macgregor
Veteran
I'm sure most of you have probably read this article by fabulous Art Adams: http://provideocoalition.com/aadams/story/non_technical_f35_guide/P4
If you haven't, you should. Now the problem is that since Art wrote that article, Sony upgraded the hypergammas in the F35. If I recall correctly, by that time, the best hypergammas were able to reach 400% and now they go up to 800%.
So I decided to give this a try and see how they compare with Slog, the holy grial.
If you have the latest firmware upgrade you should have the following in your camera:
I was planning on writing a long article but who's gonna read? I'll just cut to the results.
Basically the curves that interest me are 5 to 8. Because those give the maximum DR in the highlights while preserving a nice contrasty image that should not require LUTs or color grading.
The recorder I'm using is the hyperdeck shuttle 2 recording to prores. And here comes the trick. Prores seems to only like signals up to 100IRE, above that, and highglights are gone (not really gone but we can't see them). So with that in mind, I'm ruling out hypergammas 7 and 8, since those set the white point on 109. 5 and 6 seem to be the most interesting: whites are compressed down to 100IRE so I should be able to see all those nice highlights while preserving a nice contrast while on the editing room. No need for any LUTs.
Now the difference between HG 5 and HG6 is where midtones are. The higher the better in this case, so that skin tones are bright and clean and our beautil talent does not complain about how she looks on the screen. So there we go HG5 wins.
All this is the theory. Now lets shoot some stuff:
A couple high contrast set ups and done. Yep, HG5 seems to be the best for such a workflow. Dynamic range seems to be identical to Slog (bit precision should not). Slog still might be easier to manipulate in post, but that's the point, if we don't want, or can't spend hours doing color grading Hypergamma 5 is a fantastic trade off. It looks nice as it comes from the camera, and we are not loosing a huge amount of information. So for low budget commercials, music videos and corporate stuff this is great.
THe final image is not that different from graded Slog, but what's better for my workflow is being able to better judge the footage while editing, and being able to solve the prores 100IRE porblem when editing in PC.
Now, on this quick tests I didn't have a model to check skintones, that will be the next step.
If you haven't, you should. Now the problem is that since Art wrote that article, Sony upgraded the hypergammas in the F35. If I recall correctly, by that time, the best hypergammas were able to reach 400% and now they go up to 800%.
So I decided to give this a try and see how they compare with Slog, the holy grial.
If you have the latest firmware upgrade you should have the following in your camera:
I was planning on writing a long article but who's gonna read? I'll just cut to the results.
Basically the curves that interest me are 5 to 8. Because those give the maximum DR in the highlights while preserving a nice contrasty image that should not require LUTs or color grading.
The recorder I'm using is the hyperdeck shuttle 2 recording to prores. And here comes the trick. Prores seems to only like signals up to 100IRE, above that, and highglights are gone (not really gone but we can't see them). So with that in mind, I'm ruling out hypergammas 7 and 8, since those set the white point on 109. 5 and 6 seem to be the most interesting: whites are compressed down to 100IRE so I should be able to see all those nice highlights while preserving a nice contrast while on the editing room. No need for any LUTs.
Now the difference between HG 5 and HG6 is where midtones are. The higher the better in this case, so that skin tones are bright and clean and our beautil talent does not complain about how she looks on the screen. So there we go HG5 wins.
All this is the theory. Now lets shoot some stuff:
A couple high contrast set ups and done. Yep, HG5 seems to be the best for such a workflow. Dynamic range seems to be identical to Slog (bit precision should not). Slog still might be easier to manipulate in post, but that's the point, if we don't want, or can't spend hours doing color grading Hypergamma 5 is a fantastic trade off. It looks nice as it comes from the camera, and we are not loosing a huge amount of information. So for low budget commercials, music videos and corporate stuff this is great.
THe final image is not that different from graded Slog, but what's better for my workflow is being able to better judge the footage while editing, and being able to solve the prores 100IRE porblem when editing in PC.
Now, on this quick tests I didn't have a model to check skintones, that will be the next step.
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