Commercial Cinematographer Tests the SONY BURANO (Not What We Expected)

Yes please to the breakdown video on movements!

Huge respect for the honesty and straight talk. I have yet to see a Burano review that has a big plus positive.

Great video! Although the image is nice out of the Burano, it actually looks a lot closer to the FX6 than the Sony Venice. The Sony Venice renders a much more organic look. Closer to an Alexa. The Burano looks very similar to the FX6. And frankly, I don’t really see where it fits anywhere. I mean, I shoot commercials and corporate work with an FX6 and FX3. My clients aren’t gonna pay me anymore to shoot with the Burano that costs $19k more. The camera just doesn’t make any business sense. Especially where we’re in an era of good enough. I also own an Arri Amira that I like to shoot with because I feel like it. And I love the image, but the truth is clients don’t care, I recently shot a whole job with an FX3 that had a pretty good budget Because I didn’t wanna deal with the weight of the Amira or the FX6. And I actually prefer the colors of the FX3. And it looked great, the client loved it, and nobody ever mentioned the camera. Of course I had a rigged up with all the batteries and all the stuff. But it just doesn’t matter anymore. And then to spend all that money on this new camera and have that IR pollution is ridiculous. And you forgot to mention the horrible rolling shutter. Cheers.

In my opinion the real benefit of the Burano coming from a FX6/FX3 is the internal RAW codec which makes color balancing a breeze in post production. X-OCN is actually quite manageable in terms of files size considering its latitude and it's not that much taxing on CPU/GPU resources either using a Max/Ultra powered Apple's computer. With that said, you can still record ProRes RAW externally with the FX3/FX6.  8K is definitely overkill, 6K or even 5K would have been more than enough to reframe some shots and deliver a 4K project which is the vast majority of what has been done nowadays. Movies are screened in cinemas at a resolution of 2K or 4K at best, regular cable TV is HD, streaming platforms are 4K or HD. 8K resolution is totally unnecessary if not for (very) special VFX. The dynamic range of a sensor makes much more difference than the resolution itself in real world.

Not being able to view footage is not Sony’s fault. It’s up to your NLE on how fast they implement it into their update cycle. It was the same for when I bought the Venice and Burano. Adobe rolled out Burano file support in February. Davinci had support for Burano X-OCN at launch.

“Sony didn’t do enough testing” I think you summed up this camera

Strange to see a company that won the Red Dot Design Award for their fx6 model botch the Burano so badly. FX6 is product design in its purest form, while Burano - hmmm. Must have been a different team working on it...

Far more interested in the Chapman dolly than I am in the Burano lol

I've never seen a more compromised camera for such an astonishing asking price. Hard pass from me. Thanks for the vid!

I’ve shot 5 projects with my Burano cameras and never once saw any IR issues with the NDs. Also, Resolve plays 8K XOCN-LT without issue.

Hi guys, we've had the burano for a couple of months now, still having trouble seeing any major grain at 3200 iso (out of the ordinary fx6 style images) and the ir pollution seems non existent! we shot outside in bright sunlight and cloudy days and have not been able to see it. Having said that, all of our images exposed are at approx 60% on the waveform and we shoot 6k RAW. Puzzling, however, we did get a call from our supplier before our camera arrived saying there is a pre-shipment firmware update. Maybe they fixed that...who knows.

The rolling shutter and IR polution weren't a problem, then it would be a great camera imo. The 'small' form factor lends itself well to handheld and quick movements...

Bro I absolutely love your work, colors and lighting always on point and appreciate the industry tips you give, as I'm a newer DP in the commercial space (4 years in commercial, came from reality TV)

Would love a full commercial lighting course and/or courses in anything else related to production. Would happily pay. Thank you for all the knowledge you share through YouTube. Also the lighting pdf was great! Also this is how product reviews should be, not listing all the cool marketing specs but instead how the product performs real world. That was refreshing 👍 you have my vote for mvp YouTube channel for video production

You need 6K to get rid of the rolling shutter so you can get a clear 4K image. They really should be compensating for the rolling shutter like lens correction. Once you bake it into the video file then you can't undo the damage. They are downsampling anyways, so it doesn't make sense to not compensation for rolling shutter at this stage.

Thanks for this comprehensive review! Is there film grain added to the footage? Specifically looking at 7:25, or is that the noise you mentioned?

What is the device/mount that the camera is hanging from that is making the rotational shots?

Can I use this lens with the Sony FX3?

I love to see a comparison where you make a commercial but use the bruano and another camera like a fx3 or even a a7iv and repeat the shots for each scene to see if there is a difference in the actual bodies.

The Burano and the Fx6 have more noise because they have more controlled internal noise reduction, even the max internal nr is less than the automatic nr in fx3/a7s3, you should turn the nr off completely and then just apply nr in post (the standard resolve nr is wonderful), you get better results than if you just keep internal nr. Also, one thing for the burano, if you want to shoot with higher iso, even if it sounds weird, it's best to shoot XAVC instead of XOCN LT because the XAVC processing makes it less noisy as a starting point. XAVC with no internal nr looks actually better than XOCN LT with internal nr set to high.