F5: Yummy yummy skintones

Grug

Grug

Veteran
Hey Guys,

Just thought I'd share some samples of one of the aspects I'm loving most about my F5: the beautiful, natural skintones it can capture. These screengrabs are from a recent comedy short I shot. These were recorded in SR444 and transcoded to ProRes4444 masters that were then pushed through both the edit and the grade (and are just easier to work with in general).

It's a greatly underrated quality of these cameras, and I feel like we should shout it to the heavens a little louder (might just get us all more work!).

Cheers,

Mark


(Note: none of the actors are wearing any make-up)

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Looks great thanks for posting.

Hopefully the FS7 should be able to get somewhat close.

The F5 and F55 are very much underrated in my opinion.
I wish a few more people would shout out with nice results :)
 
surinder said:
Looks great thanks for posting.

Hopefully the FS7 should be able to get somewhat close.

The F5 and F55 are very much underrated in my opinion.
I wish a few more people would shout out with nice results :)
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I don't think they are underrated. It's a question of markets. Cinema with a capital C is happening with ARRI and RED. Not even the Sony F65 gets much play. Sony is traditionally broadcast and in many people's minds it is there to stay. One of the reasons I bought an F3 a while back is because I felt the skin tones were actually closer to the Alexa than either RED or Canon's offerings. Both the F5 and F55 are also excellent in that department, especially with SLOG. I do think however, that that with it's global shutter the F55 still has a fighting chance on larger productions. It is also clear to me that the FS7 will become the defacto owner operator camera for a while, much like the DVX100 a long, long time ago. It ticks all the boxes. However, I don't expect it will penetrate the feature market and neither should anyone else. Big budgets have there own special form of snobbism, and the FS7 is simply just not expensive enough!
 
I'll be surprised if you're not able to get near identical results from the FS7. There wasn't any secondary colour correction performed on these for skin tones (which is where the additional colour information of 4:4:4 really helps) so I'm sure you could get very close with 4:2:2 XAVC.
 
Grug said:
I'll be surprised if you're not able to get near identical results from the FS7. There wasn't any secondary colour correction performed on these for skin tones (which is where the additional colour information of 4:4:4 really helps) so I'm sure you could get very close with 4:2:2 XAVC.
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I love the skintones here. I am getting an FS7 and have never shot Slog 3 before. Any tips on exposing Slog 3?
 
Excellent skin tones! Love it! My guess is that the FS7 will be on par with the F5 as far as colour balance so with the right DP you'll end up with great skin tones.
 
yoclay said:
I don't think they are underrated. It's a question of markets. Cinema with a capital C is happening with ARRI and RED. Not even the Sony F65 gets much play. Sony is traditionally broadcast and in many people's minds it is there to stay. One of the reasons I bought an F3 a while back is because I felt the skin tones were actually closer to the Alexa than either RED or Canon's offerings. Both the F5 and F55 are also excellent in that department, especially with SLOG. I do think however, that that with it's global shutter the F55 still has a fighting chance on larger productions. It is also clear to me that the FS7 will become the defacto owner operator camera for a while, much like the DVX100 a long, long time ago. It ticks all the boxes. However, I don't expect it will penetrate the feature market and neither should anyone else. Big budgets have there own special form of snobbism, and the FS7 is simply just not expensive enough!
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I am also very happy with the skin rendering of my F3 and agree it can be quite Alexa like at times. Also had no major issues getting the image quite Canon DSLR like, ( which some clients seem to like) with very minor cc and thats with the internal 8bit. It's just way sharper than any of the current Canon DSLR offerings. Very noticable on wide shots.

100% with you that FS7 is going to be the owner operator camera for the next few years. That will also mean rental prices will be quite low and almost anyone can access it. I'm looking forward to getting an FS7 and keeping hold of the F3. Its still perfect for HD jobs and ail serve as a second camera.

We still get asked by client to shoot or hire in RED now and again but once people see the image from the F3 most are persuaded to pass on the RED unless they need HFR or RAW.

It all seemed as if Indi film cameras and high end cameras where heading towards convergence until ARRi dropped the 65mm Bomb a few days ago :)

Surinder.
 
Looks nice Mark. Can you comment a little about the post? Graded from scratch, or use of any LUTS for starting point, etc..

Thanks for sharing.
 
RatLabProductions said:
I love the skintones here. I am getting an FS7 and have never shot Slog 3 before. Any tips on exposing Slog 3?
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Just set your meter for 2000 ISO and shoot away!

I'm not too fond of the overexposing people like to do with these cameras in Log mode. When shooting linear raw? Certainly, ETR (expose to the right) all the way. But log gammas mean your detail is stored down low: middle grey at 32 IRE and white at 59 IRE - I try to stick as close to these values as possible for compressed recording so that I'm not pushing important details higher up in the curve where compression reduces their tonality.

You can use a waveform to determine this or false colour on a monitor/evf (I personally prefer false colour by a fair margin).

With the original SLOG and SLOG2, the curve wasn't so flat that you couldn't use it for monitoring purposes - I quite liked this as I always knew what I was getting. However SLOG3 is a different beast, and the curve is so flat and low-contrast that it's almost impossible to monitor in IMO. So LUTs become essential - but at the same time, LUTs can make it trickier to be precise on your exposure of the log curve (because you're not monitoring in it at all). So yeah, SLOG3 exposure - use your light meter or false colour. That's the best way to be safe.
 
starcentral said:
Looks nice Mark. Can you comment a little about the post? Graded from scratch, or use of any LUTS for starting point, etc..

Thanks for sharing.
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Post was pretty simple: I took an .xml from FCPX into Resolve 11. Used Filmconvert for the initial colour transform from SLOG2, then just tweaked the contrast a little with some custom curves. That's pretty much all there was to it.

The only place I got a little fancy was a single power window on the wide shot with the door in the background, that was used to desaturate and brighten the light coming through the entrance in order to blow out some of the detail of the street outside, and minimise the appearance of a little chromatic aberration that was showing around the edges of glass in the doorway.
 
@RatLabProductions - feel free to checkout my free PDF exposure guide which covers off some additional tips for exposing the slogs, but I definitely agree with Mark about keeping slog exposure neutral ie. not heavily biased in either direction unless you have a very good reason you are doing so. ie. green screen work so you rate the camera lower to improve signal-to-noise ratio and hence lower noise.

cinetiny.com/exposeguide


@Mark - I see. Yes I was curious to know if others are using LUTs as starting point for grading. I myself am finding the Kodak LUTs a really good place for starting anything.
 
Beautiful rich skin tones! [shouting]
Great work Mark. Thanks for sharing your results and the importance of using false colour and a light meter. I don't leave home without 'em! cheers
 
Looks nice and I really like the high key lighting.

@2:32 on the right of the frame, what is it that's making those rounded rectangular light shapes from the future? Is it some large cookaloris placed over an exterior window or patio door?

cheers,
 
Cheers fellas. The location really lent itself to the high-key style (which I rarely get to do on narrative stuff - which always seems to end either 'moody', 'edgy' or 'romantic') so it was fun to do.

Dennis, the rectangular light shapes are just glass slits in the door (which you can see in more detail in the final section of the film), they're just rectangular slits - but the perfectly circular bokeh of the CP.2s rounds off the edges when they're out of focus (which looked awesome, and is the reason I squeezed as many angles back towards that door as I could!)
 
Ah I see tricky tricky business there those rectangular window slits!

I like this piece especially because many times on DVX folks will say never to shoot on white walls, etc.. but here's a perfect example of how it can work and does work if done right.
 
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