- [Narrator] This is the Sony alpha one,
the most powerful mirrorless camera known to mankind.
Featuring a full frame, 50 megapixels sensor
with 8K 10-bit capabilities.
This camera was created by aliens,
or at least you would think so
because it is so much more advanced
than anything on earth that you have ever seen ever.
You could even see a black hole if you wanted to,
or at least imagine it.
But even so, this camera will make it happen anyway.
- Dude I go out and get a salami snack for 10 seconds
and you come and steal my microphone.
- Of course.
- This is not the "Dillon Jet" channel.
This is the "Potato Jet" channel.
Get the... out of here. (beep)
(sighs)
- I still get paid though, right?
- Yeah.
- Okay, cool.
- First question comes to us from "markchristiankc",
does it overheat?
That's a really good question
cause when you're trying to shoot 8K
in such a compact mirrorless camera body
it has trouble dissipating the heat,
and it might just R5 it.
Now the A1's been baking in there,
it's 104 degrees Fahrenheit or 40 degrees Celsius
which is the cop of the operational range of what
these cameras are supposed to be able to handle.
I'm gonna turn it on, start recording,
throw it back in there.
Now, I'm trying to simulate an 8K shoot on a hot day.
Now the first 8K overheating test I did
at room temperature around 70 degrees Fahrenheit,
and it literally went through the entire memory card
and pretty much the battery without overheating
which is very impressive.
I quickly swapped out the battery and memory card.
Let it go again.
And zero overheating issues then.
So the room temperature test, it did really, really good
but then I threw it in the incubator and didn't do as good.
It shut down much, much faster.
But here's the thing, with these cameras you can decide
how far you want to push the heat
before it shuts itself off to protect the camera.
They're standard, which the first two tests were on
but now I have it on high so the threshold
should be a little bit higher.
I don't know if this is great for the camera.
You probably want to avoid it
but let's see how long it lasts in this mode.
Time lapse.
(rock music)
All right.
So we are now past an hour and it's still going
which I'm pretty shocked about.
I just opened it once around 50 minutes in
to swap out the memory card and the battery.
But when I did it did feel really, really hot.
So I think I'm probably gonna pull it...
No, just a little bit longer, a little bit longer.
Hopefully it doesn't break.
(rock music)
Oh, snap.
Okay, I think it turned off.
I just did the math on how long it lasted.
Guess how long?
69 minutes.
Good one Sony.
Oh my gosh Dylan, you look so great in 8K.
- Hey Trey, isn't 8K better than like
all different kinds of...?
- It's a lot of K's.
More doesn't always mean better but sometimes it does.
Do you feel pretty cool sitting up there on that tall rock?
- Kinda yeah.
- It's not even that tall, actually.
I'm just shooting from a low angle.
So it looks really tall.
Oh yeah.
And this is what you look like in 8K.
There, hi.
How are you doing audience?
Having a good day?
Cool.
Nice.
So let's take a look at dynamic range real quick.
Dylan's back there right now.
This kind of looks like a title sequence
for some corny 80s movie.
Like you're about to go beat up some bad boys
at an arcade or something.
Dylan try to look cool though.
You slipping all over the rocks.
So now that we have some footage to tinker with,
let's pull it up on the screen.
So we have three shots here, all from the Sony A1.
One of the shots is 8K, one is 4k and one is just HD.
Can you guys tell which one is which?
It may be a little bit trickier for you
because you're watching it after YouTube's compression.
For me I can't really tell until
I blow it up to full screen.
I can definitely tell the one on the right is HD.
The one on the left and the middle,
they both look pretty dang good.
I don't even have an 8K display
so let's make this a little bit easier
and let's go 250% scale.
So how about now?
I think it's obvious that the one on the right is HD now
but the other two still look pretty good.
If you look closely on my screen at least
you can slightly tell that the one in the middle
is slightly sharper but it's not like a massive difference.
All right, let's just go all the way, go 750%.
I mean, this is where the 8K is gonna shine
is where you do these extreme scale-ups.
Comparing the 8K to the 4k, it is definitely better,
but is it worth the extra cost of doing all this work,
having these massive file sizes?
Also H.265, it's a compressed codec.
