Other: Sony FX6 Master Class and review

jmone said:
Yup, if it 'aint broke.....

That said, it is pretty exciting to see where this is all heading. I'm sure that individually grading for each particular colour space you need to produce is likely to produce the best results, but the concept of having a very very wide and non-destructive intermediate colour space to work in / grade then just changing the output colour space as required for delivery is (I think) a pretty big change.

It's an existing time to be alive!
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Absolutely, and I think your comments about making it easier to output for different color spaces is true. One of these days (probably years) I'll have a reason to output in HDR and then suddenly all of this will be more relevant for me personally. You bring up a good point about making GoPro and drone footage easier to work with. I wsn't even thinking about those cameras today when I was experimenting, so I have made a note to do some testing as soon as I have time. Just when you think there is a a lot of stuff to learn . . . there's even more stuff to learn. I remember when white balance, focus, and exposure were pretty much the only variables you had to think about and there were only about a half dozen professional cameras to choose from. Times have changed.
 
It would be interesting to see how your Floyd Video would look like in HDR with that color managed workflow re-grade. If you are interested the key render settings are as follows (in addition to changing the Project Settings I listed above).
DR-HDR-Render.jpg
 
Just when you think there is a a lot of stuff to learn . . . there's even more stuff to learn.
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:) I also remember splicing together Super8 as the "edit" and you did not even have to worry about Sound (which I've still not got my head around)!

Another advantage for the YouTubers, is you can upload your HDR footage and the Youtube will make and distribute various HDR/SDR grades automatically depending on the device consuming it.
 
jmone said:
It would be interesting to see how your Floyd Video would look like in HDR with that color managed workflow re-grade. If you are interested the key render settings are as follows (in addition to changing the Project Settings I listed above).
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I appreciate the suggestion and that you went to the trouble to actually post the necessary settings, but I wouldn't feel comfortable doing an HDR grade without an HDR monitor and scopes. But I'll meet you halfway. I think I'll do a color managed workflow for SDR and upload a color version of the Floyd video. I have already output it in color from Resolve using my regular LUT-based workflow so I'm kind of interested to see how a color managed version would compare. Which will I think looks better? I'm interested to find out.
 
Good point re HDR on your workflow.

It will be interesting to see the comparison of LUT vs Colour Managed Workflow..... but given I'm a newbie I'll trust you on how you think they compare - as you will know much better on how it "should" look!
 
jmone said:
Good point re HDR on your workflow.

It will be interesting to see the comparison of LUT vs Colour Managed Workflow..... but given I'm a newbie I'll trust you on how you think they compare - as you will know much better on how it "should" look!
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Not necessarily, and therein lies the problem. If you want compare two presets or LUTS that is easy because they are what they are, But once you get into the "art" of adjusting levels, saturation, etc. by eye on a item by item basis it becomes harder to compare. For example, if I post some samples and YOU happen to like A better than B, it doesn't mean that if B had been graded a little differently you wouldn't have liked it better. What I'm trying to say is that there are tons of variabls amd evemnthe Color Managed workflow still has to be graded by hand. So the difference really just boils down to applying a LUT as a starting point for grading or using the Managed method. Neither one is "finished" wthout further grading, itt is is just a base to start from. I thing the benefits of the Color Managed method are mostlu going to concern mixing different cameras and making it easy to export to different deliverables -- not with the actual grading itsel. I hope that makes sense.
 
I agree.... well I think I do (as I'm not always sure I get all the nuances or even concepts of the discussion being so new to grading). :)

Getting into grading for the first time, I read a lot of "just slap this xyz LUT on it and you are good to go". It did not sit right with me, and the results were frequently odd and frustrating (especially as I was shooting HLG at the time). I was spending all my time trying to just get the colour space right for HDR rendering from various clips...and then repeating the exercise for SDR, or trying to get a single HLG output that would play nice with the equipment I have. My finished output was close to 0, pretty discouraging, and certainly not "fun". Nothing really looked "right" much less having any creative grade.

From what I can tell at this point, I think the "art" (which I have a long way to go on) is to creatively grade to get a desired look you want not only for each clip but over all clips in the production. What I've found so far is that the big benefit is that Colour Managed workflow gets all the various clips into a single wide gamut ready for creative grading and then handles the conversion to the correct colour space you need for rendering. All of a sudden, these clips all look "right" on the HDR preview and now I'm down to making them also look "good".... and as a result, grading it is now fun and I look forward to it!

