F55: F5 & FS7: LUT's locked out of color controls

Erik Wittbusch said:
The LC709A looks very close to what I want to begin with. These presets took Sony and some other
much more experienced guys like us quite a long time to develop.
Click to expand...

That's a LUT, not a scene file, no?

I haven't seen any FS7 scene files for download. I tried the F5/55 ones and the camera doesn't see those.

I'm a bit of a numpty at this type of stuff, so any guidance would be great:)
 
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Liam Hall said:
That's a LUT, not a scene file, no?

I haven't seen any FS7 scene files for download. I tried the F5/55 ones and the camera doesn't see those.

I'm a bit of a numpty at this type of stuff, so any guidance would be great:)
Click to expand...

It's a look profile/3D LUT which is way more complex than any other way of tweaking your image
in camera.

You can use picture profiles for the F5 as far as I know and they will look pretty similar.
There are some recommendations from Abel cine but I will not use them without proper testing.
The LC709-A gives me a very good starting point but needs some tweaking in post to really shine.
If I find a picture profile which generates a similar look in camera I'll be fine with that.
But these will take some serious testing with charts and real images as well. You'll need an external
waveform and some charts for the tests and really need to know what all the values do.

At this point, I'm not trying this. Doug seems to have way more experience in these settings and
likes picture profiles/scene files very much.

With my FS100 I found settings that only need some slight adjustments in black level and have been
very pleasing in almost every situation out of cam (within the limited possibilities of this cam).

The FS7 is able to deliver much more range and bandwidth sothat it is a complete new territory for me.
I'm just at the very beginning of the lerning curve with this cam...
 
I must be doing something wrong then - I read all the stuff on Abel and can't get the 3DLUTS to load. I'll try again tomorrow.
 
Erik Wittbusch said:
It's a look profile/3D LUT which is way more complex than any other way of tweaking your image
in camera.

You can use picture profiles for the F5 as far as I know and they will look pretty similar.
There are some recommendations from Abel cine but I will not use them without proper testing.
The LC709-A gives me a very good starting point but needs some tweaking in post to really shine.
If I find a picture profile which generates a similar look in camera I'll be fine with that.
But these will take some serious testing with charts and real images as well. You'll need an external
waveform and some charts for the tests and really need to know what all the values do.

At this point, I'm not trying this. Doug seems to have way more experience in these settings and
likes picture profiles/scene files very much.

With my FS100 I found settings that only need some slight adjustments in black level and have been
very pleasing in almost every situation out of cam (within the limited possibilities of this cam).

The FS7 is able to deliver much more range and bandwidth sothat it is a complete new territory for me.
I'm just at the very beginning of the lerning curve with this cam...
Click to expand...

Also just to add, a 3D LUT can for example de-saturate color based on brightness level or even hue or several other color based parameters. They are a bloody marvel. This is something I don't think creating a color profile in-camera can do (unless I'm wrong). But this type of colorimetry is critical for losing the Sony look and approaching looks which may be far more desirable.
 
I can use LUTs in CineEI mode, I get that, but then I lose my waveform. I'm happy shooting in CineEI, I can make that work. But I want to check out Doug's method using scene files in custom mode - if I make any useful scene files I'll put them up here.
 
Thanks guys, this is the kind of conversation I had hoped for with this thread. I tend to agree with Dennis, that you cant get picture profiles with standard gamma or hyper gammas to look like a good LUT based on Slog 3. It's a different animal that has a more subtle flesh tone rendering especially the hotter parts of a face, the color may be more subtle, the color saturation in different parts of the range may be different etc. That's what i'm looking forward to. Whether you can get better results on your own in Post is a separate point.

It seems to me there are a couple of different issues involved with how LUT's work and it might help to keep them separate.

1- Simple white balance . This is what I would like to see the most. Having access to a white balance button, adjustable Kelvin , and green magenta offsets - all of which you get in RED or Alexa. This would at least allow you to visualize the basic color parameters on a monitor and correct LED's and FLO's etc . Those are very hard to correct in Post without all kinds of secondaries.

