The Sony A7S3: A Camera for Low-Light Video Enthusiasts

When it comes to low-light video performance, Sony is often at the top of the list. The new A7S3 camera takes this reputation and pushes it even further. One of the standout features of the A7S3 is its incredible flip screen design. Gone are the days of awkwardly maneuvering around the camera's back to access the record button. Now, with a simple press of a button on top of the body, you can easily switch between stills and video modes.

The camera's menu system has also been tweaked to make it easier to navigate. The card slots have moved slightly, but in a way that still allows for easy access. Speaking of card slots, they're one of the most unique features of the A7S3. With a double slot configuration, you can easily swap out memory cards on the fly. This is especially useful for videographers who need to switch between different types of media during a shoot.

In terms of connections, the A7S3 has it all. You'll find a full-sized HDMI port, as well as USB-C and multi-USB ports that make it easy to expand your camera's capabilities. This means you can power the camera with a standard USB brick, recharge the battery, or hook it up to an Ethernet cable for additional connectivity options. The camera also features multiple audio options, including mic and headphone jacks and Sony's Multi-Interface Hot Shoe.

One of the most exciting features of the A7S3 is its ability to record 4K video with 24-bit four-channel recording through the hot shoe. And if you're using a shotgun mic like the B1M or XLR K3M, you'll be happy to know that it comes with 48V phantom power for easy integration into your setup. The camera's noise performance is also incredibly impressive, making it one of the best low-light cameras on the market.

While Sony has taken a strong video-centric approach with the A7S3, there are still some features that could make this camera even better. For example, it would be nice to have the ability to switch between shutter speed and shutter angle, which can be a challenge for videographers who need to adjust their exposure on the fly. Additionally, having scopes like vectorscopes and RGB parades built into the camera would make it easier to ensure accurate color balance during post-production.

Finally, one of the most nitpicky features that Sony could consider adding is the ability to load custom LUTs into the camera for preview. While the camera does have a gamma assist function, being able to load and test your own LUTs before finalizing your footage would be incredibly useful. This feature would make the A7S3 even more appealing to videographers who need precise control over their color grading.

Overall, the Sony A7S3 is an incredible camera that's sure to impress low-light video enthusiasts. With its flip screen design, unique card slots, and impressive audio capabilities, this camera has everything you need to take your footage to the next level. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, the A7S3 is definitely worth checking out.

GIVEAWAY

If you want to get your hands on one of these cameras, I've got some good news for you. In partnership with Sony, I'm giving away an A7S3 camera to one lucky winner! To enter, simply follow me on social media and comment below with "I want this camera!" You can also share this video with your friends and family, and tag them in the comments to spread the word.

Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and the little bell icon to turn on notifications for new content. I'll see you guys in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the camera that you've been waiting for finally we have the sony a7s iii it's finally here after almost five years since its predecessor sony has clearly put a lot into this new model i can see why it was a five-year wait we've got new menus that are yeah well they're touch enabled we've got new file formats for both stills and video we've got 4k up to 120 frames a second raw output new heat management simultaneous recording internally and externally two dual function card slots there's a lot to unpack here but i'm really excited to share with you guys today the brand new sony a7s iii so a quick note here i'm actually using the sony a7s3 to film this because the s originally stood for sensitivity it also has an incredible range of video features here and it does really well in low light so i decided to reorganize my studio configuration for this video and take advantage of the low light possibilities in the sony a7s iii the original intention of the s series the s stood for sensitivity so what this meant is a lower megapixel configuration on the sensor which would give you better sensitivity in low light now the original a7s also had pretty good video capabilities as well it would shoot 4k externally you got 1080 internal it all looked really good people started using that camera and its successor for the video functions what's interesting is most camera companies do not break from the original intention and i think in this case with the a7 s3 this is the first time that we've seen a camera company in other words sony that's taken something and allowed it to adapt to what people want to use it for and i think that is actually pretty key so this is still a great sensitivity camera in terms of stills in low light but we also have phenomenal video capabilities we can go all the way up to 120p we can shoot 10 bit 422 internal and external and we can shoot both at the same time and the external signal can even be raw video it's really impressive what they've done with this so let's actually start with the new menu system this is something that sony users have been asking for well well actually pretty much forever and we finally have it the new menu is a split screen based interface so you can see all of the options that are in each folder without having to navigate in and out of sub menus and this can all be accessed via touch finally and there is touch and hold function so that you can see what each category is before selecting touch also works in the function menus and that's really nice because these are accessible while you are recording both internally and externally you can also see that this camera has a fully articulating flip screen as well so the new menus and the new layout just make way more sense than they've ever done before this is a fairly in-depth topic here because they've been completely overhauled so i've actually done a second video just dedicated to the new menu structure so i will link that in the description below this video so make sure you check that out but i do want to point out that one of my favorite changes in here is that we have differences now between stills mode and movie mode and now we can choose what settings to change when switching between those two modes it used to be you just had kind of one mode in the camera if you switched to video it just brought over all the settings from shooting stills and so this means now that you have two completely truly dedicated independent modes for this camera and they are customizable so a lot of the buzz around the a7 s3 is clearly around video but there is actually some great functionality for still shooters as well for those of you who want to shoot in low light and get excellent performance 12 megapixels i know it doesn't sound very high in today's megapixel race believe me this is still plenty big to get great looking images you can do prints up to 11 by 17 no problem and so the benefit for using this kind of sensor at 12 megapixels is going to be low light performance so you get a better pixel pitch because you have a much less crowded sensor which is going to give you a better signal to noise ratio so the noise part of that equation is going to be the same whether it's a high megapixel or a low megapixel count but the signal gets a boost because you have more room on the sensor which allows you to get much cleaner performance low light performance at high iso settings is absolutely outstanding compared to the previous versions of this camera you're going to get even better performance and it has really nice contrast even when you're really pushing this camera into high territory so another favorite of mine is there are now 759 phase detection autofocus points with a 92 percent area coverage of the frame we didn't have phase detection autofocus in previous versions of the a7s we finally got it it's a really welcome addition of course this is also compatible