there are a few things that stand out to me when i go back and look at the first
video that we ever made about the primary Linus media group camera our
sony fs700 first i'm amazed at how many
of the comments on that video are about how stupid it was to buy and how
overkill the camera is for the type of content we produce
second i'm amazed by how right those comments were i mean i knew absolutely
nothing about this device and how to unlock its capabilities all i really had
was these hopes for how we could use it
to evolve our content and grow this brand new company that i was starting as
long as we could find and keep the right talent around who did know how to use it
and then third i'm amazed at in spite of me not really understanding this
stuff very well when i made the call to spend eight thousand dollars on this
based on the promise of affordable 4k recording in the future i mean it's
still the most expensive piece of equipment that we've ever purchased as a
company how well it has kept up with us as our
needs have changed and how it continues to adapt with us a mere few days ago it
actually finally got the easy flexible
4k capability oh by the way if you think 4k is for chumps and are more interested
in triple surround curved 34-inch
monitor gaming rigs that video is coming soon make sure you're subscribed anyway
the 4k capability that i always wanted from it so i figured now would be a
great time to show you guys how it got there and some of the other ways that
it's changed over the last two years
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more our early camera wig was very basic we
had decent audio from day one with a sennheiser ew 100 g3 and the kit
lavalier mic but mounted to our pretty simple tripod and head we just had the
camera body the wussy battery that comes with it the
hand grip that comes with it the built-in screen which is in the least
ergonomic position possible by the way sony the bundled zoom lens that can't
even maintain a constant aperture when zooming and the built-in sd card
recording slot that's responsible for many of the cameras early limitations
there wasn't an upgrade for that at the time though so we kind of had to live
with that but the first thing that we did change was to upgrade the battery to
some cheap third-party high-capacity ones for all-day operation at trade
shows and edsel and brandon i guess also got so frustrated with the kit lens that
they started bringing their own lenses in for us to use at work something that
we actually didn't address by buying our own company lenses until less than a
year ago lol the next upgrade was one that caused
some pretty heated conversations internally especially between me and
brandon because it represented not just a 400 plus
dollar investment into this listtech teleprompter but a significant stylistic
change in our content i mean a move away
from the off the cuff product impressions with a dynamically moving
camera that made Linus tech tips Linus tech tips to this premeditated scripted
content with a static camera placement and then b-roll i caved eventually
and honestly it and the redrock mount
something we originally bought to fashion a ghetto shoulder rig for show coverage and a galaxy tab 10.1 tablet
have turned into a symbol for what i think was a huge
turning point for us as content creators i mean youtube has changed and by
adapting to this more professional style
when we did we put ourselves on the leading edge of web tech review
production quality rather than allowing ourselves to fall behind even if it
means i'm reaching for my little remote at my hip here all the time i know quite
a few of you are wondering what the heck is he doing down there next up was another upgrade that brandon
pushed really hard for but that i didn't want to get you can probably see a
pattern developing here and we picked up a small hd ac7 external HDMI video
monitor i figured well there's a screen
on the camera why do we need another one but once again brandon was right because
not only did it help keep images in focus it's and a flexible ARM mount were
a huge ergonomic improvement especially
when shoulder mounting the camera so you can put the screen right in front of you
or shooting from awkward angles now glam b-roll adds production values
to your video but it also adds a lot of time especially when you're manually
screwing and unscrewing mounting plates every time you move the camera from
tripod to slider or shoulder mount or whatever else so brandon asked for
another tripod and a few sets of quick releases from kessler for fast camera
relocation and i kind of went yeah no problem you know i looked at the tripod
it's cheap no big deal but what these freaking plate and release combo
units are almost a hundred and fifty dollars a pop i mean what did they make
them out of he was right about the time savings though and they've probably paid for
themselves and saved pocket change that we would normally have had to use to
swap out camera plates but uh man
i don't even know what to say about those they were too expensive but i also
wouldn't return them because men are they ever handy it was around this time that sony
released their firmware update for the fs700 finally that would give it 4k
recording too bad that it unexpectedly cost hundreds of dollars and required
