Hey welcome!
so just over two weeks ago i released uh using the samsung galaxy note 20
ultra as a cinema camera video and you guys
have been absolutely amazing giving so much
awesome feedback we just crossed over a hundred thousand views so if you
haven't already seen that video check it out after this one
link will be in the description so a ton of you commented on that video
saying i should check out the sony because it was primarily made for
professional photographers and cinematographers so as i did with the
samsung video this is not a normal phone review so i'm going to
spend the next 30 seconds to minute talking about the
general phone feel and overall design and my kind of
mini one minute take on the actual phone and then we'll get to the fun stuff so
in terms of design i really like it it is incredibly tall and skinny so
it fits in one hand very nicely however putting it in pockets since it's so tall
kind of sticks out and slides out of a lot of pockets it also does indeed have
a headphone jack yes in 2020 a phone still has a headphone jack
and this is because it has dolby atmos so if you have a really killer pair
of headphones then you can get a pretty awesome experience for that
it's got dual front-facing speakers that actually sound really
impressive i don't like to get too in-depth in terms of the processor and
ram and phones because optimization is always key here so all i
can tell you is that the android experience is actually very quick
jumping back and forth between apps opening closing i never had any sort of
lag issues and the entire experience felt very fluid and very fast does come
with a 18 watt charger or of course you can do wireless charging this phone has
a 4 000 milliamp battery and as we
transition to talking about the photo and video
i want to point out that there is a huge difference
between the basic stock camera app and the sony created photo
still and pro video app they both are stock and both come on the phone you
don't install anything else the stock app is going to be your very
basic photo and video shooting modes if you just want
everything to be auto exposure and just kind of get the snapshot that's
going to be the app for you and the rest of this video is going to
be focused on the pro apps the photography app is awesome they
basically took their sony alpha series menu system and put a more simplified
version understandably in here you also have a
secondary dedicated shutter button on the top of the phone
basically where you would have a shutter button on a normal camera
now if the phone's turned off and you press and hold this this is actually
going to bring up the stock camera app but if you're
inside the pro photo app this is going to be your shutter button
you actually won't see any sort of uh digital shutter button on the screen
yeah and here you can change to different modes like auto
full on manual shutter priority you of course can
change your shutter speed your iso your white balance
you can choose if you want to shoot raw jpeg raw plus jpeg
about the only thing you can't change is the aperture just because that's
fixed into all phones but of course you can change between the three different
lenses that this camera has which we'll touch
more upon in a little bit hands down in terms of apps that come
on a phone this is the best designed pro photo app i've ever experienced it's
crazy fast it never crashed not buggy the haptic feedback that you
get every time you're scrolling it just the experience was fantastic in a few
minutes we are going to deep dive into one of the dng files so you can see what
you can kind of do with it now of course what i
was mostly excited about was the video and that's what all of you guys were
commenting about about how you know you can control
everything just like the pro photo still app
this was the best designed app that i've ever seen
it really is awesome now it does lack some key features that i wish it had
and hope it gets in future updates for example this has
no scopes no histogram and that was a huge downside for me i got really
spoiled a couple weeks ago on the note 20 ultra having a histogram
because as you'll see in a couple minutes when we're actually
taking a deep dive into the footage what i was seeing on the phone screen
with sun glaring on it is not the end result
of what i saw on my computer and so it just goes to show you
how valuable having scopes is now again i know that i could download any of the
third-party apps i've already talked about
and get those scopes and if this continued to be my full-time phone then
i would absolutely do that but i'm just focusing right now on the
pro video app that came on the phone now inside this app you get a good
amount of settings again you can choose between
the three different lenses which do have the 16 24 and 70 millimeter focal
lengths and they are all completely different
lenses you're gonna get an entirely different feel about that and
we're going to touch upon that in just a second when we take a look at the
footage but you can also change of course iso
you can change white balance in here is kind of weird
because you can basically they have like different levels like
blue 1 blue 2 or change the tint uh it's kind of weird that for how
customizable and how like pro this app is that for white balance
you can't actually input a kelvin number no one cool
