FS-100 Picture Profiles

LiamR said:
I'm so new to this PP thing that it's doing my head in.
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I'm totally with you there... ;-) Right now I only have a vague idea of what most of the controls are about. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can pitch in and help us out here, but meantime, here's what I've figured out....

As I understand it (FG, please correct me if I'm wrong!), GlenColor2 is designed to be pretty flat, so it can capture a wide dynamic range -- i.e. get more shadow detail on a sunny day without blowing the highlights. It sounds like you're not too concerned with the shadows -- and given your subject, this makes tons of sense. Did you try GlenColor1? It has more of a vibrant look to me when used outdoors.

Also note that Frank recommends setting the black level depending on your conditions, so we may not be using it to best effect.

An issue I have with GlenColor2 is it looks a bit magenta to me -- grass/tree colours suffer from this in particular, at least on the little test clips I shot. I've adjusted by setting the "CC" part of white balance to -5, same as in GlenColor1. Since I guess you want the greenery to really contrast off the red dirt, this may be relevant to you.

Tomorrow I'll test it out, if we get any sunshine.... I'll also try playing with the color depth settings instead of white balance, as it seems odd to have the color depth push things towards magenta then pull it back again with white balance. However I may be totally mis-understanding this... :-/

Good luck!
 
I am real shy about playing around much with Color Depth. I have run across the magenta issue, but mostly I end up with my reds going to a nasty orange and start getting some banding. Those settings are a real mystery to me actually.
 
AtticusLake said:
I'm totally with you there... ;-) Right now I only have a vague idea of what most of the controls are about. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can pitch in and help us out here, but meantime, here's what I've figured out....

As I understand it (FG, please correct me if I'm wrong!), GlenColor2 is designed to be pretty flat, so it can capture a wide dynamic range -- i.e. get more shadow detail on a sunny day without blowing the highlights. It sounds like you're not too concerned with the shadows -- and given your subject, this makes tons of sense. Did you try GlenColor1? It has more of a vibrant look to me when used outdoors.

Also note that Frank recommends setting the black level depending on your conditions, so we may not be using it to best effect.

An issue I have with GlenColor2 is it looks a bit magenta to me -- grass/tree colours suffer from this in particular, at least on the little test clips I shot. I've adjusted by setting the "CC" part of white balance to -5, same as in GlenColor1. Since I guess you want the greenery to really contrast off the red dirt, this may be relevant to you.

Tomorrow I'll test it out, if we get any sunshine.... I'll also try playing with the color depth settings instead of white balance, as it seems odd to have the color depth push things towards magenta then pull it back again with white balance. However I may be totally mis-understanding this... :-/

Good luck!
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Thanks for the reply mate, im glad that I am not the only one. I will try that with GlenColour1, although I have used that a little bit and it seemed to be REALLY green?
I will definitely try that with the Black Level aswell and see if that helps out my situation!

I will also play around with GlenColour1 a lot more and see if I can get that to look any better for myself.

Cheers, Liam
 
I am loving the footage I am seeing from the FS100, and plan to buy one coupled with the Atomos Ninja very soon. However, the FS100 seems to lack a certain "richness" to the image that can be seen when compared to something like the F3. The FS100 has been tested and shown to have 11.5 stops of dynamic range, but the images still lack a certain "something" that I can't quite put my finger on. Any thoughts, aside from what has already been discussed? I am reading the posts that have appeared late in this thread, and they explain a lot. I just wonder what is going on in a general sense.
 
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I think it comes down to the 'CineTone' rather than true 'CineGamma' as found in the EX1/3 and F3. The highlight handling isn't quite there, and whilst it's very good, it's not in the same league as the F3 and its ilk. The CineTones re-distribute a range of tones over an image, and you can cheat a little by pumping up the bottom end and knocking the top end down a bit with gentle knee, but that's not 'CineGamma' by any stretch of the imagination.

The purist in me wants CineGamma, nay - wants S-Log, or the Canon pseudo-log quite frankly. Sublime highlight handling, excellent distribution of tone throughout the dynamic range, awesome images.

But unfortunately my clients (low to mid level corporate, high end event coverage) just do not want to see or pay for the difference, and that's a big deciding factor.