Imagine trying to log in 8K and trying to edit that.
I might try that actually.
But yeah.
it looks like the 4k is almost slightly out of focus
but it was the same lens, same setting, same everything.
Everything was perfectly locked in.
So the differences you're looking at
is strictly the differences in resolution,
which is cool that means the 8K actually has a purpose.
It actually is better.
I'm excited to see this though
because usually you see these features
in the flagship models, but they eventually
start trickling into the more affordable options.
By the way, this is $6,500-ish for the camera, $6,500.
So I personally wouldn't buy this camera.
I'm impressed by it, but I wouldn't buy it
because this is more of a photography first camera.
You buy a Sony FX6 for less than that
which is video first and Sony A7S3
which is also video First.
You buy two of those almost.
But this 8K that this A1 offers, it's pretty insane
especially considering that
it came out of a camera this big, that's it.
8k is 4:2:0 , everything else is 4:2:2,
but you still get 10-bit across the board.
So that's awesome.
I'd rather have 10 bit 4:2:0 than 4:2:2 8-bit.
But speaking about colors,
let me go ahead and kick this over
to someone who knows a lot more about colors than I do
because I don't know that much actually, to be honest.
Sorry, I shouldn't have admitted that.
- Having 8K in a mirrorless hybrid camera
is no doubt really cool, but what's even cooler
is when Potato Jet sends you the footage
to color grade from a camera he got from Sony.
Lucky.
In case you don't know who I am, my name is Denver Riddle,
and I'm a colorist and one of the founders of Cinema Grade,
a color grading plugin that makes color grading
super fast and easy.
So you might be wondering what is my impression
of grading footage from the Sony A1?
Well, first off, 8K and even 4k in the H.265 Codec
is very taxing on most systems.
So you'll definitely wanna keep that in mind
even if you have a computer that's like flexing a big bicep.
You'll still want to render or transcode the footage
to get real playback in 8K,
but honestly, who even has an 8K monitor?
onto the car color of this camera,
one thing we learned is if you record in 8K
the best you'll get is 4:2:0 color sampling.
If you record in 4k, you get 4:2:2.
So that is a trade-off when recording in 8K
but honestly, it's not that big of a deal
because it's not a difference that you can actually see.
Why you'd want the 4:2:2 is if you were keying
a green screen or doing precise secondary corrections
with HSL qualifiers.
Now onto grading this, we received footage
captured with two color profiles: S-Log3 S-Gamut3
and S-Cinetone.
S-Log3 is the color profile you're most likely familiar with
an S-Cinetone is Sony's newer color science
that's closer to a Rec.709 color space
but with a more cinematic look, but right out of the gate
I'm gonna to tell you to ditch S-Cinetone.
Why?
Well, if you look at these two images
one shot in S-Log3, the other in S-Cinetone
you can see right away that S-Cinetone
has clipping in the highlights.
I mean, the whole reason we shoot log in the first place
besides to show how amazing our before and after is,
is to get more dynamic range.
S-Log3 captures the highest dynamic range
that the camera is capable of.
And I'd only suggest shooting an S-tone.
If you're on a tight time schedule
or you don't want to mess around with S-Log.
Now in terms of how we would grade this,
we can use a LUT, a color space transform,
or just do it manually.
Let's see how this looks in your software.
In DaVinci resolve we can add
the color space transform effect
and choose the corresponding color space and gamma.
This gives us a good starting point
that we can further refine with an S-curve
and some hue and saturation adjustments.
In premier pro we found that the free cine color S-log3 LUT
from Nom:crawl works really well with the Sony A1
only needing minimal adjustment.
And in final cut 4:10 we can also apply
the built-in S-log3 LUT to get a similar starting point
like we had in DaVinci.
And then just add a little more contrast and color.
Finally, we found that the Sony graded beautifully
going all manual.
We found the following is simple workflow
of adding contrast first, adjusting the pivot,
fine tuning the detail in the shadows and highlights
and finishing off with a pop of color really made Dylan
the star in Potato Jet's short short-film.
I've shown this in Cinema Grade
but the same workflow applies in your software.
So what are my final thoughts?
We'll probably thing that stood out to me the most
is how sharp this camera is
and the low noise in the shadows.
