FS7: Question to RED, or higher end camera owners on their FS7 interest.

Basically we need to start calling 'looks luts' something else as it muddies the waters explaining the requirement for a technical conversion lut.

I used my FS7 in custom mode for only the second time ever the other night, doing a live streaming event for Activision. I have never seen my camera look so awful. Didn't help that the lighting people were using horrible LED stage lights but the whole thing looked such a mess. So nice to load up the CINE-EI 'all files' preset I made afterwards :)
 
In an ideal world yes Sam.. but really in the corp world esp, it can go both ways.. leave the grade up to them.. and they can totally screw you over.. or shoot custom ofcourse.. but Ive found burning in a LUT to be the lesser of evils... I have 4 user ones..shooting Slog3/cine.. one is the extended LC709A.. 0-109 .. others are not LC full DR.. and they can really look very nice.. in my opinion way better than anything in custom.. and a nicer color science ..

For straight Slog.. I use the REC 709 MLUT.. very easy for exposure /focus etc..
 
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There is a difference between 'a grade' and 'normalisation' the one click application of a LUT specified/provided by you - that should be do-able without screwing you over.

Yes I completely get that one must face reality ref clients and yes it would seem that burning a LUT could be better than custom.

Im just in the camp that we all need to be trying to educate clients - that grade vid I made on the other thread is part of me attempting that.

The one burned in job Ive done I Dougs 'Broll' profile - it was predictably inflexible

S
 
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morgan_moore said:
If they use a modern NLE they should be able to apply a LUT in one click surely?

As an op we need to shoot to make 'one click' look OK and tell them which lut they need (and maybe send it to them)

In stills we would never just shoot jpg professionally and have not done for at least a decade.

Client education is the thing of now.

S
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From my experience: If you hand over a file with an explanation, in this case: apply LUT abc.cube - the file and the explanation will be separated sooner or later or end up at someone who does not understand what you wanted to advise.

Also client education is a difficult matter. I prefer to make everything smooth for the client and supply him a solution without any stress.
Education means also you are a teacher and the client is the pupil which reverses the aspect of the relationship of client / supplier.
I try to avoid creating situations like these. My 2 cts

I am still looking for a custom setting coming close to CineEI LC709A ;-)
 
No argument from me about that.. but maybe like Clermont .. I have a lot of short corp shoots from all over the world.. and I have no idea really of the level to which they can or will grade.. or their taste.. if they would apply a LUT I gave them or strongly requested .. and the 10 suits sitting around the monitor putting in their invaluable creative input.. (power play struggles ) .. as it stands for the likes of myself and Clermont burning in a nice LC709A (Art Adams) look,or one we have made ourselves .. is the best route.. for those fortunate enough to be in control to the end,then of course better not to.
 
I actually tend to create a Premiere project with all the correct luts applied to the clips next to the footage on the drive just to make things easier.
 
Clermond said:
From my experience: If you hand over a file with an explanation, in this case: apply LUT abc.cube - the file and the explanation will be separated sooner or later or end up at someone who does not understand what you wanted to advise.

Also client education is a difficult matter. I prefer to make everything smooth for the client and supply him a solution without any stress.
Education means also you are a teacher and the client is the pupil which reverses the aspect of the relationship of client / supplier.
I try to avoid creating situations like these. My 2 cts

I am still looking for a custom setting coming close to CineEI LC709A ;-)
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I don't think you will find one in custom .. burn in the Look.. in Cine EI.. the in camera one has raised black +4 I believe and max out at 100 .. but there are extended ones out there .. so black is 0 and white 109.. or roll your own..
 
Of course.

The whole thing makes me want to shoot Standard on my EX1 - and I do on occasion!

There has to be a discourse - the client likes the look of a 50 at 1.4 and is pissed when you drop focus - it is the flip side of the same coin.

There has been a sea change in cameras in the last 5 years and we need to bring clients along (if they want to come - Im available with an EX1 too)

--

As for getting the most from an FS7 or any camera with a wide DR it will have to happen in post.

