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April, 2025

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First two days with Sony NEX-FS100

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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
So I bought the Sony NEX-FS100 camera and the Nikon 35mm f/2D AF lens about a week ago. I spent a day roaming around Spokane with friends and filmed some skating, smoking, and driving around. Hopefully nobody is offended by the smoking haha, but I thought it would be interesting to see how smoke looked. I also wanted to test the low light, and just in case anybody is curious, those shots were lit with only one streetlight next to us (and some streetlights illuminating the background).

It is a mix of shots filmed at 1080p60p:24p, 1080p60p, and 720p60p, but I only exported the video at 720p24p.

This camera is AMAZING. It's so fun to shoot, functions perfectly, and is amazing to color grade. Most of these shots were filmed very hastily and not lit ideally, but it should give a basic idea of what this camera is capable of, especially if time were taken to set up the shots.

Password: buythiscamera

Sony NEX-FS100 Test from Will Start on Vimeo.

My first two days of filming with the Sony NEX-FS100. I tried to film a few different things to show how the camera performs. The night shots near the end were lit with only one streetlight.



Filmed and edited by Will Start.



Skater:

Evan Furbeyre



Filmed with:

Sony NEX-FS100 + Nikon 35mm f/2D AF Lens - 1080p60p:24p, 1080p24p, 720p60p



Edited with

Final Cut Pro 7



Color graded with:

Magic Bullet Looks 1.2



Music:

New Theory by Washed Out

14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
Obviously the last day shots are not in Spokane. I flew to NYC that day and just took a few shots as we drove to the hotel.
14 years ago
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1337
Posts: 31078 - Karma: 29,667
dat bokeh in the last shot, me gusta
14 years ago
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NJurkiewicz
Posts: 1597 - Karma: 697
looks so sick! I love this camera!
14 years ago
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Dwarftosser1
Posts: 2602 - Karma: 951
.

I hope to see great things come out of this camera come winter.
14 years ago
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skituner
Posts: 1162 - Karma: 127
looks really really good. does it have any usable autofocus or is it just manual?
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
I believe there is some sort of autofocus if you use sony lenses, but idk much about that.

i use nikon lenses only with this camera so i have no autofocus
14 years ago
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Shenanigans
Posts: 868 - Karma: 455
Looks great, really stoked to see your future work with it
14 years ago
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Tanner-D
Posts: 2061 - Karma: 4,116
So sick cant wait for the edits this winter
14 years ago
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SkiThe603
Posts: 5376 - Karma: 498
Dude the skating was so good with color, the jeans were the perfect jean blue and the mini looked sick. The smoking shots were nasty really clear. The shots in the city were just as good as the rest
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
glad to hear you enjoyed the color of the jeans. that was probably the thing i was most worried about. i didn't want them that blue but i wanted to add a blue hue to the blacks at the same time, so there was really no way around it. tried pulling up the mids a little bit hoping to catch the jeans but it didn't do any good.
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
yeah me too!



haha don't judge us for smoking kellen! if you're not down with it
14 years ago
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[evan]
Posts: 5628 - Karma: 117
How do you think that lense would perform on a Nikon DSLR?

It looks insanely clear, did that lense work better than say the kit 18-55mm in terms of clarity, or did you just use it for the wide angle?
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
I love the lens. smooth focus ring, seems like a decent build, pretty sharp, and the bokeh is so dope

idk how it compares to other nikon lenses since this is the first and only one i've ever used, but i'm loving it so far and i think it would be great on a dslr as well
14 years ago
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I.B
Posts: 8137 - Karma: 24,367
Private video :(((
14 years ago
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[evan]
Posts: 5628 - Karma: 117
the password is in the OP
14 years ago
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I.B
Posts: 8137 - Karma: 24,367
durp.




nice vid!
14 years ago
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CoachG
Posts: 2546 - Karma: 448
damn hippies. if you're gonna make a video of lighting one up, you gotta at least have some for everyone watching. But all kidding aside looks really dope! I'm hoping we get one of those bad boys at the rental house I work at.
14 years ago
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eheath
Posts: 61937 - Karma: 126,486
ive heard the kit lens af isnt that bad but definitely not as good as a fixed lens.
14 years ago
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horner
Posts: 2439 - Karma: 1,578
Get yourself some ND's man!
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
i do need some, but why do you say that? it was already sometimes a struggle to get the amount of light needed to get the dof that i wanted for some of these shots without bumping the gain and lowering the shutter, don't really see how ND's would have helped that...
14 years ago
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horner
Posts: 2439 - Karma: 1,578
It looked like you were controlling exposure with your shutter on a few shots, specifically the first 3. A 3 or 6 stop ND would allow you to still open up your lens and keep a standard shutter speed with natural looking motion. Unless you were going for the high shutter look. Also, don't be afraid to use gain. Up to 21 is still very usable without much noise.
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
i do control exposure with shutter speed a lot of the time. i know that's not the normal way to do it, but most people don't notice subtle changes in shutter speed; they do notice changes in dof. so for me, aperture holds priority over shutter. you're actually the first person to ever point out that you've noticed a change in shutter speed in my videos. not that you're the first to notice it, but nobody has said anything until now. i am kind of a fan of a higher shutter speed too. i used to shoot low but got sick of it.

i'm not really afraid to use gain, especially not after shooting at night. all that was shot with the gain cranked
14 years ago
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.Max.
Posts: 2930 - Karma: 701
Doesn't it use a black and white digital noise that's much less noticeable? That's what I heard?
14 years ago
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eheath
Posts: 61937 - Karma: 126,486
because running 10,000 shutter isn't that good...
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
never ran anything above 2,000 in this video, if that. the only situation i could see myself needing 10,000 shutter to limit light is for skiing, and i always have an ND filter for skiing.
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
and at a certain point, won't human motion just freeze? i'm sure if you took a photo at like 1,000 shutter it would freeze motion, so i don't get how anything higher than that will look any different. frozen motion is frozen motion. depends on what you're doing of course, but for something like walking i can hardly imagine it would matter that much after a certain point
14 years ago
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McLeod
Posts: 1762 - Karma: 1,582
huh?
14 years ago
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.Max.
Posts: 2930 - Karma: 701
Click for larger image