with the latest generation of sony autofocus that you're going to find on the a9 with with flexible spot tracking object recognition and of course you have both human and animal iaf this is interesting too on the front of the camera we've got both visible light and ir sensors and what these do is they're going to improve white balance accuracy in artificial light and we have a new capture format as well for stills mode so on any sony camera we've always had the ability to shoot raw jpeg or both raw and jpeg at the same time we also have a new file format which is an heif that stands for high efficiency image format and this is something that you see in a lot of mobile phones now it's different than jpeg because you're going to have a more efficient or smaller file but what's interesting about these heif files is they actually record in hlg so you can select either 422 or 420 and as long as you have something where you can view that color space they are also bt 2020 so we're talking about hdr and there's a lot of really interesting edit possibilities at the time i'm filming this imaging edge is the only thing that will see these i had trouble with anything else and what's interesting is i actually could open them on my mac in the finder you could even preview the file by hitting the space bar couldn't get him to open in anything else photoshop would crash photos would crash lightroom wouldn't even bring him in so this is kind of a work in progress so it's more forward thinking than sony have been in the past and i think it's kind of a cool addition to have on there also impressive is the five axis in body image stabilization which is now going to give you a 5.5 step compensation you can shoot up to 10 frames continuous with either mechanical or electronic shutter this isn't the stack sensor from the a9 cameras so we're not going to get the 20 frames per second but it's still a decent speed and what's interesting is you can now get up to 1000 raw plus jpeg frame capacity in the buffer so there's a lot of performance and the autofocus performance is going to be accurate down to -6 ev so you're going to get really good auto focus in very low light this is probably a good time to mention that in the month of august i am going to be doing a camera giveaway and if you want more information i will put a link in the description below when you go to that link you will have a way to sign up it's just a random drawing and i'm giving away basically a four thousand dollar budget of the camera and or lens combination of your choice so if you want to get an a7s three this is a great time to do it now there are a couple ways of increasing your odds of winning if you own my preset packs so if you haven't bought them i have links in there these are preset packs you're seeing them in this video i'm using on various images some of them are straight out of camera some of them i did some edits on these are presets that i use on a regular basis i have designed them to work in both lightroom and capture one and if you buy presets you can increase your odds of winning you don't have to of course you can just enter the giveaway as is but it's a great way to support the channel and i thought that 2020 is kind of a dud year so why don't we make the summer a little bit more awesome than usual so i thought it'd be a great time to do a giveaway so check it out so let's go ahead and talk about the star of the show which most of you are waiting to hear let's go ahead and talk about video so the a7s3 gives you 4k full pixel readout with no bending in all modes and you're going to get this up to 120 frames per second this is also finally the camera that sony gives us 10 bit depth with 422 color sampling for internal recording and the quality is excellent the files are gorgeous and the move to 10-bit gives you files that you're really going to get a lot of flexibility with in post-production which are going to give you a much higher latitude for color grading and exposure adjustment so one of the challenges is when particularly if you're shooting in low light with digital video noise tends to hide in shadows and typically when you have an 8-bit depth on your file you're not going to get a whole lot of latitude to recover any shadow detail information in but with 10 bit it's clearly possible now if you shoot an s-log 3 you're going to see probably the biggest difference if i toggle this on and off you're going to see that i can actually grade it and i can actually recover quite a bit of shadow detail so it's really nice to have sony says that in s-log 3 you're going to get over 15 stops of dynamic range to work with and it also works down to 160 iso and this is way more versatile than the higher iso minimums that we've traditionally had in sony cameras so 160 iso makes this way more versatile image stabilization is probably the best that i have seen on any sony camera we now have active available in 4k but it actually seems much improved over other cameras that have done this before so there's two image stabilization modes you have standard and you have active there's no crop in 4k on this camera when you have it off or in standard active mode does use a slight crop because it's actually doing a lot more to stabilize your video i sign this to a function key so that i can switch it up if i'm on a tripod i can turn it off the micro jitters seem to be pretty evened out on this and i'm finding that i can hand held this even with longer lenses it works absolutely fantastically it also gets a boost obviously if you're using a lens that supports optical image stabilization such as the 100 to 400 millimeter g master or even the 100 millimeter g master which is a little bit older but very under appreciated this is one of my favorite sony lenses there are two new variants on the xavc-s codex up to now the standard was one that just supported long gop or group of pictures but we now have xavc-hs which is an h.265 file and also xavc-si which is your all-intro format so what are these crazy terms that you're using you might be wondering well if you're not familiar with the terms long gop and all intra these are two different ways that you can interpret video footage obviously video footage is a series of frames with long gop it is a much more efficient format it's easy on your computer when you're editing if you don't know what you've been shooting it's probably logging op and gop or gop stands for group of pictures and so what it does is it has an intra frame but it has these intermediary frames that aren't rendered at quite as high resolution basically the video is done in a way where your eye will see it as final video but you are not noticing that you're missing stuff in those details so that's the way the long gap works all intro is the opposite of that that's where every frame is interest so if you think of like movie film and where every frame is an image and this is much more taxing on your computer but you would want to switch over to this when you're shooting something that has a lot of motion really high detail so like things like falling water render really well is all intro it's really cool to have this option in here it is more taxing on your computer and your editor your fans will kick up when you're trying to edit with this but it's a great picture in the end i don't want to use it for everything personally but it's there when i need it and so this is really cool to finally have in this camera we also now have the ability when you're shooting externally to get 16-bit raw video that is actually the full sensor readout and you can do this at the same time you're actually recording another video format in camera so this is pretty exceptional if you're somebody who really wants access to raw video this is now possible of course at the time i'm recording this i couldn't find anything that this would work on you need an external recorder that supports it i really like the atomos ninja 5 and i think the atomos if i had to guess i don't know would probably be including this in a firmware update soon but unfortunately at the time i'm recording i did not have a way of testing this so that is something to come i also would like to point out that there's a few enhancements to autofocus that we haven't seen before so we've got five settings for subject shift sensitivity and we have seven settings for rack focus shots so if you want to do something cinematic just by using the touch screen i like changing the focus between two objects you can set