in this industry, going forward, one should know as much as they can about all tools, regardless of manufacturer." But it would sure be nice if Red could uncouple themselves from the proprietary Red Rocket route.....

 

[Martin Stevens]

But it would sure be nice if Red could uncouple themselves from the proprietary Red Rocket route.....

I dream of this as well.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Yes. During the conference, I asked : Will it be possible to edit in raw natively in premiere / fcp ? They were desapointed about this question (because, the answer is NO.) The guy said : it is absurd to edit in raw natively, it is exactly like to edit film with negatives.. I was laughing inside quietly...

I have color-corrected hundreds and hundreds of major Hollywood studio feature films and TV shows over the last few decades, and believe me, the best-light scans we used from film and digital had all the range we ever needed for final delivery (similar to the "VIP" look at Encore that Mike Most started many years ago). Having all the range in the actual negative is not needed as the DPX log scan is somewhere reasonable. There are issues with color-correcting with the native Raw scan if it slows down the computer drastically to debayer and downrez it on the fly. Often, speed is of the essence with these projects, especially if you're staring at a fast-turnaround delivery for TV.

I can think of a handful of times where the best-light scan was not optimum, and I had to get my assistant to run in another room and rescan the elements with (shall we say) a lighter touch. Not a big deal. In one case, I think 20 shots out of 3000 had to be redone, so we're talking about an extra hour of work, for a total of 1 minute of material (out of a 2-hour movie). In a perfect world, yes, the raw files are nice to have... provided there's zero performance hit in playback to debayer and apply a LUT on the fly. If the files are already pre-processed to get in the ballpark needed for correction, that gets us 25% closer and saves lots of load on the processors, particularly in a project with lots of layers and/or nodes.

But it would sure be nice if Red could uncouple themselves from the proprietary Red Rocket route.....

Yep, that would be a big step forward.

 

[Justin Barham]

The guy said : it is absurd to edit in raw natively, it is exactly like to edit film with negatives..

He's right. It's not exactly the same of course, but he's right in general. However, editing with XAVC doesn't sound a whole lot better.

Always transcode media for editorial.