Why the SONY XPERIA PRO is a UNIQUE pro video tool By Philip Bloom

In this video I am going to be looking at the sony xperia pro, not looking as a mobile phone itself but as a professional video tool although it is a really excellent phone what makes this a really unique professional video tool is it's the first phone to have an HDMI input to use it as a monitor 4k monitor It also works really well as an incredibly portable and easy to use live broadcasting device we are now live from the south bank and I am currently going live through the Sony Alpha 7 SII and the Xperia Pro now this isn't a review, Sony did hire me to front their launch campaign for it a few months ago but like always you will still get my honest opinion and i will go over what i love and also what i want to see improved. I never promote any product i don't actually like or would use. Whether I'm using a video camera or a mirrorless camera when i shoot handheld it's with an evf. It gives me stability and a really huge image to my eye and when I shoot on the tripod it's almost always using a monitor I do use the built-in lcd screens of cameras for casual shooting or for when i really have no space for a monitor in my bag it's just the problem with them is they just aren't big enough or bright enough or they're in the wrong place for me i've said countless times that my favourite monitor of all time is the SmallHD 702 touch. It has a lovely 7-inch 1080p screen it's very bright and has a plethora of functions i do use it mostly on my video cameras, so it was the fx9 now the fx6 It doesn't overwhelm the camera so much with its size, which it can do on the smaller cameras and with the FX9 and FX6 I power my monitors off of the camera's battery but when i'm using my mirrorless cameras i can't do that so that means batteries specifically for those monitors and i use the same NPF 970 batteries for them and some monitors are more hungry than others so i have to bring spares with me and that's roughly a minimum a minimum of four and even more if it's a recorder just three of these batteries adds up to one kilogram so yeah when I'm shooting with smaller cameras it means this additionalweight is quite substantial As this is the first phone to have an hdmi input it instantly makes it the lightest and smallest footprint monitor i've ever used. It does use a micro hdmi socket because it is a thin phone So when i go out with minimal gear to shoot Just the camera, tripod backpack and having that xperia pro makes it an absolute pleasure because having a backpack a couple of kilos lighter really does make a difference to me it weighs just 225 grams which is a fraction of my usual monitors.

The internal battery is 4000 milliamps this powers the screen for well quite a few hours and when it does get low i just plug in my usb portable battery i've always got on me to top up my phones and it does charge the phone whilst using it and it does it pretty quickly i really love how compact it makes my rig here I've attached a smallrig locking cold shoe mount onto smallrig rig cage and, this is a ulanzi phone holder now it's spring-loaded and with this very grippy polycarbonate case that the Xperia pro has it really feels firm in there. i use the locking cold shoe mount rather than just a basic one as i really don't trust anything that is simply screwed down because they never stay tight i can trust that it's going to stay in there because i do walk around with the phone still attached to the camera on the tripod, it's just a thing i do the image quality of the screen is absolutely fantastic. i don't actually have a 4k field monitor they're all 1080p or lower so things do look especially crisp A part of why I love to use a monitor over the built-in lcd screen is when i see what i'm shooting on a really lovely display it really motivates me double tapping or pinching the screen zooms in to check focus and the quality still looks really good, really detailed even at four times no nasty digitals zoom attracts. I really can be sure that i am in focus on manual focus lenses especially i've actually found this function to be literally the best digital punch-in of any monitor that i've used the screen is a 6.5 inch 4k HDR OLED display with gorilla glass 6. because the aspect ratio of it is 21 by 9 in reality you're only going to be using 5.5 inches of that for your 16 by 9 image... that is unless you're shooting in this aspect ratio then you can fill the screen 5.5 inches is still bigger than a Atomos ninja V which is called V (Roman numeral five) because it's a five inch screen it's not a VEE its a V, same with the shinobi you have full HDR support in the app as well as control over the color space these are very nice features to have. The brightness peaks at 1000 nits this is fine for most shooting but in bright sunshine it's not bright enough so you are going to need to use a sun hood and when you're shooting in log it looks substantially dimmer due to that lack of contrast of the picture profile and this brings me on the things that i really would like to see them add to this monitor app; first off LUTsupport.

