Gavin Rawlings falls in love with his Sony’s versatile Burano camera

Gavin Rawlings, Co-Founder of Venture Films, recently used the Sony Burano, FX3 and FX6 cameras all over the rugged Kimberley region of Western Australia, and came up trumps.

According to Rawlings, his shooting requirements change depending on his client. Some clients request footage to be shot and delivered in HD, while others request 4K masters. Some request compressed codecs to adhere to budgets, and others request acquisition in 4K + resolutions in RAW/X-OCN.

Rawlings explained, “We produce a travel show on Channel 9 called ‘Oz Off Road’ which involves a lot of remote area travel around the country. These jobs require cameras that are reliable and the BURANO, FX3 and FX6 haven’t let us down yet.

“My most recent big project was seven weeks through the Kimberley. Here, my A-cam was the BURANO paired with a Canon 30-105PL zoom, B-Cam was an FX6 running a Tokina 16-28PL zoom, and C-cam was an FX3 on gimbal running a 24-70GM MKII. I love this setup and used it a lot for overlay footage on this project.”

Rawlings noted that his clients were extremely happy with the Kimberley shoot and indeed all the projects he has delivered with Sony cameras adding, “We always get positive comments about how nice the image is whether it is a project we’ve taken through Resolve or just raw footage handed over.”

He continued, “Our workflows vary depending on the projects. For instance, when we are filming the remote area travel shows like Oz Off Road, we shoot those shows in SLOG/X-OCN with the BURANO and generate proxies in camera. We’ll then use our Starlink connection to upload and organise those proxies onto our LucidLink cloud drive.”

For Rawlings, the BURANO is the true successor to Sony’s F55. “I love this camera,” he said. “It offers incredible resolution, great codec options from X-OCN to XAVC, lots of different frame rate and imager mode options and the list goes on.

“Most importantly though, it’s reliable and produces great images.

“I love that with the BURANO one day I can be shooting with large PL cine zooms and the next I could be doing a smaller corporate video with G-Master glass taking advantage of the autofocus capabilities of this amazing camera.”