FS700 Picture Profiles

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FelixGER

Well-known member
Hi,

I tested different picture profiles today and I´m not sure how to get the best out of the camera.

So far I think cinegamma 1 and 4 are both good gammas. What you lose in the shadows in cine4 you gain in the highlights but, highlight roll off and noise is better with cine1.
In cine4 you get a small amount of knee-like color shift in bright areas while cine 1 rolls off really well. (I set knee to 105 ; 0)

Another thing is ISOs. Does anybody know what the base sensitivity of the camera is? In cine1 you get ISO 400, cine4 starts at ISO 640. I don´t want to use negative gain and reduce DR.

At the moment I tend to cinegamma 1 with cine colour. Detail -1 or -2 and WB shift one point towards magenta.
 
Interested in hearing about some picture profiles too, great thread and i've also found that i like Cinegamma 1 and 4, but i've done nothing with the settings yet other than use cinecolor. Very new to this and hoping to catch some tips in a thread like this!
 
Main things to note are that CG1 & 2 are set to 100% White, 3 % 4 to 109% White. ITU709 restricts your tonal range - but this puts a lot more punch in low contrast scenes (overcast outdoors, flat office lighting). I much prefer the CineGammas as the whole knee thing is taken away from one's control. The curves do a much better job. Detail? Far better done in post, but like the FS100 I think the 0 position seems fine if you need fast turnaround stuff. Turning it 'off' means turning the manual control off - I got spooked by the idea that turning detail off actually means setting it into an auto mode.
 
Matt

Can you explain what the technical difference between a CineGamma curve and a CineTone curve is? What's in a name? What's a HyperGamma while we're at it? Are these just marketing terms or is there some black magic technical wizardry underpinning these terms?

Do you have knee control in the FS700? Some knee settings with the CineTone curves of the FS100 are a disaster for image quality so if Sony have taken that out of the equation that would be good.
 
Right - firstly, there are more knowledgeable folk here than I to give the full low-down, and I invite them to jump all over me if I get the wrong end of the stick... so here goes:

CineTone is a Sony 'marketing' term that denotes a way of making your pictures look 'cine-like' straight out of the camera, no need for grading. In their humble opinion, 'cine-like' included crushed blacks, deepened tonality (which meant reducing the effective dynamic range), and either intensifying (CT1) or knocking back (CT2) the chrominance. This goes back to the days of the Z1, which included a simple Black Gamma adjustment called 'Black Stretch'.

CineGamma from the point of view of Sony (there's Cine Gammas of a very different ilk from other manufacturers) are not about in-camera grading - quite the reverse. They're about providing more dynamic range for the grade, and protecting highlights (I think this is where Sony CineGammas differ from Panasonic Gammas) with a soft 'film-like' curve rather than the hard cut-off of traditional video or the odd step-over point of electronic 'Knee' handling.

I've shot with EX1s for a while now, and developed an 'expectation' for CineGamma - good 'fire and forget' highlight handling, room in the blacks for either enhancement or crushing, use of the 109% brightness range - hold on: side bar...

109% brightness range. It's been there, we can use it to record onto, but when it comes to OUTPUTTING, you have to pull back the 109 whites - which I assume you want to be white - down to 100% otherwise your NLE will run its strimmer/'whites weed whacker' along the 100% line for you, and you'll get tippex on your highlights, not gently rolled off detail. Some folks simply don't have the time to do the balancing and correction, and this is where the first two CineGammas come in (I know CG2 is 100% clamped, I think I mucked up my CG1 test but pretty sure it is). They don't allow you to to shoot beyond 100% white, so you can go from card to air without blowing a fuse. CG3 and CG4 give you extra headroom to play with, but it's up to you to bring it into the 100% range in the edit, or face the 'whites weed-whacker of doom' (or apply Magic Bullet Looks or Colorista which does this for you).

So... where were we? Oh yes. So, CineGammas (Sony Stylee) take the linear 'dark to light' line graph, and adds some curve at the bottom and top so they don't suddenly switch on and off. Don't get it confused with S-Log, which paints an extra 11 and 12 on your dynamic range knob. I've seen comparisons between the best an F3 can do on CineGamma, and then switch over to S-Log, and it is pixel-sex on a stick. Please don't get too involved in S-Log as it will dampen your desire for the FS700, which is plenty good enough for any sane human being. (author takes cold shower after thinking about S-Log)

Knee? The FS700 has knee control for non-CineGammas, if you want it. I too found knee control a blunt tool compared to CineGamma. Only Alan Roberts seems to be able to tame Knee and Detail in Sony settings, but that's for broadcast use, not direct-to-web. Knee is disabled (should be disabled, but wasn't on my loaner) for CineGamma - all more the reason to buy an FS700 over an FS100.

HyperGamma? It's not an EX1R or FS100/700 thing, so as a jobbing shooter/editor it hasn't figured on my horizon. The marketing material makes it sound like a version of CIneGamma for the shoulder-mount cameras in the 'expensive' bracket. I got too excited about S-Log (takes another cold shower) to get involved in looking into HyperGamma and dealing with all that angst over whether my EX1/FS100/FS700 material would make the grade. Of course it does.

But I reiterate most strongly: CineGamma is my single biggest reason for switching over to FS700.


