Short video shot with A6300, commlite + Canon EFS 10-18mm

Hi all,

This forum has been a constant lurking environment for me in the purchase of my new camera, and I - in particular - found the information on the adapted canon lenses extremely useful. Invaluable, in fact, were the discussions on the sharpness of the Canon 10-18 for the price, and the large thread on adapters.

I purchased the A6300 on a budget, and went for the commlite adapter to utilise my Canon EFS 10-18mm and 50mm lenses. This has turned out to be an incredible budget kit, and I'd like to share the results:


Footage was shot in either 25FPS 100 4k or 100FPS 1080 with the Cine4 gamma + S.Gamut3.Cine Colour Mode. Colour graded and edited in Adobe Premiere (4k is a NIGHTMARE to edit without proxies on the latest version of CC...). Also have a ton of photos to edit (worth mentioning that the sony ARW files from the A6300 will require a recent version of Adobe Lightroom in order to avoid the painful DNG conversion).

I found there to be a lot of misinformation/disagreements online regarding the best adapter to use, and what level of usability each provided. I'm happy to say that - for video and photo landscapes - the commlite adapter has been incredible for the price, although the longevity does still concern me slightly due to the consistent sliding of pins. I use manual focus mainly, especially for video, so found this to be a moot point personally. The peaking and zebra on the a6300 are fantastic, and allow focus to become a bit of a non-issue for video in most of the areas I focus on (obviously if you do sports, it's no good). I'm sure the metabones adapter is peerless for usability, but for the price - I can't fault the commlite.

Hope this information helps someone to make a decision on their purchases, or helps to showcase some of the uses of the A6300, what an amazing bit of kit! Having upgraded from the 760d, there is a world of difference. Thanks all for a great forum.

i literally just posted a question asking about wide angle options for the a6300/6000

how good is the continuous af and is for handheld video (and photos) with this setup? and does iq take a hit due to the adapter?

Billy_A said:

Hi all,

This forum has been a constant lurking environment for me in the purchase of my new camera, and I - in particular - found the information on the adapted canon lenses extremely useful. Invaluable, in fact, were the discussions on the sharpness of the Canon 10-18 for the price, and the large thread on adapters.

I purchased the A6300 on a budget, and went for the commlite adapter to utilise my Canon EFS 10-18mm and 50mm lenses. This has turned out to be an incredible budget kit, and I'd like to share the results:

Footage was shot in either 25FPS 100 4k or 100FPS 1080 with the Cine4 gamma + S.Gamut3.Cine Colour Mode. Colour graded and edited in Adobe Premiere (4k is a NIGHTMARE to edit without proxies on the latest version of CC...). Also have a ton of photos to edit (worth mentioning that the sony ARW files from the A6300 will require a recent version of Adobe Lightroom in order to avoid the painful DNG conversion).

I found there to be a lot of misinformation/disagreements online regarding the best adapter to use, and what level of usability each provided. I'm happy to say that - for video and photo landscapes - the commlite adapter has been incredible for the price, although the longevity does still concern me slightly due to the consistent sliding of pins. I use manual focus mainly, especially for video, so found this to be a moot point personally. The peaking and zebra on the a6300 are fantastic, and allow focus to become a bit of a non-issue for video in most of the areas I focus on (obviously if you do sports, it's no good). I'm sure the metabones adapter is peerless for usability, but for the price - I can't fault the commlite.

Hope this information helps someone to make a decision on their purchases, or helps to showcase some of the uses of the A6300, what an amazing bit of kit! Having upgraded from the 760d, there is a world of difference. Thanks all for a great forum.

Click to expand...

Good choice!

I too have the commlite. I got it about 3 weeks ago for U$80. I mount the older ef-s 10-22 f3.5-4.5 usm lens on it. The lens is faster but does not have IS. Like you, focus peaking makes it easy to focus. I've tried this adapter with all my canon lenses. It even works with my 70-200 f2.8L IS, and the tamron 17-35 f2.8-4.0 Di.