Based on the 180 degree shutter rule wouldn't you get blurring if you had multiple exposures within one frame?
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
shutter speed determines how fast each frame is taken. i'm sure you know that, but i'm just stating it to preface my explanation.


say you're shooting walking. at a certain point, shutter speed X is going to perfectly freeze that motion. any shutter speed above that will freeze motion the exact same way. it just can't get more frozen. it will be about as crisp as it gets. so i'm saying that when evan said '10,000 shutter speed isn't good,' my point was that for something like walking, there are probably a lot of shutter speeds lower than that that will look essentially the same.
14 years ago
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eheath
Posts: 61937 - Karma: 126,486
past like 120 the motion is the same (sometimes you can tell that its "choppier") but you get higher contrast with higher shutters and ive been liking 250 or less, i used to run 1000 or 2000 all the time skiing and im liking 250 much more.
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
yeah see i did the opposite, i ran under 250 for a long time then it got old for me.


but even you agree that motion is basically the same past a certain point, so a lot of the shutter complaints in here are irrelevant.
14 years ago
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WillStart
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I wasn't talking about having multiple exposures in one frame
14 years ago
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.Max.
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That was more of a curiosity question on my part. If you do have multiple exposures within a single frame wouldn't it blur whatever motion happens? Like taking a 4 photos handheld and then overlaying them. There would be shifts and therefore blurring. So would it not do this for video?
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
well when you do that with photos, you're just taking four photos taken at slightly different times and overlaying them. so while it is 4 in a single frame, it's really just 4 separate frames overlaid. so i think the closest you could come to doing that with video is just taking the same shot and overlaying it over itself 3 times and separating each overlay by a frame.
14 years ago
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.Max.
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Okay, so essentially you're saying it's just too fast to make a difference?
14 years ago
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WillStart
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well i'm more saying it's not possible to achieve the same effect. in video, each frame is the same as an exposure, so it's really not possible to have multiple exposures in one frame unless you just overlay the same clip over itself multiple times, shifting it by a frame or two each time.

it would look like this:

123456789
123456789
123456789
123456789

now when you played these all at once (and if you pretend they've all been flattened into one track), then frames 4-9 would be playing 4 different exposures at once.
14 years ago
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gordie.
Posts: 2014 - Karma: 84
what were you doing for white balance will?
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
that didn't turn out looking the way it was supposed to.



and it's kind of a mindfuck really, i have no clue what it would look like. you definitely could do multiple exposures in each frame in-camera i think, but i've never heard of a camera that does that. and i guess your shutter speed would have to be at least 4 times the frame rate if you wanted 4 exposures in a frame, not too sure. i think it would be really similar to normal video except that each frame would be a little blurry i guess, i don't know really.
14 years ago
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WillStart
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i was mostly just doing auto white balance since i didn't have long to set up many of the shots.
14 years ago
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.Max.
Posts: 2930 - Karma: 701
I see. For some reason I thought that if you had a shutter speed faster than 2X the frame rate you would end up with more than one 'shutter release' within the same frame. Wow, haha I can't believe I didn't understand that, each frame is a photo, each photo has one and only one shutter release.
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
yeah, understanding how shutter speed and frame rate work with each other is confusing for sure.



i was sort of wrong before when i said it wasn't really possible, i was more thinking if it was possible in post and i was also just kind of mindfucked at the idea of it, since i always think of each exposure being a frame, so i was thinking 4 exposures would end up just being the same as 4 frames. but i can see that if you could somehow expose each frame 4 times before the next frame you could get that effect.
14 years ago
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[~_~]
Posts: 20239 - Karma: 1,273
Yeah, second on the NDs. Footage looked great, but the first thing I noticed when watching was the weird shutter speed. I'm sure some people won't notice, but to me sloppy shutter speeds really hinder a camera's potential.
14 years ago
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TomasAa
Posts: 585 - Karma: 699
footy looks great! Congrats with your camera man


14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
of course. i never said i don't plan on buying NDs. the reason i don't have any is because i just flat out don't have any money left right now to buy any filters. i don't even have a UV filter for that lens. i still have to do more work to finish paying off the camera itself.

and as i also said, the footage was taken very hastily and was meant more to show the camera's performance in normal daylight, night, etc. so i really wouldn't have had time to be putting filters on even if i had had them
14 years ago
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S.C
Posts: 3071 - Karma: 2,519
so jealous! I've got to say though that if anyone on this site deserves that camera, its you. congrats! I'm really stoked to see some skiing shot on this!
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
thanks man! although i've gotta say, at least a few people come to mind who i would love to see get their hands on this camera.
14 years ago
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McLeod
Posts: 1762 - Karma: 1,582
the picture quality looks realy promising. glad to hear your enjoying it despite some of the not completely positive reviews ive seen for this camera.
14 years ago
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WillStart
Posts: 3955 - Karma: 3,192
really? what have you read? i've read nothing but good reviews and have heard nothing but good things from other people who have it/have used it.

obviously it is lacking in some ways, but what camera isn't?
14 years ago
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TWoods
Posts: 10014 - Karma: 8,392
Really? I'd love to read them. I've heard mixed reviews on the AF100, but nothing but good stuff about this one.
14 years ago
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edd1e
Posts: 679 - Karma: 16
You've probably already seen this but I guess may be of interest to you.

14 years ago
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