feature is that you can actually set up projects
have all of your saved settings come back instantly so that you can pick up
where you left off you can keep everything really organized
and that personally i've never really seen
from a stock pro photo or video application before
so another really cool feature of the app is if you go into
manual focus you can actually set a and b focus points
allowing you to nail your focus if you're doing some sort of camera move
where you don't want to have to manually control the entire
focus throw you can set your starting focus point
and your ending and nail it every time
speaking of focus this phone by far has the best auto focus
focus pull whatever you want to call it that i've seen
of any phone that i've ever used and honestly even
a lot of dslr mirrorless cameras the transition from something close and
far away this is all completely autofocus and it's not jittery at all
and it's very smooth and i just love that so of course i went
out into the woods into the studio and just got grabbed a
bunch of different shots and here we're taking a look at skin tones landscapes
color dynamic range and all that so let's take a deep dive
into how the footage actually turned out all right so what you're seeing
actually here is the venice cs look so this is essentially supposed to be an
emulation of sony's highest end camera the venice
and so this is the clip that if we head to our color panel here
um so this is what looked like stock out of the camera and then i've made
some adjustments still not fully done let's turn those on
um we're still quite a bit uh magenta here
after i fixed the skin tones if you go into here you can see
in our skin tones magenta e you can see the
colors starting to break around the nose it's definitely looking better than
the stock this is the wide angle let's grab this still and we'll just
try applying it we'll see what happens here i think this actually looks
really good i've noticed the hardest thing about this camera is
while you have three lenses you have a 16 mil a 24
and a 70 mil you really have to think about the restrictions of each one
because this is on the 16 mil which is
very different a completely different sensor completely different
size sensor the aperture and when you get really close like this
because it has that post processing done i don't know to me it just looks more
muddy it's definitely passable you know if this was a shot that we're
trying to cut to for real quick but this one definitely looks way more
pleasant the skin tones are coming out a lot
nicer so let's see if we can actually push
this image this is kind of a good base grade and let's see if we can
actually add some style here and i'm using the lotify luts
right here of course i'm using the rec 709 luts not the log ones
okay so this this one definitely breaks the image this is too harsh you see how
on her cheek you have these like splotches
of um you know kind of the tints that this lut
is giving us and it's completely destroying her skin tones
um so that you don't want that is like the worst thing
ever but then if we go to say like this one for example pilot
this one looks very nice this one's not really breaking anything that
i'm seeing i do believe this is the 24 mil which is the best of the lenses
we are going to grab this still and we're going to paste it right
onto here apply grade yeah overall that matches
for the most part all right i'm pretty impressed with
especially the wide and the uh 24 mil the close-up
let me see if i applied this grade to it obviously the shadows
bring those up okay okay i guess that's not bad
that's matching well all right so clips like this you can see
all of the noise right here you can see how i completely
look out of focus this i believe is the 16 mil the
ultra wide which i think just did quite terribly so it was sunny
but i was in the middle of this like wooded
area that you can see here so that was blocking a lot of the sun
so i didn't really go above 400 iso so i mean it wasn't anything
crazy but you can still see just a ton of the post-processing
and so even though technically i'm in focus it's applying
so much of its noise reduction it definitely looks
a little bit more like a painting type filter
rather than sharp now if i go to the 24 i believe
it looks so much more crisp and you can see especially in
like the hair details and just don't need to go that so i thought the
24 mil performed way better and partially due
to the fact that the 24 is a f17 and the
16 mil is a 2.2 here are your three cameras on the back
again we got the 24 the 70 and the 16. all of them are 12 megapixels but you
can see the size of the sensor gets significantly reduced for the
70 and the 16 millimeter as well as the aperture on the 24 is best
it's not like swapping lenses with all the same aperture
going to the same sensor size they are almost like completely different cameras
and so if you're trying to match shots if you're creating some sort of
look or film you're going to get a different looking footage depending on
the lens that you choose now once i really
decided to stay on that 24 i thought it did quite well and this is
that nice uh greenish look you can see it tries to
search for focus there for a bit you can see a
little bit of the gimbal this phone is pretty wide now finally the last
