A7S + Ronin + Laos for Pencils of Promise
- Thread starter benjaminreece
- Start date
bill totolo
Veteran
Definitely- I'm actually very minimalist with what I do to the S-Log gamma. First, I think its important to use either Pro or Cinema- Sgamut color is hard to deal with. To my eyes, Pro makes the skin tones pop a bit orange/red more than Cinema. It worked better with the Laotian skin tones.
So after logging/organizing for 2-3 days, I edited the assembly > rough cut in premiere. Once I was done with my rough cut and I knew I had locked in the majority of my clips I then ran Neat Video on every clip- some had very slight noise correction, some a lot.
For example the room with the older man reading his medicine and the interior shots of when Luni (the main girl character) first enters the scheool, were both underexposed. The latter shot was underexposed on purpose due to the dynamic range of the scene (I thought I could pull her skin tons in from the shadows, I was kind of right, but the mountains are still blown out so I should have just set IRE 70 for skin as I did with most).
But all were sharpened through neat video (I set detail to -10 in camera). On tip on neat video- use advanced mode and enable deep bit depth mode). I find the A7S does well with light noise correction in post- I have it set to off in camera.
Then, I took the project into speed grade and pushed around the colors and luma values on gain, gamma, lift- I matched all the exteriors to a reference frame (a good scene that I tuned in first) and all the interiors to another interior reference frame.
Overall I have been happy with Slog- it pushes around a lot better (more luma than color) than h264 canon stuff - but is a far cry of course from R3D.
The shadows of course are the fabled problem with Slog2 - the detail is there but even after noise removal the loss of detail was of course not brought back all the way- so finally I added a luma curve that crushed the left end of the blacks a bit more. I find with my grading I like to lift the majority of shadows but then crush the blackest blacks so that noise floor is gone + the human eye loves to see that contrast in a scene (whitest whites to blackest blacks).
No LUTs were used. Again, I find with Pro/Cinema color you can craft your own luma curve for each shot to get the look you want. I'm used to working luma curves in Lightroom/Photoshop, so its my preferred method. Speedgrade was used to set a curve + adjust the color to match shot to shot/scene to scene.
Finally, I tried adding some grain that I had from purchasing the Osirus LUTs (which I use for quick uploads/renders) but ultimately removed it. I've decided "never again" with grain for web delivery as web compression doesn't know how to handle grain- the codec sends the bitrate bandwidth all over the image because the grain tricks the compression algorithm into thinking there is detail everywhere.
Hope provides some entertainment! It was fun explaining.
Thanks for that very candid and instructional response! I think you got some very naturalisting imagery that is severely under-represented with this camera. Nice job.
If I may ask a follow up, what was your exposure strategy? I'm sure you could'nt walk around with an 18% gray card. Did you use zebras?
Thanks,
benjaminreece
Active member
Hey bill- basically I tried to 1. get as much dynamic light on the characters as possible to bring their exposure up to the environment then 2. pushed the exposure till right before zebras would hit on pretty much every shot unless it featured the sky, then I used 70% zebras for skin tones but would use grey card next time as its probably more accurate.
3. last fall back was to use the zone meter +1.0-2.0