SONY BURANO GEAR
THE MINI VENICE 2
Sony’s Burano boasts image quality from the flagship Venice 2 with user-friendly features to make it ideal for indie production 8K
I f you love the run-and-gun capabilities of the Sony FX9 cinema camera – but yearn for even higher image quality that comes from 16-bit, 8K Raw files – Sony’s Burano is what you have been waiting for. That’s if the heavyweight £32,350/$31,889 price tag for the kit we tested is not a major hurdle. The Burano sits midway between the full-frame FX9 and the legendary Venice 2, a camera favoured by many Hollywood DOPs for big-budget blockbusters due to its stunning quality and flexibility. Where the no-compromise Venice 2 is built for sizeable crews to rig up and operate, the Burano can function as a single-shooter documentary camera used on the shoulder – since it boasts excellent phase detection autofocus. And it’s the first camera of this type to offer built-in image stabilisation for all lenses, including PL-fit manual optics as well as its own native Sony E-mount glass. It’s smaller, lighter and significantly cheaper than the 8K Venice 2. Currently, that costs around £67,000/$58,000 for body only. That’s the steep price of entry
access the high resolution, high bit depth and Raw quality of the Burano. Except it’s not as simple as the camera offering every frame rate and crop in every resolution and codec. It’s far more complicated. If you want to shoot 8.6K in 16:9 or 17:9 full-frame, you’re stuck at a maximum of 30fps whether you shoot in X-OCN Raw or XAVC. All the XAVC files are 4:2:2 10-bit H.265, with the H-L setting shooting at 520Mbps, the H-I SQ at 800Mbps and the H-I HQ at 1200Mbps. H-L is not available if shooting in 8K, though. If you want to go to 60fps, there is a much bigger choice, although all have some sort of crop. If shooting X-OCN, you can set 6K in 16:9 or 17:9 which is a slight crop that oversamples the 8K footage down to 6K. There’s no line-skipping or pixel-binning on a camera like this that values quality. If you choose XAVC, this can be oversampled to C4K, 4K or HD. Alternatively, a Super 35 mode uses a tighter crop of the sensor. Choose X-OCN and it’s in 5.8K, or XAVC where it can be C4K or HD. To get anything faster, you have to set Super 35 crop in either Raw
to this elevated world of incredible files with oodles of dynamic range and colour information that can be graded to the maximum. The Burano has the same 8.6K sensor at its heart, but omits the two most high-end Raw codecs of the Venice 2. After all, something has to go to make a camera that costs so much less. Build quality isn’t quite the same either, although it is still built like a tank and will take more abuse than any lesser camera. The Burano offers 16-bit 8632x4856 files in lots of frame rates and crops in the X-OCN LT format. This is a slightly more compressed version of the Sony Raw format from the Venice 2. That also offers X-OCN in the more detailed ST and XD flavours for even more colours and a corresponding increase in files sizes. If you must have the absolute ultimate quality, then the 16-bit Raw XD in the Venice 2 is it. But the 8.6K Raw in the Burano is still full of information – and simply incredible at half the price in a more usable package. Let’s face it, the only reason to spend more than double the price of an FX9 is to
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