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Is the SL2-S the perfect hybrid camera? To me, the answer is...


Steven

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47 minutes ago, Amal said:

Hi Steven, for a short film, which non Leica lens would you recomend for video (MF) on the SL2-S ?

I assume a Leica one would be > $5k

So how about other M lens such as voigtlander?

The only non Leica lens I have used with the SL2S is the Nokton 35 and I've loved the look of the image. It flares nicely and wide open has that glow that makes the image very cinematic. As for which lens I would recommend, it's difficult to give you a good answer without having read the screenplay. It all depends on your story. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thx Steven! 

That's unfortunately what block me to jump into the sl2s system. 

I do photo and video. 

I have an a7siii that I don't like so much for the same reason as you. 

It's a great cam I guess but I don't feel it if I can say.

No pleasure at all to using it. 

I was hoping to replace it by the sl2s with the leica color science. 

 

 

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8 hours ago, boogy_blow said:

Thx Steven! 

That's unfortunately what block me to jump into the sl2s system. 

I do photo and video. 

I have an a7siii that I don't like so much for the same reason as you. 

It's a great cam I guess but I don't feel it if I can say.

No pleasure at all to using it. 

I was hoping to replace it by the sl2s with the leica color science. 

 

 

Do what I did. Sell the A7SIII. Use your SL2S in manual focus for video. Suffer for some long weeks. Think about the A7SIII everyday. Buy it again out of regret. Go out for a walk with you A7SIII, and take a look at the disgusting texture and image it produces, then go back permanently to your SL2S. Suck up the manual focus for a couple months, and you'll come out of this a winner. 

I too thought I could not live without AF, and now that I can manual focus almost subconsciously, my footage looks much better, and every time I see some Auto focus footage it disgusts me. It looks like cheap digital home cam. MF looks so much more cinematic, even if you miss it a little sometimes. Just embrace it. You don't need your focus point to always be stuck on the left or the right eye, constantly. It's the beauty of imperfection. Thank me later. 

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Good post Steven. Agree on every word. (It’s good to hear the MF praise from someone who grew up with AF on video and not from somebody like me, who's been a cameraman in the 90ies. Focus is a significant part of video content creation and should not be left to a machine. An exception could be YouTube selfies.)

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5 hours ago, Steven said:

Do what I did. Sell the A7SIII. Use your SL2S in manual focus for video. Suffer for some long weeks. Think about the A7SIII everyday. Buy it again out of regret. Go out for a walk with you A7SIII, and take a look at the disgusting texture and image it produces, then go back permanently to your SL2S. Suck up the manual focus for a couple months, and you'll come out of this a winner. 

I too thought I could not live without AF, and now that I can manual focus almost subconsciously, my footage looks much better, and every time I see some Auto focus footage it disgusts me. It looks like cheap digital home cam. MF looks so much more cinematic, even if you miss it a little sometimes. Just embrace it. You don't need your focus point to always be stuck on the left or the right eye, constantly. It's the beauty of imperfection. Thank me later. 

 

Haha thanks for helping me avoid this journey 

I totally understand the return and final abandon of the A7S3.

For me the A7S3 is about connivence , confort when we talk about one man crew.

It lacks the fundamental for me tho.

The texture, the feeling and the organic part of an image.

It doesn't make me want to use it.

I'm also envisaging the BMPCC 6K PRO .

Cheap, no stabilization, no autofocus but the image quality that i saw was really in my taste...

So know you are fully satisfied with your SL2-S in video?

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2 minutes ago, boogy_blow said:

 

Haha thanks for helping me avoid this journey 

I totally understand the return and final abandon of the A7S3.

For me the A7S3 is about connivence , confort when we talk about one man crew.

It lacks the fundamental for me tho.

The texture, the feeling and the organic part of an image.

It doesn't make me want to use it.

I'm also envisaging the BMPCC 6K PRO .

Cheap, no stabilization, no autofocus but the image quality that i saw was really in my taste...

So know you are fully satisfied with your SL2-S in video?

