Sony a7 III YouTubers: cont’d.

Forum member techjedi over at DPReview, after reading my post about the garbage YouTube videos shot by a7 III users, was generous enough to write:

With respect, there is plenty of footage. I think you may have just been using the wrong search keywords or were expecting vloggers studio videos to be a representation of production output.

In the case that you aren’t aware, real filmmaking, at all price points, requires using a color profile that looks terrible out of camera and must be post processed according to the aesthetic desire of the filmmaker. Some vloggers go to this effort, but others just take a standard profile with little processing.

Here are some examples that are attempting to show the camera’s filmmaking capability and not demonstrate mediocre minimal settings for vlogs.

Note that all of these examples are from the very first page of results when searching “sony a7 iii filmmaking examples”

I went ahead and reluctantly watched the first of many of the videos he linked to, a YouTuber who goes by the name of Henbu who’s got over 100,000 subscribers. And to my astonishment, it’s the most hideous looking image quality I’ve seen yet. The worst of the examples I posted earlier don’t even begin to approach the level of ineptitude seen here. In fact, it is probably the single best illustration of what I’ve been talking about: the complete absence of texture and detail; flat tonality; no color saturation and horrendous lighting – the very antithesis of what is generally considered ‘cinematic’ imagery. The resolution probably maxes out at somewhere around 540p, and all in all looks like it was shot with a potato or something Henbu found in a box of Cracker Jacks. But like Mr. Reid, I’m sure he does a lucrative business selling picture profile settings and LUTs to beginners mistakenly believing they will magically impart a filmic look to their dreadful footage.