(smooth jazz music)
- What is up people, Dunna here,
and today I've made a
bit of a breakthrough
and I'm very excited
to share with you guys
the secret that I found that's gonna make
dealing with S-LOG so much easier.
And it's super simple,
but first, let me explain.
About two years ago, I
picked up the Sony A6500
upgrading from the Sony A6000
and I made a video about the 10 features
that I was most excited about.
One of those things was the
fact that I was gonna get
access to the Sony Picture Profiles.
Most notably, S-LOG2 which
increases your dynamic range
a whole bunch when shooting video.
Now, if your not sure what that means
basically if you're
shooting a scene that has
really bright brights
like this light back here
and really dark darks like my shirt,
then you're gonna be able
to capture both of those
and when we're capturing it
it looks more like a
reduction in contrast,
so everything kind of looks flat and gray
and then when you're editing it,
you can pull all of that back.
But the important part
is that it's capturing
all of that information
so you get to decide
if you're gonna push
those blacks back down or
if you're gonna push those
whites back up to be white.
But here's the issue,
when I got that A6500
and I started to shoot in S-LOG,
I just hated it so much.
With the file sizes and file types
that your dealing with
in the Sony cameras,
I just found that it was really difficult
to work with the S-LOG2 footage.
The idea of shooting in S-LOG for me
was actually so that I would
have more control afterwards,
but when I actually went to push
the footage around where I wanted it to go
it just started to fall apart.
So, basically after a couple
of weeks of trying it and
trying a bunch of different things,
I basically gave up on S-LOG.
But I was always interested in
how I could try and make S-LOG work.
Let me show you a quick
example of the problems that
I've been having with S-LOG2 footage.
Okay, so we're looking at
the plain S-LOG version.
It's super flat, it's super de-saturated.
Let's just crank up the
saturation so you can see
what's going on with the colors.
I'm gonna crank it up and
then we're gonna zoom-in here.
We're gonna take a look right here,
this is where I notice it
the most for whatever reason.
You see all this crazy blotchy,
there's pink and then green.
This is exactly what I'm talking about
and even if I back off the
saturation a little bit,
you can still see it in there
so it's happening right off the bat.
And I know my skin isn't perfect,
but it's definitively not like that.
Okay, so if we to that then we go over
to the clip that has my fix on it,
right away it looks like
a more consistent color
and then if we crank up the saturation,
you can see that it's a nice even color.
There's none of that blotchiness
that we saw in the other one.
Now again, I can crank it up
so that it's super over-saturated
and you can tell that
it's just nice and even.
I'm looking a little crazy,
but maybe a little too
much spray tan there Dunna.
But even if I go back
and you're looking at it not zoomed-in,
you can see this splotchy
difference in color,
it's almost like this
isn't getting saturated.
Like it's so de-saturated to start with
that there is no color to find in there.
Now, maybe I'm missing something because
I see other people using S-LOG2
and they seem to enjoy it
and seem to have no problem with it.
But for whatever reason,
I couldn't get it to work for me.
So, leave a comment down
below if you think that
I'm just totally missing something.
But, the way that my brain works
is that I wanted to fix it.
So, recently I had a little bit of time
and I did some experiments,
and I managed to get
this to look like this
by changing a simple
setting inside the camera.
All right, so we're back in this corner.
We've got basically that same shot
set up again as you can see
and if you're looking at
the screen you can see that
I'm in S-LOG2 so it's super
flat, super de-saturated.
This is just the standard S-LOG2.
So, I'm talking about no
modifications whatsoever.
We're just on Picture Profile seven,
the one that comes in the camera.
Now, there are a couple of ways that
I've heard people talk
about exposing S-LOG2,
there is exposing two stops over,
those kinds of thing.
The two main ways that I've
basically heard is that
you wanna set you zebras up
and you wanna max out at 107.
So, anything that's going over 107
is gonna be permanently clipped,
so try to keep everything under that
or you're going to set you
subject which, if it's a human,
the skin should be around 70 IRE.
Now, personally I like the 70 IRE,
but we'll test both ways here.
So, I'm gonna go into my zebras,
and I'm gonna choose 70 and
now you should be able to see
that on the side of my face there's
a little bit of zebras going on.
Now, I've exposed it under a little bit,
like I could make it so that
the whole side of my face
has the zebras going on,
but then I'm blowing out
the window pretty hard
so I'm gonna back that
off just a little bit.
I'm gonna go down to the base ISO
on the 6600 in S-LOG, which is 500.
(smooth jazz music)
Now, we've got the shot.
Let's now do it the other way
where we're trying not to clip at all.
So, I'm gonna change my zebra level
to lower limit of 107 so we can see
what exactly is clipping,
and then I'm gonna have
to mess with my aperture
to get it so that we're
not clipping at all,
that got rid of it.
