The news have been out there since this year’s NAB but I had been waiting for more meaningful test results and this video by Philip Bloom finally hit it home for me:

This camera is a low-light giant. But one could say, after looking at this impressive footage, “well, impressive it is but I am not going to have too many night shoots, so being able to shoot well what I see is more than good enough” (which is not possible with most cameras btw.). Lets translate what was visible in PB’s video into a concrete example from real-life super-low-budget filmmaking.

A few years ago we shot a short at a location I liked very much, an underground parking lot with neon lights. I liked the looks of the place including the greenish neon light but it was not a lot of light, which meant that we had to work with fast lenses wide open when we did not use additional lighting (which always screwed up the natural look of the place a bit). In numbers that was a F 1.4 with ISO 800 at 1/50th shutter speed yielding a well-exposed image (example ungraded still frame below, shot with mostly available light).

We ended up shooting between F 1.4 – 2.8 and ISO 800 (the maximum really usable with the Panasonic GH1 at the time) – 1600 and shutter speed between 1/50 and 1/100 (for slowmo) tolerating noise and suboptimal exposure and always had to live with shallow depth of field, no matter if we wanted or not, resulting in many shots being slightly out of focus when camera or subjects were moving and, of course, the creative option of keeping everything in focus just wasn’t available.

Imagine the same situation/location/lighting possibilities but with the Sony A7S, for simplicity’s sake assuming ISO 51200 is the max ISO that delivers usable images. Doing the math, we could have done this here as well at ISO 51200 getting well-exposed shots:

• F 8, 1/50 (large depth of field)
• F4, 1/250 (for the 120 fps super slowmo, that the A7S supports)

This is a game changer. It makes scripts/locations possible that otherwise would not work due to budget constraints, mostly because lighting certain locations is beyond a super-low budget. And all that with a super-simple workflow based on the XAVC codec. In addition to that it makes shots, that you would have been able to do with the extra lighting you have, faster to do, if they work with less light, so this saves time (IMO not having enough time on location is one of the top 5 reasons for quality problems in the end result).

The camera itself is not super-cheap as 2500$ for a body is certainly a lot for a student or hobbyist but if you can afford that, what in my opinion is one of the top problems, i.e. not having enough light to realise an idea, is simply a thing of the past in 99% of the cases with this camera at least for the stuff I want to do and that is huge.

Update: https://alphauniverse.com/stories/sony-a7s-paranormal-activity/ totally makes that same point.