+1 on everything Burkphoto said. FWIW - I've found Lightroom to be surprisingly capable at extracting a photo from a video. WhoDaThunkIt!
Davinci Resolve is free, full featured, incredibly powerful, and a very steep learning curve with lots of online instruction, 1600+ pg manual..
Wondershare Filmora is $40-$100 depending on purchase decision, simpler to learn/use, not as powerful, also lots online instruction.
Be prepared to stay up lots of nights learning video ediiting. It's a "Hill for a Stepper".
Good Luck............. R
I just now checked the firmware revision on my Sony A7 (original model). It DOES have the most recent FW, and it DOES NOT have the Highlight metering mode. Based on what I'm reading here, it sounds like the Highlight metering mode entered the picture with the Model 3 variants.
I took a couple of quick interior shots in Highlight mode the A7iii with a strongly backlighted scene (windows). The focus/exposure spot was on the room interior (not on the window), and the ambient shot revealed the view out the window beautifully with an underexposed interior as you'd expect. The flash shot also revealed the window view nicely and was somewhat less underexposed for the foreground interior.
I think this Highlight mode is going to be great for that dark theater bright stage situation, but perhaps not for much else. Anything with strong backlighting where you still want to see the foreground is going to require the usual treatment not with this mode. That is a very quick look at this exposure mode, so I could easily be overlooking lots of things.
There must not be many Sony photog's on here. I recently got a Sony A7iii, and while setting it up, came across the Highlight exposure mode. I'm also interested in it but don't have first hand experience with it yet. I normally shoot real estate ambient interiors with 2EV3-bracket and single TTL flash. I'd like to know if this exposure mode offers some new process opportunities for either ambient or flash. I plan to play with it in the next few days and will post any learnings. In the meantime, I'll be watching for more info here.
Lee -- I assume that you're switching the window pull layer mode to Darken in Ps, that the pull layer is above the background layer, and the pull layer has a black mask?
The only thing I can think of that might be missing is that you set the shutter speed for a proper exposure of the view out the window, and then grossly overpower the flash. Ps is supposed to use Darken mode to reveal the pixels that are darker than the pixels below and conceal the ones that are not. So when you paint white over the black mask it should nicely bring the "dark" properly exposed pixels down to the background and leave the overexposed pixels concealed. At least that's my understanding of it.
Let us know how you make out. Regards........... Bob R.
I haven't tried that and will do so. Thanks........... R
Good idea, but I think something else was going on in this case. I closed everything and restarted the laptop multiple times with the same result until two days later when I was about to put it in the shop. Am sure I'll never know the root cause, but I've already got steps to improve the situation based on this thread, including taking my time removing the card from the camera after turning the camera off, and not running it into a low battery warning. The new camera rig will have a 5-hour battery where the one I was running this weekend had a 2-hr battery. I'd got a low batt warning but had to take a couple more shots before I could swap in a fresh one. I'd have thought the Sony A7 would have avoided a hard stop on the SD card, but I don't really know. I'll avoid the situation in the future as well as start treating my memory cards with more respect. First time I've had this kind of problem, but am discovering that memory card problems are not unusual. Taking a little comfort in having dual cards in the future.
Wow! Just signed up with UHH this morning when I stumbled across it, and the first digest I got had this thread with useful info about an immediate issue for me.
I've been running a Sony A7 mirrorless that has only a single SD card slot for real estate photography. Got home from a job with a first-time client over the weekend, took the card out of the camera, inserted it into the laptop, and DANG, it froze up my laptop. Got that really bad sinking feeling in my stomach, but it ended up OK this time.
I found that the card would read properly on my desktop machine, but consistently froze up my laptop despite restarting the laptop several times. So I successfully got the photos retrieved, edited and delivered, but decided that fate had given me a heavy lesson that I need to take some actions sooner rather than later to avoid the inevitable. I needed a backup camera anyway, so an obvious early step was getting a camera with dual card slots. Have a Sony A7iii on the way with dual card slots.
The rest of the story -- I was packing up the laptop yesterday to take to my local PC repair hospital to check out the SD card slot for malfunction, when I tried the 'faulty' card again, and Double DANG, now it's working perfectly in the laptop! So now I don't know what the root cause of the problem really was, but this thread has given me lots to think about, from running into a low battery warning, popping the card out too quickly, a card going bad, or the card reader. Regardless, I'm taking actions that should help minimize future risk of losing a capture.
Good forum/thread. Thanks ............. Bob R.