That is the nature of choosing how to spread 10+ stops into a 7 stop (with proper contrast) box.

If they want choice the will have to make choices!

So the convo starts with 'how do you want this to look'

And the more dps/operators who are having that convo the more normal the convo becomes.. partly why Im on boards like this.

All the clients have iphone filters they use daily - that is a good way in!

S
 
morgan_moore said:
Of course.

The whole thing makes me want to shoot Standard on my EX1 - and I do on occasion!

There has to be a discourse - the client likes the look of a 50 at 1.4 and is pissed when you drop focus - it is the flip side of the same coin.

There has been a sea change in cameras in the last 5 years and we need to bring clients along (if they want to come - Im available with an EX1 too)

--

As for getting the most from an FS7 or any camera with a wide DR it will have to happen in post.

That is the nature of choosing how to spread 10+ stops into a 7 stop (with proper contrast) box.

If they want choice the will have to make choices!

So the convo starts with 'how do you want this to look'

And the more dps/operators who are having that convo the more normal the convo becomes.. partly why Im on boards like this.

All the clients have iphone filters they use daily - that is a good way in!

S
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I've seen two levels in my clients over the years, the unsophisticated who thinks the contrasty, saturated REC709 blown highlight look is absolutely perfect and the sophisticated who understands the image and wants a more high end look.

I always start the conversation off with mood boards and a brief questionnaire. I want them to show me what they like and I then show them what I think the project should be like then we chat and eventually decide on my way... if only. With animation work it's vital to kick off the project with some agreed looks because it's too expensive to redo on a whim but I don't think video based work should be any different.

The fact that instagram filters exist is a great thing because clients are already warmed to the idea of changing looks of footage even if they don't understand the emotional response to colour.
 
Donny 123 said:
Well I know the debate rages on.. but I don't see why they have SLog options in custom TBH.. then there would be no confusion ..whats the point.. when you shoot Slog you want to be in Cine EI mode... for LUTS and the color space.. clearly this is what Sony intended too.. so Im surprised they give the Slog option in custom.. lack of NR option in the FS7 is a pain.. you want pre set WB for grading anyway.. but otherwise I cant see why you would shoot Slog in custom in the first place.. shoot HG7 or 8.. same DR as Canons so called LOG anyway.. !
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Well custom mode being what it is, its a mode where the user can select anything they want from ISO, gamma, white balance, level of NR, matrix options, etc.. so it is literally a "custom" mode. I feel it makes sense that a user can make an Slog selection in Custom Mode.

To Sony CineEI mode is really a mode meant for productions that will go through post production and get it's noise reduction there, white balance tweaked, and be graded - hence why sgamut3 is locked more or less to slog3 in CineEI mode… because it is just way easier to grade and it looks better.

Fundamentally this makes no sense to me. If "custom mode" is meant to be customizable then I should be able to select the color gamut I want too. But Sony didn't do it this way probably because they are reusing old code, or their is some tie with the dreaded "matrix" to custom mode even when turned off… god knows their reasons.




Lenilenapi said:
This is all very interesting but I still find myself a bit confused as to what really affects the colorimetry of the camera .
Back in the old days when presumably all major video cameras were using the same 709 color gamut ( is that correct usage?) There was a tremendous difference between Ikegami's , Sony's and the Panasonic cameras ( who reportedly stole all Iky's engineers). The Iky and Panny simply looked better and we didn't need an extended gamut to get prettier faces. I used to summarize it as Sony doesn't do brown - its always some combination of green or magenta, while Iky/Panny had nice rich browns which applied to flesh tone.

On top of that all those cameras like our present Custom mode had matrix adjustments that you could alter yourself though you still couldn't really change that fundamental camera colorimetry.
In fact I always wondered whether the cameras has something like an underlying matrix before the adjustable one that set the cameras look. Of course that's coming from a guy with no engineering background at all and its probably a complete misunderstanding.

