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Our original SLog article ([a|fs700slog8bit]) created some discussion around the results, with quite a few believing that the camera is capable of more than we showed. Just to reiertate here, we showed a very conservative and useful range. The point at which you feel there is no detail is dependent on how much noise you accept. Of course the transmission step wedge used to test with could be at fault (unlikely) but i think the real reason is that this kind of testing is a little flawed if you ta...

This is a very short post to cover a few points about using the new Red Pipeline footage (IPP2) in Premiere Pro CC. The approach here is one of many and i’m not sure if it’s even the best way to go about this, but right now it works and i’ll try to explain why.(i also have tonnes of other blog posts about all sorts of things sort of waiting, just incredibly busy in post - once there’s a breathing space i hope this blog will be a lot more active.)IPP2 is the new colour pipeline from Red. It was d...

LUTs have been seen as the holy grail and the very embodiment of the devil itself. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. This post will attempt to show you what a LUT does and when it doesn’t do it very well.Lets define a few terms before we dive into what’s going on.There are two basic types of LUT. One is a 1D (one dimensional) LUT and the other is a 3D Cube LUT.A 1D LUT is very simple, very useful and not a problem. All a 1D LUT does is convert one value into another - you have an in...

I happened upon these little lights and out of curiosity ordered a couple. There are a number of small battery powered LED lights out there now, at a variety of price points. My go to light is an Area 48, which is stunning light in terms of quality, flexibility and, sadly, cost. I also have a small LED panel from Aladdin as well as a bi-flex lite panel, both of which i really rate. With the ability to become more and more portable on the camera side of things, it’s wonderful to see the numbers o...

This has been my favourite light since i got it at the beginning of the year (actually last year now, how time flies). Review done.Okay, a bit more. I’ve always had an issue with most of the LED lights out there at the moment. They’ve never seemed ‘right’ to my eye, nor on most recorded footage, especially on skin tones. I’ve tended to use those panels for rim lights and accents rather than keys. Admittedly I’d not been using the really expensive panels but the expensive ones i’d seen, or the fo...

We’ve a bunch of exterior shoots coming up and i’ve been seriously considering the A7s over the FS700 because if it’s size and the fact that it can be rigged and gimballed easily. Last article we looked at issues of resolution and increasing colour depth by downsampling. We know that approach works well.Overall the dynamic range of the A7s appears to be roughly the same as the FS700, around 10 to 11 stops. (And if you read the rest of this blog you’ll know that i believe camera manufacturers ove...

As part of the plan for our feature we chose to invest in the Nuke compositor as well as use the Adobe suite. There are a number of reasons why and also before I get too used to Nuke i though it might be useful to jot down some experiences and assumptions i made along the way. The kind of misconceptions that seem obvious once you're using something but forget the little 'epiphanies' you made along the way. Perhaps this will make someone else's life a little easier if they're considering the move...

The new firmware v3 for the FS700 gave us 4K RAW but it also gives the standard camera some new curves to record with, these are SLog2 and 800%REC709. Sonys reason for adding them is primarily to help with monitoring RAW recording on the LCD, the SLog2 adds a massive amount of detail in the highlights which gets around how to monitor the large dynamic range of RAW on the internal LCD.Of course you can record with these curves with the stock FS700 and they offer some useful options. The biggest p...