Pro Moviemaker Winter 2018

GEAR

SONY FS5 II TEST

a cool grand or more on top of the camera price, but for many it was worth it to squeeze the ultimate quality out of such a small package. Now Sony has revealed the Mark II FS5, and on the surface there are few changes. The most obvious is that the camera is cheaper than the FS5 was a year ago, and comes with the Raw and high frame rate upgrade free as standard – a big saving. Externally, the only difference is the new badge and the black rather than silver ND dial. If you don’t want the expense and hassle of recording Raw externally, the camera also has a new colour processor that makes images recorded internally look far more natural. It’s based on the algorithms from the full-frame Sony Venice cinema camera, and it makes a big difference. You can’t upgrade the original FS5 to do this. For pure quality, you’ll still want to use the Raw output so you will need a monitor/recorder that offers support, such as the Convergent Design Odyssey Q7+ or Atomos Shogun Inferno. The Odyssey is £1560/$1495 and needs a further purchase of a ProRes licence for £750/$999, compared to the Atomos at £1350/$1295 which includes ProRes. For Final Cut Pro X users, the Atomos can convert Raw files to the new ProResRaw format – a huge bonus. You need to also budget for an SSD to record onto, which can easily cost £200/$250 for a 480GB version that’s fast enough to cope, and a dedicated card reader. Plus an SDI lead and, potentially, Atomos’ own

ABOVE The controls will be very familiar to users of the original FS5.

RIGHT The variable built-in ND filters are a joy to use, allowing you total control over exposure with ease.

DCI output, then it would be even more. That’s why it makes sense to use a recorder to convert to a ProRes format which uses up less space and is faster to edit. And ProResRaw gives the most flexibility in getting the look you want. It makes the Sony FS5 II give results that were inconceivable just a few years ago, especially for a camera at this price. But the FS5 II is also an ideal small-package camera for those who don’t want to shoot in Raw as the new colour science is definitely a step ahead of the original camera. Sony claims that it’s down to the colour science borrowed from the Venice, with rich mid-range colours, far more natural facial tones, and a softer tonal look. In use, the camera is a step ahead of the old FS5, with skin tones an obvious improvement.

HDMI cable if you want to use the recorder for HD recording. You’ll also need some sort of small ball head to attach it to the camera, as well as batteries and a charger for the Atomos. So, it’s a significant investment but you get a seven- inch monitor/recorder and lots of memory space. But you’ll need it, as recording Raw or converting Raw from the camera to an editable format like ProRes or ProResRaw takes up vast amounts of space. For example, if you record XAVC-L UHD (3840 x 2160) internally at 30fps in 100Mbps, an hour of footage takes up roughly 60GB of space. If you were shooting it in Raw 4K at the full size of 4096 x 2160 at 30fps, the data streams at 3Gb/s, so an hour would fill 1.5TB of hard drive space. If you shot at the maximum of 60fps in 12-bit 4K

“The FS5 II is an ideal small- package camera for those who don’t want to shoot in Raw”

PRO MOVIEMAKER WINTER 2018