A productive week in the life with the Sony FX3.

I've been using my Sony FX3 for over 8 months now, so I thought it'd be cool to document what a real week in my life looks like creating with the FX3, from planning, recording, editing, and everything else, as well as just share some of my experiences and thoughts on the camera itself. So it is Monday, and this is actually a new lens that I just bought. It's a Viltrox 20mm. Last week I recorded the A-Roll for this video, which is my 6 month review of my Macbook, and today I'm going to try to record the B-Roll, get the voiceover done, and then also get the thumbnail. First on the agenda is the voiceover. So I always record my voiceovers in my room because I have one of these bad boys. This is the Shure SM7V. Do I need that? Absolutely not. But when it comes to anything production quality related, I don't mind being overkill. In fact, I prefer it. And then right here I have the GoXLR, which was actually sent to me by someone I used to work for, KreekCraft. Thank you very much, KreekCraft. And just to show you the quality difference, this is just using the shotgun mic on my camera, which is really good for a lot of situations. For something like a voiceover, something like the Shure SM7V, you cannot beat it. It is so crisp. You know, it also makes my voice sound deeper, so, you know, I'm more masculine like this. I have no friends. The full specs I got, the full specs I got, the full specs I got are the 16-inch with nano, and also being able to internally store multiple videos of mine at once. Another voice crack. I'm done. I'm quitting. It's actually almost impressive how often I stumble over my words in a voiceover. So it's going to suck for whoever's going to have to edit that down, am I right? It's me. Okay, so I have all of my, actually, wait a minute. Now I have all of my lights up. We have the key light. We have this light that's just bouncing into this wall that's the same color temperature as this lamp back here. And then on the opposite side of the main key light, we have this light, which is the fill light, just to kind of fill in the shadow side of my face. Is this overkill? I think you're learning by now. Absolutely. I've had zero issues with my FX3 since I bought it, and recording with it today was no different. Having it matched up with my Sigma 24-70 lens has to be one of the most versatile camera setups possible. So I've just noticed two reasons why I like making these kind of vlog videos. One, it makes me a lot more appreciative of the tech I use because I'm paying attention to it more. The FX3 is amazing. Later in the week, I will be talking about kind of why I made the decision to get this camera and also show like some other cameras that are the same thing, cheaper and better for vlogging situations. And the second reason is recording yourself working for the vlog behind the scenes. It holds you accountable if you're ever being lazy. So I've gotten a lot done so far. I'm pretty productive. When I'm recording b-roll, I'm always trying to group similar angled shots together so that way I don't have to move the tripods and lights after every single shot and just overall makes the workflow a lot more efficient. But the b-roll can definitely take a long time. I think this recording session took about six hours. For some videos, I can blow through in about two to three hours. Maybe there's less total shots or maybe the shots are just easier or maybe I just consume more caffeine on those days. I don't know. But my goal for today was just to finish up the b-roll no matter how long it took. And I did. And once I finished up, I plugged my MacBook into the setup in my room and started offloading all of my footage from the vlog, from the b-roll, from the voiceover, thumbnail pictures, and even airdropping some iPhone clips. And there are a lot of files on my Mac at the moment. For this video, I was recording and the 10 others I still have stored, which I definitely need to and will address tomorrow. Obviously, camera quality does matter, but there are a lot of other more important factors to create good videos. Planning, lighting, which I'll show later this week, and also music. Especially for a video like this, I've picked out some pretty cool songs from Epidemic Sound. I'm not sponsored or anything, but I do have a link to get a free month in the description if you are looking for some good music for your videos. I've been offloading a lot of footage for videos I've been working on, but from the and also my A6500, which is kind of what I've been using to capture the behind-the-scenes shots for yesterday. But all of that's just being dumped onto my laptop and I'm just moving on to the next video when it's done. My SSD is almost completely full. So my plan is, and this is also kind of my creator hack, is all the past videos that are done and posted, I'm going to go