this up so you're going to see exactly how fast it's going to work and you can really dial it in and get it just right now at the heart of this camera and the main reason that all of these new features are possible it's the new processor so this is a bionz xr which gives us up to eight times more processing power than the previous bionz x and it makes a gigantic difference so this means not only faster processing but it means a much faster response with network and file management you can also get improved color reproduction a more natural gradation faster autofocus face detection and a faster write speed to the card if you were using cf express type a memory cards now i was hoping i could test this out i just have the tough cards that sony makes which are pretty fast and so i don't know that i'd even be able to measure a speed difference but it's really interesting that they've chosen this format because it has one slot that you can fit either card into so we have dual slots that actually take two different card types so that's something that's actually very cool it's very forward thinking sony are going to be making the cf express type a cards they will be available when the camera is available i'll put pricing and stuff when i get it in the show description below there's also a reader that you will be able to use and there's also some other ways that you can get files in and out of the camera if you want to go over a network and get speed that way and i'm going to talk about all that in another dedicated video that i'm going to do just to compatibility with connections there's a lot of really cool stuff that sonia put on this camera it is a very forward thinking and i think that a lot of this stuff is going to come in very handy and be realized by video shooters and still photographers alike so i will put a link to that in the show description as well another favorite feature of mine on this camera is the viewfinder so this viewfinder is the world's first qxga 9.44 million dot oled evf so it has a 0.9 x magnification and a 41 degree field of view and it is gorgeous this is probably the closest and i'm gonna go on a limb by saying this but it's really better than any dslr reflex viewfinder this is my favorite new viewfinder on any system i've used today is absolutely gorgeous now you're going to get two options for this viewfinder you can shrink the display for a high point so if you shoot with eyeglasses and you can't get your eye as close to the evf as when you're not wearing glasses you can't see everything so it's nice to be able to just shrink this down and you can also adjust the frame rate for better performance versus better battery life you will get a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life but honestly both options are stunning for me it's the resolution that's really amazing the body design on the camera is very similar to the a7 r4 but slightly deeper towards the back and this accommodates a heat reduction design internally that does not use a fan so you don't have any noise or moving parts so gone or overheating issues finally sony has also lifted all recording time limits on this camera so none of that 29.9 minute stuff where it cuts off you can just go as long as you want you're really only going to be limited by battery life or your recording space so now when your kid signs up for that 15-hour wagner opera that they're going to show at the end of the school year you'll be able to film the whole thing no problem there's some other new physical changes as well we talked about the flip screen a little bit which is quite excellent the movie record button is no longer hard to get to it's placed on the top of the body basically where the c1 button was before everything's kind of moved over the card slots as i mentioned are very unique with the double slot configuration connections on this camera include a full-sized hdmi port thank goodness no more the little mini hdmis that have the tendency to get bent a lot we also have a headphone jack and a mic jack and the sony favorite multi-usb as well as finally usb-c connections this is going to give you an enormous amount of expandability to this camera again i'll have a dedicated video on that but you can power the camera you can recharge the battery with a usb brick you can also hook it up to an ethernet cable with the right adapter it's got a lot of flexibility all of a sudden by just adding that one port onto the camera you've got multiple audio options as well mic and headphone jacks if you want to use a rode mic monitor with headphones but sony also makes use of its multi-interface hot shoe this gives you options of either using the shotgun b1m that sony released last year with the a7r4 or you can use the xlr k3m yes these are their real names audio interface the a7s3 supports four channel 24-bit recording through the hot shoes so guess what no cables and you actually have 48 volt phantom power for any external mic you want to use and it just is powered through the camera so this is pretty amazing there's just a few little nitpicky observations that i have that would make this even better and so first of all hats off to sony for delivering i think that's one of their best cameras for low light performance especially for video it really is outstanding it's one of the best pictures i've seen on any sony camera it's one of the best image stabilization systems that i've seen on any sony camera i do think it's interesting that they have taken a video centric approach but it would be nice to have some of the features that panasonic has been giving us for a long time so for instance the ability to switch your shutter speed into shutter angle this is something that most people if you don't shoot a lot of video you're probably not going to care about but if you are a video shooter it's nice to know that you have a 180 degree shutter angle or if you want to vary that angle up for some reason you don't have to calculate the math with frame rate so that's one little thing the other thing is since we have video features right now it would be great to start seeing scopes and this is something that is nitpicky i mean we do have zebras they work just fine we have a histogram but it would be nice to have things like a vectorscope and maybe rgb parade so you can make sure that your color balance is right in camera these are little things that have nothing really to do inherently with the image quality per se but they are usability issues and i think that that those small little things would make this a much more usable camera for video shooters another thing that is super nitpicky and it's not just on this camera it's on the a7r4 and some other cameras as well but i wish the locks on the dials that have them were consistent it's nice to have a press on and off for your exposure compensation but then the mode selection dial is a press and turn and it would be nice if they were just both up and down locked or unlocked because sometimes you want to lock them sometimes you don't and it's just fiddly to be able to press that button in when you're turning these are super nitpicky but that's just one thing i wish were consistent and one other thing that's not so much a complaint it's just kind of a forward thinking idea but it would be to have the ability to load your own lut files into the camera for preview now we do have a gamma assist function in the camera so if you're shooting an s-log and you don't want to watch the washed out image or if you have a client around and they don't get it you can turn that on but it would be really nice to be able to preview luts that are your own and be able to load those in the camera again this is something that other cameras do and it would be really great to see sony move in this direction so this has been a lot of information and i hope that you've sat through it this far i want to know what you guys think i'm really excited about this camera don't forget about my giveaway i'll put a link in the description below i will catch you guys in the next video until then laterthis is the camera that you've been waiting for finally we have the sony a7s iii it's finally here after almost five years since its predecessor sony has clearly put a lot into this new model i can see why it was a five-year wait we've got new menus that are yeah well they're touch enabled we've got new file formats for both stills and video we've got 4k up to 120 frames a second raw output new heat management simultaneous recording