You can dump a certain amount of richness back into the FS100 picture with Magic Bullet Looks or similar (according to the law of 'find what you like, then reduce it by 50%') and get 90% of the way there. The FS100, like the AF101, can bite back with 'wind everything to 11' approaches to Picture Profiles, and perhaps slightly under perform WITHOUT using Picture Profiles. So you have to do some work: test, test, test. As Frank demonstrates, you need to be flexible with your black levels, and as many have found, you need to calm your overall chroma levels to avoid the dreaded 'channel clipping' in red. You may even have to (egad, hangs head in shame) carry some powder to tame the temples of your interviewees.

At some point, you need to ask yourself (and answer truthfully) is your camera choice driven by a business plan or your ego? Be totally happy if you answer with the latter, but understand that it comes at a cost that may not make it possible. The F3 is the better camera if you're pixel peeping. It's a better camera full-stop. It bloody well better be, considering the price difference.

Hopefully I'll be able to post a link to a movie which will help on all this soon.
 
David G. Smith said:
I am real shy about playing around much with Color Depth. I have run across the magenta issue, but mostly I end up with my reds going to a nasty orange and start getting some banding. Those settings are a real mystery to me actually.
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Yeah, I have to admit, that I also run into some weird color problems lately that I don´t fully understand yet.

I made my profiles with the help of calibrated charts, vectorsocpe, waveform andwhatnot.
So in theory, especially the color depth settings should be as good as possible.
Andy form AbelCine came to similar settings in color depth, so I guess I´m not totally wrong here.

And here comes the strange part: Sometimes they work, sometimes not.
I just shot an interview, controlled light, kinos and a LED light, studio, nice on the waveform, about a stop under, everything should be fine.
If I looked at the material on the NLE, the guy had a nasty pink patch on the cheek, with an unusual sharp border.


I never came across something like that. Looked like it was painted on him.
I can´t remeber, that I saw that on my monitor (TVLogic) when I was shooting (so it may be a codec issue, but I don´t rally think so)
I used my GlenColor1 in situations like this and it was always fine.
Checked the settings, noting wrong. I don´t get it.

The first clue I got is the spectrum of different lights. I checked all my material from the FS100, and never saw a problem with full/continuous spectrum light, like tungsten or sun/daylight. It seems to be more a problem under certain florescent and LED light.

I have too look even deeper into that.

Until I (hopefully) come up with something, I would suggest to set all color depth to zero, if you use my profiles.

Frank
 
Hey Frank, is your GlenColour1 supposed to have this green tinge?


It goes:
AbelCine CinemaTone1
AbelCine JR45CINE - VariCam
GlenColour2
GlenColour1

Cheers, Liam
 
GC1 is (mainly) for indoor use.
Since I´m a skintone nut, I found the normal settings to magenta for my taste, so yeah, the greenish is intended to get the magenta out.

But when it comes to skintobnes, there is no right or wrong - it´s a mater of taste.
You can always set the WB-shift to zero, to et rid of the greenisch.

Frank
 
Postmaster said:
And here comes the strange part: Sometimes they work, sometimes not.
I just shot an interview, controlled light, kinos and a LED light, studio, nice on the waveform, about a stop under, everything should be fine.
If I looked at the material on the NLE, the guy had a nasty pink patch on the cheek, with an unusual sharp border.


I never came across something like that. Looked like it was painted on him.
I can´t remeber, that I saw that on my monitor (TVLogic) when I was shooting (so it may be a codec issue, but I don´t rally think so)
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I can confirm the FS100 is prone to do strange things with flesh tones when (even slightly) overexposed - but this almost certainly is NOT a codec issue: when recording simultaneously to AVCHD (internally) and XDCAM HD (on my nanoFlash), both pictures are the same in this respect:(

Perhaps the higher color accuracy of a 10-bit codec would help, but unfortunately with FS100, we're limited to 8 bit (output, anyway - who knows what the internal processing is; certainly this is one of the major differences to the F3).

The worst part is that patches like this are impossible to recover in post, without making whole faces look "plasticky" and flat...
 
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Postmaster said:
Yeah, I have to admit, that I also run into some weird color problems lately that I don´t fully understand yet.
The first clue I got is the spectrum of different lights. I checked all my material from the FS100, and never saw a problem with full/continuous spectrum light, like tungsten or sun/daylight. It seems to be more a problem under certain florescent and LED light.
Frank
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Seems like a good thought...

I shot a scene in a car park at night - all pratical flo's overhead, and it was fine, i went back to do a pickup, and used a little LED lamp, ended up with similar resualts to your's - plasticy skin tones... went back a third time and shot the insert without the LED (and with more gain), it was fine.

I'm using caution when mixing LED lamps with anything now.

d
 
Frank, thanks so much for doing all this research and sharing the results. GlenColor1&2 are my PP1&2....