Yes. I am. 
The BMPCC is a very valid choice if you only do video. To me, between this or the SL2S for video only, it comes down to lens ecosystem. I like M lenses better than EF lenses, so they’ll always look better on the SL2S than the BM. Add to that the fact that the SL2S also has an extremely impressive ibis system (way better than Sony and canon) + the fact that It’s also the best still camera I’ve ever tried, and you have yourself a no brainer. 

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54 minutes ago, boogy_blow said:

 

You have solid points in favor to the SL2S...

I dont have M lenses , i thought about buying the 24-70 f2.8 to start .

Do you use a follow focus on the SL2S?

No, M lenses are quite easy to focus as most of them have a little tab under the focus ring to turn it effortlessly. All you need is practice, and time. Your muscle memory will develop and you'll be able to know where you focus is without looking at your lens. 

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8 hours ago, hansvons said:

Focus is a significant part of video content creation and should not be left to a machine

Exactly. It's an important narrative tool. Cameras will get something in focus, but it's not necessarily the thing that you want your audience to look at.

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@boogy_blow I spent last 4 months or so trying to figure this out for myself.

I sold my bmpcc4k after 6kpro announcement. But didn’t end up buying it. I really wanted to use my leica glass on it. Battery life is still negligible unless you build it up. Plus stabilization is big issue for bmpcc, unless you shooting everything from tripod.

I end up renting bunch of cameras to check how I feel about them.

A7siii — very comfortable camera. Good stabilization. Great autofocus that can be actually used in video. Slog3 can has good color volume, and looks pretty good with resolve color transform. Slightly soft image, need some sharpening in post. Sooc looks pretty nice with s-cinetone. Battery life is excellent. Photos are 12mp, love it or hate it. Durability is questionable, Lensrentals had to send to fix loose hdmi port after one use (and I didn’t do anything special). Sony fixed it by warranty, but still. 4k/120 is awesome, but rarely used by me.

A1 — better than A7siii in pretty much everything except screen (Flip out screen is much handier to keep on left hand while waist level shooting) and super low light capabilities. The feeling of focus is incredible, it feels better as in AF comparing to A7rIV as A7rIV to SL2S. I liked it the most of all Sony cameras. Colors are still noticeable Sony, but the way they react on color/light sliders in Lightroom is much closer to what Leica DNGs are doing. The image is less “cartoony”. S-cinetone photos look nice, but since there is no profile for Lightroom, it is a bit hard to replicate for raw file. 8k is cool, but more like party trick for me so far.

SL2 — Usability is amazing. AF is hit or miss. Got it after sl2-s so didn’t use AF on it at all. Not a fan of colors though. It is probably still better than A1, but I like colors from my m10-r more. Moire in full frame on video. Crop mode is nice, if you don’t need full frame, it will handle video perfectly. Plus has 4:3 5k for anamorphic lenses (crop). Skin become greenish in underexposure. Couldn’t find proper way to do color-transform for l-log, so ended up using in hlg, which works perfectly.

SL2-s — Usability is better for video than sl2, for photos the same as sl2. Colors Sooc are amazing. Vibrant and saturated but without being cartoonish. Stabilization is gimbal-like. Rolling shutter is visible, but way better than bmpcc4k or a7riv. AF is hit or miss. If it wouldn’t AF at all, I wouldn’t miss it. Ended up switching SL lenses to manual linear mode, which is infinitely more predictable for me. In general it is better video camera than SL2. Less noise in shadows, more in-camera recording modes.  There is moire in photos, but that is expected for 24mp. Was able to get moire/aliasing in ff and crop modes in video, but is was mostly minor (unless you film moving textures). Similar to SL2 issue with l-log, so have to stick with hlg. Picky on sd cards. I got video recording stop couple of times on my v90 prograde card.

Not sure if I’m in position to recommend anything, but in my case, I decided to go with sl2-s despite its shortcomings. I need camera that I would want to shoot, and sl2-s is the one.

If I would use camera professionally for photo/video, I would go with A1 or fx3 (better durability a7siii). It is more flexible and postproduction workflow is more straightforward.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Vlad Kuzemchik said:

@boogy_blow I spent last 4 months or so trying to figure this out for myself.

