How to properly set up your Sony A7s for video – a Philip Bloom seminar

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by Nino LeitnerApril 27^th, 2015

EDIT: Philip wanted to add in regards to his “fast access to audio levels” comment, that it can be done as follow:
Settings-Custom key settings- Custom button (3 is easy to access)-Audio Rec Level. Now you can access your level directly.

The Sony A7s has become the turn-to camera for many smaller run-and-gun purposes due to its size, its video functionality (including proper XAVC S codec, peaking, zebra …) and the incredible low-light performance. In fact, whenever I attend industry meetings like NAB or when I’m giving workshops I’m constantly amazed how omnipresent this camera has become in so little time, after it was introduced about a year ago. It certainly has taken over our cinema5D office here, with every team member using the camera constantly, and me personally owning 2 by now …

The market is much different from 5 years ago, when the Canon 5D Mark II was first introduced, with many more large-sensor cameras to chose from. However, it is fair to say that the Sony A7s has taken the spot of the 5D in the same price bracket, which is easy to see considering how omnipresent the camera is these days.

Late last year, my friend Philip Bloom has given a free Sony A7s workshop at our main site sponsor’s headquarters B&H in New York for a selected few. Attendees were to shoot a short film with the A7s in a short amount of time. Before they went out to gather their footage, Philip ran through the most important settings of the camera which you absolutely need to know in order to shoot proper video with the Sony A7s.

People who are used to shooting with the A7s might know most of what is discussed in this video already. However, I urge every A7s user to watch it – there’s a few things that many people certainly weren’t aware of before:

Some interesting topics covered in this free seminar, among many other things:

• Different gamma curves in different Picture Profiles (e.g. Cine2, Cine3, Cine4 or SLOG2)
• Detail/Sharpness settings
• Dual video file recording with XAVC S and MP4 proxies (which can be transferred to your smartphone to be posted online right away)
• How to expose properly with this camera (avoiding noise)
• Setting up audio for internal and external recording (attention: Philip told me he made a mistake in this seminar – there actually is a way to change audio levels during recording, but you have to assign audio to a custom button to do that)
• Frame guides for different aspect ratios
• external HDMI quirks