Thanks
Nathan

PS - I think any advice that says, "just chuck it all into the Colour Managed work space and you are good to go" is also flawed, as it may look "right" but it is still not "good".
 
jmone said:
PS - I think any advice that says, "just chuck it all into the Colour Managed work space and you are good to go" is also flawed, as it may look "right" but it is still not "good".
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Agreed. And the exact same thing can be said about dropping a LUT on footage in post and thinking you are good to go. It may look "right" but it is often still not "good".
 
jmone said:
It will be interesting to see the comparison of LUT vs Colour Managed Workflow..... but given I'm a newbie I'll trust you on how you think they compare - as you will know much better on how it "should" look!
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I'd be interested to hear your feedback on this grade (color this time) of my Floyd video. What do you think?
 
I think it looks great! ... but I'm really impressed with the composition of the shots, the use of the slo-mo, separation of the foreground, tight shots of the faces / hands / candles with subtle movement. All of this lends real emotion to the video. For me, the grade itself works perfectly by not being distracting to the mood of the moment. It's not dark and morbid, or bubblegum pop.

0:49 - Sun through the trees
1:20 - Sharing the candle and the glow on the hands warming up the shot (must be pretty dark as there is plenty of noise in the shadows)
1:30 - Fist in the air with that background looks really really good (you get a bunch of primary colours in the background that offsets the hand really well). This is my favourite clip.
1:45 - is another example I really like the balance between the sharp foreground and the pallet of the background. How did you get in that close (I'd be concerned it would offend the subject)??? but boy does it work.
3:30 - the pan around the back of their heads works well and again looks great with the strong background colours.
Various - For some reason I'm not so keen of the strong red colour on the young man's shirt when he is in the foreground, but the strong colours look great when in the background.

Anyway, enough of my amateurish blithering... How did you feel the Colour Managed workflow grade work for you?
 
I'm going to stick my 2 cents in here and I hope this isn't perceived exactly as criticism. The shooting and grading are both very nice and of course the content is affecting. However I found the extreme slow motion distracting because it at often seemed as though the images were stills, but then the stills would suddenly move , and then go back to being stills. . That's not an intellectual reaction but just a gut perceptual one. That was certainly an interesting effect and a consistent look , I'm just not sure i liked it. Was this 120fps?
 
Doug FWIW - and this is not criticism, merely my reaction, there were some great shots and I think the grade actually adds to the intended mood. And kudos to you for highlighting such a worthwhile cause but for me (and I might well be in the minority, which I can live with) the slo mo was just too much. My view is that slo mo will quickly (intended) go the way of crushed blacks, unnecessary blurred backgrounds, etc. Because we can doesn't always mean we should. Again, please don't overreact as this is purely my view and I offer it because I think when someone posts a clip they are inviting/secure enough for people to offer honest (but polite) opinions. Overall, I think there is some genuinely good photography in there and your website has some great work.
 
I think the B&W version "says" much more than the color one. The B&W version sets this vigil in a historical perspective which reminds us that this story has a very long history.
 
Thanks for all the helpful feedback guys. I can totally understand why some people might find the slow-motion too slow. Yes, it was 120 fps. That is just a creative choice that I made and I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with it. If I had been shooting with a different camera that couldn't do 4K @ 120 fps then I would have selected 60 fps and probably been perfectly happy with it. But my attitude about slow motion is that slower is almost always better! :-) I'm sucker for slow motion and shallow DoF. I admit it. Maybe I need an intervention but if I had to shoot this event again I'd use the same settings, and I do like the feel of it. In fact, if I didn't want the look of a FF sensor and super-slow motion I wouldn't even have used the FX6 at all. I did try to put enough camera movement into the shots that there was usually some motion as I slowly moved the camera closer or circled around a person, fist, etc. I like that look. But as Lenny says, maybe a few were too static at the head or tails. That is another judgement call that might even be "fixed" with a slightly different edit or perhaps ramping the speed up to 150%.

I was mostly interested to hear what people thought of the grade, and I guess that gets a thumbs up, right? The beauty of XAVC-I S-LOG, however, is that we don't have to agree on the grade either. It is so malleable that anyone could take the raw footage and manipulate in Resolve it however feels best to them.

Alan, I agree that the B&W version is the better one. I'd kind of like to go back and add some film grain to it.


jmone said:
How did you feel the Colour Managed workflow grade work for you?
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I originally graded this video in color last week with Resolve (LUT-based workflow) using my normal methods and then I just reduced the saturation to zero in Premiere when I decided I wanted a B&W version.
So, since I'm hobbled and on crutches this weekend with an achilles tendon injury, I had time yesterday to back to the original footage in Resolve and start over from scratch using the color managed workflow that Daria promotes.
I wouldn't say the grading process was any faster or easier. It was different, but I could see no real advantages or disadvantages to it. If I was mixing footage from different cameras or had to be concerned about different output formats, then I'm sure the advantages of color managed would come to light. But on this little project neither of those things was a concern to me.

