This is my Sony BURANO video. Now, because I've only had this camera for a short period of time, this is not gonna be an exhaustive review, but I will share some
test results with you and tell you why I went from being possibly the most excited I've ever been about a camera to feeling kind of lukewarm about it. But first, you should know that
Sony did lend me this camera to make this video. I wasn't compensated in any way, and this isn't sponsored by Sony, and I have to send it
back today, actually, after I'm finished filming. And I'm also not a filmmaker. I don't shoot docs, I don't work on narrative sets. So, take my opinion with a grain of salt because it's really just
coming from a person who is enthusiastic about cameras and has tested a lot of them. So I do have some perspective based on comparisons with
things in the market. And lastly, this is your opportunity to go and grab a snack, because I don't know how long this video is gonna be because it's unscripted, it's gonna be ranty,
there's gonna be jump cuts. I just wanna unload everything I've been thinking about this camera. So let's get started. First of all, why was I so excited? Well, think about the combination of features in the novelty here. I love that this hasn't been done before and that they did it
successfully, for the most part. You've got IBIS, autofocus,
built-in variable ND. It's compatible with PL lenses
and with Sony E-mount lenses. And you can do all this
stuff in conjunction if you put on an E-mount lens, you know, you have different levels of IBIS and it autofocus, like it's
crazy that it can do all that. And a lot of this stuff
was limited before. People were like, well
you can't possibly combine an ND and an IBIS. It just doesn't work. Well it's like, look, it works and it's re, excluding the body, but that sensor platform
is reasonably compact. So maybe there's also
future potential there, which is what I'm most excited about. But for me, I was thinking, but it's also supposed to
be kind of like a Venice, so we're gonna get crazy
fast readout speeds, really good dynamic range and a built-in variable ND
and IBIS, and autofocus. It's gonna be able to do
everything and do it the best. And so I think that's where some of the disappointment toward
this camera came from. But I think that's on us because we forgot that a machine that's purpose-built to do one thing will always outperform a machine that's built to do it all. And that's what we have here with BURANO. A machine that can do it all but doesn't really do any
one thing exceptionally well. Other than that it does all those things, if that makes sense. Let's jump into some test results first because I want provide some evidence for the rest of the ramblings
that I am about to do. Okay, let's start here
with the rolling shutter, because I think this is
probably the best way to talk about the different readout modes before getting into the
dynamic range of those modes. But also the readout speeds were one of the most contentious
things about this camera when the test results started to come out. So here we've got 8.6k, I
think I did this in raw, but it's the same in the H.265 mode. It's the full readout of the sensor. By the way, if I say
H.265, I might say HEVC. What I mean is the new X-AVC
H I codec that's in this camera. It's a new, you know,
H.265, all-intra codec. And I think there's still some minor compatibility issues with
certain NLEs. It was working for me in
Resolve as of the latest update. But there is a quirk
when compared to the raw, they don't quite match. It's almost like the lift
is up like one point, the blacks just aren't quite the same. Anyway, full readout, I
got 18.8 milliseconds, which yeah, for a $25,000
cinema camera, it's a lot. 18.8 milliseconds is definitely more than people were expecting when
you pay that kind of money. And I'm gonna reference the a1 a lot here because the a1's actually slightly better in it's 8K mode and it
costs a fifth of that. Anyway, now the BURANO
has a FFc mode that they have in 6K, which is slightly faster
at 17.6 milliseconds. And some people have noticed
that it's slightly softer, which I guess makes sense when
you learn about all the stuff that it's doing. Pre the process of like debayering and all that. They're taking the data, using
like an oversampling method that they're not really sharing, but their method was just like, maybe we can give people
almost the same feel as the 8K, but for much
smaller data rates. I'm not sold on this as a concept. I think they should have gone with like a 4K pixel-
binned method or something. But it is slightly faster, slightly. Probably not worth it for the
