Sony FX9 Series | Introduction & S-Cinetone

Hi, Carl here for ProAV TV, and today we are starting a new series of videos looking in detail at the new Sony FX9. This is definitely one of the most exciting cameras on the market at the moment, and one that is been getting a huge amount of attention from our customers. In many ways, this is the spiritual successor the incredibly popular fs7, a camera that has dominated the owner operator market, particularly for large sensor broadcast use here in the UK for the last few years. Because of that there are lot of FS7 owners out there looking at upgrading to this FX9 as it improves pretty much every aspect of the camera. Better picture, better ergonomics, dual native ISO, we are going to be talking lots on this channel as to how the FX9 will be an improvement to FS7 owners, but this is not a fs7 replacement. This is its own camera, in a new position in the lineup for Sony. It lays the foundations for Sony to fill in the wide gap in their full-frame lineup of cameras between stills cameras such as the A7 III, and cinema cameras such as the Venice. It's a completely new sensor, adding Phase Detection Hybrid Autofocus, Dual Native ISO, 6K down sampling and improved colour rendition. We haven’t had long with the camera, and the weather has been pretty appalling here recently, so rather than spending out short time with the camera trying to film something pretty, we instead decided to do a series of tests to examine and demonstrate each of these new features. We will have a video coming soon on High ISO performance and the autofocus, plus several videos discussing how the camera fits into various sectors of the market, just like we recently did with Canon’s new C500 II. But for our first test I wanted to look at colour. So colour is an area that Sony were often criticised for with the FS7 and FS5, however the Venice is an entire different situation, with fantastic skin tones and accurate colours. Sony are saying that the colour’s on the FX9 are much closer to the Venice than the fs7, and from what I have seen so far that does seem to be the case. Particularly with their new S-Cinetone profile. This is essentially a rec709 standard picture profile. But with a much softer highlight roll of and a different colour science behind it. It keeps the mid range saturation but without oversaturating the skin tones and looks far better in the highlights than normal picture profiles do. If we compare the new Cinetone profile to their standard rec709 in the fx9 you can see the difference straight away. The big difference is of course in the highlights, her white hat here is completely clipped and looks really ugly on the standard recording, while on the cinetone it looks great. That's the obvious difference, but theres also a definite subtler difference in the skin tones, they are slightly more natural and healthy in the cinetone while they look a little more washed out in the rec 709. Lets now compare it to the same shot done in S-Log 3 and apply a LC709 Type A look up table in resolve. Instantly we do see a difference, the skin tones look even better, but we have much lower contrast look overall. I’d want to tweak the white and black points a little in this image but its pretty much there, straight away. If we do the same thing on an interior scene under controlled lighting the difference is even more obvious. The contrast on the Cinetone still looks great, but the skintones now seem a little lifeless compared to the log with just a simple look up table on it. I think both the cinetone results and the log shows how far Sony have come with their colour science, but what do you think? Are you interested in using the S-Cinetone profile for your work? And what do you think of the colour performace of the new FX9? Let us know in the comments section, subscribe to this channel for more tests of the FX9 and other cameras and of course if you want to buy an FX9 then head over to Proav.co.uk. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.