internally and externally two dual function card slots there's a lot to unpack here but i'm really excited to share with you guys today the brand new sony a7s iii so a quick note here i'm actually using the sony a7s3 to film this because the s originally stood for sensitivity it also has an incredible range of video features here and it does really well in low light so i decided to reorganize my studio configuration for this video and take advantage of the low light possibilities in the sony a7s iii the original intention of the s series the s stood for sensitivity so what this meant is a lower megapixel configuration on the sensor which would give you better sensitivity in low light now the original a7s also had pretty good video capabilities as well it would shoot 4k externally you got 1080 internal it all looked really good people started using that camera and its successor for the video functions what's interesting is most camera companies do not break from the original intention and i think in this case with the a7 s3 this is the first time that we've seen a camera company in other words sony that's taken something and allowed it to adapt to what people want to use it for and i think that is actually pretty key so this is still a great sensitivity camera in terms of stills in low light but we also have phenomenal video capabilities we can go all the way up to 120p we can shoot 10 bit 422 internal and external and we can shoot both at the same time and the external signal can even be raw video it's really impressive what they've done with this so let's actually start with the new menu system this is something that sony users have been asking for well well actually pretty much forever and we finally have it the new menu is a split screen based interface so you can see all of the options that are in each folder without having to navigate in and out of sub menus and this can all be accessed via touch finally and there is touch and hold function so that you can see what each category is before selecting touch also works in the function menus and that's really nice because these are accessible while you are recording both internally and externally you can also see that this camera has a fully articulating flip screen as well so the new menus and the new layout just make way more sense than they've ever done before this is a fairly in-depth topic here because they've been completely overhauled so i've actually done a second video just dedicated to the new menu structure so i will link that in the description below this video so make sure you check that out but i do want to point out that one of my favorite changes in here is that we have differences now between stills mode and movie mode and now we can choose what settings to change when switching between those two modes it used to be you just had kind of one mode in the camera if you switched to video it just brought over all the settings from shooting stills and so this means now that you have two completely truly dedicated independent modes for this camera and they are customizable so a lot of the buzz around the a7 s3 is clearly around video but there is actually some great functionality for still shooters as well for those of you who want to shoot in low light and get excellent performance 12 megapixels i know it doesn't sound very high in today's megapixel race believe me this is still plenty big to get great looking images you can do prints up to 11 by 17 no problem and so the benefit for using this kind of sensor at 12 megapixels is going to be low light performance so you get a better pixel pitch because you have a much less crowded sensor which is going to give you a better signal to noise ratio so the noise part of that equation is going to be the same whether it's a high megapixel or a low megapixel count but the signal gets a boost because you have more room on the sensor which allows you to get much cleaner performance low light performance at high iso settings is absolutely outstanding compared to the previous versions of this camera you're going to get even better performance and it has really nice contrast even when you're really pushing this camera into high territory so another favorite of mine is there are now 759 phase detection autofocus points with a 92 percent area coverage of the frame we didn't have phase detection autofocus in previous versions of the a7s we finally got it it's a really welcome addition of course this is also compatible with the latest generation of sony autofocus that you're going to find on the a9 with with flexible spot tracking object recognition and of course you have both human and animal iaf this is interesting too on the front of the camera we've got both visible light and ir sensors and what these do is they're going to improve white balance accuracy in artificial light and we have a new capture format as well for stills mode so on any sony camera we've always had the ability to shoot raw jpeg or both raw and jpeg at the same time we also have a new file format which is an heif that stands for high efficiency image format and this is something that you see in a lot of mobile phones now it's different than jpeg because you're going to have a more efficient or smaller file but what's interesting about these heif files is they actually record in hlg so you can select either 422 or 420 and as long as you have something where you can view that color space they are also bt 2020 so we're talking about hdr and there's a lot of really interesting edit possibilities at the time i'm filming this imaging edge is the only thing that will see these i had trouble with anything else and what's interesting is i actually could open them on my mac in the finder you could even preview the file by hitting the space bar couldn't get him to open in anything else photoshop would crash photos would crash lightroom wouldn't even bring him in so this is kind of a work in progress so it's more forward thinking than sony have been in the past and i think it's kind of a cool addition to have on there also impressive is the five axis in body image stabilization which is now going to give you a 5.5 step compensation you can shoot up to 10 frames continuous with either mechanical or electronic shutter this isn't the stack sensor from the a9 cameras so we're not going to get the 20 frames per second but it's still a decent speed and what's interesting is you can now get up to 1000 raw plus jpeg frame capacity in the buffer so there's a lot of performance and the autofocus performance is going to be accurate down to -6 ev so you're going to get really good auto focus in very low light this is probably a good time to mention that in the month of august i am going to be doing a camera giveaway and if you want more information i will put a link in the description below when you go to that link you will have a way to sign up it's just a random drawing and i'm giving away basically a four thousand dollar budget of the camera and or lens combination of your choice so if you want to get an a7s three this is a great time to do it now there are a couple ways of increasing your odds of winning if you own my preset packs so if you haven't bought them i have links in there these are preset packs you're seeing them in this video i'm using on various images some of them are straight out of camera some of them i did some edits on these are presets that i use on a regular basis i have designed them to work in both lightroom and capture one and if you buy presets you can increase your odds of winning you don't have to of course you can just enter the giveaway as is but it's a great way to support the channel and i thought that 2020 is kind of a dud year so why don't we make the summer a little bit more awesome than usual so i thought it'd be a great time to do a giveaway so check it out so let's go ahead and talk about the star of the show which most of you are waiting to hear let's go ahead and talk about video so the a7s3 gives you 4k full pixel readout with no bending in all modes and you're going to get this up to 120 frames per second this is also finally the camera that sony gives us 10 bit depth with 422 color sampling for internal recording and the quality is excellent the files are gorgeous and the move to 10-bit gives you files that you're really going to get a lot of flexibility with in post-production which are going to give you a much higher latitude for color grading and exposure adjustment so one of the challenges is when particularly