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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...

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...

DNG, a digital negative, was designed to hold the RAW sensor data from your camera. This post is specifically focused on the RAW data from the FS700 via the Odyssey 7Q. Both the 2K and 4K RAW but should apply to other cameras. cDNG is cinema DNG which is a superset of the DNG standard and it’s becoming more common with support increasing all the time - although when it comes to valid workflows it’s the wild-west out there.Each DNG contains the data from the camera before debayering (hence RAW da...

A big facilities house will spend a lot of time and money on their infrastructure and network as the performance of this will have a knock on effect on practically everything they do. Typically, networks will be SAN based and the costs can run quite stratospheric. Here's a quick run down of some typical optionsTypical Network ChoicesFibreChannel requires a FC capable server, FC switch and FC host bus cards in each machine running it. There are numerous varieties and speeds range from 2 to 16 gb/...

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...

We knew we wanted some kind of decent dolly. We had a slider, which was a bit lightweight but useful for some moves but we needed something longer. We'd considered a floor dolly and in fact at one point we were hoping to get someone on board who also happened to have a Chapman but sadly for all sorts of reasons we were unable to get things to work out, also the floor of the location was only smooth-ish. It was polished concrete but with quite a few bumps and joins. Most importantly a lot of the ...