FS-100 Picture Profiles

Let's talk about these profiles. Outside or inside matters not. Whatmatters is how much dynamic range is in your scene. With extreme DR the camera needs to squash a lot of stops into AVCHD's 8 bit bucket. I see the best results in high DR scenes, such as back lit or side lit by the sun on a sunny day, with FS100 set to Cinetone 1 gamma, Black level +10, Black gamma high +7, Cinetone 2 color, Knee 75 Slope +3, Color level -5, Color depth +5 on all colors. These settings keep an extreme amount of DR as long as I don't over expose the highlights. It seems hard to not over expose with this camera though because of years of conditioning by the fear of getting a dark noisey picture. The FS100, however, has a very low noise sensor and you can shoot a full stop under exposed and still recover a lovely amount of noise free shadow detail. I have seen zero banding from these settings. Of course it requires a lot of grading in post. That's why I convert to CineForm so I'm grading with a much larger 10 bit file. CineForm interpolates the difference in values between 8 and 10 bits as you change the values in First Light. It's almost like grading an original 10 bit file. Before shooting, it is important to get in the menu and set the camera's lcd to BRIGHT. At the default LOW setting, it is impossible not to over expose because the lcd is so dark you bring up the exposere way too much.
 
As the DR in the scene becomes less and less I will compress the knee less and less. I've set my5 preset profiles to gradually range from my above settings augmented by changing only Knee 100 Slope -3, Black -10, Black gamma high 0. So as the scene becomes less contrasty, I make it more contrasty. When the scene is very contrasy I make it less contrasty. I just cycle through the 5 profiles 'till I see the most appropriate look.
 
Frank - I've been very pleased with a combination of your PP settings and the Abel Cine black gamma/slope settings, but the one thing that I'm still seeing a lot of is color skewing in the highlights. I knew that this was something I'd be getting with the camera, but I was wondering if you or anyone else has found any improvements on this when tweaking the color level settings.

Cheers, and thanks again for the hard work you put in straight out of the gate.
 
What PP would you recommend as a good contrasty image, no color correction needed, and vibrant in color but not clipping? For indoors and outdoors.
 
this thread has been a great help, lots of great starting points for tweaking.

Someone asked earlier and didn't get a reply, so I will ask again, what about low light/night settings?
What PP settings are recommended to try to minimize noise in shadows/dark areas?
 
The nose is super low on the FS100 anyway and if you see some, it´s only luminance noise that looks more like film grain.
This is the first video camera, where I have no desire for noise reduction in post.
So don´t sweat it. But if you want to get rid of noise, avoid high black gamma settings and negative color depth.

Frank
 
profnoxin said:
Frank - I've been very pleased with a combination of your PP settings and the Abel Cine black gamma/slope settings, but the one thing that I'm still seeing a lot of is color skewing in the highlights. I knew that this was something I'd be getting with the camera, but I was wondering if you or anyone else has found any improvements on this when tweaking the color level settings.

Cheers, and thanks again for the hard work you put in straight out of the gate.
Click to expand...

The setting that I have found that minimizes color shifting in highlights is by using cinematone1 gamma and cinematone2 color mode. I have been very impressed with this setting so far especially compared to the AF100 which seems to have worse color shifting in highlights in pretty much all gamma/matrix modes.

The only thing with this camera (also I keep seeing this on the F3) that I have not figured out is how to make bright bright saturated reds and probably other colors not look weird when they clip hard to white. This is only something I see when looking straight at red lights or bright objects lit only with bright primary red lights. I have to test this further. It may be related to the way the FS100 and F3 without S-log implemented their gamma modes to clip the top 3 stops of highlight latitude off the sensor. So far it hasnt been a big problem, and I shot with heavy primary red filtration on a light for a music video last weekend. The issue only showed up in one shot with a shiny object and the specular reflections of the red light occasionally looked weird when they went from bright red to white.
 
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After endless tests my conclusion is that the cinetone 1 gamma with cinetone 2 color is the only adequate way to get a look close to film.
I refused to use cinegamma 1 because of the apparent drop in brightness. I´m getting the same great skin tones from both gammas but something in standard gamma always looked videoish. I was never satisfied with the whole color rendition.

Example: When shooting in standard gamma using a moderate flat setting (not RedLogFilm style!) I´m raising the contrast in post and desaturate the colors a little to get right skin tones, other colors like green and especially red are still oversaturated a lot! I didn´t understand this until I switched to cinegamma 1. The skin tones are identical to standard gamma but all the other colors are less saturated. Red looks like it should.