you to send your camera into a sony service center in order to have them
perform the upgrade fortunately they have a location about 15 minutes from
our office so aside from the inconvenience and cost the only really
annoying thing about the whole experience was that they refused to service our broken hand grip record
button claiming that it was normal wear and tear on the button and i was over a
month out of warranty i mean it turns out that they diagnosed it wrong anyway
so i found some other eighth inch cable
with a jack on the end soldered it onto it and it works like a charm now in fact
i think it even gives our camera a bit more you know character but it was still
a little frustrating the next one was a big upgrade the
second most expensive item for us yet including all the accessories so we
picked up some eneloop pro xx batteries for our wireless mic so we wouldn't have
to change out the batteries as much that was no big deal but then we got the
recording unit that we needed to finally record in 4k
or so we thought it cost five thousand
dollars for our convergent design odyssey 7q recorder an anson bauer
battery charger and mounting plate two 512 gig ssds with proprietary firmware
to work with it and a couple cables and it was only when our pre-order arrived
that i realized i hadn't really read the fine print and 4k recording wasn't even
enabled yet i mean we did get higher bitrate 1080p recording a slightly
bigger and noticeably better OLED external display with more onboard
diagnostics and stuff and the firmware update to record 4k raw including
continuous 240fps raw recording did come
pretty quickly and that did come in handy but i'd have probably held off if
i'd known that the 4k prores firmware was going to take a year after that time
because the 4k raw workflow is terrible
it's so much data it takes up so much space it's really hard to work with
it was at this stage that i finally bought some lenses so that brandon and
edsel wouldn't have to bring their own to work there wasn't a real quality
upgrade to the content or anything at this time though because we've replaced
brandon's tampon 24 to 70 with our own
tampon 24 sorry did i say tampon just a
bug brandon because i meant tamron and then we
picked up tamron's 90 millimeter macro lens for close-ups as well
the next round of upgrades has some pretty cool stuff in it our sennheiser
kit lav cable started fraying for the
second time so we preemptively picked up a countryman b6 lavalier
pretty sweet it sounds better than our old one it is so small that i can just
tape it to anything with tuck tape on the inside of my shirt or hide it in a
buttonhole and it's actually waterproof something we took advantage of when i
did the ice bucket challenge and it was also around this time that we finally
upgraded our old tripod head to the manfrotto 509 hd and man
i'm not a camera dork but
even i can tell the difference it makes smooth tilts and pans so easy that i'm
not convinced we even need brandon around anymore and unlike our old one
which in its defense did serve us well and has seen so much overburdened action
that the rubber on one of the knobs like came right off the lock is much more
conveniently placed on the left side of the tripod so a right-handed shooter
doesn't always have to be reaching around the tripod which is pretty nice
which i guess brings us to wrap-up time and the reason for us to do this video
now out of the box two years ago the fs700 could record 1080p at up to 60
frames per second continuously with audio and up to 240 FPS slow-mo with an
8-second burst and up to 960 FPS in a
2-second burst if you were willing to sacrifice three quarters of your
resolution the issue was that for both continuously
recorded and slow-mo burst footage
the sd card media was simply not fast
enough for high bitrate video files that are suitable for color correction and
while physically the camera has been rock solid other than that time we got it wet
and it wouldn't turn on until i disassembled the housing and dried it out for the weekend some significant
upgrades were needed for it to stay competitive now and moving into 2015 but
they pulled it off and i've got to hand it to sony i don't always like their way
they run their business but through their partnership with convergent design
they really delivered and we love this camera it was a great investment which
leads us to the last upgrade one we actually didn't have to pay any extra
for now while you may have noticed that we've done some 4k uploads in the last
little while we were actually using an older firmware that
took 4k raw footage and then down sampled it to 1080p prores
i mean we did discover that it looked really good even when you re-up
converted it to 4k so that's why some of our videos have been in 4k but it's
actually been kind of feco4k two days ago though the proper 4k prores
firmware dropped and now we are ready to go full 4k whenever we shoot with our
fs700 because we've also got our brand new secondary camera a panasonic gh4
that does internal 4k recording to high-speed sd cards and we've got our
upgraded workstations from the whole room water cooling project so
bring on the 4k baby we are ready
guys thanks for watching this behind the scenes look at the gear that we use like
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