I sold my bmpcc4k after 6kpro announcement. But didn’t end up buying it. I really wanted to use my leica glass on it. Battery life is still negligible unless you build it up. Plus stabilization is big issue for bmpcc, unless you shooting everything from tripod.

I end up renting bunch of cameras to check how I feel about them.

A7siii — very comfortable camera. Good stabilization. Great autofocus that can be actually used in video. Slog3 can has good color volume, and looks pretty good with resolve color transform. Slightly soft image, need some sharpening in post. Sooc looks pretty nice with s-cinetone. Battery life is excellent. Photos are 12mp, love it or hate it. Durability is questionable, Lensrentals had to send to fix loose hdmi port after one use (and I didn’t do anything special). Sony fixed it by warranty, but still. 4k/120 is awesome, but rarely used by me.

A1 — better than A7siii in pretty much everything except screen (Flip out screen is much handier to keep on left hand while waist level shooting) and super low light capabilities. The feeling of focus is incredible, it feels better as in AF comparing to A7rIV as A7rIV to SL2S. I liked it the most of all Sony cameras. Colors are still noticeable Sony, but the way they react on color/light sliders in Lightroom is much closer to what Leica DNGs are doing. The image is less “cartoony”. S-cinetone photos look nice, but since there is no profile for Lightroom, it is a bit hard to replicate for raw file. 8k is cool, but more like party trick for me so far.

SL2 — Usability is amazing. AF is hit or miss. Got it after sl2-s so didn’t use AF on it at all. Not a fan of colors though. It is probably still better than A1, but I like colors from my m10-r more. Moire in full frame on video. Crop mode is nice, if you don’t need full frame, it will handle video perfectly. Plus has 4:3 5k for anamorphic lenses (crop). Skin become greenish in underexposure. Couldn’t find proper way to do color-transform for l-log, so ended up using in hlg, which works perfectly.

SL2-s — Usability is better for video than sl2, for photos the same as sl2. Colors Sooc are amazing. Vibrant and saturated but without being cartoonish. Stabilization is gimbal-like. Rolling shutter is visible, but way better than bmpcc4k or a7riv. AF is hit or miss. If it wouldn’t AF at all, I wouldn’t miss it. Ended up switching SL lenses to manual linear mode, which is infinitely more predictable for me. In general it is better video camera than SL2. Less noise in shadows, more in-camera recording modes.  There is moire in photos, but that is expected for 24mp. Was able to get moire/aliasing in ff and crop modes in video, but is was mostly minor (unless you film moving textures). Similar to SL2 issue with l-log, so have to stick with hlg. Picky on sd cards. I got video recording stop couple of times on my v90 prograde card.

Not sure if I’m in position to recommend anything, but in my case, I decided to go with sl2-s despite its shortcomings. I need camera that I would want to shoot, and sl2-s is the one.

If I would use camera professionally for photo/video, I would go with A1 or fx3 (better durability a7siii). It is more flexible and postproduction workflow is more straightforward.

 

 

great post. I identify. If you ever find the good SD for the SL2S, let me know. My biggest annoyance is with photo/video playback. So slow... 

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14 hours ago, Vlad Kuzemchik said:

Similar to SL2 issue with l-log, so have to stick with hlg.

L-log is based upon Rec2020. You can use it well with colour managed editing and finishing systems such as Resolve, Avid, Flame. It does work with FCP-X; I haven't tested Premiere Pro yet. Just use Rec2020 as the working space instead of Rec709, and you're good to go. In ACES chose as Input Transform Rec2020. It also works with Resolve's wide colour space. In Rec709, which most editing systems use by default, colour is off, which is expected when you base your colour science on Rec2020. But, IMO, doing so makes sense because Rec2020 is the video colour space of the HDR future and is very wide, with plenty of room for the SL2-S colours and dynamic range.

14 hours ago, Vlad Kuzemchik said:

If I would use camera professionally for photo/video, I would go with A1 or fx3 (better durability a7siii). It is more flexible and postproduction workflow is more straightforward.

