SONY FX6 REVIEW: Best All Around Cinema Camera?

Today we are talking about the Sony FX6 cinema camera, which Sony just released the specs for this morning. I had the chance to get out and test the camera with Maria Polla and put the camera through its paces. And man, did this camera blow me away. My first thoughts is this looks like someone shrunk my FX9. Like, I don't think I've ever been so excited to try out a camera. Let me take this down here. This is the Sony FX6. I keep looking at it expecting there to be something that it's missing compared to my FX9, but this thing has it all. 422, 240 in full HD, 120 in 4K, has time code in. So for all the doc filmmakers out there, you're very happy. So I've already built this up. I'm gonna figure out my monitor setup, but you can just see how light and easy this is already to use. Here we go. Shooting on the Sony 24 1.4. This is what I shoot on my FX9, always 24 mil full frame. I like it because when you crop into 235, it still feels that anamorphic vibe. So yeah, we'll get a monitor on here and I'll start doing some camera tests with Callie. I can tell you already, just seeing some of the footage that we've shot, for me is the best value camera around. I don't know, I'm trying to think if there's a better camera for this price range in this way. I'm amazed. This is gonna kill a lot of other cameras out there. 422, 10 bit, autofocus. No, the second base ISO is 12,000. What? How? Mark just discovered that the second base ISO is 12,800. I don't need. I should have been using that in the basement earlier. This is, I was excited. 12,800 is like, it's super clean. That's crazy. Like, I thought 4,000 as a base ISO. I can't even say it, I'm so excited. 12,800. I think we're gonna have to go to the catacombs and film something. It's on there. You'll never not have enough light. Never. With 12,000 as your base ISO. This isn't boosting the game. No. This is the base ISO. That's crazy. I didn't even know it had two ISOs. 240 at 1080. I mean, the last time I shot 240 was probably with you, Mati, when we first met each other in that abandoned school. Wasn't that F700? The last time I shot 240 was like, when I first met Mati, like eight years ago. Eight years ago! That was 2012. That's crazy. And then here we are. Big thank you to Coach Callie. Check her out on Instagram. Amazing ballerina. Part of the National Ballet of Canada. She also does private lessons? Yes. Yes, so I might take some over Zoom. Learn my turnout. It's very impressive. You guys know I hate gimbals, so this is the human gimbal, where it's either me running across the room, or... Or you hire a Mati with a Onewheel. Onewheels come with YouTubers now. That's a special edition. It's a Black Friday sale. They come with a YouTuber. It's amazing. We are hiding right now because Mati is getting a really epic shot. Good chance I'm gonna bail on this one, but it's worth the shot, so we'll see. Okay, that is a wrap with the FX6. Big thank you to Mati, Coach Callie, Kimmy Snaps, everyone who is in this. I am thoroughly impressed, and I've never been so excited to go try some new footage for a camera, so let's go look at it. And so, what I wanna say, too, is that I'm a big Sony user. I'm not sponsored by them, but ever since I used the FS7, I've kind of stayed in that ecosystem, and that's why I went out with Mati, because I've used these cinema cameras from Sony a lot, including the Venice. I mean, heck, we own two FX9s, so I was really excited to try this FX6, and to be honest, I had really low expectations. The FS5, its younger brother, the predecessor to the FX6, to me, it was kind of a useless camera. It had a terrible bit rate internally. I owned one for like a week, and I sold it right away. I was really underwhelmed with it. I bought my FS7 and was so, so happy. This FX6 is a completely different camera to that. This has it all, and kind of why I got almost emotional on set, I joke about that, is I wasn't thinking about the technology, but what I was thinking was what it did for me as a filmmaker. This camera unlocks a whole new world, because a lot of the films I shoot are in dangerous countries or in precarious situations. I'm a doc filmmaker. We have to go everywhere to shoot those films. You can shoot 12,800, and I could not believe how clean the signal was. We went into the basement of this old abandoned warehouse. Big shout out to Jesse Driftwood and Christoph Benfrey for letting us use their space. It's amazing. At 12,800 ISO, you're expecting for skin tones to be crazy, you're expecting for there to be noise everywhere, but we barely had any light, just the shaft of light in the basement, and it was clean. The signal on this is blowing my mind. So for me as a filmmaker, I can shoot at night now. You don't really need lights with this camera. That's why we did this test with no lights, just the available light coming through the windows. But for me now, I have a cinema camera in thing the size of a large apple. That's a really big apple. Maybe like two sweet potatoes or like a melon. Yeah, a