Now while i'm using my fx6 i can record in s-log 3 and output an image over hmi and sdi with a lut. This isn't possible with the a7 sII and a1. Th ey do have a gamma assist mode that's just for the lcd and evf, it doesn't output it over the hdmi. So Sony please can you add at least a gamma assist mode like this or ideally user uploadable LUTS. there are some assist tools in there but there needs to be more.

There is that digital punch-in and there are markers for your different aspect ratios and gridlines for my obsessive symmetry needs you know just like this one here but there needs to be more we need to have focus peaking and exposure tools. I really do miss having a waveform on the screen. I will even take a histogram because that's what i'm having to glance down at the lcd screen to check what my exposure is and I told Sony that i need to add in all of these features into the app and they have said that they're aware of this and they are working on it. You can of course set the camera to output the on-screen display out of the hdmi but the way that the Sony cameras do this means the image is going to be much smaller than when you just have a clean image. It also disables the lcd screen of the camera so you lose the ability to use touch focus and touch tracking autofocus this This is a limitation of the camera, nothing to do with the phone the other main feature is the ability to go live with your camera using the xperia pro hdmi input.

I wasn't sure how much i would use this feature but once i started testing it out i loved it you see all my YouTube lives are from the same place in my edit suite with the camera connected hardwired into my router, with the Xperia Pro i can connect to my wi-fi in my house and go live wherever i want to even when i'm in the bath nah that way i won't do that of course the main benefit of this is being able to go live out and about in the big wide world you can do this with a 4g signal but a 5g one is of course preferable one of the key physical features of the Xperia pro phone is it has a 5g mmWAVE and 5g sub 6 connectivity for high bandwidth connections when in those 5g hotspots and it also has a 360 antenna design and that nice grippy polycarbonate case is designed to optimise that signal strength. i did a lot of live tests to see how good i could get the images to look whilst going live using both the standard youtube app and the stream labs app after much experimentation i found i was getting better results with the streamlabs one as i was able to set my bit rate at a specific rate. I also did find i got much better results when my camera was set to 30p with the youtube app and streamlabs also wants an ntsc frame rate to give you the best results. As i shoot in 25p it's a bit annoying because when i've done these lives i've on a couple of occasions forgotten to change back to PAL. I know, a bit amateur really! There may be other live streaming apps out there i haven't discovered which would let me stay at 25p which would be great I've done a number of remote shoots over the years for clients and with this setup i'll be able to send my camera output to an unlisted YouTube stream and they could watch that from the other side of the world whilst i'm filming in a way making this a sort of super long range video transmitter, it could be very very useful that Right now you can't use the hdmi input with skype or zoom as the apps don't let you switch between the various cameras.

For Youtube and Streamlabs you just press the image flip button to cycle between the different cameras until you get to the 5th one because there's 3 on the rear of the phone ,1 on the front and the hdmi is the 5th one i've really loved using the xperia pro these past few months it's really made going out and filming on my own so much easier by bringing down that weight. I do hope that i can improve the app soon by bringing in those functions that i mentioned which will make things much better It's also made me do more live streams on youtube because i've just gotten so bored of doing them in my edit suite, being on location is so much more interesting and i'm not just talking about me talking on camera answering the same questions, i'm talking about broadcasting other things; the longest one i did was about seven hours and that was pointing at a hole in my garden waiting for a rat to pop its head out.... I know it didn't happen which was a shame but it still was a seven hour live! i also broadcast a sunset in richmond and that was 35 minutes long and i did record in camera at the same time and i took that recording which was broadcast live and i made an edit out of it and i used topaz labs video enhance to crop in massively to give me lots of shot options and it came out really well and that was just from a live shot without question this is a niche phone i mean it has a very high price tag for a phone of £2,500 I struggled with this price for a while but when i looked at it as a professional video tool that just so happens to be a phone i was able to reconcile this price much more this isn't a sort of phone that you're going to upgrade every year you need to think of this like your other pieces of camera gear something you'll use for years, way longer than the traditional lifespan of your phone. This won't replace my other monitors as I still will use them for bigger shoots when weight isn't such an issue, but for the rest of time it just makes sense to use it because for what this does in such a small size, there's nothing else like it and to misquote Chase Jarvis' famous line The best monitor is the one that you have with you... and this will always be with me.

Source : Philip Bloom