I went through all the footage shot-by-shot and graded it again to whatever looked good to me. Then I exported the clips as ProResHQ files and brougt those into Premiere. I put all the clips from the first grading session and the second session on a timeline and did a split scree comparison. The really surprising thing is how very, very similar both version are. They almost look the same, which is suprising to me because every clip has been graded by hand with a totally different workflow, yet I could barely see a difference on some clips. I didn't expect to have that kind of consistency.

The clips you are looking at in the color version I posted last night are from the Color Managed grade. Overall, I just liked that version a little better on certain shots. But in all honestly, if you put them side by side I probably couldn't identify which was which.

Bottom line is that I'll probably continue to use my regular LUT-based workflow because I'm more familiar with it and I kind of felt my computer was slightly less responsive in the color managed mode.
I hope this rambling helps.
 
I'm sure nobody else cares about this saga at this point, but it has been a good chance for me to spend some time playing with the FX6 footage in post. I took a look at my grading with fresh eyes this afternoon and I decided I didn't like the color version or the B&W version. The color version was technically okay, but it was dull. And the B&W version didn't push the whites high enough or the blacks dark enough for really good contrast. So I redid them both.

This is the new Color version. Mostly I warmed up the tones in this version.
https://vimeo.com/557019778

The original color version that I decided I didn't like has been moved to here.
Password "FX6"
https://vimeo.com/557345243

The new B&W version can be found here. I think it it has a brighter, crisper, and sharper look to it even though no sharpening has been added.
https://vimeo.com/557348438

The original B&W version that I decided I don't like anymore is still on Youtube.
https://youtu.be/xp2fP3-0Z7M
 
I think my initial reaction to some of the moves especially in the beginning, was that they were post moves within stills - but then there would be obvious real movement so I was distracted bhy wonderingh what it was, but that might be a filmakers reaction . It is a nice effect that maybe on subsequent viewings I could decide i love .
 
Maybe I'm just a contrarian, but I prefer the original B&W version over the others.
The newer, higher contrast b&w feels more like tri-x reversal, while the original b&w reminded me more of double-x negative.
I really prefer the sky when it's murkier as well - more of a gray dusk feeling, rather than the more blown out feel of the new version. (Yes, I realize it may not technically be 'blown out' - but its brightness tends to pull attention away from the subject.
I am waiting for the hybrid version where you go wild with selective color through either Rotobrush2 in AfterEffects, or with Magic Mask in Resolve. (haha)
 
I'm traveling for work so just comparing on my Laptop screen, but for me the new Colour Grade is better for the feel of the event. eg, the Red shirt on the young man is no longer eye popping saturated, and much more subdued. If it was a Music Video then the first version would be better.

I'm also very very pleased to hear your feedback on grading in the "Color Managed Space" without LUTS. It is ideal that you have been able to get a near identical grade using either method. The upside for newer users (like me), is I don't have to hunt down or create LUTS for each type of original footage --> desired colour space. Resolve will expand the original footage to the Intermediate Wide Gamma from any of the supported footage types, let you creatively grade, then select your desired output for rendering. Love it, and FWIW I have found it works as advertised and really has been a game changer for a newbie like me wanting to combine a range of SLOG, DLOG, GoPro, whatever and produce both HDR and SDR material.

I still would be interested in how close you got physically to the subject at 1:50 for that shot and if you are as close as you look how you managed to have the subject not react.
 
OnSet said:
Maybe I'm just a contrarian, but I prefer the original B&W version over the others.
The newer, higher contrast b&w feels more like tri-x reversal, while the original b&w reminded me more of double-x negative.)
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Very good, my hat is off to you. The difference between the two versions of the B&W grade is that the second one has the Lumetri Tri-X preset dumped on it.
 
jmone said:
I still would be interested in how close you got physically to the subject at 1:50 for that shot and if you are as close as you look how you managed to have the subject not react.
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That is my favorite shot. I really wanted to find that kid and his mother after the event so I could hire him for something else, but they were gone. Opportunity missed.
He was on one knee so I got down on the grass so I could be below his level. I then rolled on it for about 25 seconds and did a few different variations of that move -- hoping for his expression, the camera movement, and the focus to all come together at some point. Towards the end he was used to me being there and that was when I got the best take. 25 seconds at 120 fps gave me a 2 minute clip to scrub through and find the best moment. There were a couple of other segments that would have worked too, but the last one was my favorite. I've noticed that I shoot people like I shoot wildlife: Begin from a distance, work myself closer a little bit at a time without going in a straight line right towards them, and avoid eye contact.

One advantage of shooting @ 120 fps, that hasn't been discussed, is that you don't need to be in someone's personal space very long to get the shot. I usually like each of my clips to be 15 - 20 seconds, so I only need to roll for 3-4 seconds and I've got what I need. I'll tell you though, that can be a hard rhythm to break when I'm not shooting slow-motion. I have to watch the duration counter in the VF constantly to force myself to hold my shots longer than what feels right after I've been shooting slow-mo.
 
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