Well, too bad! Here's some more.

But seriously, shooting at 240fps is totally addictive. I headed upstate the day after I picked up my camera and couldn't stop shooting slow-motion. Firework, guns, and water. I'd have to be some sort of America hating terrorist not to overcrank!

Overall, I'm in love with this camera. It doesn't have the low light performance of the 5D, but its a small price to pay for the convenience associated with shooting with a camera that was actually built to be a video camera.

Everything was shot using Canon L-series lenses via a Metabones adapter (which seems to work great - except for autofocus, if you need that).
Included is low light to bright sun footage, so you can see the difference.

(One issue I did encounter that I need to look into: When I first started using the camera, it would seem to 'freeze' up after I turned the power on and the camera was booting up. It would get 'stuck' on the 'Sony' logo. After 3-6 minutes, I would turn the power off, but the 'Sony' logo would stay up on the LCD. I would have to pop out the battery to power down. But when I restarted, there was no problem. This happened a couple times, but I've probably turned it on 50 times since then without any problem - curious if this is some sort of software bug and if anyone else has encountered it?)

Anyway......

eye dee four on Vimeo

Just wait for the slo-mo shallow focus transitions.

Heh. That footage more interesting . How about 2 bugs getting frisky with a 100mm or 200mm macro in Slomo ? Oh 4mm instead of 3mm bugger pulled focus too far.

Is there a lens with focus transition that will do it on this cam? Maybe not?

Winter here, few bugs

Any E-Mount lens can do a programmed focus pull. The FS700 has a shot transition function where you can memorise two focus and exposure points and transition between them. Only works with E-Mount lenses but a nice feature.

Slow-mo BBQ is torture for hungry people... ;-)

Heh. That footage more interesting . How about 2 bugs getting frisky with a 100mm or 200mm macro in Slomo ? Oh 4mm instead of 3mm bugger pulled focus too far.

Is there a lens with focus transition that will do it on this cam? Maybe not?

Winter here, few bugs



Did somebody say 2 bugs getting frisky?
Ask and ye shall receive (at least I think that's what they are doing here?)

frisky on Vimeo

Hah hah! Music very appropriate. Was that the stock lens?

I'm thinking you would have to get pretty close to a fast moving insect for slomo with a 30mm emount macro... Like 3-4cm for 1:1

I don't know of any other macro emounts to take advantage of focus transitions

Maybe some amount macro with a la ea2 ... Actually. Does anyone ever use autofocus in macro?
Haven't done much

No one will ever get tired of seeing slow-mo footage. It's going to give videography another edge over still photography in the marketplace.

Okay - resisted for too long, but here's yet more gratuitous slomo. Note that I was originally looking for image degradation in the slomo modes, but as usual the Vimeo rendition covers up a lot of the aliasing.

Girls leaving the nightclub - gratuitous FS700 slomo on Vimeo

Technical notes - these are all 200fps scenes as my camera was set to PAL at the time. I've used the FCPX Optical Flow to retime a couple of shots to 400fps to see which sort of degradation I preferred - the line skipping or the slightly trippy image distortion - I'll go for the latter, and remember to have a card handy for 240fps (and therefore 480fps with retiming) in the future.

Hah hah! Music very appropriate. Was that the stock lens?

I'm thinking you would have to get pretty close to a fast moving insect for slomo with a 30mm emount macro... Like 3-4cm for 1:1

I don't know of any other macro emounts to take advantage of focus transitions

Maybe some amount macro with a la ea2 ... Actually. Does anyone ever use autofocus in macro?
Haven't done much


That was actually shot with the Canon 70-200mm 2.8L (version 1).
Luckily those buggers like to stay in one place and chill out, so it was easy to focus on and capture them.
I actually had to wave my arms around to get them to fly away for me.

The problem with focusing in slow-mo on something like this, of course, is that you can be watching a 6 second video thinking to yourself "I had 6 seconds, why wasn't I able to focus?", and then you realize it was less than a second in real time.

Okay - resisted for too long, but here's yet more gratuitous slomo. Note that I was originally looking for image degradation in the slomo modes, but as usual the Vimeo rendition covers up a lot of the aliasing.

Technical notes - these are all 200fps scenes as my camera was set to PAL at the time. I've used the FCPX Optical Flow to retime a couple of shots to 400fps to see which sort of degradation I preferred - the line skipping or the slightly trippy image distortion - I'll go for the latter, and remember to have a card handy for 240fps (and therefore 480fps with retiming) in the future.

Very Nice Matt! I keep telling myself I am going to stop shooting "test" footage soon, and only use slomo when really appropriate..... but then my 70-400mm sony and alphatron evf just turned up... ahhhh. I guess we all have to get used to it, so that the moment comes its really going to be appropriate we are not fiddling with extra buttons and trucking in more lights for a 3 second shot.

I'll have to try twixtor for that. good idea. Do you mean an extra card so you don't mix base framerates on the same card or?

I can see a fs700 on a set, I presume at 400fps and up, after "cut", "ok tea break everyone as it writes out the card" :) I guess if you have an ssd in the FMU it would write out like probably 8 times faster?

Another test ;) I am presuming that doesn't happen with a phantom, but then again, different price point of product.

Well, too bad! Here's some more.

