SLOG2 picture profile

S

Stuart Mannion

Member
I like the gamma and roll-off with the new Slog2 setting but the image is too under-saturated for most of my work. Most of the picture profile settings don't do anything with Slog selected but I've found the Color Depth settings do work. I've tried cranking them all up and it helps a bit but the colours are not very accurate. Has anyone tweaked out a good Slog Profile for accurate colour?
 
exactly right. cranking up the saturation, in camera, is self defeating and not what slog2 is designed for.
 
Unfortunately, you cannot tweak any settings except the Red adjustment. I do wish you could adjust the saturation as that would help greatly with an 8 bit codec. Since nothing is really adjustable, one cannot really make a profile for it. The colors are kind of strange in S-Log, especially the Reds and sometimes Green. Reds almost always come out orange. If I want change it, I select the Red channel in Hue / Saturation filter in After Effects and tweak it a little there.

or, since the Red is adjustable in camera, you can do it there as well. Not sure how that effects Skin tones though as I haven't pixel peeped the Red Adjustment much (yet).
 
If you could adjust saturation then wouldn't that defeat the purpose of Slog? It's like that to prevent colour channel clipping. Have you tried a SLog LUT? Isn't that the expected workflow, as for the F5/F55 etc,. I've not had a chance to play with it so i don't know from experience.

cheers
Paul
 
I recently shot a video-art piece using Slog and the director looked at the monitor and said: "wow, I really like the look of that profile. Love the milky blacks..." He wasn't joking. I did almost facepalm.

Personally I also quite like the profile! But mostly because you get an insane DR out of it. Add a slight curve and a boat load of saturation and you get some great images. I've only used it on a couple of shoots - but they both involved shooting outside in bright sunshine - and the extra DR really helped to hold everything together.

Personally I'm doubting somewhat whether I'll bother with any other profiles in future...
 
Colinelves said:
I recently shot a video-art piece using Slog and the director looked at the monitor and said: "wow, I really like the look of that profile. Love the milky blacks..." He wasn't joking. I did almost facepalm.

Personally I also quite like the profile! But mostly because you get an insane DR out of it. Add a slight curve and a boat load of saturation and you get some great images. I've only used it on a couple of shoots - but they both involved shooting outside in bright sunshine - and the extra DR really helped to hold everything together.

Personally I'm doubting somewhat whether I'll bother with any other profiles in future...
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Hi Colin,

There's enough log looking footage on tv anyway, blame the instagram look!

Have you used slog in low light situations? I've not had a chance to see but that would probably be the place to go with a different profile.

cheers
paul
 
If you hesitate to crank the saturation way up (in post) try adding a parabolic curve to the gamma. It does beautiful things to the image saturation.
 
paulcurtis said:
Hi Colin,

There's enough log looking footage on tv anyway, blame the instagram look!

Have you used slog in low light situations? I've not had a chance to see but that would probably be the place to go with a different profile.

cheers
paul
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I've done some low light tests and SLog is great as long as you avoid under exposing as it gets noisy fast. If I want that low light atmospheric look, I expose a bit brighter and then bring it down in post, as opposed to doing it in camera to lessen the noise.

I saw some low light test shot in Japan by Matt Allred (sic?), and it was clean at 20,000 ISO. No way you can even do that with Cinegammas. I have a big job coming up for HGTV, some artsty lifestyle type spots of people trying to look cool and unassuming, and the muted desaturated look of SLog is a perfect fit. The Director loves a slightly graded SLog look, at least for that type of spot.

The cool thing is I showed the director the 4K / 2K stuff that Flippo shot, and he loved the look FS700 on steroids look so much that he going to buy an extra FS700 + CD 7Q. If the 7Q isn't out yet, we will probably just shoot SLog internally as we need slow motion.

hey Paul, I found the low light video. He did mention that he shot to recorder. I found if you don't grade it heavily (aka e Instagram look), S Log works fine with internal codec.

https://vimeo.com/71194594
 
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Gents;

I'm gradeng a fllm currently shot on F55's, and i'm useing Sony's Slog2 display lut in gradeing for maybe 90% of the show, the camera is really impressive... really very impressive.

I would really recomend using Sony's 3D Slog2 display LUT to unfold the images as a default / start position, and THEN see how noise, contrast and saturation sit... you may be surprised...

d
 
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I haven't tried it in low light - but given that ISO 2000 is the starting point, I'm guessing it will be pretty good! Previously I've used Cinegamma 1 up to ISO 3200 with no noticeable increase in noise.

Although I must admit the shadows and even into the low mids did look noisy in Slog2, so I tended to expose to the right when I could: pushing everything until the 100+ Zebras came one (not sure if this is necessarily the best approach, but it made sense in my head).

Thanks for the tip on the LUT dermot - I'll chuck some of the footage in Resolve when I get back from holiday and check it out (I've found with some clients, it helps to make some grading suggestions - or even to offer to do a grade myself) although as some of the other guys have pointed out, the ungraded log look is very 'now'.

Colin Elves
DoP, London (currently sunny myself in Brittany)
www.colinelves.com
 
Im writing this in nearly every thread about slog in here.
32IRE is 18% grey in Slog2. Yes u have ISO2000 native but u need to underexpose about the same amount (2stops) to hit 32IRE.
 
sorry skyline, but, that's just plain wrong. you've been harping on this for a while. clearly, following your advice results in unacceptably noisy footage. for whatever the reasoning, exposing to the right is the only acceptable approach for slog2 on the FS700. If you have FS700 images that disprove this, I'd welcome your posting your results.
 
I agree with cuervo. I've set Slog2 to the side for right now... I've gotten some noisy footage out of it and like others have noticed, it can get blocky and super hard to get any saturation back into. My best results have come from overexposing slightly and bringing the image back down.
 
I've seen it suggested elsewhere that using the Slog-2 LUT for the F55 helps with the noise when grading in resolve. I'm probably going to give it a go later on with some of the rushes from my last shoot.
 
Colinelves said:
I've seen it suggested elsewhere that using the Slog-2 LUT for the F55 helps with the noise when grading in resolve. I'm probably going to give it a go later on with some of the rushes from my last shoot.
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Now that you mention it, the couple videos that I shot pretty much all Slog2, I held off any color work til the very end and used Resolve (w/ the LUT). This yielded pretty good results.
 
Just realised that the place I saw the suggestion that the LUT might help with the noise... was in this thread. wow. What a douche I am.
 
I just ordered Calman5 with a Fujifilm LUT box. So, I should be able to feed the LUT box via the SDI port on my FS700, and with the right LUT, view a corrected Slog2 image on my Pix240. I'm thinking this should really make some definitive information on properly exposing Slog2, not to mention recording dailies in DNxHD or Prores 422HDready for final viewing.
 
cuervo said:
sorry skyline, but, that's just plain wrong. you've been harping on this for a while. clearly, following your advice results in unacceptably noisy footage. for whatever the reasoning, exposing to the right is the only acceptable approach for slog2 on the FS700. If you have FS700 images that disprove this, I'd welcome your posting your results.
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+1
 
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