melon with a Sony E-mount. That's how big this camera is and about how much it weighs. This is why you use hazers. We call this beamage. These shafts of light that come through, you begin to see the volume, the actual depth of the space. But the most important thing when you're buying a camera is its dynamic range and its color science. Those are the two things that are gonna impact the image and is what's gonna make it look quote cinematic. And this camera has those things. It doesn't deviate far from the FX9. I actually don't think there's much image quality difference at all from the FX9, not from what I've seen so far, not even in dynamic range. Sony's claiming that there's about 15 plus stops and from the quick color correction I did here, it looks to be the case. I don't get too caught up with the numbers. I just wanna know if it works and I could recover some highlights. We shot this test to blow out the windows, so that's why the windows are clipping here. But I was impressed. There wasn't much information that was clipping besides what we wanted to clip. So that's important. We had all the information we needed. The color science in this is amazing. All of this footage was just used with one quick LUT that I've developed and it looks amazing. The skin tones are perfect. By the way, I'm going to be selling LUTs finally. I've been really debating that. I didn't wanna be the guy pushing my LUTs, but a lot of people were messaging me about them and I use these LUTs on all my Sony footage. So keep a lock to this channel for that. I will be putting out a LUT package. So very impressed with the dynamic range and color science. And moving on to slow motion. Now for a dog person like me, I do need real time. I need to hear what people are saying. I can't shoot everything in slow motion or else I don't have a film. They included both 23.98 and 24P, which means that they're gearing for this to be a B camera to both the FX9 and the Venice. But the frame rates on this are amazing. You get 60 frames at 4K DCI and 120 frames at 4K UHD, as well as 240 frames at 1080. And maybe there was a tiny bit of aliasing at the 1080 at 240, but that's kind of to be expected, especially when you're up against a high contrast area, but it wasn't enough to make this footage by any means unusable. We shot 120 frames in the basement of this building with Callie in practically the dark. This footage you're seeing here is 120 frames and that's a 12,000 ISO. And it is a clean image. When you're shooting 180, 120, 240, there is zero crop. It's full frame. And that's what this camera is also, full frame. I forgot to mention that by the way. And you might say, well, Mark, have you used an A7S III or have you used a Canon R5 in the dark? No, because I don't use mirrorless cameras. I use cinema cameras. I have to, I need time code in, I need XLR, which by the way, this also has time code in. So now I can have a sound guy or we can sync multiple cameras together. And the FX6 has packed in everything that's become standard for Sony, which is the variable ND, which is amazing. You don't ever have to put a screw on an ND filter on the front. It also works with Catalyst Browse, which if you've seen my video about stabilizing camera footage, it's amazing what Sony does. They use the gyroscope metadata inside the camera and kind of eliminates the need for gimbals in many situations because of how smooth it is when you stabilize it. And also too, the battery lasts at least three times longer than my FX9. I had one battery all day. We shot for maybe about five hours and we never swapped a battery. And I was also pulling the power for my monitor, my small HD off of that battery as well. Guys, I wasn't expecting much when Marty called me up to come use the FX6. I thought, okay, I'll try it out. I was super underwhelmed with the FS5, but the low light, the slow motion and the durability of the Kodak, how strong this image is that I could push and pull it in post with color and it still survived. I'm impressed. Definitely wanna add this to our arsenal, thinking about swapping one of our FX9s out for an FX6. But if you're looking to buy a new cinema camera, I would highly, highly recommend the FX6. I don't try to push cameras on people. I talk about what cameras I use. And honestly, in the end, it doesn't really matter what camera you use as long as you have a good story. So if you can, go try and get your hands on one of these and try it out. And also keep locked on this channel for my upcoming Let's Package. And big shout out to Callie for dancing for us for so many hours. She did an amazing job, complete professional, kept pushing her and made her do more jumps and more jumps and more jumps. And she doesn't stop. Also a big shout out to Matty for having me out. Really appreciate it, brother. And also a huge shout out to Kristoff and Jesse for allowing us to use their space. There you have it, guys. I'm, as you can tell, sold on this camera and can't wait to start using it more on projects. I'll see you guys on the next one.