But seriously, shooting at 240fps is totally addictive. I headed upstate the day after I picked up my camera and couldn't stop shooting slow-motion. Firework, guns, and water. I'd have to be some sort of America hating terrorist not to overcrank!

Overall, I'm in love with this camera. It doesn't have the low light performance of the 5D, but its a small price to pay for the convenience associated with shooting with a camera that was actually built to be a video camera.

Everything was shot using Canon L-series lenses via a Metabones adapter (which seems to work great - except for autofocus, if you need that).
Included is low light to bright sun footage, so you can see the difference.

(One issue I did encounter that I need to look into: When I first started using the camera, it would seem to 'freeze' up after I turned the power on and the camera was booting up. It would get 'stuck' on the 'Sony' logo. After 3-6 minutes, I would turn the power off, but the 'Sony' logo would stay up on the LCD. I would have to pop out the battery to power down. But when I restarted, there was no problem. This happened a couple times, but I've probably turned it on 50 times since then without any problem - curious if this is some sort of software bug and if anyone else has encountered it?)

Anyway......

eye dee four on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/45497453)

I'm sure the fad in a few months willl be over.

Tired of it! we're just getting started

Royal International Air Tattoo 2012 in Super SlowMo! - YouTube

It doesn't have the low light performance of the 5D, but its a small price to pay for the convenience associated with shooting with a camera that was actually built to be a video camera.

Todd, when you say it doesn't have the low light capability, in your opinion, is that a function of the kit lens it comes with being too slow, or something else? I need to be able to shoot in low light, and have not made any lens purchasing decisions yet. I do see some of the Sony Zeiss lenses in the A mount series down to 1.8.

One of the best uses I've seen.
Shot at 1:23 is friggin awesome!

Copter Kids FS700 Slow Motion Test on Vimeo

Todd, when you say it doesn't have the low light capability, in your opinion, is that a function of the kit lens it comes with being too slow, or something else? I need to be able to shoot in low light, and have not made any lens purchasing decisions yet. I do see some of the Sony Zeiss lenses in the A mount series down to 1.8.

Hey Dave - I'm not a particularly technical person, but I think it's mostly an issue of sensor size. In fact, I don't even own the kit lens. (I found this article about why larger sensors are better in low light, if you're interested - Why are larger sensors better at low light? - Photography (http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/15684/why-are-larger-sensors-better-at-low-light)).

The 5D just has a huge full-frame sensor that you don't really get with any other reasonable affordable cameras. The FS700 has a large sensor - larger than most cameras, but that 5D sensor is just huge.
Here is a good chart that compares sensor sizes. You can see that the super 35mm sensor in the FS700 is much larger than most cameras, but still not as large as the 5D.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zkeQmhnxvVw/Tt6bWkbJvNI/AAAAAAAAA_0/0P9mnvS344g/s1600/SensorSizeChart_2.gif

so, to be clear, I think the FS700 has great low light capacity, but just not quite as nice as the 5D. And of course, there are many things about the FS700 that, in my opinion, make it a much nicer camera to shoot with than the 5D.

It's not about sensor size, its about pixel size. If you have the same number of pixels a bigger sensor should yield better sensitivity, but the 5D has a lot more pixels than the FS700 and as a result the 5D's pixels are not all that different in size to those on the FS700. Then you have to consider noise, because a noisy sensor is less useful in low light. The sensitivity of any camera is a trade of against noise performance and light gathering ability. Generally the more pixels you have the noisier the image becomes because each pixel contributes a little bit of noise to the overall image. The original 5D MkII does quite well in this respect because all the line skipping etc means that not that many of the pixels on the sensor are actually used in the video modes. That's also why an HD camera is generally noisier and less sensitive than an SD camera with the same size sensor.

In addition clever noise reduction also makes a difference. Sony's EXMOR sensors use both analog and digital CDS noise reduction on the sensor as well noise reduction in the DSP. So while generally speaking bigger pixels (not necessarily bigger sensors) mean lower noise, as sensor and processing technology improves this is not always the case.

When looking at lenses what counts is the f number. The lower the number the faster the lens and the better your low light performance as a result. The kit lens is f3.5 at best so it needs 3 times as much light as an f1.4 lens, but your not going to get a zoom lens with the kind of zoom ratio (10x) of the kit lens that is f1.8 or f2.8 without spending very large sums of money. You can certainly get plenty of prime lenses that are f1.4/f1.8/f2.8 especially if you get the Metabones adapter and start to consider Canon lenses.

<The lower the number the faster the lens and the better your low light performance as a result. The kit lens is f3.5 at best so it needs 3 times as much light as an f1.4 lens,>

It's worse than that.

If you go from f/1.4 to f/2, that's half the light.

Go from f/2 to f2.8, that's half the light, again. 1/4th as much as at 1.4.

Go from f/2.8 to f/4, that's half the light, again. 1/8th as much light at f/1.4.

So, in reality, the kit lens needs almost 8 times as much light as does a lens at f/1.4. With a lens that has a variable f/stop as it zooms, you could need 16 times as much light when zoomed out as you would need with a lens at f/1.4.

It's about the square root of 2, and some other math stuff. ;)

In addition to the more shallow depth of field, there's a big reason seasoned photojournalists have always liked fast lenses. Fortunately, we can now buy fast lens inexpensively -- think used.