Sony A7SII – Slow motion test – Setagaya Park, Tokyo December 2015

On a windy day last week I went to my local park to do some test shooting with my new A7SII in 120fps slow motion mode.
I shot handheld with Picture Profile off and the Neutral setting with auto white balance. I used a Pentax 35-70mm K-mount lens on a Fotoga adapter.
The footage was conformed to 24p in Premiere, black and white levels adjusted, some saturation and a touch of sharpening added.

My take aways from this are:

It looks pretty damn good.

120fps is not really slow enough for this kind of stuff, it looks great for people but the leaves were moving so fast in the wind that 240 or 480fps would look better.

I over exposed quite a few of the shots. I didn’t use an ND filter which I really should have. No built in ND’s is the A7SII’s biggest downside IMHO, well ok that and no XLR audio inputs unless you buy the expensive XLR-K2M.

Steady shot is pretty impressive but even with it this would have been better with a tripod, I was getting blown around by the wind. Luckily slow motion makes it look ok.

Even in this mode the footage is head and shoulders above 24p footage out of my trusty old 5DmkII. There is definitely a skin tone advantage to the 5D (if properly white balanced) but that obviously wasn’t apparent in this case.

My old Pentax K-mount lenses are surprisingly good. The 35-70 is prone to a little flaring but hey that’s cool right?

I guess I’d better do some 4K tests next…….

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