How to Get the Best Image From Your Sony a7SIII!
The Sony a7SIII is quite possibly one of the most important mirrorless cameras to have come out recently. It offers an excellent variety of filmmaking options for people who shoot video, especially in an era where 4K is becoming the new standard for shooting video. From its 4K video recording, to 10-bit 4:2:2 color, to filming high frame rate slow motion, precise autofocus, and its high dynamic range; the Sony a7SIII is essentially a filmmaking powerhouse at a reasonable price (okay, so that depends if $3,498 is reasonable for you).
For those who would like to achieve the absolute best image from your Sony a7SIII, here is a little guide on how you can pull it off!
Choose Your Frame Rate, Any Frame Rate!
Whether you are shooting a feature film, music video, or a commercial; feel free to choose a frame rate that best fits the project you’re shooting. Personally, I mainly shoot 24fps on most of my projects.
Use the XAVC S-I Codec!
The a7SIII comes with a variety of codecs for you to use. Choosing a codec really depends on your use case. However, if you want the absolute best quality out of your a7SIII, the codec to choose would mainly be the XAVC S-I codec. The reason is because it records the highest bitrate at 4K at 240mbps and it’s intraframe recording, meaning that every frame is recorded separately. Having a high bitrate means more information is being recorded; therefore, giving you a cleaner overall image without possible blocky artifacts that you may see with highly compressed footage.
Shoot in 10-bit 4:2:2 Color!
Shooting in a higher color depth gives you a variety of benefits. It allows you greater flexibility for color grading in post, as well as any VFX work such as green screen. Having all of that color information means that your image will better suit HDR standards if you are shooting for that. And also, there will be smoother transitions between different shades of color, such as filming a blue sky, so there will be no color “banding”.
Use S-log3!
For those who aren’t familiar with log, it is essentially a way to significantly boost the dynamic range of your image by heavily reducing the contrast. When you are shooting in log, your footage will look very washed out and flat. Not to worry, this is a good thing! What log is doing is that it’s preserving the detail in the darkest of blacks and the brightest of whites. That way when you are in post-production, you can convert the footage to Rec. 709 using a LUT and it will show all of the detail that it has kept (I highly recommend Joel Famularo’s Phantom LUTs. They basically make your footage look like it was shot on an ARRI Alexa!).
On your a7SIII, navigate to your picture profile settings and set it to PP8. This is where S-Log3 is. Then, check to make sure your Color Mode is set to S-Gamut3.Cine. S-Log3 is considered the best setting for maximizing your camera’s dynamic range in the image to about 15 stops.
Optional: This is an optional choice as this is mostly subjective. In the PP8 settings, navigate down to where you see Detail. This dictates how digitally sharp your image will be overall. I personally set the detail to -3, however, feel free to set the detail to however you wish as long as it’s not above -2 because you can get chroma noise. Having the detail set at -7 by default is alright but sometimes it can come off as a little soft for some.
Pro Tip!: The a7SIII does have a special little secret that allows you to monitor your Log footage in a Rec. 709 color space so that you’re not constantly looking at a washed out image. This secret is called Gamma Display Assist. You can find this feature in the Setup menu, under Display Option. Turn this feature on and make sure the Gamma Display Assist Type is set to S-Log3->709(800%). I highly recommend configuring it to a custom button that you can press to turn on Gamma Display Assist. That way, you can turn it off quickly when you don’t need it.
Use the Native ISO!
Every picture profile has a different native ISO. In S-Log3’s case, its native ISO is 640. The a7SIII also happens to have a second base ISO, which is 12,800. Your native ISO is what will capture the best overall image without compromising too much noise.
Expose To The Right (ETTR)!
This technique is often a way to help compensate for darker tones at neutral exposure and help with achieving less noise in the overall image. What it generally means is exposing your image more to the right of your waveform, making it brighter. You can accomplish this by either using your waveform or by using the EV scale at the bottom of the screen that tells you how exposed the overall image is (the latter being ideally exposed between +1 to +1.7 stops). The EV scale really depends on what you’re shooting so don’t expect to always be shooting between 1-1.7 stops overexposed.
Disclaimer: Of course, there are better and more accurate ways to monitor exposure in your image. You can use Zebras on your a7SIII and configure them in a way that ensures you’re not losing information in your shot. If you’re using a monitor that supports false color, then that would be even better.
Properly White Balance Your Shot!
Your image is all for nothing if you don’t perform a proper white balance. One of the best ways to do this is by using a grey card! Show a grey card in front of the a7SIII and navigate to the camera’s custom white balance settings. The camera has an amazing feature of being able to select exactly what is white in your image and perform a white balance based off of that.
And BOOM! If everything checks out, your a7SIII should be giving you the highest quality image you can get out of the camera. I have been using these settings for a couple projects and they have turned out wonderfully beautiful for me. Of course, there are even more ways you can further improve the image, such as shooting in ProRes RAW with an Atomos Ninja V and using high quality lenses. However, those options are mostly optional and really depend on the project that you are shooting.
Hopefully, this little article serves you well. In the meantime, I will see you around!