through all of the b-roll shots, and if there's any chance that I can reuse them in another video, I'm going to separately save them to what I call my stock library. Some people pay for stock footage subscriptions where you can just pull different shots of other things, but I pretty much made my own library of my own shots. But I wanted to start off this little vlog segment for today reading some comments. It's right here on my video about why I am still on my iPhone 11. Thank you for this. Most tech reviewers would disagree. They're still on their iPhone 12. Their battery is not good. Relatable. And they're not a fan of USB-C. I like USB-C. But yeah, thank you, actually. I'm not trying to be like a tech reviewer, I'm trying to be more like a regular human with making video capabilities. This phone works. That's all I need. I'm a regular guy that likes tech. Like if there was an FX3 Mark II, I would probably make a video saying why I'm keeping my FX3 Mark I, because I wouldn't need to upgrade because it does everything I need to. We got great video. Thank you. Much appreciated. Underrated channel. I'm going to type this one out. Thank you. You get two exclamations. This just looks like I'm stroking my ego by reading these. I'm so glad I came across your channel. Humor, editing, pacing. Couldn't believe when I saw your subscribe. Wow, dude. Everyone's so nice. Thank you. Who would prefer Finder? You're crazy. So this has to do with my video when I said why I prefer Mac over Windows. And one of the things was I like the Finder system for files. I did say I prefer it. I think I do, just very slightly. At the end of the day, it's like pretty much the same exact thing. Like, oh yeah, look, here's my stock library. This is the current state of it. Hey man, I like Finder. Hate me all you want. Sue me for it. Don't do that. You just got a sub from Ghana. That's one of the most interesting parts of this is people like DM me on Instagram from like all these different parts of the world. I don't know. It's just so interesting how people all over Earth can watch specifically my videos. That's awesome though. I do try to respond to all of my comments. I definitely read all of them. So let me know if you have any questions. Maybe, maybe I'll read yours. I have better things to do, like scroll through Instagram. So I got that DashPass trial for DoorDash. The trial. I'm not paying for that. I am getting three sushi rolls and it would be $38.98. With the good deals that they're running for the summer, it's $13. Now could I order it for pickup and go pick it up myself and save more? Yeah. Am I going to do that? Absolutely not. Place order. Unfortunately, I now have no more excuses to not start dreadfully sorting through my past 10 videos and renaming clips one by one. But I need to get it done now. Otherwise, I never will. The sushi has been consumed. It was absolutely delicious. And I actually made a good bit of progress here. I went through, I think, the first two videos. Enough buffoonery, enough tomfoolery, dare I even say flim-flamming. It's time to actually get back to work. So I continued the journey of sorting through over 200 shots, trying to find anything at all that could be reused or referenced in the future. Even like me drawing Squidward. You never know. I'd say about 90% of these clips were recorded on the FX3 in LOG, which definitely helps to keep as much detail as possible. And I'll go into that a little bit later because I finally finished going through all of the footage stored on my internal SSD, which was only the first step. So I once again went through all of the clips. I renamed everything and loosely sorted it based on category. And then I once more went through every single clip and took the extra step to trim the start and end. This makes it practically drag and drop for editing in the future. So taking a little time to trim it now will save lots of time trimming later. And I happened to notice that I surprisingly had a lot of videos that were either only partially recorded or I'm just putting on the back burner for now. So I transferred that to an external drive and it freed up about 300 gigabytes of space. And at this point, I've been working on it for hours, but I was determined to finish it tonight. So once again, I got myself all set up in my room and got back into trimming down these clips. All the shots you're seeing now are all recorded on the high base ISO on the FX3 of 12,800. And I got to say, it looks pretty clean, but I finally finished trimming down every single one of these clips. So in an effort to make it as easy as possible in the future to find these clips, I organized and sorted it based on category. And tomorrow I'll show a little bit more in depth of how I have this whole thing set up. After six to eight hours, everything was finally in place. So I was able to delete all of the original recording