Generally, when you shoot in low light
and bring up the shadows, you introduce a lot of noise
but not so much with the sensor.
I would have to say that Sony has done a really good job
with their newest sensor and their latest color science.
I would like to see higher chroma sampling
just to get that cinema quality badge,
but the 4:2:0 honestly, isn't a deal breaker for me,
especially if you can use an external recorder
like an Atomos.
It's not been since the first MiniDV camera in the 90s
that I actually owned a Sony but with the new flagship A1
I'm definitely making eyes with you Sony.
(rapping)
- Oh, hey.
I wasn't expecting you back so early.
Shout out to Denver for having all that
very insightful information on color grading.
I'll link his information down below
and let's go answer some more questions, and stuff.
Jonas asks, is this a photo only camera?
Actually, no.
I mean, the video capabilities are outstanding
but I do think that they did put photography
as their priority when designing it.
Caroline says A1, better or worse than the steak sauce?
I'd probably give it to the Sony.
I don't really like steak sauce.
I mean, I guess that's just like a personal opinion,
but I don't know I...
If anything, I like to put a little bit of salt
and that's about it on my steak.
Steak sauce ruins it for me.
Itsibee asks record limits.
No, as long as you've got battery
and a memory card in there, you should be good to go,
although, I've had some Sonys in the past
that said no record limit
and I think it was like 13 hours or something like that
before it would cut on its own.
So, not sure if that will do that.
Does it have better low light performance
in the the A7 iii, it's got way more megapixels
which should be a bad thing for video
but it also costs so much more.
I've got the A7Siii, and I'm gonna go ahead
and assume it's gonna have better low light
because it has those massive pixels
but one way to find out.
(hiphop beats)
So as expected, the A7Siii takes
the win for the best low light
but the A1 was right there on its tail.
It still has that great backside illuminated sensor
which means more light gets to hit the sensor
compared to traditional sensors.
So even at the extreme ISOs, it was still doing decent.
But let's say you don't need to go all the way
to that extreme of 12,800.
That's probably the biggest weakness of this A7Siii
because 6,400 ISO is kind of right there
in the middle of the two native ISO.
And until you hit 12,800 you do not get to take advantage
of that higher native ISO.
So I would actually say in a lot of cases
the A1 would be the better low-light camera
until you go to 12,800, then the A7 takes the win there.
AuthenTech says A1 versus A7Siii 4k video side by side.
From what I've seen the both look very, very comparable.
I've pretty much been using S-log3 for everything
and the colors match up real nice.
If there's anything I noticed I think the A7Siii
does a touch of digital sharpening.
And some of you may like that
because it does tend to look a little bit sharper
but at the same time professional cameras
like the FX6 they tend to not do that
so that you have more control later in posts.
And that kind of brings me back to why
I would rather have an A7Siii than the A1
is because this has video in mind.
I mean, look at this flip screen, I need this flip screen.
I film myself all the time.
But I imagine this A1 is going to be a very hot camera
amongst a lot of the top tier photographers.
There's crazy features in here, like 30 frames
per second in 50 megapixel bursts and raw.
What?
And I'm actually pretty shocked at how usable this 8K is.
I've been waiting for a catch.
Oh yeah, you can shoot 8K, but it won't do this.
I mean, the only downsides again, is 4:2:0,
you can't do active image stabilization
but you could still use the standard stabilization
which is usually enough.
You can't use like clear image zoom
or crop mode, which is expected.
I mean overall, this 8K is actually usable
in this camera, which it blows my mind.
So even though this isn't the camera for me in particular,
it is amazing to really just see
how far this technology has come and what's possible
out of such a small mirrorless camera now.
But that's all I got for now.
Thanks again to Denver for coming on the channel.
And he's got a really useful YouTube channel.
So I'll link it down below.
And also next week, I'm dropping a video
about this Canon C70, that I'm recording on right now.
So ask me questions about it and I will be answering them
then and see you next week.
I'm gonna get a headache.
I'm too old to be heading...
(upbeat music)
Thank you guys so much for picking me
as the giveaway winner for the new Insta360 One X2 camera.
I love the channel and all the content you guys create.