A photographer has shared on Reddit how he was able to “reverse engineer” the firmware on his Sony A7 IV to add a shutter angle feature to the mirrorless hybrid stills-and-video camera.
Reddit user Mr_BananaPants shared the feat of software engineering in a thread, although he didn’t go into the specifics of how exactly he achieved it. “I found a path traversal bug allowing me to get the fully decrypted firmware of the A7 IV, which nobody had managed to do before,” the videographer said.
Shutter angle is a way of measuring exposure time relative to your video’s frame rate. Measured in degrees, it determines how much motion blur appears in each frame of footage.
While photographers measure exposure in absolute time – such as 1/250 second – cinematographers prefer shutter angle because it automatically scales when you change your frame rate, enabling consistent motion blur without having to do any mental math.
Although the A7 IV would be perfectly capable of calculating shutter angle, Sony restricts the feature to dedicated FX cinema-line models, which include similarly priced models such as the FX30, as well as higher-end rigs such as the FX6.
After the initial hacking success, Mr_BananaPants then tried to enable 8K video recording on the A7 IV, despite the self-professed “major risk of bricking the camera.”
Failing to heed his own warning, the videographer’s next update in the Reddit thread was simply: “camera is bricked and stuck in a bootloop.” That’s to say, the camera had become unresponsive, rendering it useless and requiring a professional service.
Luckily, as Mr_BananaPants kept the details of the firmware bug under wraps, other users in the thread weren’t able to copy him. “Thank you for not publishing full details before you proved the hack – you probably saved dozens of people from bricking their cameras too,” said another Reddit commenter, HeavyDuty_Ken.
It’s not only the risk of bricking your camera that makes fiddling around with its firmware super risky, either.
Sony Alpha Rumors also covered this story, and someone left a comment on its article claiming to have even been contacted by a law firm representing Sony after publicly sharing that they’d used a similar firmware hack to enable 30fps shooting when using a Sigma 300-600mm f/4 lens on an A1 Mark II body.
“Be very cautious. I got a serious cease and desist legal letter served and several threatening phone calls,” said ScottOphoto.
I think it’s safe to say that, between potentially bricking your camera and facing legal action, it’s probably not a good idea to try to reverse engineer firmware. I know I won’t be attempting it anytime soon.
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