A7S PicPro Settings

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Nice work Kholi! I did a quick test it's soooo much better. I have a quick sweeps promo that needs a standup this afternoon and I'm going to use the A7s and this profile.
 
Kholi said:
All feedback appreciated as usual! =D
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My thoughts after reviewing the video:

Blueberries - great choice
Unsweetened nut milk - great choice
Raw hemp seeds - fantastic choice
White sugar - whaa??

Blueberries already have a bit of sugar (and you already went with the un-sugared milk) so what you presented appears to be a little over-sugared.

However, if you wanted to use a little touch of honey, I think it would give it more of an organic feel.
 
Cyork, stills are looking nice and natura with the slog. How is the codec holding up for you when grading?
 
Joshua Cadmium said:
My thoughts after reviewing the video:

Blueberries - great choice
Unsweetened nut milk - great choice
Raw hemp seeds - fantastic choice
White sugar - whaa??

Blueberries already have a bit of sugar (and you already went with the un-sugared milk) so what you presented appears to be a little over-sugared.

However, if you wanted to use a little touch of honey, I think it would give it more of an organic feel.
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In my opinion, if no Sony firmware follows in due course to modify colour, perhaps a PicPro developed to reduce the 'Blueberries' may be in order, or not.

With skin tones, observing in some footage that lower exposed or shadow areas of skin tone may bring out the blueberries, instead of skin colour darkening, magenta appears to become stronger. It may be at a certain IRE level and below that this can be identified. It is more obvious to me with skin, because we know what we expect to see of our fellow human, skin to look realistic and/or accurate, whereas other surroundings/objects we may not require to perceive to be the same as the actual object in real life. Hence, the blockbuster look, we still expect skin tone to be somewhat real to life, well, to some extent, while teal modifies and creates a look. The magenta/blueberries may need to be slightly reduced from the a7S firmware diet, if possible, imo. I understand the 8 420 50Mbps limitation may not help. Interested to see if the 8 422 1080p HDMI to an Atomos is much better, however, looking at Philip Bloom's 7GB 4K Vimeo uploaded file that was recorded via a BM card/rack at 4K ProRes (HQ), I still see magenta tones around his eyes, and another colorist grading it revealed that the magenta was something to correct. Not sure if in that case it was caused by the mix of daylight and a powered light source to the right of Philip. I could be wrong with this whole observation. Just sharing some thoughts. I still would like to purchase an a7S.

Edit: I revise some of the above. Calibrated again, not as pronounced magenta. Push the a7S S-Log2 too far in post, of course issues will arise.
 
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reem12 said:
Cyork, stills are looking nice and natura with the slog. How is the codec holding up for you when grading?
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Thanks! Overall, they hold up really well for the type of grading I generally do. I can definitely tear it to shreds in Resolve if I'm trying to get a real punch look out of it but it can be done without breaking it if you expose up a bit and give yourself some headroom. The noise/grain is really not bad at all at 3200 unless you try to expose "properly". I find that the other profiles do very well with ETTR but you can also just shoot for the final image too. Either way, the camera's noise pattern at any ISO will look far better if you give it more light than trying to always choose the lowest ISO. It's hungry, just feed it and you'll be happy.
 
cyork said:
Thanks! Overall, they hold up really well for the type of grading I generally do. I can definitely tear it to shreds in Resolve if I'm trying to get a real punch look out of it but it can be done without breaking it if you expose up a bit and give yourself some headroom. The noise/grain is really not bad at all at 3200 unless you try to expose "properly". I find that the other profiles do very well with ETTR but you can also just shoot for the final image too. Either way, the camera's noise pattern at any ISO will look far better if you give it more light than trying to always choose the lowest ISO. It's hungry, just feed it and you'll be happy.
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Yeah I usually light my projects, so this may not be as big of a deal for individuals who do the same. I've noticed as long as you give this sensor enough light to work with it will give you better low light results than most of the latest crop of Sub $10,000 cams out there. I just don't want this new low light sensor technology to make me lazy as a filmmaker. I'm seeing little to no real narratives that are properly lit by any of the latest and greatest cams, only a massive amount of footage shot into the dark with an expectancy of the camera magically making great images.
 
jcs said:
S-Gamut ("an approximation to Sony's Pro S-Gamut" (> 8-bit)) is not very useful so far due to the non-linear 3D color errors (yellow/green splotches in midtones). While I found Pro color mode decent, so far we prefer Cinema color mode (less peaky reds in skintones). Example Slog2 with Cinema color mode here: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?326025-A7S-Hollywood-Fashion-Show
The red/blue/magenta is from colored spotlights at the show.
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Can you explain a bit more about the non-linear colour errors so i can understand what you mean a bit better (not enough coffee this morning for me)?

thanks!
Paul
 
The work that Kholi has done is looking really good.

