REAL-TIME AURORA in ProRes RAW 4K with the Sony a7sIII & ATOMOS Ninja V+

👉 Please consider supporting my channel by buying us a virtual coffee at: ​ I am back in full swing after some health issues. On the menu today, I offer a most anticipated reel, as it features some of the best aurora displays in Norway since the start of the aurora season. But that’s not the full story. I had been expressing my discontentment towards the internal recording on the a7sIII, which is somehow supposed to be an upgrade from its predecessor. In all honesty, it is NOT. So, buy a now rare second-hand a7sII and go back in time or buy a 6K dollar Fx6? I found a better solution, which I was quite skeptical about at first: continue filming with the a7sIII using an ATOMOS Ninja V external recorder and shoot in RAW. I was quite scared of the increased amount of noise and the incredibly heavy files shooting RAW. However, as you can see with this footage, having a good denoising in post (NeatVideo) was more than okay, and the advantages are endless: You can get full control on the odd exposure of the aurora, too often blown out in the highlights and too dark in the landscape. Thanks the huge dynamic range of the ProRes RAW footage (12 bits effective) in 4k25p, I was able to bring out colors I would never have gotten with internal shooting, even in 4K 10-bit 4:2:2... Colors are just so much more vibrant without any sort of over-saturation. Overall, I can but recommend adding a ninja V to your A7sIII to finally get the results expected of this ’low-light beast’. It makes it much more heavy but if you ask me now, I would never part from it again for extreme low-light filming. On a side note, I should mention that a few sequences are slightly sped up for denoising purposes and so slightly faster than real-time (but not that much either!). Most of the sequences are real-time. If you want to know more about the specs used, samples and my process, consider becoming a member at where I write regular blog posts. I hope you enjoy this short video anyways. All content is of course copyrighted Night Lights Films (except for the sountracks, which most were licensed through Artlist (see below for the credits). Therefore, no footage can be used in any way without the author’s permission. Hit the like and subscribe button if you liked this video!