F65: Road test

With the help of Tony Gardiner, co-founder of 3rd Gear, we have one of the first serious test drives of the Sony F65 camera.

The F65 is an 8K camera that samples to 4K resolution. Coupled with the new SR solid state recorder, it offers remarkable digital cinematography and high resolution RAW recording capabilities.

But to really test a camera you need to shoot with it.

Gardiner worked with some old friends to make one of the world’s first short films with the Sony F65.

Post house Engine was the production company, in association with The Kacevski Brothers
and 3rd Gear. The short film was written and directed by Nick Kacevski. It was produced by George Kacevski
The title of the film is III.

The project involved filming three separate high performance artists in three very different locations:

• high sun at dawn, backlit at a beach

• a low light industrial ruin

• a high frequency leafy set, with high contrast and shafts of dappled light breaking through the trees

Some material such as the beach used the built-in ND filters of the F65 and also for testing was shot with a reduced shutter (90 degrees) to sharpen the crashing waves, while other areas such as the industrial ruins opened the shutter to 270 degrees. Interestingly, the F65 has a mechanical shutter so there is no rolling shutter artifacts, although this can be bypassed if 360 degree shutter is required.

The workflow was to film a variety of speeds from 24 to 60 fps and to record most RAW (although some were HD in Rec 709). The RAW material was transcoded by processing it through DaVinci which reads the native F65 RAW files effortlessly (even the free version of the DaVinci can read the Sony RAW diles). The material was then edited in FCP – which also has a RAW plugin, but generally this was not required – and then once approved, the final version was graded in Lustre and down converted for web distribution.

The crew was small but did include a grip as this camera is at least as big as an Alexa and thus does not lend itself to a run and gun indie style of filmmaking.

The camera performed extremely well. The only complication is that the card reader for the SR memory card was only 10 gig ethernet, and as the team shot a terrabyte of high speed beach footage in RAW alone, transfer times were longer than one would want on production. Although there are faster options for this, the team did not have a faster option during this test.

Actual frames from the ungraded film downres’d to 1920 x1080 – no grading, jpeg compressed 8 bit.

Click on any for a higher res version:

The noise level also appears to be much higher than it actually is if you review the RAW footage before processing. There is no noise to be concerned about, but the RAW viewer makes the image seem as if it has noise, a heart stopping undocumented side effect of the workflow, best avoided with any first time director. It is not that the noise needs to be removed by noise reduction, it is a product of the RAW viewer.

There is no doubt the final footage is beautiful and Gardiner is extremely pleased by the footage and the faultless running of the camera.

Watch III.

This camera feels like it was designed for rental. It is big, solid and reliable, producing massive rich ‘negatives’ for post production. The ease of reading the RAW files should not put off anyone in post, but there are some options and features not yet enabled by Sony, so it is worth checking closely what features are enabled when hiring. Post NAB, we can reasonably expect to see more of the initial specs fully implemented.

4 thoughts on “F65: Road test”

  1. Francis Pimenta

    thank you for the road test it looks interesting….
    but do you also have 4k footage RAW 12bit or even 16bit to share?

  2. Yes we will be sharing clips but inside our fxphd site, as the RAW 4K are huge we cant just post them. But we have a more indepth look at the F65 next week in fxphd that also includes green screen test

  3. Any chance of seeing the short film in 1080p H264 instead of the web-sized version that’s embedded here?

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