if you're shooting in low light with digital video noise tends to hide in shadows and typically when you have an 8-bit depth on your file you're not going to get a whole lot of latitude to recover any shadow detail information in but with 10 bit it's clearly possible now if you shoot an s-log 3 you're going to see probably the biggest difference if i toggle this on and off you're going to see that i can actually grade it and i can actually recover quite a bit of shadow detail so it's really nice to have sony says that in s-log 3 you're going to get over 15 stops of dynamic range to work with and it also works down to 160 iso and this is way more versatile than the higher iso minimums that we've traditionally had in sony cameras so 160 iso makes this way more versatile image stabilization is probably the best that i have seen on any sony camera we now have active available in 4k but it actually seems much improved over other cameras that have done this before so there's two image stabilization modes you have standard and you have active there's no crop in 4k on this camera when you have it off or in standard active mode does use a slight crop because it's actually doing a lot more to stabilize your video i sign this to a function key so that i can switch it up if i'm on a tripod i can turn it off the micro jitters seem to be pretty evened out on this and i'm finding that i can hand held this even with longer lenses it works absolutely fantastically it also gets a boost obviously if you're using a lens that supports optical image stabilization such as the 100 to 400 millimeter g master or even the 100 millimeter g master which is a little bit older but very under appreciated this is one of my favorite sony lenses there are two new variants on the xavc-s codex up to now the standard was one that just supported long gop or group of pictures but we now have xavc-hs which is an h.265 file and also xavc-si which is your all-intro format so what are these crazy terms that you're using you might be wondering well if you're not familiar with the terms long gop and all intra these are two different ways that you can interpret video footage obviously video footage is a series of frames with long gop it is a much more efficient format it's easy on your computer when you're editing if you don't know what you've been shooting it's probably logging op and gop or gop stands for group of pictures and so what it does is it has an intra frame but it has these intermediary frames that aren't rendered at quite as high resolution basically the video is done in a way where your eye will see it as final video but you are not noticing that you're missing stuff in those details so that's the way the long gap works all intro is the opposite of that that's where every frame is interest so if you think of like movie film and where every frame is an image and this is much more taxing on your computer but you would want to switch over to this when you're shooting something that has a lot of motion really high detail so like things like falling water render really well is all intro it's really cool to have this option in here it is more taxing on your computer and your editor your fans will kick up when you're trying to edit with this but it's a great picture in the end i don't want to use it for everything personally but it's there when i need it and so this is really cool to finally have in this camera we also now have the ability when you're shooting externally to get 16-bit raw video that is actually the full sensor readout and you can do this at the same time you're actually recording another video format in camera so this is pretty exceptional if you're somebody who really wants access to raw video this is now possible of course at the time i'm recording this i couldn't find anything that this would work on you need an external recorder that supports it i really like the atomos ninja 5 and i think the atomos if i had to guess i don't know would probably be including this in a firmware update soon but unfortunately at the time i'm recording i did not have a way of testing this so that is something to come i also would like to point out that there's a few enhancements to autofocus that we haven't seen before so we've got five settings for subject shift sensitivity and we have seven settings for rack focus shots so if you want to do something cinematic just by using the touch screen i like changing the focus between two objects you can set this up so you're going to see exactly how fast it's going to work and you can really dial it in and get it just right now at the heart of this camera and the main reason that all of these new features are possible it's the new processor so this is a bionz xr which gives us up to eight times more processing power than the previous bionz x and it makes a gigantic difference so this means not only faster processing but it means a much faster response with network and file management you can also get improved color reproduction a more natural gradation faster autofocus face detection and a faster write speed to the card if you were using cf express type a memory cards now i was hoping i could test this out i just have the tough cards that sony makes which are pretty fast and so i don't know that i'd even be able to measure a speed difference but it's really interesting that they've chosen this format because it has one slot that you can fit either card into so we have dual slots that actually take two different card types so that's something that's actually very cool it's very forward thinking sony are going to be making the cf express type a cards they will be available when the camera is available i'll put pricing and stuff when i get it in the show description below there's also a reader that you will be able to use and there's also some other ways that you can get files in and out of the camera if you want to go over a network and get speed that way and i'm going to talk about all that in another dedicated video that i'm going to do just to compatibility with connections there's a lot of really cool stuff that sonia put on this camera it is a very forward thinking and i think that a lot of this stuff is going to come in very handy and be realized by video shooters and still photographers alike so i will put a link to that in the show description as well another favorite feature of mine on this camera is the viewfinder so this viewfinder is the world's first qxga 9.44 million dot oled evf so it has a 0.9 x magnification and a 41 degree field of view and it is gorgeous this is probably the closest and i'm gonna go on a limb by saying this but it's really better than any dslr reflex viewfinder this is my favorite new viewfinder on any system i've used today is absolutely gorgeous now you're going to get two options for this viewfinder you can shrink the display for a high point so if you shoot with eyeglasses and you can't get your eye as close to the evf as when you're not wearing glasses you can't see everything so it's nice to be able to just shrink this down and you can also adjust the frame rate for better performance versus better battery life you will get a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life but honestly both options are stunning for me it's the resolution that's really amazing the body design on the camera is very similar to the a7 r4 but slightly deeper towards the back and this accommodates a heat reduction design internally that does not use a fan so you don't have any noise or moving parts so gone or overheating issues finally sony has also lifted all recording time limits on this camera so none of that 29.9 minute stuff where it cuts off you can just go as long as you want you're really only going to be limited by battery life or your recording space so now when your kid signs up for that 15-hour wagner opera that they're going to show at the end of the school year you'll be able to film the whole thing no problem there's some other new physical changes as well we talked about the flip screen a little bit which is quite excellent the movie record button is no longer hard to get to it's placed on the top of the body basically where the c1 button was before everything's kind of moved over the card slots as i mentioned are very unique with the double slot configuration connections on this camera include a full-sized hdmi port thank goodness no more the little mini hdmis that have the tendency to get bent a lot we also have a headphone jack and a mic jack