So what set those cameras looks apart & what sets a Canon apart from a Sony or a RED now . Is it the the gamut, the basic chip, the engineering, the Matrix?
Does that stuff disappear in RAW or is the cameras identity still there?
On top of that now we have the Gamut to deal with, and the "Art Adams or Alexa" type Gamma that desaturates highlights.
Are flesh tones nicer in CINE EI ? If so is it the gamut or the desaturating gamma?
Is the Sony look that people hate because of the cameras colorimetry or because none of those people know how to set up a good matrix. Or is it not color at all but something related to how sharpness is rendered?

Just musing here.

Thoughts?
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Lenny great questions, aside from the obvious influences of lens filters or specific lenses being used here's my best answer on the chain and influence of colorimetry in sensor based cameras:

Colorimetry on any camera first and foremost starts with the FULL RANGE of COLOR that the sensor itself can "see". From manufacturer to manufacturer and sensor to sensor model this boils down to the specific characteristics of the sensor. I suspect that for a long time CCD sensors could deliver very wide gamuts but for the purposes of recording video and displaying them - simply meeting the REC709 standard seems quite logical. Why exceed it when there is no way to display it?

The next aspect of colorimetry is the Color Filter Array. As everyone knows this is used for demosaicing the image coming off the bayer-pattern sensor to reconstruct the original color. But the CFA also serves another purpose, it can be used to pass and/or limit any specific colours in the spectrum. Again keeping in mind "video display" as the final destination it would make some logical sense to design a CFA meant more for REC709.. and it will save some processing and complex color conversion in the next stage.

The electronic image even AFTER the CFA is still wider than the visible spectrum so it will require some COLOR TRANSLATION to put it into a more practical and visible color spectrum. Wikipedia says, "The responses of the filters do not generally correspond to the CIE color matching functions, so a color translation is required to convert the tristimulus values into a common, absolute color space." With video we know that mostly the images are going to be displayed in REC709 space via TV's and monitors, so it becomes the ideal choice as the final color space required. From Sony we know that some of their camera's use specific CFA's made for REC709 like the F3, F5 and FS7. The F55 and F65 CFA's are meant for very wide gamuts, as Sony has stated "wider than even film". The F55/F65 are able to record MORE of the color spectrum which regularly would get filtered out on a REC709 specific CFA. I suspect the color translation from the F55/F65 are far more complex to convert to REC709, and this is even more true with Sony's original "S-Gamut" because it is far more complex to do conversions on.

Sony developed "S-Gamut3.Cine / S-Gamut3" because it is closer to color that was being used for film outs, it is easier to grade, and many believe it looks better.


So what sets different camera's apart like Sony, Canon and ARRI you ask? The sensor for sure, the CFA for sure, but lastly the color translation they've designed and probably the most important part for yielding specific color renditions and looks. Just look at those god awful three colours on the bottom of the color chart shot in Custom mode / S-Gamut! RED, YELLOW and MAGENTA look nuclear and I have never ever seen these colors in real life except maybe at a stationary store looking at highlighting markers. Shoot a flat 4-5 stop scene without a lot of color and predominantly mid-tones and flaws of S-Gamut aren't so obvious. Shoot an East Indian wedding and some might argue the colors "pop" nicely and look really nice.

Color in the end is definitely debatable.


Nirv said:
Thanks for this post it clears up a lot of questions.

Gamut and SGamut3 have the same gamut according to an Art Adams article on DVInfo so the question is what is the juju the camera doing behind the scenes?

Do you know what is happening when you shoot with CUSTOM mode with MATRIX on? Is that actually changing the gamut in anyway or is just saturating and vectoring colours around?

Thanks
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Your welcome Nirv.

What I suspect the camera is doing behind the scenes is a different color conversion math.

When you shoot with custom mode MATRIX on you are applying Sony's nuclear color to the equation :) but technically no I don't know if adjusting matrix is adjusting the math on the actual color space conversion or if it's acting like a LUT and just altering color, hue, saturation, curves, etc..


