The Sigma FP was one of those cool cameras that came out last year that never really got the attention it deserved.
Part of it was from firmware issues when it was first released, and I think most people just weren’t ready to jump over to the L-Mount.
But this camera is very compelling and I had a ton of fun shooting with it last year. I personally wouldn’t buy this camera for stills without a mechanical shutter at this point, but for a video-focused system, this thing is really cool, especially now that they have cleaned up the firmware.
I really like the design of the camera and think this is kind of the future for video systems. A sort of modular brain that you can build around to suit your needs.
Did you know you can attach an external SSD to this camera and record straight to drive via USB-C with some insane bitrates? It’s CinemaDNG, but you can always just feed that through Media Encoder and turn it into a much more workable codec, or just proxy it.
A lot of people aren’t aware the Premiere allows you to do basically a 1-click proxy setup. We do this at our agency when making game trailers. We capture everything 4k60 but edit proxy or if we do Netflix ads we shoot 4 or 8k and again edit with proxies, always. We have assistant editors that manage all that but I have put together a nice Proxy editing guide for Premiere here.
Anyways, the whole point of this article was to mention that SmallRig released their cage for the Sigma fp. To me, this really enhanced the versatility and usability of the camera. It really needed this and now I think this camera is a very viable system and very appealing.
SmallRig Cage Sigma fp – Amazon