For example - Just this week I did a number of shots where I wanted to make daylight windows or daylight LED's outside a late afternoon window alternately cooler or warmer than my interior lit with Flo's. So I needed to pick a Kelvin that would give me what I wanted for the out side sources and then gel my interior Flo to balance - A monitor helped immensely and especially helped me see where I needed a little bit of magenta on some lights that were going green as they were all different. My eye can't do that well. That's why film shooters were very reluctant too mix sources with available fluorescents - its hard to see. Video made that much much easier.
Another shot was an interview in a room with available fluorescent that i couldn't turn off. I had to make my key match the Flo's . Very hard to do without a monitor in my experience. Maybe I'll get better at it now that i have to do , but Flo's and LED's are hard to predict.

2 - Exposure - As some people have mentioned - how you expose can put you on a different part of the Slog curve, so that could affect whether a LUT is working properly .
Alexa does an interesting thing where they tell you right on the camera how many stops over and under you get at different ISO's

3- Noise Reduction

4- Other paint controls that are typically available in std & hyper gammas, like saturation, matrix, black level etc. Interestingly you can adjust some of these on a RED in the deeper menus if you want to create a look. I don't know about an Alexa. I could live without this though as its not hard to imagine what a change in saturation or contrast could do to an image. Much harder are subtle effects of white balance in mixed light. Also I could see Alister's arguments about LUT's making more sense if you were to manipulate the image that much.

5 - LUT's and waveform availability - that's just a technical question.

Like Dennis & some other people here, I suspect that Sony could make the LUT's work with white balance controls . If the same LUT can work over 3200, 4800 and 5600 it ought to be able to work equally well over any Kelvin temp & subtle-green magenta offsets.
I doubt whether Sony is using completely different LUT's for each color temp - though perhaps they are and that would imply a problem giving more control.

I can't quite get my head around the exposure issue this evening, but it seems Sony's already figured that out for CINE EI at least.

I don't know enough about Sony's color science to know if it would be better to add white balance & noise reduction to CINE EI - which already has nice LUT availability or whether they should add LUT's to CUSTOM where Alister's arguments might hold more water. That's a Sony engineering question.

With the caveat that i'm totally guessing here (and don't really know squat) I suspect that the whole CUSTOM vs CINE EI distinction grew from Sony engineers beginning with a basically incorrect idea that high end videographers really wanted to emulate film (so color control and LUT's were too "old school") - and then scrambling to keep up with demands for LUT's, baked in looks, color controls - So they ended up with something that's more complicated that necessary and ties the DP's hands a bit. Just a guess though, maybe there are real technical problems getting what I would like to see. And maybe when I actually get the camera these things won't bother me as I learn to shoot with it.

I still know very little about the post workflow yet, so its hard for me the tell how easy that will be for clients. Ultimately I want is what someone (Erik?) mentioned a few pages ago. Make it easy for my client and make it easy for me to give them what I want. Don't make them say -" well i could see that with an Alexa/RED!"

That's a lot of words huh - No one ever accused me of being succinct.

lenny

I would like to see more people demand that Sony make a simpler more workable solution.
 
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starcentral said:
What does it mean that you replied to my post with this link?

Sorry no comprende.
Click to expand...

Dennis,
Sorry, I didn't mean to single you out. I just think there's a lot of misconceptions(in general amongs most users) floating around about Slog3/sgamut3/LC709A. While I think it's a good archiving format, I have to question it's viability on today's REC709 limited monitors and displays. Grading the huge color space on a REC709 monitor has got to be misleading. And, there aren't many REC2020 monitors available that would show the full gamut of Slog3.
 
No problem, I don't mind to be singled out or anything :cool:

I was only referring to using LC709-A as a starting point for grading, independent of whether you use sgamut or sgamut3, etc.. so maybe we are talking about to different things.

This maybe off topic however but one thing about Adam's article is that he was using the F55 in his tests which have a Color Filter Array capable of capturing even more color than film. The F5, FS7, A7S, F3 all have CFA's specifically designed for REC709. So what I'd like to know is how exactly can the FS7 have slog3.sgamut3 when conceivably the camera can't even see more than REC709 starting right at the sensor?
 
Liam Hall said:
I must be doing something wrong then - I read all the stuff on Abel and can't get the 3DLUTS to load. I'll try again tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Right now, the FS7 has a bug where it's looking for a folder named "PMWF55_F5" in the "CAMERA" folder on the SD card.