rolling shutter improvement to switch to the mode or
the diminished sharpness. You could argue that maybe
the data rates are important, but I don't know. Then we have the Super35 5.8K mode, which is like a true 6K, but
it's cropped in, you know, 1.5x into the sensor and that is faster as you would
expect, 12.6 milliseconds. And then we have the Super35c, which is basically like
a 2x punch in. It's like a micro four thirds, it's got a GH5 built into
this camera if you want. And that's 8.5 milliseconds. So if you wanna match those
like a7S III, FX3 speeds, you have to get all the way into 4K. And Sony will say, look, we
have all of the same speeds or better than the other cameras that people are comparing it to. And they do, but you're
sacrificing field of view. You're not getting full
frame to get 8 seconds. But yes, you are getting 4K at 8 seconds like the a7S III, but it's like a 2x crop. Sony a1, look at that, 7.9 milliseconds. That's the a1, that's the Alpha 1's 4K pixel-binned mode. See the Alpha 1 has 8K, but if you switch to 4K,
they're all pixel binned, which means you can do 4K24, 30, 60, 120, without changing field of view, the image quality is worse
than the 8K for sure, but I did a comparison back
when I reviewed the Alpha 1 and it was hard to tell the difference between it and an a7S III. So the pixel-binned 8K on the Alpha 1 looks like the 1:1 4K on the a7S III and reads out at about the same speed. So it has an a7S III built into the Alpha 1. It's incredible. So why is there no 4K pixel-
binned mode on the BURANO? Because that would solve
a lot of complaints. It would say, look, you
want the 8K resolution, you want all the data
rates, slower readout speed, but you can pixel bin to 4K,
still get your full frame image, you know, and shoot that all-
intra at much lower data rates. And the rolling shutter
is only 8 milliseconds, but it's just not in
there, I don't know why. Moving on. Sony Alpha 1 at 8K24, 15.2 milliseconds, again faster than the 17-18 milliseconds you're gonna see on the BURANO. Now they're completely different cameras, but I just wanna point
out, we have a sensor here that can read 8K at 15-
something milliseconds and over here it's 17-18 milliseconds. Strange, right? Okay, I've got a lot of
dynamic range test results here because there's a lot of
different modes and comparisons. So I'm gonna try to breeze
through them pretty quickly. But for people who aren't
familiar with this, this is Imatest, and up at the top here you're gonna see what, you know, Codec combination I was using. And then over here are results. I filmed with something
called the Xyla 21, which is a step chart, has 21 stops, and it will give us a score over here that says slope-based DR. That's the total number of stops detected. And then below that is a
signal-to-noise ratio tolerance. So medium, the 0.5, that's
a signal-to-noise ratio of two. And that's normally what we use to assess an acceptable level of noise. Basically whatever
score you get at medium, those are good clean stops. So this here on the top, you'll see it says 8K on 8K raw. That means it was 8K on an 8K timeline. So there's no downsampling going on here and it's EI 800 and no noise reduction because one of the great
things about the BURANO compared to something like the Alpha 1 is that you can control
your noise reduction. Now you'll see that we
get 14.4 stops total with a medium score of 10.9. And this isn't great when
it comes to a cinema camera, in my opinion, but it's also the worst it's gonna be because it's only gonna go up from here as we involve oversampling
and noise reduction. But it also gives us an idea of maybe whereabouts the a1 would be if we could turn off its noise reduction and shoot the same raw codec, no oversampling and that kind
of thing on an 8K timeline, we'd probably get a similar dynamic range. But that's also part of the problem. Why are we getting a similar dynamic range between a mirrorless camera
that costs a fifth of the price and a cinema camera? This is 8K on 8K timeline raw with medium noise reduction, which is actually similar
to the noise reduction that's baked in, in an Alpha 1. And you can see that we
go from 10.9 to 11.8. So it's a significant uptick. But I think that the noise on the BURANO actually looks nice. I've actually preferred it to the Alpha 1 with the baked-in noise reduction because you do get a bit of a finer, a bit more detail and there's
like a finer grain to it where it hasn't been kind of mushed away. At 100% comparison, they look identical. But if you punch in at like 400%, the BURANO's no noise