and the sony favorite multi-usb as well as finally usb-c connections this is going to give you an enormous amount of expandability to this camera again i'll have a dedicated video on that but you can power the camera you can recharge the battery with a usb brick you can also hook it up to an ethernet cable with the right adapter it's got a lot of flexibility all of a sudden by just adding that one port onto the camera you've got multiple audio options as well mic and headphone jacks if you want to use a rode mic monitor with headphones but sony also makes use of its multi-interface hot shoe this gives you options of either using the shotgun b1m that sony released last year with the a7r4 or you can use the xlr k3m yes these are their real names audio interface the a7s3 supports four channel 24-bit recording through the hot shoes so guess what no cables and you actually have 48 volt phantom power for any external mic you want to use and it just is powered through the camera so this is pretty amazing there's just a few little nitpicky observations that i have that would make this even better and so first of all hats off to sony for delivering i think that's one of their best cameras for low light performance especially for video it really is outstanding it's one of the best pictures i've seen on any sony camera it's one of the best image stabilization systems that i've seen on any sony camera i do think it's interesting that they have taken a video centric approach but it would be nice to have some of the features that panasonic has been giving us for a long time so for instance the ability to switch your shutter speed into shutter angle this is something that most people if you don't shoot a lot of video you're probably not going to care about but if you are a video shooter it's nice to know that you have a 180 degree shutter angle or if you want to vary that angle up for some reason you don't have to calculate the math with frame rate so that's one little thing the other thing is since we have video features right now it would be great to start seeing scopes and this is something that is nitpicky i mean we do have zebras they work just fine we have a histogram but it would be nice to have things like a vectorscope and maybe rgb parade so you can make sure that your color balance is right in camera these are little things that have nothing really to do inherently with the image quality per se but they are usability issues and i think that that those small little things would make this a much more usable camera for video shooters another thing that is super nitpicky and it's not just on this camera it's on the a7r4 and some other cameras as well but i wish the locks on the dials that have them were consistent it's nice to have a press on and off for your exposure compensation but then the mode selection dial is a press and turn and it would be nice if they were just both up and down locked or unlocked because sometimes you want to lock them sometimes you don't and it's just fiddly to be able to press that button in when you're turning these are super nitpicky but that's just one thing i wish were consistent and one other thing that's not so much a complaint it's just kind of a forward thinking idea but it would be to have the ability to load your own lut files into the camera for preview now we do have a gamma assist function in the camera so if you're shooting an s-log and you don't want to watch the washed out image or if you have a client around and they don't get it you can turn that on but it would be really nice to be able to preview luts that are your own and be able to load those in the camera again this is something that other cameras do and it would be really great to see sony move in this direction so this has been a lot of information and i hope that you've sat through it this far i want to know what you guys think i'm really excited about this camera don't forget about my giveaway i'll put a link in the description below i will catch you guys in the next video until then laterthis is the camera that you've been waiting for finally we have the sony a7s iii it's finally here after almost five years since its predecessor sony has clearly put a lot into this new model i can see why it was a five-year wait we've got new menus that are yeah well they're touch enabled we've got new file formats for both stills and video we've got 4k up to 120 frames a second raw output new heat management simultaneous recording internally and externally two dual function card slots there's a lot to unpack here but i'm really excited to share with you guys today the brand new sony a7s iii so a quick note here i'm actually using the sony a7s3 to film this because the s originally stood for sensitivity it also has an incredible range of video features here and it does really well in low light so i decided to reorganize my studio configuration for this video and take advantage of the low light possibilities in the sony a7s iii the original intention of the s series the s stood for sensitivity so what this meant is a lower megapixel configuration on the sensor which would give you better sensitivity in low light now the original a7s also had pretty good video capabilities as well it would shoot 4k externally you got 1080 internal it all looked really good people started using that camera and its successor for the video functions what's interesting is most camera companies do not break from the original intention and i think in this case with the a7 s3 this is the first time that we've seen a camera company in other words sony that's taken something and allowed it to adapt to what people want to use it for and i think that is actually pretty key so this is still a great sensitivity camera in terms of stills in low light but we also have phenomenal video capabilities we can go all the way up to 120p we can shoot 10 bit 422 internal and external and we can shoot both at the same time and the external signal can even be raw video it's really impressive what they've done with this so let's actually start with the new menu system this is something that sony users have been asking for well well actually pretty much forever and we finally have it the new menu is a split screen based interface so you can see all of the options that are in each folder without having to navigate in and out of sub menus and this can all be accessed via touch finally and there is touch and hold function so that you can see what each category is before selecting touch also works in the function menus and that's really nice because these are accessible while you are recording both internally and externally you can also see that this camera has a fully articulating flip screen as well so the new menus and the new layout just make way more sense than they've ever done before this is a fairly in-depth topic here because they've been completely overhauled so i've actually done a second video just dedicated to the new menu structure so i will link that in the description below this video so make sure you check that out but i do want to point out that one of my favorite changes in here is that we have differences now between stills mode and movie mode and now we can choose what settings to change when switching between those two modes it used to be you just had kind of one mode in the camera if you switched to video it just brought over all the settings from shooting stills and so this means now that you have two completely truly dedicated independent modes for this camera and they are customizable so a lot of the buzz around the a7 s3 is clearly around video but there is actually some great functionality for still shooters as well for those of you who want to shoot in low light and get excellent performance 12 megapixels i know it doesn't sound very high in today's megapixel race believe me this is still plenty big to get great looking images you can do prints up to 11 by 17 no problem and so the benefit for using this kind of sensor at 12 megapixels is going to be low light performance so you get a better pixel pitch because you have a much less crowded sensor which is going to give you a better signal to noise ratio so the noise part of that equation is going to be the same whether it's a high megapixel or a low megapixel count but the signal gets a boost because you have more room on the sensor which allows you to get much cleaner performance low light performance at high iso settings is absolutely outstanding compared to the previous versions of