thing i want to talk about in regards to the footage here
is the dynamic range now on the actual monitor when i was filming i
thought it was way worse than it actually ended up
turning out so for example this looked near pitch black on the screen
and again there was some sun but i wanted to see
the dynamic range for if i wanted to perfectly expose the sky i didn't want
to clip any of these nice clouds over here all this looked
almost like it was completely gone but of course on the computer we can see
that there's still a good amount of detail if i were to go
into a color here how much can we actually
play around with it alright so you can actually recover
things quite nicely you can see that of course
grass and trees are all different shades of green
but here they kind of all get blended together and to kind of
mushy green looking of course there's some
uh differences but like this entire tree looks like it's painted and it's one
color and that is just a good example of what
low bit rates do as well as like 8-bit video you don't
have all of the colors to pull from so
although i didn't play around with the stills
features too much but here you can see that i've exposed for
the sky again and all the trees on the left
hand side here are obviously nearly crushed
uh blacks but i can simply go into the shadows and lift these up
now now we can see how much noise there is
in the image but again now i have control rather than
them just applying a ton of noise reduction i can go in here
in photoshop and do some color noise reduction
to take any some chroma issues out of it and then
apply just enough uh to where i would like something like
that i don't need to completely get rid of
the grain uh i'd rather have a little bit of noise or grain looking
but pretty far to the right here this is what your phone does
automatically with like jpegs and you can see just how much that's a bit
too far how much it's really reducing the noise
this is no noise reduction this is about the healthy amount that i
would do it because again it looks noisy here because i'm all the way zoomed in
at the normal size it looks just fine now to give my final thoughts on how
this phone is for cinematographers filmmakers content
creators there's a couple ways that i can look at
it for someone like me personally who let's be honest i'm not going to shoot
my main projects on a phone just yet this is an absolute great tool
for scouting locations for doing pre-visuals
and then of course there's the people who want to use this as their main
camera and i'm a little torn because as you all
commented on the samsung video saying hey this phone was literally made for
cinematographers you know my expectations and my bar was
set really high for this phone and in terms of software i really think
they almost knocked out of the park again
things like scopes the not having calvin for
white balance is a little weird but the software experience was really fast
no bugs that i experienced whatsoever and so really
like eight out of ten there but in terms of the final
look that you actually get to be honest if i was carrying around that note 20
ultra or even my iphone i'm gonna pull those
two out before i pull this one i think the audio that comes out of it
is quite incredible they really did a good job in terms of
the mics and the wind cut filters that they built in
but i think the three different lenses look so different and you almost can't
trust them to always match up to each other especially if
you're in a more low light situation but the biggest part that kills me is
the dynamic range yes it's not as bad as i thought when i
was actually filming it because once i got on the computer
i could save it a little bit more that no 20 ultra
that thing never clipped the entire sky at least maybe like clouds on the super
sunny days but the dynamic range was so much better
on that camera everything else on this phone i
absolutely love it's a fantastic experience overall and
i think that if you own this phone or you plan on buying it
my biggest piece of advice from a cinematographer's point of view
is to make sure that you understand its limitations
take a ton of test shots and if you're filming outside and you want the best
look definitely wait for a overcast time of
day or just an overcast day in general and
you're going to get some amazing shots i actually really like the
skin tones and how far you can actually push this
in terms of color grading still nowhere near what you can do with
raw capabilities from a real cinema camera
even though the highlights may clip sometimes the roll-off was really nice
and pretty gentle for a phone and so that was really impressive
to see so again overall just know your camera's limitations
just like anything else and the sony xperia 1 mark
ii will be a fantastic camera thanks so much for watching guys if this had
any value to you make sure you hit that like button
it really helps out the channel a ton leave a comment below on what phone i
should try to turn into a cinema camera next
and how i can step these videos up thank you so much for all the continued
support especially these last couple weeks i've really
enjoyed making videos like this and it seems like you guys like watching them
so as long as those two things remain true i'll keep making them thanks so
much for watching guys see in the next one