TOOLKIT SONY BURANO
SONY BURANO TRIED & TESTED We put the VENICE’s smaller, more affordable sibling through its paces, finding a revelatory camera perfectly suited to indie production
WORDS Adam Duckworth
I f you love the run-and-gun image quality that comes from 16-bit, 8K Raw files – the Sony BURANO is what you have been waiting for. With a price tag of £32,350/$31,889 for the kit we tested, the BURANO sits mid-way between the full-frame FX9 and legendary VENICE 2, a camera favoured by many DOPs for its stunning quality and flexibility. But where the no-compromise VENICE 2 is made for big crews to rig up and operate, the BURANO can function capabilities of the Sony FX9 cinema camera – but yearn for even higher on the shoulder as a single-shooter documentary camera since it boasts excellent phase detection autofocus. It’s the first camera of this type to offer built-in image stabilisation for all lenses, including PL-fit manual lenses as well as its own native Sony E-mount glass. It’s smaller, lighter and significantly cheaper than the 8K VENICE 2, which currently costs around £67,000/$58,000 for body only. That’s the steep price of IT’S THE FIRST CAMERA of this type TO OFFER built-in image stabilisation FOR ALL GLASS”
entry to this elevated world of incredible files with oodles of dynamic range and colour information that can be graded to the max. The new 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 is not quite the same either, although it is still built like a tank and will take more abuse than a lesser camera. The BURANO offers its 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, of course, 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 is simply incredible at half the price, and in a more usable package. But let’s face it, the only reason to spend more than double the price of an FX9 is to access the high resolution, high bit depth and Raw quality of the BURANO. And it’s not as simple as the camera offering every frame rate and crop in every resolution and codec. It’s far more complicated than that. If you want to shoot 8.6K in 16:9 or 17:9 full-frame, then 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 setting at 800Mbps and the H-I HQ setting at 1200Mbps. H-L is not available if you’re 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, you can set a Super 35 mode which 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 or XAVC where you can shoot in 4K/120fps, which is great for
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