Many churches have video cameras they wouldn’t shoot photos with and vice versa. But affording separate quality cameras to shoot video and photos can be difficult for smaller churches. Now Sony has introduced the Sony FX30, an extremely small DSLR camera that is designed to shoot both quality video and photos.
Sony recently sent an FX30 to Point Church in Cary, North Carolina, for a Church Production Road Test. In this video, Our Marcel Patillo interviews Point Church’s Colin Wells who has a unique role as someone who oversees creative for his church’s independent campus model and Mission Support. He says Mission Support exists to provide some services of a large church affordably to smaller churches.
The Sony FX30 has a small form factor, long battery life, and interchangeable lenses. Wells says it brings a lot of versatility for the price.
“Myself and a couple of churches that I have the opportunity to work with had the chance to check out the Sony FX30, and we really enjoyed it,” Wells explains. “The Sony FX30 is a user-friendly camera from my experience, using the automatic settings, they did the job. This camera has a ton of headroom of where it can go. There are so many things that you can do.”
The Sony FX30 has a small form factor, long battery life, and interchangeable lenses. Wells says it brings a lot of versatility for the price.
“I consider myself a photographer first and foremost and the pictures that I was producing were pictures that I would use. And yes, it is a cinema camera first, but it's a great tool to be able to use the other aspects of it,” he says.
The FX30 is a part of Sony's cinema line, designed to have the look and feel of a Sony Cinema camera at a much more compact size and price.
“When you have a camcorder, you're limited by the lens on it. You're limited by your audio inputs, but [the FX30] already has the XLR’s and that's plenty of quality for what you'd be doing in almost any context with this camera. You have interchangeable lenses and one of the churches that I had the opportunity to work with on this, what they use currently for streaming is a camcorder. And just being able to see this step up for a few Sundays was definitely a noticeable difference in quality. But also, there wasn't a feeling of, holy cow, this is something that we can't do.”
Wells concludes by saying that churches who are looking to improve their media will find this camera a great step up from using an iPhone to get a foot in the door of elevating media at their church, with a lot of room for growth in expertise.