this camera you're going to get even better performance and it has really nice contrast even when you're really pushing this camera into high territory so another favorite of mine is there are now 759 phase detection autofocus points with a 92 percent area coverage of the frame we didn't have phase detection autofocus in previous versions of the a7s we finally got it it's a really welcome addition of course this is also compatible with the latest generation of sony autofocus that you're going to find on the a9 with with flexible spot tracking object recognition and of course you have both human and animal iaf this is interesting too on the front of the camera we've got both visible light and ir sensors and what these do is they're going to improve white balance accuracy in artificial light and we have a new capture format as well for stills mode so on any sony camera we've always had the ability to shoot raw jpeg or both raw and jpeg at the same time we also have a new file format which is an heif that stands for high efficiency image format and this is something that you see in a lot of mobile phones now it's different than jpeg because you're going to have a more efficient or smaller file but what's interesting about these heif files is they actually record in hlg so you can select either 422 or 420 and as long as you have something where you can view that color space they are also bt 2020 so we're talking about hdr and there's a lot of really interesting edit possibilities at the time i'm filming this imaging edge is the only thing that will see these i had trouble with anything else and what's interesting is i actually could open them on my mac in the finder you could even preview the file by hitting the space bar couldn't get him to open in anything else photoshop would crash photos would crash lightroom wouldn't even bring him in so this is kind of a work in progress so it's more forward thinking than sony have been in the past and i think it's kind of a cool addition to have on there also impressive is the five axis in body image stabilization which is now going to give you a 5.5 step compensation you can shoot up to 10 frames continuous with either mechanical or electronic shutter this isn't the stack sensor from the a9 cameras so we're not going to get the 20 frames per second but it's still a decent speed and what's interesting is you can now get up to 1000 raw plus jpeg frame capacity in the buffer so there's a lot of performance and the autofocus performance is going to be accurate down to -6 ev so you're going to get really good auto focus in very low light this is probably a good time to mention that in the month of august i am going to be doing a camera giveaway and if you want more information i will put a link in the description below when you go to that link you will have a way to sign up it's just a random drawing and i'm giving away basically a four thousand dollar budget of the camera and or lens combination of your choice so if you want to get an a7s three this is a great time to do it now there are a couple ways of increasing your odds of winning if you own my preset packs so if you haven't bought them i have links in there these are preset packs you're seeing them in this video i'm using on various images some of them are straight out of camera some of them i did some edits on these are presets that i use on a regular basis i have designed them to work in both lightroom and capture one and if you buy presets you can increase your odds of winning you don't have to of course you can just enter the giveaway as is but it's a great way to support the channel and i thought that 2020 is kind of a dud year so why don't we make the summer a little bit more awesome than usual so i thought it'd be a great time to do a giveaway so check it out so let's go ahead and talk about the star of the show which most of you are waiting to hear let's go ahead and talk about video so the a7s3 gives you 4k full pixel readout with no bending in all modes and you're going to get this up to 120 frames per second this is also finally the camera that sony gives us 10 bit depth with 422 color sampling for internal recording and the quality is excellent the files are gorgeous and the move to 10-bit gives you files that you're really going to get a lot of flexibility with in post-production which are going to give you a much higher latitude for color grading and exposure adjustment so one of the challenges is when particularly if you're shooting in low light with digital video noise tends to hide in shadows and typically when you have an 8-bit depth on your file you're not going to get a whole lot of latitude to recover any shadow detail information in but with 10 bit it's clearly possible now if you shoot an s-log 3 you're going to see probably the biggest difference if i toggle this on and off you're going to see that i can actually grade it and i can actually recover quite a bit of shadow detail so it's really nice to have sony says that in s-log 3 you're going to get over 15 stops of dynamic range to work with and it also works down to 160 iso and this is way more versatile than the higher iso minimums that we've traditionally had in sony cameras so 160 iso makes this way more versatile image stabilization is probably the best that i have seen on any sony camera we now have active available in 4k but it actually seems much improved over other cameras that have done this before so there's two image stabilization modes you have standard and you have active there's no crop in 4k on this camera when you have it off or in standard active mode does use a slight crop because it's actually doing a lot more to stabilize your video i sign this to a function key so that i can switch it up if i'm on a tripod i can turn it off the micro jitters seem to be pretty evened out on this and i'm finding that i can hand held this even with longer lenses it works absolutely fantastically it also gets a boost obviously if you're using a lens that supports optical image stabilization such as the 100 to 400 millimeter g master or even the 100 millimeter g master which is a little bit older but very under appreciated this is one of my favorite sony lenses there are two new variants on the xavc-s codex up to now the standard was one that just supported long gop or group of pictures but we now have xavc-hs which is an h.265 file and also xavc-si which is your all-intro format so what are these crazy terms that you're using you might be wondering well if you're not familiar with the terms long gop and all intra these are two different ways that you can interpret video footage obviously video footage is a series of frames with long gop it is a much more efficient format it's easy on your computer when you're editing if you don't know what you've been shooting it's probably logging op and gop or gop stands for group of pictures and so what it does is it has an intra frame but it has these intermediary frames that aren't rendered at quite as high resolution basically the video is done in a way where your eye will see it as final video but you are not noticing that you're missing stuff in those details so that's the way the long gap works all intro is the opposite of that that's where every frame is interest so if you think of like movie film and where every frame is an image and this is much more taxing on your computer but you would want to switch over to this when you're shooting something that has a lot of motion really high detail so like things like falling water render really well is all intro it's really cool to have this option in here it is more taxing on your computer and your editor your fans will kick up when you're trying to edit with this but it's a great picture in the end i don't want to use it for everything personally but it's there when i need it and so this is really cool to finally have in this camera we also now have the ability when you're shooting externally to get 16-bit raw video that is actually the full sensor readout and you can do this at the same time you're actually recording another video format in camera so this is pretty exceptional if you're somebody who really wants access to raw video this is now possible of course at the time i'm recording this i couldn't find anything that this would work on you need an external recorder that supports it i really like the atomos ninja 5 and i think the atomos if i had to guess i don't know would probably be including this in a firmware update soon but unfortunately