Guerilla Toss at the Middle East Upstairs 4/30/16

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Some more funky, punky, electroniky, art-rock (or something like that.) Whatever the labeling, it's basically pretty nice stuff, and were the finale songs to the "KLYAM Presents Rama Lama Ding Dong!" fest. Shot with a Sony a6300/Tascam TM-2X mic combo (tech notes below.) For more info: http://guerillatoss.com https://guerillatoss.bandcamp.com https://www.facebook.com/Guerilla-Toss-294357483907927 http://mideastoffers.com https://klyam.com Tech Notes Well, after nearly a year of delays, Sony finally released the a6300. I rented it for testing with a (bulky) Sony 18-200mm, f/3.5-6.3 OSS lens. The lens looked grossly oversized for the camera body, and I only got it because that was the only suitable zoom lens available at the time I rented the camera. Compared to my well worn-Canon EOS M (with an 18-55mm, f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens), it can do 4K video and has amazingly fast focusing, but overall the a6300 turned out to be mostly just an overall incremental improvement over my now 4-yr old EOS M, and not really worth its current pricing for me to upgrade. Bear in mind, though, that I use these cameras primarily as unobtrusive video cameras in funkily lit, extremely loud rock clubs, and this sort of environment really exposes camera limitations, especially when it comes to low light performance and audio handling with an external mic. The above video came out nice, but it took a *lot* of processing to get that result. The bad things I've found: while seemingly bright while shooting, the a6300's footage turned out to be much noisier than the M's, requiring more post-processing for denoising and cleaning concert footage; unlike the M's easy to deal with RAW images, the a6300's RAW images are a big pain in the butt -- I ended up downloading and installing a Sony utility to tweak the images before exporting them to a more usable format for further fixing (its Jpegs were pretty much useless for brightening and denoising; the Sony's menus are awful and you will need time and Google to locate things like where to set SLog or even where the mic level adjustment is; 4k video recording really heats up the bottom plate (which might explain the overheating reports -- be mindful when using a tripod head); I experimented with its 4K recording, but had bad luck in being able to process the footage with my existing software (Panasonic has the better 4K format); and again it's overpriced. The good things I found: focusing is usually blazingly quick -- at times, I could point & shoot several pixs before the M or its successor, the M3, would even cleanly lock on something; the battery life turned out better than expected, and better than the M's; lots of useful log and color space options (I shot the above in SLog3 with a "Cinema" color space); the mic pre-amp was at least as good as the M's very good pre-amp, better than the M3's and laughably better than the one in the Panasonic G7, and my well-worn Tascam TM-2X mic worked well with it. The bottom line is that the Sony a6300 is yet another Japanese mixed bag of virtues and drawbacks. I was expecting better much better low light performance (and certainly didn't expect the high noise level), and its file formats are rubbish, but its wickedly fast focusing and having a solid mic preamp makes it potentially a very nice run & gun, all-purpose stills & video cam. But with the high tech Light 16, another EOS M, and even the DJI Osmo Pro coming out later this year, I might have better options for my own needs (and money.)