SONY FS700 TEST
I was lucky enough to be invited down to shoot the guys in Bury Tomorrow as part of their UK tour with Parkway Drive. This was just in time for the arrival of my Sony Fs700!
This is a camera i had been fascinate by since i first seen the opening frames of Tom Welsh's One Hundred Days. I had since found myself engrossed in everything the internet has to offer all things FS700 related. The one thing however that i had not accounted on was how tricky this camera would be to operate right out of the box.
No longer switching through the simple controls and menus of a Dslr this pro camcorder had me fighting to locked down various functions and setting in time for stage time.
-Sony NEX-FS700RH
-Metabones Speedbooster
-Canon 24-105 F4
-Canon 17-40 F4
-Canon 50 F1.8
-Glidecam HD4000
During the 8 song set which felt like it was over seconds i switching between lenses and moving on and off stage, as this was my first time catching this set admittedly i did miss out on a couple of key moments but i had to keep focused and gather as much usable content as possible.
As the support band we only had extreamly limited lighting, these cast a mix of horribly harsh Blues, Greens and Purples, forcing me to make the edit Black and White. Frustratingly the crowd was in entire darkness making it next to impossible to catch the scale and beauty of the Academy.
My plan for this shoot was to utilise the cameras slow motion ability however the biggest obstacle for shooting at such high frame rates is always going got be be dealing with artificial lighting.
During post i was looking in to options of what i could do to cancel out the horribly distracting flicker effect, when i stumbled across a video from Philip Bloom who had only just gone and posted a video testing the FlickerFree plug in from Digital Anarchy. With instantly impressive results right out of the box this 100% saved this video. There are still a number of artifacts cause by different light sources but i am more than happy with the result.
Big thanks for the band for getting me involved and i cant wait until i can catch them live once again!
Parkway Drive closing the show!
,Marc
