Sony A7riii low light high contrast performance (real world use)

As my real estate media journey continues to move into the high end luxury world, I've been continually chasing the 'perfect' gear kit. We all know this is a myth, and a desire for improvement is great, until it becomes a little more like torture, so we eventually stop upgrading gear, and work on upgrading technique.

The thing about high end luxury real estate is that the homes tend to be incredibly difficult to shoot. They're often dark and moody on the interior, and have epic views outside, which should be shown as effectively as possible, all whilst staying within time and finance budgets.

The Sony A7riii and A7iii cameras have proven to be great platforms upon which to park the upgrade bus and work on skills. They're not intended to be cinema cameras, recording output is only 8-bit (even for log and raw recording), and the footage from the high megapixel sensors tends to be noisy. However, they have fantastic dynamic range at 14 stops, the 4k recordings are crisp and clean, and most importantly, they're paid for, free and clear.

This video is the most recent showcase of what I've been able to squeeze out of these cameras, much to my pleasant surprise. Also, I'm grateful and proud to say that I'm feeling relatively confident in my current ability to use advanced coloring techniques to extract the most out of the data.

Ground shots were all from primarily the A7riii (wide & close range macro), and telephoto shots were made on the A7iii. Footage was captured using a custom S-log2 profile, coupled with my own custom LUT and some tricky color board layering and masking in FCPX. Also, heaping helpings of NR.

No composites here, just using the max DR for view shots, but I had some lighting to assist. I used a pair of Dracast Bi-color 1000 LED panels with adjustable temp and brightness. The lights were used only as fill, taking care to preserve natural shadows.

Note: I would have loved to blend ambient sounds on this one, but the wind was outrageous! Flying a drone was interesting indeed.

Enjoy and CC always welcomed.