Sony colours tend to suck. The only exception is the Venice. That's the only Sony cine camera I know that delivers fat, colour-rich cinematic colours down to the deepest shadows. Coming from the Alexa and Red and searching for a hybrid camera with acceptable colours, the SL2-S caught me as the only contender in that market that can create true cinematic colours, especially in skin tones, sky blue, foliage, and the shadows. Every other manufacturer is either on the video-ish side (nasty highlight roll-off, skin tones with carrot tints, unsubtle greens, ultramarine sky blue) or the muted side with missing juice in the shadows, or tries hard making the world a better place with too healthy skin tones, too vibrant colours and other measures to serve a user base that desperately want to make their clients happy with good looking media.

The lack of nice texture in the video footage is another problem that arises with too much processing, noise reduction, compression and whatnot. In all these fields, the SL2-S is best-in-class by a large margin. It may be lacking in AF and frame rates. No one is perfect. But the SL2-S at least motivates me to go out and shoot because later in post, I'm not fighting with the colours but enjoying them, shot by shot, pretty close to what the Alexa can do. I consider motivation the greatest virtue of great film gear and the SL2-S delivers.

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11 hours ago, Steven said:

great post. I identify. If you ever find the good SD for the SL2S, let me know. My biggest annoyance is with photo/video playback. So slow... 

@Stevenand @Vlad Kuzemchikfor SD card I have good success with this. It comes with the fastest card reader i ever tried too.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=kingston+canvas+react+plus+v90+uhs-ii

If you have slowplayback, try unsing only one memory card inside the camera. Strangely it speeds things up noticeably. Or if you must have two make sure they are exactly the same ones.

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Slender said:

@Stevenand @Vlad Kuzemchikfor SD card I have good success with this. It comes with the fastest card reader i ever tried too.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=kingston+canvas+react+plus+v90+uhs-ii

If you have slowplayback, try unsing only one memory card inside the camera. Strangely it speeds things up noticeably. Or if you must have two make sure they are exactly the same ones.

 

 

Very interesting. Thanks Guillaume. 

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5 hours ago, hansvons said:

L-log is based upon Rec2020. You can use it well with colour managed editing and finishing systems such as Resolve, Avid, Flame. It does work with FCP-X; I haven't tested Premiere Pro yet. Just use Rec2020 as the working space instead of Rec709, and you're good to go. In ACES chose as Input Transform Rec2020. It also works with Resolve's wide colour space. In Rec709, which most editing systems use by default, colour is off, which is expected when you base your colour science on Rec2020. But, IMO, doing so makes sense because Rec2020 is the video colour space of the HDR future and is very wide, with plenty of room for the SL2-S colours and dynamic range.

I think I read somewhere that they use Rec2020 gamut, but gamma curve is still proprietary. So you have to have to de-log by hand.

Going through ACES still gives same flat image  (Rec2020->ACEScct)=>(ACEScct->Rec709), which makes sense, since, I believe, it uses HLG.

F-log curve looks close, but still not perfect.

6 hours ago, hansvons said:

Sony colours tend to suck. The only exception is the Venice. That's the only Sony cine camera I know that delivers fat, colour-rich cinematic colours down to the deepest shadows. Coming from the Alexa and Red and searching for a hybrid camera with acceptable colours, the SL2-S caught me as the only contender in that market that can create true cinematic colours, especially in skin tones, sky blue, foliage, and the shadows. Every other manufacturer is either on the video-ish side (nasty highlight roll-off, skin tones with carrot tints, unsubtle greens, ultramarine sky blue) or the muted side with missing juice in the shadows, or tries hard making the world a better place with too healthy skin tones, too vibrant colours and other measures to serve a user base that desperately want to make their clients happy with good looking media.

The lack of nice texture in the video footage is another problem that arises with too much processing, noise reduction, compression and whatnot. In all these fields, the SL2-S is best-in-class by a large margin. It may be lacking in AF and frame rates. No one is perfect. But the SL2-S at least motivates me to go out and shoot because later in post, I'm not fighting with the colours but enjoying them, shot by shot, pretty close to what the Alexa can do. I consider motivation the greatest virtue of great film gear and the SL2-S delivers.

I do not disagree, but consistency in color tends to be more important than color quality itself with a lot of projects. And it is easier to color match Slog3 to other cameras than SL2-S footage.

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