SONY FS7, First shoot.

So I took my FS7 (together with 2 rented FS7s as the other cameraman didn´t get his in time) on a transatlantic job. An intense week covering New York, Fort Lauderdale, The Keys, and Boulder.




We did a little testing beforehand and decided on Metabones Ultra and Canon 24-105mm and 70-200mm as our main work horses. We brought Commlite adaptors for a bit of extra reach.

Luckily we did that as one of the Metabones adaptors didn´t work on the first day (and we never got it to work either, it had been working before we left). It was not possible to controll the aperture on any lens with that Metabones. 
Caused a bit of stress, but luckily we had the Commlite adaptor.

On the next day it was the Commlite adaptor that started acting funny. We had to FS7 set up the same way, but one had the Ultra and one the Commlite. Both with Canon 24-105mm F4.
For some reason the camera with the Commlite was way brighter on the same settings. I know this makes no sense, but we tried and tested it and double checked. This problem continued for the rest of the shoot. Some time the image would jump up in brightness for no apparent reason as well.

Very weird behaviour. 




We burnt in the LUT (709 800%) and the footage looked great. I had no problem nailing focus and exposure with the Sony viewfinder.

The slow respons aperture changing is a big pain. We were on a boat filming a Sailfish competition with clouds coming and going, the hosts going in and out of shadow as the boat turned etc, made this a very annoying fault with the camera. I hope they fix it soon.

We shot a softgun battle war photography style. Running after one host each, getting close action shots (and taking a few shots ourselves) and the camera was great for this, would have been perfect if I could ride aperture as I would like.

During the battle we had a helicopter coming for the next shoot ( dessert rally) so I decided to jump into the heli and quickly  grab a few overview shots of the softgun battle as a bonus. 

This went very well as the camera is so small and light, but still is a fully fledge camera.
During the dessert rally I was in the heli the hole time shooting hand held and following the car around a track. Sun was setting and it was challenging light conditions, shooting in all directions as we very flying, but the sensor held up very well, even without shooting log.


We used easyrigs for most of our handheld work, that worked great. Even without, I never felt the camera leaning to one side bothersome as people were complaining.

We will continue using the FS7 for this TV show, and we were eagerly waiting to try out the 28-135 lens. What a disappointment that its as unresponsive as any other lens on this camera. From wide to tele tok 6 seconds or so. It´s crazy slow. 

Hope a firmware update fixes this, or maybe the FS7 is just the stoned little brother of the F5 and F55

Backing up footage was very fast using USB3 on a Macbook air. We usually had 3 * 128GB cards almost full every day. Dumping one card to a Seagate 2TB portable took less than 15 minutes, UNLESS there where very long takes on the card. Then it could take up to 3 times as long!!

Took a little while to figure out why on 2 days the batching took forever, but the long clips were clearly the culprit.


Hope this write up can be to help for other shooters new to this camera.


My fellow cameramen, Rune Moe and Ray Hansen. Note the location ;-)

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