HUGE Update to the Sony A7SIII - v3.00!!

All right, this is going to be a good video. What's up friends. Sony has just dropped a massive firmware update for four of their higher end cameras today and a lot of these features are things we've been asking for for a really long time and I have not made a video on the a seven S three in ages, but this is actually probably my most favorite camera of all time. I worked the crap out of this thing for like three and a half years. It's crushed everything I've thrown at it. Basically every YouTube video you've watched over the last three and a half years has been shot on this camera. I've shot commercials, music videos, client work and it's been basically flawless. Now I'm just going to focus on the a seven S three update because obviously there was new firmware for the a one a seven four and a nine mark three and I know the a one users have been neglected but they're going to be happy as well with that update. I'm also going to show you how to do the firmware update on this as well. At the end of the video, if you have an Apple Silicon Mac because it's the most ridiculously convoluted process to do and I'm sure there's going to be a few of you that need help. It's not as easy as just dropping the SD card in and updating. You have to download drivers and stuff. So I'll show you how to do that. I'll timestamp the video so you can watch that at the end if you need to watch that first. You know what I mean? Okay, so right off the bat, uh, the firmware version 3.0 for the a seven S three is giving us things that they didn't even talk about in their update notes. But this thing has the entire new UI so it looks exactly like the newer Sony cameras. So you have all touchscreen stuff in the UI now. So you have your swipe in, you have all your settings, you can customize this, you can change picture profiles, focus modes, you can record right from the screen now. So if you're vlogging, you can flip it around and see that this was added I think in the ZV one and this entire new menu looks a little bit different. So your audio levels are at the top and I'll show it side by side with the old UI. But now you have touch in the UI so you can change all your settings right on the screen here. And this is all new because this was not in the old version and they don't even mention this in their firmware update. So if you go to menu here now, you also have your at a glance settings. So we can go up here and this is really cool. This was added in in some of the newer cameras as well. But now you can go in here and change your settings easily just at a glance. And that's really cool. And that's, again, something I didn't see mentioned in the notes. And of course they added focus, breathing compensation to this camera, which is awesome because it was released later on in the newer cameras. And it's something I didn't know you could even add to this, but the FX three did come with it and that's basically the exact same camera as this. So, um, I have shown focus, breathing compensation in the past. So I'm not going to explain it to you, but it is a pretty big deal if you have some Sony lenses that have a lot of breathing and this is going to correct that. They've also added the ability to shoot DCI 4k and true 24 frames per second. And that requires a free license to install. And I haven't done that yet. Um, but it is in this firmware update and I don't know how many people actually need that, but you have it. They've also added support for C2PA, which is coming soon and probably going to be added to all Sony cameras. This is like an image certification that's baked into the file. It's kind of like exit data that kind of stores the history of an image to tell if it was manipulated. Um, and I think this is kind of preparing for AI so we know what's authentic or what's been altered and there is no license for it yet, but it is coming and it's set up for this camera. Now they've also updated to work with the new creator app, which has replaced the imaging edge app. And this is for controlling the camera and sending photos and videos to your phone directly from the camera. It's just a quicker workflow. If you need to do it quick and to go along with it, they've also added FTP transfer that'll upload to the creator cloud. So it doesn't have to be connected to your phone as long as it's connected to wifi or internet. It'll upload those files directly to the cloud. And the last thing I want to go over is how you can now control the camera with the monitor control app. And I've been using the monitor plus app, which is not made by Sony because it does basically the same stuff, but was better than Sony's imaging edge app. Now this is completely different. This is for the FX line cinema cameras, but you basically have full control over the camera from an app. You can use your phone or the iPad and I'll show you how to do that with the iPad. So we're going to watch the monitor control app, turn the camera on and it should pop up here. It uses Bluetooth to pair and then it switches over to wifi so we can connect to it there. And it's going to ask me to connect to its wifi hotspot. And this works pretty seamless. This is much better than the imaging edge app, which was horrible. I'm glad they made something a little bit better. But this is only really to control the camera. It's not like the creator app where you can control the camera, but also send the files. This just has more control over the camera. So as you can see right here, we've got our white balance control. You can toggle record, stop record. You can change your aperture here, stop it down, you know, ISO shutter speed. Basically all the controls on your camera can be done directly from this app. You can even change the recording format. So if I wanted to change it to like 60 frames per second, we could do that. You can change your bit rate as well. It does have pretty decent latency, so it's not that bad. I don't know if you could use this as a monitor on your actual camera, but definitely when you're remote controlling it, it's pretty decent. And then up here we've got our basic control or focus