reduction is actually nicer. And I'm glad that it exists, if we compare that to the H.265, again, that's that X-AVC H I with no noise reduction, we get 12. And this is weird, that
means that the H.265, which we've known in the past, sort of gets a higher score and sort of deals with noise on its own. And remember I said that the H.265 seemed to be like the blacks were
pushed down a little bit, but even with no noise
reduction in the H.265 mode, we get 12 stops, which is
a huge jump from the 10.9. And if we add the medium
noise reduction on the H.265, we get 12.6 and now we're in the territory of what the Alpha 1 would
score like a high 12, which means that if you shoot H.265 with medium noise reduction on this, you're basically baking in all the aspects that the Alpha 1 does automatically and you end up with the same dynamic range and the same image, which is why I think
they probably would have the same starting point. If all the codecs were
the same in both cameras, I feel like we would
get very similar numbers in all the different codecs. Now if drop that 8K H.265 on a 4K timeline with no noise reduction,
so now we get oversampling, we get 12.5, and if we put the 8K on a 4K timeline, H.265 with medium noise
reduction, we get 12.9, which is similar to the
pixel-binned 4K that you get on the Alpha 1. But isn't it weird that I'm trying to see if I can get the BURANO to
score as highly as the Alpha 1? It's kind of strange. Although again, I can't
turn those things off in the Alpha 1, which I
kind of wish that I could. They should make an FX version of the Alpha 1 that isn't $25,000 but that's like $8 grand or something. Put a fan in it, put that gray, you know, FX3 body on it, give
us noise reduction control, shutter angle, all that kind of stuff. Then you get yourself a
camera right over there. I did the 6K full-frame
C mode on a 6K timeline, we got 12.8, which means that
whatever process Sony is doing where they're like,
we're shrinking it down, then we're expanding,
we're oversampling it, we're doing proprietary stuff, it's crushing some noise
too, while you're at it. And then just for fun,
I did the 5.8K modes. If you put the 5.8K
Super35 on a 5.8K timeline, you get about 11.5. If you take the 8K raw in camera and put it directly on a 4K timeline with no noise reduction it is 12.2 and with noise reduction
at medium is 12.8. Now if you saw on social
before I made this video, I put a little post up showing my test rig for comparing the Alpha 1 to the BURANO and they were kind of
stacked on top of each other and some people asked what the, you know, cage parts that I had on the
BURANO were in that post, and how I was able to
sort of support it all. And so I wanna give a
shout out to Kondor Blue for sending over when they heard that I had had the BURANO, they
sent over their cage parts, and allowed me to do some weird things like move this top handle that comes with the BURANO back into a weird position so I could mount the Alpha 1 in the front. That's not what it's for, though. They're, they're for more
logical purposes than that, but I've got a few other parts here. So here this is actually
two different pieces and they're interchangeable. So you could put this one on the front or that one on the back,
whichever you prefer. But they're pretty
symmetrical, which is great. They have, you know,
NATO rails on the front, both sides have sensor plane demarcation. So if you need to like, and with little threaded inserts, if you wanna put a little pin in there and then like, you know, measure
your to subject distance, you can do that, and you can opt for a little side piece that comes down here which puts the, you know, ARRI rosette thing for the grip and everything comes along the side and they even have a little one that goes on this side
here with a little shoe. If you wanted to put like, one of those little wireless mic kits with a cold shoe, you
can clip it in there. It's pretty cool. And apparently there's even more parts than what they sent me. So I'll put a link in the description. If you're planning on, you
know, rigging out a BURANO and you wanna see what they got, I like 'em, they look good, they look good on the gray cameras and they add more holes to your camera. Now that you've seen the test
results with the actual facts, let's go and do some heavily
opinion-based ranting, again, that you should
take with a grain of salt. Because what do I know? I don't work on film sets
or shoot documentaries, However, from somebody who
cares a lot about value and can compare a lot of cameras, I do have trouble with the