files that I just don't need anymore. I do like to keep the final rendered out video, all of the thumbnails, the music that I use, the thumbnail frames, and of course the project files. And I went one step further backing all of that up from every single video I just went through to an external drive to really save as much space as possible. And at this point I was pretty tired. I was still grinding though, and the FX3 was also still grinding. This stuff is important to do in my opinion, but it's just not a very glorious part of creating. But with everything now either organized, backed up, or just deleted, I prayed I didn't goof up and forget anything, and I emptied my trash. And with that, I went from around 70 gigabytes available to over 1.2 terabytes available. At that point it was somehow midnight and I was more than content to call it a day. The next morning, after making a double shot of Espresso, recorded in 4k 120 frame slow motion thanks to the FX3, I made sure to back up the actual stock library itself. And to be honest, I took it easy in the morning. I'm trying my best here to show a real whole week, not just me being productive. Because the truth is, I'm not always productive. Between every cut of me doing a different task, there's probably a good chance there's about 10 minutes of me doomscrolling Instagram. So when I'm documenting a real week in the life, I'm trying to get all parts of it, including the unproductive ones. You know, don't get me wrong, I'm glad I finished sorting through all of that last night. After midnight is when I finish, but I am exhausted right now. I want to finish planning out my video that I'm going to be recording next, which is trying to make my iPhone footage look professional. So that shouldn't be too hard. It's a pretty straightforward idea. I think I promised to show you my stock library setup and how it works. If you don't want it, you're getting it anyways. We're now sitting at just under 88 gigabytes. But in all these folders, it's probably close to like 400 shots. Where I'm pulling from the most is usually in the working category. So, shocker, we have shots of me working. I tried to name them. So if I ever needed to, let's say I wanted me typing. And then we can go to sort by this folder. And there we go. We have four different typing ones. We have typing in my setup. We have typing on a laptop. We have another shot typing on my laptop. And then we have another shot typing on my laptop. So do I have three shots, which is pretty much the same thing? Yes. I now have options, which means I'm not just going to be using the same shot over and over again. Now, the editing folder has so much. Like I've been anticipating having a stock library since before I even started this channel. This is me when I was still doing YouTube client work. That's a video I was working on there. And I'm like, hey, matter of fact, I'm going to record this because it could be useful. Like whenever I mentioned something like when I was working as a YouTube video editor, I can throw up the shot of me editing. And I do also have some screen recordings of me editing because I do find that it's helpful from mentioning something about a specific software. I can pull me working on Resolve here. Same thing with Final Cut. Then we have the planning section, which is just anything related to making videos that's not actually recording or editing. Like a lot of these shots just have a high rate of reusability. For some reason, I gave cooking its own section. I'm actually I'm going to drag that into the other category, but sometimes I just find it's useful to make an analogy to cooking. You get some pretty good shots and where I hear it is the glorious drawing of Squidward. This will come in handy. I'm going to be using this one a lot. Actually, there's a chance I never use that one again, but I just think it's funny. And then there is the tech category. It's like there's this one of holding up my AirPod. I have now a bunch of shots of computers and then also a category for cameras, which is just again, shots of my cameras. You understand this. This isn't complex. And probably 95% of these shots were all from the FX3. So I know it's high quality and I pretty much save anything that I could reuse again. And I make sure I have a lot of options to choose from. And you might be wondering why it looks so gray and dull and unsaturated and bad contrast and bad. This is called log footage, and it's actually what I'm shooting on right now. I guess in short, it's a way that when you record, it captures the most data as possible. So when you throw it into an editing software, you convert it back to look normal and any adjustments you need to make editing, whether it's just like exposure, contrast or colors, you can definitely push the image farther without it falling apart and looking awful. Another video that I'm looking to