control. So right here it's kind of like a focus puller. So we've got to have this a manual focus and this is only going to work on lenses that are also autofocus clearly. Otherwise you'd need a focus motor, but you've got your little focus scale here so you can change your focus and that's pretty cool. You've got other things. It looks like you've got all focus transition speeds and stuff like that. So there's a lot of cool little options in here that you don't get in the creator app. And so I thought it was worth showing because it's something they've added to this camera. It's not in all of the cameras, just in the FX line as far as I know. Anyway, this is literally breathe new life into this camera, especially having that newer UI like all the FX cameras or the newer bodies that came out last year, but it's still missing a few things. It would have been nice to have like shutter angle, but I assume that we'll have to wait for the a seven S four, which honestly could be coming this year because it's been almost four years since a seven S three came out. And yeah, I want to say thanks to Sony. Thank you for listening to us and adding the firmware updates that we've been asking for over these years. And it's making this camera that much better four years later. And if I could tell you to all go run out right now and buy one, because I really love this camera that much. It's not cheap, but it's definitely been rock solid for me and it's paid itself off 10 times over, over the last three and a half years. Anyway, thanks for watching. That's all I've got in this video. I tried to get this together as quick as I could, but it was such a pain in the butt to update this camera. And if you want to know how to do it, here's how to do it right now. I'll have a link in the description where to find this exact link, but you're going to need to download the version three firmware for Mac. Like I said, this is going to be for Apple Silicon Macs. I assume a lot of people have them now, and this is the most awkward way to update this camera, but I'm going to show you how to do it. While that's downloading, scroll down a little bit further. Then you need to download the Sony camera driver. Next check the firmware version on your camera. I have version 2.0, but you need to be on version 2.15 in order to update to version 3.0. And once that's been downloading, you're going to open the camera driver up and you're going to install this first. And once that's done, you're going to open up the firmware updater. So you're going to see that actually version 2.15 is in here because Sony already anticipated you won't have it. And once it's loaded, you type in your password. And this is where things are going to get a little bit annoying for Apple Silicon Macs because there's so many safety protocols. It actually comes up with an error for the privacy and security settings. So you're going to hit okay on that enable system extensions. And then it's going to tell you that you're going to have to actually hold down the power button to launch in security utility. And then we shut that down. So you're going to hold the power button down for as long as you can, until you see it pop up with your hard drive or options. You're going to select options, which is the gear icon. I apologize for the low quality here. I was just trying to record it with my phone as quick as possible, but there's a lot of reflections here. Once it launches recovery mode, you're going to type in your password to get in. Then you're going to go up to where it says utilities. You're going to go to startup and security, then go to unlock and type in your password once more. Then click on security policy, and you're going to go to reduce security and allow user management of kernel and hit okay, and type in your password again. Then you're going to go up and hit restart and it's going to load back into macOS. Then once you load it back in, you're going to open up that firmware file again, and we're going to go to the update. The 2.15 version is going to load, type in your password once more, and then you're going to get a bunch of extension blocked errors. So you're going to hit okay on those and you just get hit okay again. And then you're going to go to your privacy and security settings and hit details. And then you're going to use your password. Once more turn on Sony imaging products and the J micron technology hit. Okay. Then type in your password once more, and then you're going to restart. But this is what I had to do. Then once we're starting you might as well plug in your USB-C cable from the camera to the computer. And then you need to make sure the camera is set to USB mass storage device. Now that all that's set up, we can launch the firmware update again. So we're going to go back into the 2.15. We're going to load that up. And this time it'll finally see the camera and work. And you're going to click next. And this is where it's going to check to see which version you have. And you're going to see, I have version 2.0 and we're going to update it to version 2.15 hit next. Then it's going to automatically restart the camera and start updating for you. This took me a good 20 minutes. And yeah, so go find something to do for 20 minutes. And when that's finally done updating, which seemed like an eternity, you can now update to version 3.0. And once this loads, it'll show you that you're actually updated now to version 2.15 and you're going to go to version 3.00. Then you're going to hit next. And this is where it's going to take another 20 minutes to 25 minutes to update the camera to version three. And this is how I had to do it. I don't know if it's going to be like this for everybody, but unfortunately this was all the steps that I had to go through in order to update this camera. Now, apparently from this version on, you can do it from the SD card, which is way easier. Anyway, hopefully this video helped you. Thanks for watching. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up. If you dislike this video, give it a thumbs down twice. Don't forget to hit that notification bell and I'll see you guys in the next one.