So here´s my final PP for narrative work:

Black Level: +4
Gamma: Cinematone 1
Black Gamma: High ; +6
Knee: 90; +1
Colormode: Cinematone 2
Color Level: -6
Color Phase: -1
Color Depth: Red -2
WB Shift: LB-CC ; LB -2
Detail: 0 (Didn´t test this, yet)

With this setting, I use a very very soft S-curve to raise the contrast a little and 3 way Color-Correction. No essentail need for secondary CC.

Edit: Wrong Knee value. I meant +1, not +2. +1 doesn´t cost you DR, it just doesn´t record so much superwhites.
Edit2: Altered Black Level
 
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FelixGER said:
After endless tests my conclusion is that the cinetone 1 gamma with cinetone 2 color is the only adequate way to get a look close to film.
I refused to use cinegamma 1 because of the apparent drop in brightness. I´m getting the same great skin tones from both gammas but something in standard gamma always looked videoish. I was never satisfied with the whole color rendition.

Example: When shooting in standard gamma using a moderate flat setting (not RedLogFilm style!) I´m raising the contrast in post and desaturate the colors a little to get right skin tones, other colors like green and especially red are still oversaturated a lot! I didn´t understand this until I switched to cinegamma 1. The skin tones are identical to standard gamma but all the other colors are less saturated. Red looks like it should.

So here´s my final PP for narrative work:

Black Level: +6
Gamma: Cinematone 1
Black Gamma: High ; +6
Knee: 90; +2
Colormode: Cinematone 2
Color Level: -6
Color Phase: -1
Color Depth: Red -2
WB Shift: LB-CC ; LB -2
Detail: 0 (Didn´t test this, yet)

With this setting, I use a very very soft S-curve to raise the contrast a little and 3 way Color-Correction. No essentail need for secondary CC.
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Why the +6 Black Level? As far as I can tell, this basically raises the floor of your blacks, this value seems extreme to me.
 
Two reasons:

1. I don´t like ultra deep blacks. I like it a little milky. Just a bit.

2.When I apply an s-curve on a clip, I want to raise contrast in the midtones without crushing the blacks or blowing the whites. But the ends of the curve are unfortunately affected too (Maybe I´m doing it wrong). When using Black Level 0 any S-curve throws out a some bits of information in the highlights and shadows. To keep informations in the shadows I use Black Level +6.
 
I understand about your taste in blacks. But it seems to me you can always raise the floor with no loss in data using levels. As for the s-curve, perhaps it depends on what platform you grade on. I've been using a value of +2 and am happy with the results after grading in PP CS5.5. One thing I noticed when I tried a higher value (ie. +6), after levels were applied to bring the floor down, I could see stepped gaps in the histogram, which seems like a bad thing to me.

I suppose one could encounter some lighting scenario whereby raising the floor (with a high black level) gets you more DR, but I have not found that yet. Everything I've tried suggests that the black level control has nothing to do with the DR of the capture, just the processing of the data (which may be true for everything in the Picture Styles, for all I can tell).
 
FelixGER said:
Two reasons:

1. I don´t like ultra deep blacks. I like it a little milky. Just a bit.

2.When I apply an s-curve on a clip, I want to raise contrast in the midtones without crushing the blacks or blowing the whites. But the ends of the curve are unfortunately affected too (Maybe I´m doing it wrong). When using Black Level 0 any S-curve throws out a some bits of information in the highlights and shadows. To keep informations in the shadows I use Black Level +6.
Click to expand...

What app are you grading in?
 
Sony Vegas. I know, it´s not the first choice, but I mainly do documentary work for a living so I want a fast NLE. Vegas´ render speeds compared to Premiere CS5 are like comparing Warp drive with impulse power...^^

I already retested it. I lowered it to +4. Works too. Thanks for the input! :)
 
matteo1 said:
Just a little curious about Detail. Has anybody played with it yet? Any thoughts beyond leaving it at zero?
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I haven't... and I am gun shy about it to be honest, after having played with similar settings with a HD-DSLR, with results I was not too pleased with. However, the more that I use the FS100, the less importance preconceived notions, developed using other cameras, are. So I do want to play with detail. Just ain't gotten to it yet.
 
I did some testing with the PP I posted on how far you can go, before you run into trouble with the 8-bit avchd.
It´s pretty amazing! Here I have a short high contrast scene, where I pulled back a lot of detail in the sky and at the same time introduced heavy contrast. No banding issues!

http://www.steinhardtverlag.de/Felix/vergleich.mp4
First few seconds = Original MTS (Nothing is clipping), then graded version. Only contrast, no colors
 
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