Note the twist orientation of S-Gamut/S-Gamut3 to REC709 vs S-Gamut3.cine orientation to REC709:
 
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@Starcentral

Gamut and SGamut3 are superimposed on that graph, they have the same gamut. I just wondered what the new camera juju in SGamut3 (not .cine) was compared to SGamut. If Sony claim SGamut3 is better for grading than SGamut then what is happening with the colour processing? Maybe this is Sony secret sauce you are not privy too.

I understand the difference between SGamut3 and SGamut3.cine that is obvious from the graph and indeed very obvious in the output from the camera.

The moment the UK sees sun again I'm going to do a back to back of Custom Mode Gamut vs CineEI SGamut3 and see if I can detect any differences. I wonder if SGamut3 (not .cine) is less prone to producing fringing effects which seem to be exaggerated in CUSTOM SGamut?

Cheers.
 
Oops I meant that Sgamut3.cine is oriented more in direct line to the REC709 space and have updated my post.

As for S-Gamut vs S-Gamut3, Sony says that "the color space of S-Gamut3 is kept the same area of original S-Gamut, though color reproduction inside S-Gamut3 is more accurate than S- Gamut."

Yeah I agree with you it's a bit deceiving what it means. To me it means that Sony at some point or another realized that S-Gamut had too many limitations when it came to color space conversions (perhaps that color temperature was such a huge factor) that in revamping their color to the newer S-Gamut3 they start with the same native gamut, but do newer and better math that is more efficient and has the benefits already mentioned.

About your other question when shooting in custom mode and MATRIX on, well in my opinion you are applying Sony's nuclear color rendition to the equation. Technically speaking I don't think this is working the same way we know a 3D LUT to work which essentially is like "grading" color, hue, saturation, etc… I do think that adjusting matrix is actually adjusting parameters within the color conversion process of the camera.

Cheers,
 
starcentral said:
the color translation they've designed and probably the most important part for yielding specific color renditions and looks.
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Dennis ,
Thanks for a very detailed post and helps clarify my understanding of what creates a cameras personality. I took the above quote to be the most important for me, implying that its not just the gamut itself , but what the engineers are doing with it to translate it inside the camera that makes the picture. After all lovely color was coming from those old Iky's and Panny's in the dread 709 color space, though no doubt newer cameras have much more accurate color. I remember when no matter what shade you put in front of camera you got Sony or Iky RED - that was it.

I do find many of the comments about how horrible Custom is to be mystifying. Either I'm just a hack or a lot of you guys don't know how to shoot traditional video. Sure in some cases Cine EI can look a lot better, but its often a subtle difference and sometimes if I have the time , I put both up and prefer Custom - even Std gamma - usually when your dynamic range stays within its limits. The nice thing about Custom is I can control and finesse it in the menus . While I have made a number of LUT's with LUTCalc, its still difficult to have the control you get with the menus. I guess it helps if you've been shooting traditional video for 25 years.

Ben talked about how horrible his "custom" shot was under colored LED's .Well that's a worst case scenario no matter what and it might be that Slog will handle the LED saturation and dynamic range a lot better. But that doesn't mean all Custom imagery is garbage. I'm still curious how much of the advantage to CINE EI is the color gamut vs the the dynamic range and desaturated highlights of LC709A. I'm also not at all convinced that CINE EI handles fringing any better than Custom once you've saturated both shots equally. It might , but I haven't seen it yet.

Re Clients and Log: My experience is that the clients who can use Log and LUT's are already doing it and they tell me that's what they want. Their Post people are already interested in it. Its more common with clients used to RED. The sad part is that doesn't guarantee they know what they're doing with it. If my client wants WYSIWYG though, I'm not going to argue with them, I'm going to give them the best picture I can. A pleasant conversation about the advantages of shooting Log and offering to give them tools to make it easy is fine, but many of these guys just don't have the eyeballs, skills or the time to color correct and preaching to them seems to me a loser's game. To me its a bigger plus to be able to say - "Hey I can give you a fantastic look right out of the camera, but its tricky, and that's why you should hire me instead of somebody who really doesn't understand the power of this camera."