Put your .Cube files in there, and they should show up when you go to Menu > File > Monitor 3D LUT > Load SD Card. One thing to be careful of (this might only apply to Macs...) is that the file list will show files starting with "._", these files will fail to load. Scroll down further on the list of .cube files to find the ones that do NOT have "._" at the beginning. I ended up finding a utility to remove these hidden "._" files.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Thanks guys, this is the kind of conversation I had hoped for with this thread. I tend to agree with Dennis, that you cant get picture profiles with standard gamma or hyper gammas to look like a good LUT based on Slog 3. It's a different animal that has a more subtle flesh tone rendering especially the hotter parts of a face, the color may be more subtle, the color saturation in different parts of the range may be different etc. That's what i'm looking forward to. Whether you can get better results on your own in Post is a separate point.

It seems to me there are a couple of different issues involved with how LUT's work and it might help to keep them separate.

1- Simple white balance . This is what I would like to see the most. Having access to a white balance button, adjustable Kelvin , and green magenta offsets - all of which you get in RED or Alexa. This would at least allow you to visualize the basic color parameters on a monitor and correct LED's and FLO's etc . Those are very hard to correct in Post without all kinds of secondaries.

For example - Just this week I did a number of shots where I wanted to make daylight windows or daylight LED's outside a late afternoon window alternately cooler or warmer than my interior lit with Flo's. So I needed to pick a Kelvin that would give me what I wanted for the out side sources and then gel my interior Flo to balance - A monitor helped immensely and especially helped me see where I needed a little bit of magenta on some lights that were going green as they were all different. My eye can't do that well. That's why film shooters were very reluctant too mix sources with available fluorescents - its hard to see. Video made that much much easier.
Another shot was an interview in a room with available fluorescent that i couldn't turn off. I had to make my key match the Flo's . Very hard to do without a monitor in my experience. Maybe I'll get better at it now that i have to do , but Flo's and LED's are hard to predict.

2 - Exposure - As some people have mentioned - how you expose can put you on a different part of the Slog curve, so that could affect whether a LUT is working properly .
Alexa does an interesting thing where they tell you right on the camera how many stops over and under you get at different ISO's

3- Noise Reduction

4- Other paint controls that are typically available in std & hyper gammas, like saturation, matrix, black level etc. Interestingly you can adjust some of these on a RED in the deeper menus if you want to create a look. I don't know about an Alexa. I could live without this though as its not hard to imagine what a change in saturation or contrast could do to an image. Much harder are subtle effects of white balance in mixed light. Also I could see Alister's arguments about LUT's making more sense if you were to manipulate the image that much.

5 - LUT's and waveform availability - that's just a technical question.

Like Dennis & some other people here, I suspect that Sony could make the LUT's work with white balance controls . If the same LUT can work over 3200, 4800 and 5600 it ought to be able to work equally well over any Kelvin temp & subtle-green magenta offsets.
I doubt whether Sony is using completely different LUT's for each color temp - though perhaps they are and that would imply a problem giving more control.

I can't quite get my head around the exposure issue this evening, but it seems Sony's already figured that out for CINE EI at least.

I don't know enough about Sony's color science to know if it would be better to add white balance & noise reduction to CINE EI - which already has nice LUT availability or whether they should add LUT's to CUSTOM where Alister's arguments might hold more water. That's a Sony engineering question.

With the caveat that i'm totally guessing here (and don't really know squat) I suspect that the whole CUSTOM vs CINE EI distinction grew from Sony engineers beginning with a basically incorrect idea that high end videographers really wanted to emulate film (so color control and LUT's were too "old school") - and then scrambling to keep up with demands for LUT's, baked in looks, color controls - So they ended up with something that's more complicated that necessary and ties the DP's hands a bit. Just a guess though, maybe there are real technical problems getting what I would like to see. And maybe when I actually get the camera these things won't bother me as I learn to shoot with it.

I still know very little about the post workflow yet, so its hard for me the tell how easy that will be for clients. Ultimately I want is what someone (Erik?) mentioned a few pages ago. Make it easy for my client and make it easy for me to give them what I want. Don't make them say -" well i could see that with an Alexa/RED!"