Let's just make sure that others realize that the commlite is NOT good in AF. It is very, very slow. It may not even focus with some lenses. But if you have EF and EF-S lenses, it fits nicely and manual focus is easy. Even for the clunky 50 f1.8 mk2.

If AF is important to you, best to go with the sigma mc-11 or metabones.

per55 said:

i literally just posted a question asking about wide angle options for the a6300/6000

how good is the continuous af and is for handheld video (and photos) with this setup? and does iq take a hit due to the adapter?

Click to expand...

I have the Canon 10-18 and both the Commlite and a superseded Fotodiox NEX-EF Pro. The latter AF works better than the Commlite and I found the MC-11 very inconsistent with Canon lenses but well with Sigma. I think it was built for their lenses rather than Canon. I sold mine with the Sigma 17-70 C.

I've read that the newer Fotodiox doesn't work as well as mine unfortunately. But have no personal experience with it.

très belle vidéo, j'aime beaucoup.:-D

Hi did you use 1/200 shutter speed for the 100fps video? Is it really necessary or can you get away with slower shutter speeds, say 1/100?

per55 said:

i literally just posted a question asking about wide angle options for the a6300/6000

how good is the continuous af and is for handheld video (and photos) with this setup? and does iq take a hit due to the adapter?

Click to expand...

I haven't tried the continuous AF too much with this setup, however I must be honest - I believe if you require a reliable AF setup, you should be going for native Sony lenses. One of the selling points of the A6300 is it's extremely fast AF, and you won't get close to this with the commlite adapter. The video linked above is entirely shot handheld, so this should give some indication. However, in 4k 25FPS handheld is unachievable unless you're simply holding a still shot. 100FPS makes handheld filmmaking much easier, and although I've seen a lot of comments on the 1920x1080 not being great on the A6300 - I really disagree. The 10-18mm Canon EFS does have image stabilisation, which is a big help. Even with lens IS and a (I think) relatively steady grip and handheld movements - warp stabiliser was still used in a majority of the shots in my video.

Generally speaking, 100 FPS 1920x1080 shot in a good picture profile, with good composition and a use of warp stabiliser will provide good handheld shots - BUT it's not something I will rely on for future. A gimbal or slider is definitely needed for 4k, it's just not an option otherwise. So if you're looking for handheld 4k shots - it's not going to work. Photo wise you're totally fine, as I wouldn't recommend shooting handheld with a low shutter speed on any camera anyway, and the A6300s great high ISO performance makes this pretty easy to be honest.

Image quality wise, I'm extremely impressed. This combo is substantially better than the 760d with the same lens. Here are some straight out of the camera, unedited, RAW shots converted straight to JPEG for you to have a look at. I haven't even touched these in Lightroom yet:







^this had a picture profile on it, hence the more washed out colours.

In conclusion, I'm happy - and the setup suits my needs and purposes. But if you're looking for continuous video AF, you should probably look towards native Sony glass.

FlyinDoc said:

Hi did you use 1/200 shutter speed for the 100fps video? Is it really necessary or can you get away with slower shutter speeds, say 1/100?

Click to expand...

Some of these shots were taken on as low as 125 shutter speed, but wherever possible - 200 was used. I didn't need to utilise 25% speed much (if at all) in editing, and when slowing down to this level 200 is always going to be better than 100. I think the thing to consider is how amazing the A6300's higher ISO performance is, I wouldn't be afraid to boost it to 800+ in order to utilise 200 shutter speed - something I'd be hesitant to do on other cameras. The picture profiles also make this a doddle, really.

I'm honestly impressed with the 100 FPS feature (on PAL, NTSC is 120 FPS but would tend to avoid NTSC personally, even just for stopping that infuriating pop-up message every time you turn the camera on! ).

Billy_A, for AF on the A6300 with an adapter, if you haven't already, try setting AF Type in the menu to Phase Detection. This menu option is not available with Sony lenses but adapters work better with PDAF over CDAF. Exception is MC-11 which seems to work like native Sony but not as fast. I sometimes wonder if this is the problem with those with the newer Fotodiox. I don't recall what default setting was.

I'd just like to add that I really enjoyed the video clip! Well done.