News

A Place to Call Home, the Seven Network’s upcoming television drama starring Noni Hazlehurst and created by Bevan Lee and the producers of Packed to the Rafters and Winners & Losers, is the first Australian series to be shot exclusively with Sony’s flagship F65 4K camera.

Director of Photography on A Place To Call Home - a series described as a ”compelling melodrama about love and loss set against the social change of the 1950s” - was John Stokes ACS who explained the rationale behind choosing the F65, “I had been using Sony F35s on Packed to the Rafters and I was curious to see what the F65 offered as a camera system. After a lot of research and testing I came to the conclusion that this would be a perfect system to shoot the new Seven flagship TV series A Place to Call Home. I liked the look of the images coming out of the F65 in both HD and RAW. The colours looked natural and rich. The images looked crisp yet not unnaturally sharp. The workflow also proved to be a big plus working with the SR Codec.”

The Sony F65s for A Place to Call Home were supplied by Lemac Australia’s Sydney office, a Sony Content Creation dealer and supplier of equipment, production support, post and technical services for digital cinema, broadcast, TV and film projects. 

Stokes continued, “The production values for A Place to Call Home were very high so we really needed a camera and an equipment supplier to match. The F65 proved itself to be fast, flexible, have very high image quality and critically a simple and stable post workflow. It really helped me as a DP to work faster knowing that I had confidence in tight situations. Lemac offered very good on and off set support which was also a great help throughout the shoot.”

Lemac MD Sue Greenshields added, “The Sony F65 really is an exceptional camera, the quality of footage it has been producing is remarkable. We worked with the DOP John Stokes ACS on preparing for A Place to Call Home to make sure the camera kit delivered everything he needed in both 4K and HD during testing and the shoot. We also spent time with the production and post to make sure they were totally across the workflow of dealing with this new system in editorial and then into Baselight for the online and grade. The Lemac philosophy is to always offer complete end-to-end support. We were thrilled with the camera's performance and are sure that the F65 leads the way for high end capture."

John Stokes ACS insisted on testing the F65 in a variety of different environments and conditions before making the final decision to use the camera. “We tested the F65 by using it in the real world.” He added, “The main reason for this was that we knew the cameras would be used to shoot a lot of scenes against windows with very high contrast and we had to know they were up to the job. On set I’m delighted to say the F65s performed exceptionally well in all areas – over exposure, under exposure and high dynamic range. I also particularly like the mechanical shutter. All in all the F65 is a great camera that’s easy to work with, produces excellent images and because of the excellent colour reproduction of those images, they are a delight to colour grade.”

The 20 megapixel F65 flagship of Sony’s large sensor acquisition technology was recently joined by the new PMW-F5 and PMW-F55 cameras models to significantly broaden the Sony CineAlta™ range. Both cameras feature a new type of 4K Super 35mm image sensor with a 4096 x 2160 resolution and have attracted a great deal of interest from the production community worldwide.