I’d love the Zr as my A/talking head cam for a few reasons for sure. Not sure I’d touch the RED side of the house though, nor would I ever rig it, so for that reason I’d wait till it’s cheaper used.
My Z9 has all of the codec/format/fps option functionality I would buy the Zr for, so short term it’s just really that I need a monitor.
Sonnar-7 wrote:
What was appealing to me was the in body Lut treatment with the cinebias, I thought it was pretty handy, I thought it was less gimmicky than a picture profile.
I understand that it might feel cheap to someone more versed in video but I thought it was less cheap than the photo equivalent of a filter.
The other thing was access to some framerates without crop that I could only access through a Z8.
The Zr felt compelling to me as a second body companion to my Zf with not too much redundancy.
But I’m still pondering, it was my initial thoughts but doubts are lurking.
I think paired with a Zf or Z5ii is THE use case, otherwise you get into better bodies that already take better video. This is assuming you're just trying to add better video to a stills setup. Video productions will want it for other reasons.
RoamingScott wrote:
I think paired with a Zf or Z5ii is THE use case, otherwise you get into better bodies that already take better video. This is assuming you're just trying to add better video to a stills setup. Video productions will want it for other reasons.
Yes and no, while also the Z9 can shoot long form video without overheating, if you need a gimbal setup it requires a much larger and heavier gimbal which can quickly be tiring to operate. The ZR can shoot high-quality video apparently without overheating and is much lighter and smaller, and works with a correspondingly lighter gimbal, making the gimbal shooting experience much more realistic as a regular technique to use. The ZR also has less rolling shutter in video than the Z8/Z9 (9 ms vs. 14-15 ms, if I recall correctly) and supports digital microphones and 32-bit float audio recording, so no fussing about with levels knobs in each stage to get a good signal without clipping (this of course is separate for the gimbal applications since the gimbals generate vibration which shows up as noise in the audio track, so a separate audio recording is needed to get good on-location audio). The video image quality on the Z8/Z9 is excellent but I would prefer access to digital microphones, 32-bit audio, and a more gimbal-friendly size and weight of the camera. The audio equipment transition has been frustrating to witness as the new technologies are available but they're still sort of coming out and not every piece of gear supports them.
Yeah. Camera’s not even out and there’s no point in declaring such a limited, definitive use case. Apart from the fact that - for me - it makes a fantastic companion to a Z6III, there are going to be entirely new use cases opening up because of its quirky design.
This is great since the camera has such high data rates, external SSDs have both high speed and also high capacity and much lower cost per TB of storage than those CFexpress cards which run cool enough inside the camera. It might also enable redundant recording.
jlafferty wrote:
I don't get the issue with media cards. Video cameras have been notoriously lax in their attitude toward recording medium and we shouldn't be needlessly bringing our stills anxieties into the conversation.
We need a camera that does USBC out to record to external SSDs. It should also record raw (and other formats) over HDMI.
And if necessary it should have some internal storage
Please stop making a mountain out of a mole hill.
100% on enabling recording to SSD via USB. Every time I use my Z cameras for video, I think about how much more convenient it would be, especially when recording closer to the 6 hour time limit in the ZR.
ilkka_nissila wrote:
This is great since the camera has such high data rates, external SSDs have both high speed and also high capacity and much lower cost per TB of storage than those CFexpress cards which run cool enough inside the camera. It might also enable redundant recording.
Sadly still nothing yet on this front. But fingers crossed