The great thing about LUTCalc is that it gives us a much broader palette to burn in a good looking and appropriate LUT. Its a fantastic tool. The bad thing is that its still a PITA to change LUT's within an FS7. Sony could help us out a lot simply by giving us NR in CINE EI, and letting the Menu actually display the name of the LUT instead of User 1,2,3 or 4, and letting us see it in the viewfinder or a Status display. That's a small change to bug Sony about - Write to Juan Martinez or the Sony Community Forum.

Lenny Levy
 
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I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this, which I've seen many times - the part about Cine EI being so noisy:

To Sony CineEI mode is really a mode meant for productions that will go through post production and get it's noise reduction there, white balance tweaked, and be graded - hence why sgamut3 is locked more or less to slog3 in CineEI mode… because it is just way easier to grade and it looks better.


After shooting an entire feature and multiple short projects with the camera in Cine EI, I can count on one hand the number of noticeably noisy clips. I did screw up and underexpose here and there, but still never ran into any real problem with noise- at least compared to my HVX, which often suffered from noisy blacks. Never once needed NR on the feature. What circumstances are causing noise in Cine EI?



 
"slog3" being noisier is subject to lots of disagreement. Generally being underexposed one stop is enough to rear it's ugly head in my experience.

If you overexposed one stop you improve the signal-to-noise ratio by 6db.
 
As the SNR ratio is the same for Slog2 and Slog3 I guess its in the fact that 3 gives more data to shadow.. and so before full grade.. seems to show more noise
But everyone is dropping it a stop of EI .. which is fine but most NLE cant read the Sony metadata.. so unless you tell them.. it looks like your rushes are 1 stop over exposed .. !
 
Maybe I'm not as bothered by the noise because to me it looks more like film grain than the blocky looking noise of the HVX. But as I mentioned I had several under exposed scenes, and as a general rule they just looked too dark, not noisy.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Either I'm just a hack or a lot of you guys don't know how to shoot traditional video.
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I wonder if two things are at work here.

1) the sands of time - going back to old work it might not look that great!

2) the pressures of (modern?) production.

Of course footage can look great shot with pretty much any gamma/DR as long as one has enough lighting/time to set the shot and a good enough monitor to actually understand on location what you are getting.

My recent big project on trains - I was 'forced' to use HG/50mbs and I was very clear to the director that to control the balance between the int and the ext we would either need to shoot log and burn in the windows (which I did on the test shoot!) - or use a significant lighting package (with all sorts of issues such as powering it, obstructing fair paying passengers et al) Of course on the actual shoot it was me and my one dedo LED and a HG camera setting, nothing to compete with the EXT light levels and the footage looks, er, not the best. I guess in 'the golden age' of television such scenes would have be shot with an actual crew and probably closure of the carriage.

Im not sure, therefore that it is a lack of knowledge, it is probably a lack of opportunity to shoot 'properly'.
 
The only way anyone's getting objectionable noise from these cameras is if they're underexposing them (unintentionally or otherwise) and then push processing their footage in the grade. Even pushed a full stop, the noise is barely noticeable - but push it two stops and you're really going to start seeing some texture (more than I'm willing to tolerate at least).

Properly exposed, the image is exceptionally clean and crisp - so clean that I (frankly) find it bizarre that people would pull process a stop (at the cost of a stop of highlight latitude) just to get the image even cleaner still.

I never overexpose the camera (although, as I'm sure most of you know by now - I rate the sensor at 1125 ISO), this isn't overexposure though, it's simply exposing the camera at its native sensitivity - which places middle grey where it belongs. And the results are beautiful, noise-free images.

Also, SLOG3 is no noisier than SLOG2. The gamma you shoot with has ZERO impact on the noise floor of the sensor. So if your SLOG3 footage is noisey, it's because you're underexposing it.

This is why I keep advocating that people dust off their meters, and light/expose properly. It's not complex, it takes no time at all, and it ensures clean, consistent images every time.
 
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