Sony FDR AX53 4K Camcorder Test Video and Configuration movie
I just purchased the Sony FDR-AX53 4K camcorder last week. So far, I love everything about it. The image quality and image stabilization (5-axis gimbal) is insane. I went out yesterday afternoon to a beautiful area about a mile from my house, Worthington Valley, which is "horse country" for thoroughbreds. I thought an overcast day would be a good test of the camera. These video clips were done for the purpose of testing the image stabilization with hand held (especially the zoom). I must confess that on some of the tightest shots, I held the camera against me but definitely did not use a tripod!
I did a lot of research about 4K cameras (prosumer level, under $1000) and what drew me to this camera was the long zoom (30x) and the 5-axis gimbal that is truly amazing with hand held videos and during the full zoom. I have been mostly in auto mode but have played with the manual settings. In the AX53 model, only one manual setting can be set at a time. I found that the most useful manual settings are exposure and focus - I'll play around with aperture control another time. I used the manual focus in this video to set the close up focus on the mailbox and then left it on manual focus for the 30x zoom. The results are perfect. Auto-focus on tight zooms works well only half the time (the camera has trouble finding the precise focal plane). I have plenty of hard drive space so like to capture and render in the highest quality. The settings I used are in the title page of this video.
The camera is super easy to learn - the menu structure is the nicest I have seen on any video or D-SLR camera. To shoot in 4K, one must use Sony's XAVS codec which works fine with the major editing software. To get best quality, I shot at the maximum 4k frame rate, 30 fps. There are faster frame rates for high speed at lower resolution. Also, chose less compressed (100 Mbps which is 12.5 MBps). Any ultra high speed class 3 SD card will have no problem keeping up with that data stream rate. These are the highest quality settings one can get from this video camera.
I hope you enjoy this video demo. I'll try to get some sunny day test videos up one of these days.