value proposition of the BURANO. Allow me to explain. I've already established that
it's basically an Alpha 1 from a sensor-performance perspective. In fact, it's slightly worse. The rolling shutter is worse and it doesn't have as many modes as the Alpha 1 when it
comes to speeding that up, if you want to improve
the rolling shutter. And dynamic range-wise, it's the same once you've sort of fully
processed your image. The only advantage this has is that you don't have to
fully process your image if you don't want to, but I suppose you could go
the Ninja ProRes Raw route with the Alpha 1 and then it starts to kind of equalize those differences. So a lot of what's gonna
set the BURANO apart are things that are very specific and hard to tell that they're
worth 5 times the price. An example of one would be Genlock. So if you're doing XR or some kind of virtual production thing, it's got it and then other cameras don't. So I mean, but then you
can make the argument, what about the FX9? Because in the 6K mode, the FX9 has similar rolling shutter and has Genlock and is
like half the price. So if you just need Genlock and that's really your defining need, is this what you're gonna spend? And then what about the fact that you can get like a Venice 1 used or other cameras that
probably have Genlock for less than 25k. Because you can't spend 25k
just for Genlock, is my point. But it is something that sure as hell that mirrorless cameras can't provide. Now like I said, I haven't
tested the XLR inputs, the time code or whatever. I'm just assuming that
this many generations in, Sony has those things figured
out and they can nail them. And so we'll assume that
they all work excellently, but again that's not
really a separating fact because you can get a module, Sony makes one from mirrorless cameras that gives you XLR inputs and you can figure out time code and stuff like that for you, you can rig it all up, you can rig it up at a V-mount plate, you could put cage parts on it. So all that isn't, like
what makes it a cinema body isn't something that, you can't turn a mirrorless
camera into with hurdles. Now yeah, you've got your sort of like nice, all your
buttons are on one side, I've never been sold on that. But again, I don't work on film sets. I find this thing and this type of interface
to be more cumbersome to use for multiple reasons. One, anytime you switch modes,
the camera like restarts, if you want to get into a
menu, you gotta hold buttons. There's like weird dials and stuff. When you've held a cam
in your hand for so long and you're like, I can just
do everything in my thumbs, it feels so much faster. It's like comparing a joystick to a PS5 controller in my opinion, just doesn't, it's not the same. But again, this is what works in certain industry things. So if you need that, there it is. And you can't really mod that out too much onto
a mirrorless camera. And then you could say
it's got built-in NDs, and that's also true. And built-in NDs are sweet compared to putting weird screw-on fillers in the front of your lenses. Although if we're making a cinema rig, you would use a matte box and
you use high quality filters and not ones that, you know,
you rotate and do weird things. But Robert Machado did a great video-- Also, that's the video you
should be watching instead of this bozo ramble about it because he's actually used the camera in proper applications. I really like his video by
the way. It's excellent. Really objective, really
balanced. Go check it out. He talked a lot about the IR pollution that he was getting on this camera. He showed some shots where
your blacks were like red and it was strong and it was bad. So then you'd have to say, and he is talking about
putting filters in the front of his lenses to get rid of that. So now I'm thinking, well
if you're putting filters in the front of lenses anyway, how advantageous is that built-in ND? You know, how is that a selling point now? Well it's got IBIS and it's
got autofocus and it's got ND. Okay, and that's true. And I did do some mild testing on the IBIS and the autofocus and they're both good. For some reason the
cinema camera autofocus always feels to me slightly worse than the mirrorless
autofocus, which makes sense. If the Alpha 1 is one generation ago and the current generation is the one with all the AI processing
chips like the a7R V and onward, this camera would be the
generation before the Alpha 1, in terms of how I feel like it performs. Small things, like I pointed it at my kid who was drinking from
his like little sippy cup and when he had the
cup here, both had eye, and it was both great. When he brought the sippy cup up, The Alpha 1 was like,