And let's try that for
a couple of seconds.
(smooth jazz music)
Okay, so we've got our
standard S-LOG footage,
the stuff that I've been
having trouble with forever
and now I'm gonna make
that one little change
that's gonna make it much easier,
but first let me explain
why I came to this result.
To my understanding, there
are two main things happening
when you go into S-LOG.
The contrast is being reduced
so that it can capture more dynamic range
and the saturation is being
reduced significantly as well.
Now, what I really want
to get out of S-LOG2
is an increased dynamic range.
So, that's really the catch.
I do want to it to reduce the contrast,
but I don't necessarily need
it to reduce the saturation
and the problem that I'm having in the end
is the fact that, on Sony
with 8-Bit and 4:2:0,
I can't seem to push the colors
around enough to get that back.
I'm having that weird
little blotchy problem.
So, within my picture
profile, what I'm going do
is I'm gonna go in,
I'm gonna leave everything standard,
except I'm gonna go down to saturation
and I'm gonna bump it
all the way to plus 32.
Now, when you're in S-LOG and S-Gamut
it's already so de-saturated
that when I push it
all the way up to plus 32,
it's still not as saturated as if you were
just not using a Picture
Profile all together.
But, in my experience so far because
I don't have to push the
saturation up so much
when I go to color grade the footage,
I don't get nearly as
much of that blotchiness
and problems that I was
having in the colors.
Let's try it.
On my function button here,
then I'm gonna go into my Picture Profile,
I'm gonna go over.
This is hard to do backwards.
I'm gonna go down to my saturation
and I'm gonna crank it
up all the way to 32.
You can still see that
we're very de-saturated.
We've lost a little bit of
light so I has to crank up
the ISO just a little bit,
but I've got that same
zebra on the left hand side
where the light is coming
in through the window,
so we should be able to get
about the same kind of results.
So, we'll try this one first.
(smooth jazz music)
And then we'll try it the other way,
where we go to 107
and we make sure that we're
not clipping anywhere.
Oops, wrong way.
Okay.
No clipping.
I look very dark.
(smooth jazz music)
All right, let's get this
footage into the computer
and we'll see if we can make
this whole thing work again.
All right, so we got
fresh footage in here.
These are the new ones that we just took.
So, this one here is the regular S-LOG,
the Picture Profile seven.
This one is the modified one
with the increased saturation.
Let's see if we can
replicate what we had before.
So, let's crank up the saturation.
You can see we've got that same problem,
little bit of a different area
this time, but same issue.
We've got this splotchy red
color noise or something,
and even up into my
beard you can see it all.
My skin does not look like that.
So, with the fix applied,
so this is the one with
the increased saturation in the camera.
We crank it up, there might still be
a little bit of it happening,
but you can tell that it's a lot less
and obviously this is,
again, super over-saturated.
Now, in regard to the other
ones where we exposed to
attempt not to blow out the
highlights in the window,
I'm finding that it's just
way too dark on this side.
It's pretty much unsalvageable.
I would much rather blow out
the highlights in the window
and make sure that my face
is a little bit more exposed
or you just add a light onto this side,
or some kind of a reflector,
or something like that so that
you don't have this problem.
Unless you're going for
something super moody.
But ignoring the exposure for now,
if we do the same thing
with the saturation.
Crank it up there to, then we zoom-in,
even though it's a little
darker you can see on my face,
we got all sorts of different
kind of splotchiness.
Now, if we go over to the other test shot
significantly under-exposed in my opinion,
kind of unusable because you'd have to
bring up all this noise
and we saturate a whole bunch.
That gross blotchy splochiness
is way, way less in this one
than it was in the one.
Like if we matched the
kind of saturation level
you can see in my face it's crazy.
In this one, it's a lot more even.
So, now if you wanna throw
a LUT or something on that,
you're gonna have to make
sure that before you do
you just dial back the saturation.
This is just the Sony provided S-LOG LUT
and it looks pretty good.
Before, after.
Now, lets try and do that
same thing to this one.
And again, same LUT.
We've got that gross blotchiness.
So, if you have some LUTs
or something for S-LOG,
they'll probably actually
work better with this method.
But you have to make sure that
you dial back the saturation.
So, after all that time I can finally
confidently shoot in S-LOG2 and get all
that dynamic range back.
It's just nice to have as an option,
I don't need it all the time,
but it's just nice that it's there
and it makes a huge
difference that I feel like
I can actually color grade it now.
Hopefully this helps
some of you guys, too,
to make you S-LOG footage better.
If you have any other tips of tricks
that you think I should know about,
make sure to leave them down
in the comment section below
and on your way down there
hit the like a subscribe button,
and make sure to hit the bell notification
so you don't miss anything.
Thank you so much for watching,
and I'll see you next time.
(smooth jazz music)