make soon is using log versus using something like on Sony cameras, S-Cinetone, which I will switch into right now. So now I'm in S-Cinetone. This is straight out of the camera with zero adjustments. This is a lot better if you don't want to mess around with color grading. Personally, I'm an editing nerd, so I like to have as much control as possible. But even though having that stock library took so long just to sort it, it is worth it. It is like a cheat code for creators. And it's just those little things, adding a clip in here and there. I can always say for myself that I do think having that makes my videos better, and it definitely saves an unbelievable amount of time. Maybe I'll just record the rest of this vlog in S-Cinetone. So yeah, like obviously the FX3 is an amazing camera, and I can pretty confidently say that I will not have to buy another camera anytime soon. For vlogging, I'm covered. For vertical social media videos, I'm covered. For getting that cinematic high quality b-roll, for more professional gigs where I kind of have to rig my camera up. If I'm recording outside and it's hot out, I'm covered in sweat most likely. But the fans and the FX3 will make sure it doesn't overheat. So even though I dabble in looking other extremely good camera deals, I always look at my FX3 and I'm like, gee, you know, this is everything I need and more. On a lot of professional sets, they require the FX3 sensor because it's kind of like the industry standard. It matches the FX6. So having cameras that can kind of all work together well is ideal. But even with all of that and everything I just said, I will stand by if you're just doing social media content or something where you're not going to need the extra benefits of the FX3, the ZV-E1 is better. Even just with this tiny lens, like my hand is still getting sore holding this up. The ZV-E1 is a little bit lighter and it's not like you're sacrificing video quality since it's the exact same image. I started to lay out the video I plan to record tomorrow about comparing my five-year-old iPhone to the FX3, just setting up a few angles, a few talking points, a few b-roll shots, and also which test shots I'm going to get between the two cameras to compare them. And then like I was supposed to do days ago, whoops, I got all the screen recordings, screenshots, and downloaded all the assets I needed for my MacBook 6 month review. Which now means all I have left to do for that video is edit it, make the thumbnail, and post it. But then I decided to do something scary and uncharacteristic. Leave my house. Okay so I got all the screen recordings done, which you know, should have been done yesterday, and also got a pretty good head start planning the video for tomorrow. So how do I reward myself? By playing basketball. And of course matching my glorious Patrick Starr screensaver, I have the Patrick Starr basketball shoes. And of course I hit this half court on my first try. I mean, you don't have proof that it wasn't. About three hours later, I got back and got back to work, again staying up a little bit later than I wanted, trying to finish up preparing for tomorrow's video. So I'm going to be recording the main A-roll of the video, where I take my five-year-old iPhone and try to make it look professional. So really I don't know how much of this I'm going to be able to vlog because all of my cameras, including my phone camera, is all going to be in use. Like I honestly wasn't even sure if I was going to end up recording it today, which I feel like probably if I wasn't vlogging this week, I would just push it to next week. I still need to get to that M4 Max MacBook review. I'm trying to post that in like two days. That is not ready to be posted in two days. And I mean, talking about MacBooks, I feel like the FX3 itself is very Apple-y. Like, you know, it's built well. It's reliable. It does what it's supposed to do very well. It's popular. It's expensive. But it's amazing. So I'm going to break down my little lighting setup here and what I actually use the FX3 to do to get it looking, at least to me, pretty good. Okay, I think that's perfect. So the first thing I do is just get the angle. I use this exposure tool called Zebras, which you might see on that screen right now. All those weird zebra-esque lines. Pretty much you just set it to a number and then that number is associated with a certain level of exposure. So for my skin, I like it to be at 65. So if I zoom in, because I'm actually sitting kind of far away, that looks perfect. I can see it on my face right there. This is with all of the lights off. I mean, the FX3 is amazing, but some things you actually can't improve without additional lights. So that's the key light. That's the little backlight kind of hitting my shoulders. And that one over there is the fill light, which I think is too bright. I think that looks good. That's 