That's a lot of words huh - No one ever accused me of being succinct.

lenny

I would like to see more people demand that Sony make a simpler more workable solution.
Click to expand...

These are definitely all good points and seem logical and practical to me. But so far no official word on this from Sony and it doesn't help that some people who are close to Sony don't agree with this point of vie,w and if anything have fizzled out any small spark and chance for us to see an actual flame.

I suggest you head over to the Sony F5/55 forums and either resurrect the conversation there, or start a new topic with your points and facts to see where it goes. It would be more valuable over there than on DVXuser.
 
I'm already in contact with some Sony people.

They say, that they know about most of the issues, but things might not be
corrected due to missing processing power.

1)Simple white balance + 3) Noise reduction
I agree totally - wanna have it!
Sony says: CineEI came with RAW implementation where processing wasn't even
possible. As SLog is imitating RAW in a way, CineEI is used as it was in RAW only
times: no WB, no NR, no anything
People at Sony seem to rethink the CineEI workflow with SLog, but nobody knows
if this is technically possible with the FS7. He said the F5 has this now.
Is that true?

2)Exposure
I agree here, too.
I don't know why the 3D LUTs aka "Look Profile" behave like this. With the 1D LUTs
aka "LUT" everything seems to be okay. The Sony-guy doesn't really understand
what's going on here.

4)Paint control
I won't need this but I wouldn't bother to have it working.

5)LUTs + WFM
I need this! Sony guy says it's the same on the F5/55. Might be a problem
of processing power, too
 
Here's what cineEI + LC709A LUT in post brings out easily.
I put a slight Fuji look via filmconvert on top. But this kind
of workflow is so fast! All clips get the Sony LC709A LUT
as input look (2 clicks), then I put the fimconvert look on top
for the whole timeline (5 clicks with adjusting WB + grain).
I even can't spot any "high contrast aliasing" or fancy colors
in your highlights. Can you?

Especially the 3rd and 4th picture show how much latitude you
have thanks to SLog3 and how nice the higlight rolloff can be.
This is extreme backlight! I think this looks very natural without
matrix science and sophisticated grading techniques.

Just shot + delogged + a slight look via filmconvert. Very easy!

V1-0001_00093147.jpg
V1-0002_00094046.jpg
V1-0003_00094685.jpg
V1-0004_00095309.jpg
 
THX guys. But this one goes to Sony at the pretty little boy!

Yes. Resolve as it is very easy for grading.
In don't like FCP X for color but the workflow from FCP to Resolve
is easy too.

When I look at the footage here (don't want to show too much face
in public places) I'm really happy with it.

When I'll meet the Sony guy on wednesday I'll bring my laptop and show
him the footage and explain why we need WB, NR and waveform
during LUT ability (viewfinder only).
I think at least the NR and waveform issue can be "solved".

BTW: The iris adjustment is way to slow for R+G.
Another problem is that "push auto iris", which is a solution for R+G
does even not work in cineEI. Don't ask me why...
 
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jshbckr said:
Right now, the FS7 has a bug where it's looking for a folder named "PMWF55_F5" in the "CAMERA" folder on the SD card.



Put your .Cube files in there, and they should show up when you go to Menu > File > Monitor 3D LUT > Load SD Card. One thing to be careful of (this might only apply to Macs...) is that the file list will show files starting with "._", these files will fail to load. Scroll down further on the list of .cube files to find the ones that do NOT have "._" at the beginning. I ended up finding a utility to remove these hidden "._" files.
Click to expand...

Thanks Josh. I'll give that go.
 
Thanks for that Josh. Does it usually take an age for them to import? Just trying to ascertain if my camera has crashed or not - a few minutes and counting...
 
Ben Scott said:
Thanks for that Josh. Does it usually take an age for them to import? Just trying to ascertain if my camera has crashed or not - a few minutes and counting...
Click to expand...

It shouldn't take too long. It pops up with a little confirmation window to load the LUT, you say "OK", and then a few seconds later it should say OK if it loaded fine or a different message if it failed.

Here is a short video showing how it works for me... about 10-15sec.

http://d.pr/v/1iOZX
 
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