But one thing to be mindful of is that the result is no longer Slog2, it's a custom set up that would need to be graded as such. If you are working in an environment where you need things to match or to be photometrically accurate then you would need some custom work to linearise this profile. YMMV. I'd just be a bit cautious about calling it Slog2 anymore, some other nickname would help prevent any confusion for people handling the footage.

So now we should name the profile...

cheers
Paul
 
paulcurtis said:
Can you explain a bit more about the non-linear colour errors so i can understand what you mean a bit better (not enough coffee this morning for me)?

thanks!
Paul
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Non-linear in that WB can't fix the yellow/green splotch issue. It reminds me of a messed up 3D color cube (3D lookup table): thus appears like a non-linear 3D color error (the color cube is distorted via a non-affine transformation (not fixable with a simple linear matrix: a non-linear (warped) 3D cube (LUT) is needed)). For example, after setting WB in post, everything looks pretty good. Except for the splotches. If the splotches are corrected (with a global adjustment like WB), everything else looks wrong (a Resolve style qualifier can also fix just the bad colors).
 
S-Gamut is indeed non-llinear, whereas S-Gamut3 (not available in the a7s) was designed to be linear (so that WB doesn't affect relations between colors in a non-linear way). Explained here:

Current S-Gamut needs color temperature setting to select color conversion matrix. But S-Gamut3 is optimized to combine these color conversion matrix. The conversion matrix does not depend on color temperature any more.
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That must be one messed up 3D color cube in S-Gamut if it is indeed the reason for the thing with the yellow splotches.
 
Samuel H said:
S-Gamut is indeed non-llinear, whereas S-Gamut3 (not available in the a7s) was designed to be linear (so that WB doesn't affect relations between colors in a non-linear way). Explained here:



That must be one messed up 3D color cube in S-Gamut if it is indeed the reason for the thing with the yellow splotches.
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This makes sense. When converting from SGamut3.Cine you have the green primaries of the source and targret space more or less aligned with respect to illuminants (on the CIE chromaticity diagram) so a simple interpolation of two standard illuminants will result in a good approximation for any illuminant inbetween (and even beyond them) on the illuminants curve. Not so with SGamut where a similar color space conversion operation would result in a larger error.
 
paulcurtis said:
The work that Kholi has done is looking really good.

But one thing to be mindful of is that the result is no longer Slog2, it's a custom set up that would need to be graded as such. If you are working in an environment where you need things to match or to be photometrically accurate then you would need some custom work to linearise this profile. YMMV. I'd just be a bit cautious about calling it Slog2 anymore, some other nickname would help prevent any confusion for people handling the footage.

So now we should name the profile...

cheers
Paul
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Oh yeah definitely. The numbers I gave for LOG panel in R10/11 are specifically for this. You really can't use any existing workflow, so I wouldn't call it SLog2. And honestly, these are really early settings, I expect you guys to figure out far better setups!

Examples are looking great, maybe there is too much of an orange bias? Let me have a look today.

Chris re magenta/blue - I did that on purpose. Or, I do that on purpose, and it's because I feel like pulling it out or adjusting it in post is better than not capturing it in the XAVCS? I could be wrong, haven't tried it, I immediately went for what I thought would work best based on experience with the normal profiles.

Once you guys are in the Color Depth and Custom WB settings, combining that knowledge with the color matrix, there'll be far far better images. I'm gonna check them out again today to see if I can find a better balance.
 
Thank god for the technical people to figure out how far you can go with this camera. On the other hand, for the person's wondering if you can make gorgeous images that clients would pay for? Seems the case for any project wth a reasonable but not crazy budget that would allow for a more expensive rental of purchase. For $2500c there's no reason you can't do high end weddings with 8-12k budgets or even commercial work for small, medium companies as an A cam. Yes. A cam. People piss money away on gear for little payoff in my experience but hey, to each their own.
 
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