Bakari - Unilingual (Sony FX9 Music Video)

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This video served the dual purpose of creating a music video and testing out my new Sony FX9.
Below are notes on how each scene was shot and what we were testing out in the camera. Hopefully you find this helpful!

Convenience Store - Custom mode - S Cinetone. ISO 1600 - look is burned in.
Fabric Tent - Custom mode - S Cinetone. ISO 1600 - look is burned in.
Red Room - Shot at ISO 4000 - SLog 3 - Rec 709 LUT applied in post
Black Room - Shot at ISO 800 - SLog 3 - Rec 709 LUT applied in post

There were 2 color tweaks done in post.
1. adding a vignette overall
2. On the wide shot of the fabric tent, some saturation and contrast was added (it was shot on a 28mm lens that didn't pop the way the other lenses did.)

Lenses used:
For autofocus we were testing
Sony FE 28mm f2,
Sony FE 55mm f1.8
Sony FE 90mm f2.8 Macro
Tamron 28-70mm f2.8
Other lenses used:
Leica R 35mm f2
Leica R 50mm f2
Leica R 90mm f2
We wanted to test:
- Custom mode vs the Cine EI mode, specifically the S-cinetone
- Dual Base ISOs (800 & 4000) in Cine EI mode as well as Custom mode (1600)
- Auto Focus, specifically with atmospheric elements (smoke), Full Frame, dark skin tones, Contrasty lighting and darker scenes, camera movement and talent movement, Foreground elements, shallow DOF(everything was shot mainly between 1.8 and 2.2) and a diffusion filter (everything was shot with a 1/4 Hollywood Black Magic Filter)
- general performance and ease of use
- 6K oversampled to 4k
- Full Frame.

Here are my general thoughts after shooting for 2 days with a very small crew.

Autofocus. Super impressed with this. Very responsive. I set the camera up for failure and it did really well. There were a few times where it struggled, mainly when the face and eyes were not visible and when we had heavy foreground elements. After playing with it more I'm confident that I can drastically reduce the times where it missed focus. The settings can be tweaked more to hold the focus even when the face isn't visible and there are foreground pieces. All push ins and pullbacks were done with autofocus as well as everything that was shot in the fabric tent world. There is a lot of freedom in adjusting the focus for the speed of the subject and the speed/responsiveness of the focus. Gone are most of those distracting micro adjustments that we normally see with autofocus.

ISO. The dual base ISO looked great in both scenarios. After overexposing the FS7 by a stop on most shoots over the last 5 years to reduce noise, I was really quite impressed with the low noise level at all of the native ISO's. If I had been braver I may have switched the ISO 4000 scene and ISO 800 scene from the Red Room to the Black Room to really test the noise levels.

Custom vs CineEI. Custom has a really nice Sony Venice look with S-cinetone. I can definitely see this playing well in a lot of fast turnaround scenarios and for all the clients who dont want to deal with LUTs and log footage. I pushed this half a stop to a full stop on a few shots and it seemed to perform well. I really didn't notice the noise at all
I will probably keep using the Cine EI for the most part due to wider , but I feel more

General Performance - I shoot on a lot of different cameras depending on the budget and concept. I own a Sony Fs7 and have put thousands of hours on it. This review is coming from the perspective of looking at the camera as an Fs7 replacement.
Its very power hungry. I started with the BPU 60 batteries. The ones that are older really struggle. Some of them only lasted 5 minutes The batteries with less use still didn't run too long before getting low. I switched to the Core SWX V mount unit and its much better.
Love the locking E mount. Very sturdy and built to last.
Love the beefed up build quality. lots of improvements with the body and button placements.
The menu is similar but a bit more user friendly. The first tab in the menu has most of the commonly adjusted items so its really handy in comparison. Overall Its still probably more of an owner operator menu system. There are a few changes that I'm still trying to get comfortable with as they are buried pretty deep or have odd names.

I hit my character count here. Please read the rest of the review in the first comment

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