there's still an eye there. This camera was like, I don't see an eye, and it just like did some weird face thing and like tracked the cup,
and it was still acceptable. But the Alpha 1 was better, certainly usable and
it's certainly very good, but it's not the best. And yet this camera costs so much, right? And then IBIS, the same thing. It's there and it's cool, but there's a lot of limitations
on when you can use it. Like there's multiple
modes to the IBIS, right? Just like on a mirrorless camera. But what's cool with the Alpha 1 is that, say you were in that 4K pixel-binned mode, well now you can turn everything on, you can turn IBIS on active, you can do whatever because
it's just deciding how much of the 8K it's gonna read from, where on this camera
because so many of the modes were about that crazy
full frame 6K crop thing they're doing or the 8K modes. You can't really turn everything on until you're like at
Super35, and also not in raw. Because if you're in
raw you can't, you know, turn on a lot of the weird
things like focus breathing, compensation, stuff like that. So again, it's cool, it has so many mirrorless camera functions like I didn't mention, but you've got distortion compensation from when you're using e-mount
lenses obviously, right? You've got distortion, you've
got peripheral illumination, you've got focus breathing compensation, you've got those active
stabilization modes, they're all in there, but
you're only using them when you're already at a
crop and you're not in raw. So you're shooting Super35,
you know, HEVC mode, then you can turn a bunch of stuff on and at that point it's like, I'm just using a mirrorless camera! And you're not using the ND filters because they have IR pollution. So you're putting filters
on the front of your lens, it just, it gets really confusing. So then it becomes, well this
thing is a lot more reliable and I cannot take that away from it. This thing is a tank, it's heavy, but it's built like a tank. It's got a fan inside with control on it. All the things that the
Alpha 1 doesn't have. And I feel like in a hot environment this camera is gonna
dump all over the Alpha 1 in terms of performance. But there are things you
can do with the Alpha 1, I've shown some pretty
cool stuff in my videos where if you put a Ninja V on it, you can set the camera to 8K but record externally
to the Ninja V in 4K, basically recording an
oversampled 4K mode automatically to an SSD in ProRes, if you want, ProRes 4:2:2 10-bit, that's a great codec to work with. Put a dummy battery in this thing, rig it all out with a cage, and it's not gonna be this reliable, but I've never had that overheat and I can record for a really long time with the camera set to 8K. If you wanna record 8K internal raw, then yeah you're gonna need a big monster with like a fan and stuff like that. But there's media differences too, like this thing's using,
Sony sent over with it their new two-terabyte
CFexpress Type B cards, two tough cards. I don't know what these things cost, but they're probably like
thousands of dollars, right? And I don't get to keep these by the way, they go back but they're
part of the trial unit here. And so that media is crazy expensive where my little ProRes 422 thing, it's the cost of an Ninja and some SSDs. So it's hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars in media. And once you have that set up, you can have a whole fleet of SSDs if you wanna just swap 'em out. Now I'm not saying that it's equal, I'm just saying that it can
get you most of the way there for only spending a thousand dollars extra for the Ninja, the SSDs, the dummy battery and some parts on top of
this price than all of this. This is just why I'm having
this sort of like value crisis and I really can't stress enough how much I want them to put
in that 4K pixel bin mode in this BURANO. I feel like that would take away like 30% of my complaints and maybe
more of other people's, 'cause then it'd be like, hey you've got an 8 millisecond mode, maybe it'd be slightly
worse than the Alpha 1. So maybe let's call 9 milliseconds. You got a 9 millisecond mode in there now and it's full frame and it's 4K and you can do up to 120, because again, with these cinema cameras, with the Sony interface
with cinema cameras, even that's harder. You wanna shoot in 4K120? You gotta go into one of the crop modes, then you have to turn on S&Q, then you have to dial your S&Q up to 120. You can't just go menu,
4K120, let's roll baby. And like your field of view didn't change, over here it's more tedious and you think, if anything,
