SONY BURANO GEAR
run, or else you’ll be in a world of proxies and hours of rendering. And with massive file size, you’ll need huge, fast hard drives to store the footage as well as pricey CFexpress Type B cards in the twin slots. We used a pair of 1920GB Sony cards, which are VPG400 rated though cost £2058/$1998 each. You could choose cheaper cards, but do need VPG400 spec to let the camera record without issues. Sony’s cards come with free recovery service, so if there are any issues they should be sorted for free. When it comes time to edit, the files are stored in an MXF wrapper like the Venice 2. If you are shooting X-OCN Raw, each clip is stored in its own folder, so opening them in DaVinci Resolve is quite a pain. XAVC files open in all NLEs, except you can’t control settings as well as you can with pure Raw files – or Camera Negatives as Sony likes to call them. That’s where you get the real benefits. However, S-Cinetone gives a cinematic look straight out of camera. Using that on something like the Burano does seem like a bit of a waste. The bottom line is that you need to understand what each codec offers, how to set the camera up
or XAVC, where you can shoot in 4K/120p. That’s great for action as it gives your lenses far more reach. It gets even more complicated when you want to output the different signals via SDI or HDMI, include baked-in LUTs or set a de-squeeze option. For example, record in 8.6K in X-OCN and the SDI outputs HD, but can’t output an HDMI signal at the same time. Shoot 6K in XAVC-I, meanwhile, and the SDI and HDMI can output 4K or HD at the same time with or without LUTs – but not output any anamorphic de-squeeze unless it’s HD through the HDMI. It’s a minefield of permutations, and Sony has set up a website so users can see what settings work. It makes sense to download this to a phone so you’ll always have it with you. When shooting, you’ll find a choice of the usual Sony Cine EI and Custom modes, and you can adjust lots of parameters including noise suppression levels in three steps. Base ISO settings are 800 and 3200 in S-Log3, and you can use internal LUTs or load your own. These can be baked in or not, as you wish. The camera records in H.265, which is roughly twice as quick as H.264 but needs a fast computer to
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PRO MOVIEMAKER
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