Is the Sigma fp the Best Budget Cinema Camera?

Thank you for watching.
The more I work with this camera, the more I am convinced of it's capabilities as an everyday cinema camera. The image you can get from this thing, is pretty immaculate. However, I still maintain my position that it will never compete with industry standard cinema cameras.

[@camerondubefilms]

amazing vid, super comprehensive. thanks for the tips!!

[@charlestcrepps]

@@camerondubefilms that’s my guy

[@LiveMyJourneyTom]

The information on how to work with this cameras exposure is out there but I’ll save you looking. When recording in 12 bit RAW the your two native ISO’s are 800 and 5000. It works like Cine EI. You can’t expose well only judging by the screen or waveform as sadly with no log profile in camera these tools give you the default 3 stops of highlights above middle gray. If you set your exposure to 100 you also only get 3 stop in higlights. Both 800 and 5000 have 6 stops over and 6 stops under middle gray. Of course if you want to pull more information in a shadowy scene you can bring the iso down but for most scenarios you want 800 / 3200-5000. You will need to set a shortcut to false color to judge the exposure properly. I tend look at the metering and when it shows about +2.7-3 I flip the false color and than adjust the ND / aperture until there are not longer avoidable points of clipping (in red). Try this next and you will be amazed how much latitude this cameras has and how clean the image is. I’m new to this camera as well but I read up on it and run my tests. You’re welcome to check my lest video where I put this to test and what image you can expect to get when this is applied.

[@LiveMyJourneyTom]

Btw zebra is just as useless as the waveform

[@charlestcrepps]

@@LiveMyJourneyTom Nice. I knew this information, but not to a level where I was ready to apply it. Thanks for breaking it down for me.

[@LiveMyJourneyTom]

@ it is a very confusing approach from sigma. They had know about these shortcomings and while they had fixed some other issues and improved the camera over all they had never addressed this. Despite all this I’m willing to put up with this nonsense due the image being so nice. I can’t stress enough that you need a ssd in your life because the 1080p is very substandard in comparison to 4K and especially the 4K DC crop on this camera. It’s night and day.

[@charlestcrepps]

@LiveMyJourneyTom I usually do film with an SSD just didn’t in these scene because I wanted to specifically see the shortcomings of the 1080p. Thinking about making this my A cam for an upcoming short. Rigging it out and shooting the whole thing on various SSDs

[@LiveMyJourneyTom]

@ btw the monitoring shortcomings can be addressed by using a field monitor, which I’m sure you own already.

[@0xBlurryface]

I do miss my FP because of its size. But I needed a hybrid so had to let it go. Moved to Z8. Needed many accessories to get good footage out of my FP. Had it fully rigged out. With Z8 everything is covered inside the body.

[@fidocinematic]

Beautiful footage! Nice work. I, too, live in Alabama (Huntsville) and bought the Sigma fp to start my film/video production work. Drop me a line!

[@charlestcrepps]

@@fidocinematic absolutely would love to shoot some stuff!

[@MarkAngeloMazzola]

I would recommend to shoot in iso 800 to have the most balanced DR. If you shoot on the suggested iso 100 you're gonna loose 3 stops in the highlights. For folks who have used an Arri or a RED this should be common practise.

[@charlestcrepps]

No. On ARRIs and REDs the iso is actually completely irrelevant unless for monitoring purposes.

[@meanmarine24]

It's a cool video. I think for youtube, it would be nice if you added chaptering. Also the image seems very blurry due to low bitrate on the video. I thought i was watching 480p.

[@meanmarine24]

Even if a video is not 4K, you can render it out into 4K for youtube to get a higher bitrate...i think.

[@charlestcrepps]

Actually the opposite. I didn’t limit the nitrate during export, so KZbin uses all of their might to compress the file. Next time, I’ll limit the bitrate to something just before KZbin compression kicks in.

[@ChrisParayno]

No, mainly due to yhe lack of codecs. Raw is great but not always needed.

[@CoreQ]

but not it's not ... zv-e1 used is the best budget cam you can buy from any brand .. sigma FP. i'm so glad I sold it. it's pain in the butt in everyway.