at the time i'm recording i did not have a way of testing this so that is something to come i also would like to point out that there's a few enhancements to autofocus that we haven't seen before so we've got five settings for subject shift sensitivity and we have seven settings for rack focus shots so if you want to do something cinematic just by using the touch screen i like changing the focus between two objects you can set this up so you're going to see exactly how fast it's going to work and you can really dial it in and get it just right now at the heart of this camera and the main reason that all of these new features are possible it's the new processor so this is a bionz xr which gives us up to eight times more processing power than the previous bionz x and it makes a gigantic difference so this means not only faster processing but it means a much faster response with network and file management you can also get improved color reproduction a more natural gradation faster autofocus face detection and a faster write speed to the card if you were using cf express type a memory cards now i was hoping i could test this out i just have the tough cards that sony makes which are pretty fast and so i don't know that i'd even be able to measure a speed difference but it's really interesting that they've chosen this format because it has one slot that you can fit either card into so we have dual slots that actually take two different card types so that's something that's actually very cool it's very forward thinking sony are going to be making the cf express type a cards they will be available when the camera is available i'll put pricing and stuff when i get it in the show description below there's also a reader that you will be able to use and there's also some other ways that you can get files in and out of the camera if you want to go over a network and get speed that way and i'm going to talk about all that in another dedicated video that i'm going to do just to compatibility with connections there's a lot of really cool stuff that sonia put on this camera it is a very forward thinking and i think that a lot of this stuff is going to come in very handy and be realized by video shooters and still photographers alike so i will put a link to that in the show description as well another favorite feature of mine on this camera is the viewfinder so this viewfinder is the world's first qxga 9.44 million dot oled evf so it has a 0.9 x magnification and a 41 degree field of view and it is gorgeous this is probably the closest and i'm gonna go on a limb by saying this but it's really better than any dslr reflex viewfinder this is my favorite new viewfinder on any system i've used today is absolutely gorgeous now you're going to get two options for this viewfinder you can shrink the display for a high point so if you shoot with eyeglasses and you can't get your eye as close to the evf as when you're not wearing glasses you can't see everything so it's nice to be able to just shrink this down and you can also adjust the frame rate for better performance versus better battery life you will get a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life but honestly both options are stunning for me it's the resolution that's really amazing the body design on the camera is very similar to the a7 r4 but slightly deeper towards the back and this accommodates a heat reduction design internally that does not use a fan so you don't have any noise or moving parts so gone or overheating issues finally sony has also lifted all recording time limits on this camera so none of that 29.9 minute stuff where it cuts off you can just go as long as you want you're really only going to be limited by battery life or your recording space so now when your kid signs up for that 15-hour wagner opera that they're going to show at the end of the school year you'll be able to film the whole thing no problem there's some other new physical changes as well we talked about the flip screen a little bit which is quite excellent the movie record button is no longer hard to get to it's placed on the top of the body basically where the c1 button was before everything's kind of moved over the card slots as i mentioned are very unique with the double slot configuration connections on this camera include a full-sized hdmi port thank goodness no more the little mini hdmis that have the tendency to get bent a lot we also have a headphone jack and a mic jack and the sony favorite multi-usb as well as finally usb-c connections this is going to give you an enormous amount of expandability to this camera again i'll have a dedicated video on that but you can power the camera you can recharge the battery with a usb brick you can also hook it up to an ethernet cable with the right adapter it's got a lot of flexibility all of a sudden by just adding that one port onto the camera you've got multiple audio options as well mic and headphone jacks if you want to use a rode mic monitor with headphones but sony also makes use of its multi-interface hot shoe this gives you options of either using the shotgun b1m that sony released last year with the a7r4 or you can use the xlr k3m yes these are their real names audio interface the a7s3 supports four channel 24-bit recording through the hot shoes so guess what no cables and you actually have 48 volt phantom power for any external mic you want to use and it just is powered through the camera so this is pretty amazing there's just a few little nitpicky observations that i have that would make this even better and so first of all hats off to sony for delivering i think that's one of their best cameras for low light performance especially for video it really is outstanding it's one of the best pictures i've seen on any sony camera it's one of the best image stabilization systems that i've seen on any sony camera i do think it's interesting that they have taken a video centric approach but it would be nice to have some of the features that panasonic has been giving us for a long time so for instance the ability to switch your shutter speed into shutter angle this is something that most people if you don't shoot a lot of video you're probably not going to care about but if you are a video shooter it's nice to know that you have a 180 degree shutter angle or if you want to vary that angle up for some reason you don't have to calculate the math with frame rate so that's one little thing the other thing is since we have video features right now it would be great to start seeing scopes and this is something that is nitpicky i mean we do have zebras they work just fine we have a histogram but it would be nice to have things like a vectorscope and maybe rgb parade so you can make sure that your color balance is right in camera these are little things that have nothing really to do inherently with the image quality per se but they are usability issues and i think that that those small little things would make this a much more usable camera for video shooters another thing that is super nitpicky and it's not just on this camera it's on the a7r4 and some other cameras as well but i wish the locks on the dials that have them were consistent it's nice to have a press on and off for your exposure compensation but then the mode selection dial is a press and turn and it would be nice if they were just both up and down locked or unlocked because sometimes you want to lock them sometimes you don't and it's just fiddly to be able to press that button in when you're turning these are super nitpicky but that's just one thing i wish were consistent and one other thing that's not so much a complaint it's just kind of a forward thinking idea but it would be to have the ability to load your own lut files into the camera for preview now we do have a gamma assist function in the camera so if you're shooting an s-log and you don't want to watch the washed out image or if you have a client around and they don't get it you can turn that on but it would be really nice to be able to preview luts that are your own and be able to load those in the camera again this is something that other cameras do and it would be really great to see sony move in this direction so this has been a lot of information and i hope that you've sat through it this far i want to know what you guys think i'm really excited about this camera don't forget about my giveaway i'll put a link in the description below i will catch you guys in the next video until then later\n"