BTW - Frank Glencairn posted this way back in 2009 - a satisfying edification and great read with a glass of something. Cuddle up:

http://frankglencairn.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/cine-gamma-dynamic-range-for-digital-cinematography/
 
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@Matt: Just one small correction. CG1 goes up to 109 IRE. Only CG2 stops at a 100.

After some more testing i´m in a dilemma...while CG1 gives you an amazing amount of shadow detail with low noise and highlight rolloff from another world compared to the FS100, CG4 simply sees much more in bright areas just like film. But I find CG4 too noisy, in every ISO (not generally too noisy but for the specific ISO level) and the highlight rolloff generates a noticeble colour shift, far not as bad as ITU709 with knee but it´s there.

I´ll be in the garden after the F1 race and continue testing.
 
FelixGER said:
@Matt: Just one small correction. CG1 goes up to 109 IRE. Only CG2 stops at a 100..
Click to expand...

Thanks Felix - knew there was something up. If you expect CG1 to be capped and it appears not to be, but you can't peel the difference back... well, time for the Scientific Method.

Meanwhile, back at Wimbledon and Silverstone (what a weekend)....
 
Matt thanks for the explanation but I'm not sure I understand the differences still.

I understand what a gamma curve is and I can see from the FS700 footage that their curves are different. It appears that on the FS700 you get the best of the FS100's Standard Curve plus the highlight handling of the CineTone 2 curve. As a FS100 user I have to decide whether to best capture the low and mid tones with the Standard Gamma curve or the highs and mid with the CineTone 2 curve. As FS700 user you can have your cake and eat it by selecting the appropriate CG curve you get the best of both worlds all in the one curve. Is that a fair appraisal?

So, what I really want to know is why the FS100 wasn't given these curves and why Sony produced the peculiar CineTone 2 curve that does a good job of highlights then utterly rogers the black detail? Why limit the FS100 in such a way? Presumably there must be a reason for it? I'm wondering if the FS100 LUT doesn't have enough data points to produce a gamma curve that can capture highlight detail and shadow detail together?

I have been shooting with CT2 and been very thankful to the 100-109 (buffer) region to allow me bring up lower mid tones out of the clutches of the black crunching zone. I can then legalise to taste. Once detail has been lost to the CT2 black hole it's impossible to do anything with it especially in 8 bits. Ho hum.
 
Nirv said:
what I really want to know is why the FS100 wasn't given these curves and why Sony produced the peculiar CineTone 2 curve that does a good job of highlights then utterly rogers the black detail? Why limit the FS100 in such a way?
Click to expand...

LOL! Welcome to 'marketing'. I can't really speak for Sony, but my guess is that on first release, the FS100 wasn't allowed to step on the turf of the F3. In those usual product line charts, the FS100 would probably appear alongside the Z7 or Z5 rather than EX1. The FS700 on the other hand is perceived to be in the EX1/EX3 camp and a sort of baby F3 - thus it gets the Cine Gammas rather than the more 'trainer wheels' Cine Tone. It gets HD-SDI and the rest, too.

I repeat - this is only my reading of the entrails, it's not 'informed' and should never be confused with reality. :)
 
MattDavis said:
LOL! Welcome to 'marketing'. I can't really speak for Sony, but my guess is that on first release, the FS100 wasn't allowed to step on the turf of the F3. In those usual product line charts, the FS100 would probably appear alongside the Z7 or Z5 rather than EX1. The FS700 on the other hand is perceived to be in the EX1/EX3 camp and a sort of baby F3 - thus it gets the Cine Gammas rather than the more 'trainer wheels' Cine Tone. It gets HD-SDI and the rest, too.

I repeat - this is only my reading of the entrails, it's not 'informed' and should never be confused with reality. :)
Click to expand...

:)

Matt, I suspected that was the case given the Firmware 2.0 didn't upgrade the gamma curves. Clearly there has to be a reason for users to upgrade to a FS700. How long this attitude can exist with the likes of Blackmagic entering the market remains to be seen.

I just wondered if there was a technical reason for the limitation. The FS100 and F3 share the same sensor but that's only part of the story and the back end electronics are sufficiently more capable/expensive to get every last bit of goodness from the sensor.

It has taken me a while but I have got 2 profiles that cover me for all my shooting needs and combined with a couple of homebrew FCPX effects I can stick two fingers up at Mr. Sony for the foreseeable.

Cheers
 
Joking aside, the F3 and FS100 share the imager, but right from the get-go the FS100's image processing was going to be throttled back to give the F3 a clear shot at the accolades. It may be that the processor just isn't up to the job of manipulating the curves in real time (or doing whatever mojo they do in the F3 and EX1/3). The FS700 has a completely different imager and probably needs some hefty processing power and plenty of space to do stuff in.

I'd like to think the engineers/designers were looking at the necessary specs for a 4K camera, thinking 'what would you do with all that memory and processing power if you DIDN'T shoot 4K?' and a little voice at the back says 'you could do some kick-ass slo-mo' and another one pipes up 'what about cinegammas?' Boss says 'throw it in'. Sort of like the scene in Robocop but in reverse. Of course it wasn't really like that, and it was probably a campaign of user focus groups asking for it (or listening to boards like this and people forever moaning about its lack thereof).
 
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