this should be faster. Like almost like you
press the 4K120 button or something, that's not a thing. You gotta go in and change everything. The camera restarts. It's frustrating. Then there's some people listening to probably like, yeah that's all of Sony as you know F-whatever line. And it's like, yeah I guess so. And that's true, but it doesn't mean that it's not tedious, you know? And then one more thing, this is more of just like a bug report. Maybe it's not a bug report
but it might be a condition of having all these different modes that have different rules and needing to reboot and everything. But say you thought, well Gerald, can you do some of your HDMI Ninja tricks on this camera, and you know,
circumvent some of the issues? Yes and no. Yes, there's a cool thing which is that if you do record out
to the Ninja via HDMI, the issues between the raw and
the H.265 looking different, they go away. So it makes me feel like those differences in how they look might
actually be on the NLE side and not what the camera's outputting. However, anytime you change
anything in this camera, the HDMI modes change and it doesn't remember
to be more specific. Say you're an 8K and you're like, you have to go in go to HDMI, so you want turn the
HDMI on 4K out over HDMI. Cool, now you look at your monitor and boom, we're getting 4K signal. But then you say to yourself,
oh actually, you know what? I wanna switch to H.265
and record H.265 internal or I wanna switch that 6K
full-frame crop mode thing. Or I wanna switch to Super35 4K, or I wanna switch to be able to do 4K120. Any one of those times you switch, you have to go back into this
HDMI menu, which is buried, and then redetermine which resolutions are coming out of SDI, which ones are coming out of HDMI, because not all of them
are available in each mode. So it's almost like that resets. And what's annoying is
even if you went through and for 8K, you're like
for 8K, gimme 4K over HDMI for 6K, gimme 4K over HDMI, for whatever, and you go through, then when you go back to the
8K one, it forgot it again. So it doesn't remember
what HDMI output you want for each, unless like you go in and you save a complete memory profile for each mode and then what, you gotta load that up each
time, again, more tedium, right? On this camera you just say, "Always put 4K over HDMI,
thank you!" And it's done. Everything is here. But there isn't one thing I can think of that it does better than any other camera that does that thing on its own. Even if it's like, how
fast can you shoot 8K with 12 and a half stops at dynamic range? It's like, well not quite
as fast as the Alpha 1. Well, can you shoot 4K
as fast as the a7S III? I cannot unless I do a 2x crop. There's always like a caveat. I am happy however, that it exists because it's like look what can exist! And I always have sort of
a promise for the future, not so much about buying this and getting firmware updates, more of the fact that this exists. I'm not saying that they're gonna be able to take this mechanism
and stick it in something, but imagine if they could, or imagine that other
brands can look at this and say look what can be done. That is fascinating and that makes me really
like that this exists. 'Cause imagine if somebody
took a faster sensor and stuck the same IBIS ND module, but learn from the IR pollution and fixed that and then
put it in another camera that costs $12,000. The BURANO made that possible and then that $12,000 camera becomes, you know, two years from now, somebody's making a video that's like "the greatest
camera of all time" or whatever, like that would now, this
paves the road for that. So I love that this exists
as a proof of concept. And I don't want to just make this seem like I was just hating on this camera, but I fell into the hype,
you know, of like $25K BURANO! It's like a VENICE, but it does so much, and it's gonna solve
everybody's problems everywhere! I don't know that it does. I do believe though, that
there are gonna be some people, even when I just made this whole rant that are just seeing the check marks of like, I needed that,
I need that, I need that. I don't care about that. I don't care- And they're like, "This is
the perfect camera for me!" I really do think this is gonna be the absolute perfect
camera for some key people. I guess I'm just saying, if they had to make this somewhat
flawed jack of all trades to open the door for a
future master of all, that I think it was worth it. I just don't think for the average person, it's the definitive answer
that we were hoping for. Alright... I'm done. (water splashing)