I'm trying to get a good setup for outdoors & sunny, and I find GlenColor 2 works well, if I set the WB shift to CC=-5 -- same as GlenColor1. There's definitely a lot to learn here though!

Postmaster said:
I just shot an interview, controlled light, kinos and a LED light, ... The first clue I got is the spectrum of different lights. I checked all my material from the FS100, and never saw a problem with full/continuous spectrum light, like tungsten or sun/daylight. It seems to be more a problem under certain florescent and LED light.
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Yeah, I think you have to be really careful with LEDs. As you know, all incandescent lights produce a full spectrum of light from red to purple, but with a hump somewhere -- like a plain old light bulb will produce more orange/yellow than anything else. The position of that hump is the color temperature.

But LEDs produce extremely narrow spectra -- basically a single colour. So a red LED produces one wavelength of red light ONLY (actually a very narrow band, but effectively the same thing). The spectra of red, green and blue LEDs is shown here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Red-YellowGreen-Blue_LED_spectra.png

Imagine if the red parts of your camera's sensor were sensitive to a very specific frequency of red light. With an incandescent source they'd be fine, because all colours are there; but with a red LED, if it wasn't exactly the same frequency, it would be black! Of course cameras don't work that way, but certainly you could get some wierd interactions with LEDs that you don't get with incandescent.

Now, for white LEDs, what they do is use a blue LED and put some phosphor on top, so the blue light makes it glow. So the LED is effectively a phospohrescent source, with an added spike of blue light coming through the phosphor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:White_LED.png

Basically LEDs don't follow the rules of colour temperature, so I can see having unpredictable problems with them.
 
I have done some more testing, playing around with Franks PPs and also some of AbelCine's...


1. Is essentially custom, it started off as AB_Range (from AbelCine) and then I made changes to it.
2. Is GlenColour1 with the CC turned to 0 and all the Color Depth to 0, not sure what Black Levels were, probably -2.
3. Is GlenColour2
4. Is AbelCine CinemaTone1 <-- just threw it in there for comparison.

All the footage is ungraded, and that is a big part of my shooting style, when I don't have to have the video ready in under 24 hours I do prefer to setup and spend more time in post, but to me, The first 2 are winners. Much more vibrant and don't seem to be lacking any detail or quality difference.
 
We tested quite a few cameras recently. Alexa and RED (unfortunately we had to give them back) were the only ones not showing major color problems when close to saturation, even the F3 did. But since it's sensor is very low-noise (better than RED and close to Alexa), you should rather underexpose a tad for skin tones and pull them up later.

Admitted, that works better with S-Log and 10 bits than in 8 bit, whatever profile you use, but it helps. LEDs can be more critical, but I've seen that with other lights too.
 
Everyone has seemed to notice the extra punch of red and magenta in this camera. I definitely see it too. If that is the case, why do all the color phase setting posted here have R and M at -2 or higher. Sometimes, they are even positive. Shouldn't they be lowered to get rid of the extra red? I might not know the concept of color phase well enough. What have you guys done to get an accurate red/magenta reading?

Thanks!
 
Kyle McConaghy said:
Everyone has seemed to notice the extra punch of red and magenta in this camera. I definitely see it too. If that is the case, why do all the color phase setting posted here have R and M at -2 or higher. Sometimes, they are even positive. Shouldn't they be lowered to get rid of the extra red? I might not know the concept of color phase well enough. What have you guys done to get an accurate red/magenta reading?

Thanks!
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In the next few weeks, me and my editor/colorist are going to spend a few nights tuning the red down on the FS100. Our next feature has TONS of red in it, and our initial tests demonstrated issues with that much red and highlight handling. When we get done, I'll share our findings.
 
Rick Burnett said:
In the next few weeks, me and my editor/colorist are going to spend a few nights tuning the red down on the FS100. Our next feature has TONS of red in it, and our initial tests demonstrated issues with that much red and highlight handling. When we get done, I'll share our findings.
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:love4: :love4: :love4:
 
Rick Burnett said:
We're also getting ready to do a pinball arcade promo with the FS100 as well. Which is why I am working on the highlight issues as well. I cannot wait to share that video, but mainly, because I love pinball! :)
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Double :love4::love4::love4: !!!

I love a good pinball game. Growing up, I made the Bally "KISS" pinball machine my b*tch!! If had all the quarters I have shoved in to pinball machines, I would be able to get the new Scarlett!! I look forward to seeing you results Rick.
 
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