Sony A7 Video – A First Look
When it comes to testing a DSLR video camera, there are few whose judgement I trust as much as Johnnie Behiri, one of the owners of Cinema5D.com. Johnnie has consistently great insights on the entire world of video and video production. He is a master of the necessary craft skills. When Sony first introduced the A7 & A7R, my question after seeing great still image samples was “How is the A7 Video?” Of the two cameras, it appears to me that the A7 video should be the way to go, given it has an anti-aliasing filter which always seems to improve DSLR video.
When director Jan Woletz asked Johnnie Behiri to join his team as a DP, and help creating a teaser for his (hopefully) up coming “Wienerland” web series he immediately said, “Yes. This project looks like great fun!” Besides the fun of realising other peoples dream, it was a good chance for Johnnie to quickly test before and in between takes the new Sony A7 that landed a day earlier on his desk (together with the A7r and the RX10) and give it a run for a “low light” test.
Looking at the test movie above, it seems the A7 video is going to be great. I am happy to hear the viewfinder is good for A7 video. I note that Johnnie does caution that aliasing is still a problem and likely a problem that will be with us for many years in lower priced DSLR bodies. If the manufacturers could readout the whole sensor, and then down sample, the results would be fine. Unfortunately until very recently the onboard processing chips and available memory to do a far better conversion have not been available. Ditto for the Codec used. The better the Codec, the greater the need for a speedy conversion chip. Presently, most of the lower priced systems (Under $5,000) rely on simply skipping video “lines” in order to reduce the output video in size, and hence the tendency for aliasing, particularly disturbing on diagonal lines.
I for one will be quite interested to see Johnnie’s review of the differences between A7 video and the video samples from the A7R, which Johnnie has sitting on his desk right now. The time is coming soon when Sony will be shipping these new A7 video machines. I can’t wait to receive my own to put it to work!
Johnnie’s full article can be found here: cinema5d.com/news/?p=22066