1%. So I know that window is probably a little bit blown out back there, but when I'm recording myself, there's a ton of windows in here. I just want to make sure I look good. I need to end this recording, transfer all this footage, and also make sure all the batteries are charged. Which the battery life on the FX3, I think is pretty good, all things considered. I have three of the little batteries, and I find that they get me through like a good four to six hour recording day. So not bad, not bad at all. And also when I am recording, I typically put the lav mic onto this so you don't see this giant black square hanging off of my shirt. And instead, it's just like a little clip-on mic right there. I just think it looks a little bit better. I'm transferring all the footage as we speak. This is a much more chaotic recording day than normal. I just need to mention that for the vlog. Just, uh, it's not normally this bad. In fact, the only reason it is bad is because of this vlog. It's all your fault. Got all the lights, got the FX3 going. I got this top-down angle, which I can barely even see what's on the screen there. And then I'm going to be screen recording on the iPhone. I literally don't have enough cameras to vlog this. So I do apologize, and I'm not going to let this gaslight me into thinking I need another camera. So you're just going to get what you're going to get. So I just finished the first part of the A-roll here. Now I'm going to get into the side-by-side camera testing. That's where this is going to get a little messy. Well, I got about halfway through it. I recorded everything on this side of the room that I needed to record. So between this video and this vlog, and the video I didn't even finish editing yet, we need to say collective prayer for future editing Carter. And I was using the a6500 here, and I got an overheating warning. That camera does not have fans. The FX3 does. And that's once again proven why the FX3 is an amazing camera. But for the price I paid, my wallet and I would hope it is. After packing up all my gear and knowing I'm falling behind on my goal to finish the six-month MacBook review by tomorrow night, I locked in on some editing for the rest of the day. So one week and around 460 gigs of vlog footage later, today is a big edit day. All things considered, it's been a productive week and pretty all over the place. I've been vlogging with the FX3. I've been recording B-roll with the FX3. I've been recording A-roll with the FX3. I put it in tests for a part of a video, and I've even taken thumbnail pictures on it, which is actually cool because this again is the same sensor in the Sony FX6. But that camera cannot take pictures, and this one can. The FX3 can do it all. Sony autofocus is great. Like it just locks onto my eye and it will not lose you no matter like the lighting condition or how fast you're spinning around. The in-body stabilization is okay. I think it's good enough for a vlog. Something that's not specific to the camera being good itself and rather what it's compatible with, like lenses. When I throw in the 24-70, I can get some really nice looking B-roll shots. When I have this 20mm Viltrox on, it's perfect for vlogging. There's such a big selection for Sony, and you don't have to buy their first-party lenses. The most important part of a vlog isn't what camera you're using, it's what you're capturing. And that can be done on any camera, even like a phone. I think it's actually perfect for that. But I am a believer that you should always buy depending on your personal needs. Like if I was just vlogging, I would get the Osmo Pocket 3. If I was just kind of generally doing YouTube stuff, I would get the ZV-E1. If I was just trying to get into video production, I would get the FX6 or the C300 Mark III. But I wanted a camera that can do everything. It'd be hard to vlog with an FX6 or, you know, uncomfortable at least. My arms aren't that big, okay? As much as the Pocket 3 has incredible image quality, compared to something like an FX3, it's not quite there. The ZV-E1 has the image quality, but lacks in some professional features. And for some more budget-friendly content creation options, there's the Sony a6400, ZV-E10, or ZV-1. There's also the Canon R50V and the Lumix S5 II. And especially for used, you can find some really good deals on these. Part of the reason I got a maxed out MacBook pretty much, is because it has like a 0% chance of limiting me creatively ever. And as far as cameras, the FX3 also fills that role. Well, I have to finish editing this, desperately. And then I have to start editing this, which I'm honestly scared to do, because I know it's going to be incredibly long. And if you're somehow still watching, thank you. And if you want to see more vlog content like this, feel free to let me know and feel free to subscribe for more. I got a lot of work ahead of me.