Sam Sheppard

Hello If you'd like some advice on the post-production end: Here's what I've found from grading Sony RAW .mxf. Although the same holds true for XAVC if you're using that. I love the F55 and F65 (at least I love the files that I receive. I can understand why the F65 is not every cameraman's friend when it comes to handheld or Stereo3D rigs). I've graded (mostly RAW .mxf from the F55) on Resolve and Baselight for HD television, and on Mistika the same delivery and also for HDR (1/2/ and 4,000 nits). In all cases I got great results but, in the case of HDR deliverables, the Sony exterior images were much easier to grade for the brighter displays than the equivalent from Alexa and RED Epic. Arri and RED naturally try to fit everything nicely between 0 and 1 (in float. That would be 0 and 1024 in 10 bit). Sony records 'everything that it sees', which can cause 1st time colourists not used to working with Sony material to panic a bit as doing things like debayering a bright exterior directly to Rec709 will give them what will look like a very clipped image (all of the information is actually there. Sony just allow it to extend beyond 1/1024 where as RED and Arri round off the highlights to give a nice 'normalized' image). If you know what you're doing though then Sony material is great as it will give you 'everything' and let a colourist who knows what they're doing creatively roll the exposure to where every they want it to sit. Grading Sony files set either to Linear Light or SLog3 (underneath a final transform to PQ and then to the monitor) gives a result that barely needs any adjustment if you're simply looking for a 'natural look' for how the scene looked on the day. Adding a creative grade from there is relatively easy compared to most other camera formats as I'm not fighting an in-built transforms like soft-clips/toe-roll-off. I would always recommend exposing 'correctly'. However, if you have a gun to your head and a maniac forcing you to choose between protecting your blacks and protecting your whites I would recommend protecting your blacks when it comes to Sony material (set to SLog3). All of the information will be captured (I can easily unpick the SLog3 curve/gamma and transform it to any other the other curve options. The Log curve is mainly useful for 'cheating' extra headroom when recorded to XAVC. If you shoot XAVC set to SLog3 I can usually extract just as much info from the file as I would be able to get out of the same image shot Sony RAW. The SLog3 is mostly acting like an 'Image Zip file'). The trick is to use a purely mathamatical transform, what they call a 'Shader' in compositing-land, and not a LUT which usually won't work with values above 1/1024. In Mistika the effect is called 'UniColour' and it contains all of the camera transforms, including SLog2, SLog3, as well as LogC, Cineon, etc. It makes matching different camera types much easier that grading them all in their native log flavours. It's the contrast/gamma that's hard to match, not the chroma. Why save the blacks? Because in the end it's all down to light hitting the sensor. If no light hits the sensor then I have no image. I have to either leave those shadows clipped/solid or composite in some sort of replacement. If you have protected the blacks then (with the way that the camera captures everything linearly) I'll probably have most of the highlight information that I need as the dynamic range is very impressive. I can usually do something with the whites even with the brightest image. However - if the blacks are clipped then they're just gone. Nothing that I can do with that. I've never really had much trouble with Sony noise levels, but I've most graded F55 material. If you want a cheap but brilliant denoise tool though then the NEAT VIDEO plugin is brilliant and gets consistently great results. I know for a fact that almost every frame of The Hobbit went through that Plugin in the end. Hope that's helpful. I absolutely love it when I hear that I'll be grading SLog3 or RAW Sony material. There's usually more options and less limitations than I would usually expect.

You have (borderline) identical charts shot by two different cameras? If so then you could use the LUT node in Nuke or the CURVES node in Fusion. The Fusion CURVES effect has 2 inputs - the 1st is the image that you're grading the 2nd is the image that you're matching to. In 'Reference' you'll find a 'Match Reference' button. Select either RGB, YUV or HSL (RGB & HSL usually get the best results). You can then use the CURVE match to generate a LUT. I would just do it by eye using any Curve editor. There's one in any professional colour grading software: Resolve/Baselight/Nucoda/Mistika/etc. Same for compositing software like Nuke & Fusion. If you're matching 'Good' to 'Bad' it's not hard. 'Bad' to 'Good' can vary from 'Difficult' to 'Impossible'. Once you have the curves correct it's easy to export a LUT - either in the colour grading software or by applying the same correction to a specific chart and using software like Light Space to create the LUT from there.

Hello I've graded material using all of the screens from each manufacturer, including the 4000 nit monitor from Dolby that is the brightest of them all. I found that very little changed for me as a colourist - although it did require me to either grade on top of a transform (like the PQ curve) or under the same transform. I experimented first and found that both grading Linear Light under a PQ transform, and grading on a Log flavour like LogC/REDLogFilm/SLog3/CanonLog2/etc, also underneath a PQ transform, and all resulted in successful workflows. If I had to use any analogy I would say that it was like grading for a film deliverable again - I was grading under a LUT transform (although in this case it wasn't a LUT, it was a shader transform that didn't create clipping like a LUT can do). I've been spoiled though and all of the material that I've worked on so far has been either C300 mkII, RED Dragon, Arri Alexa, or Sony F55. The thing I find that I have to remind some cinematographers occasionally is that your digital cameras have all been HDR for years now. What we're seeing currently is just the displays catching up to you. As such I found it quite enjoyable to grade using an HDR display as all of the camera RAW 'flavours' like .r3d/.ari/.rmf/etc all seemed to 'fit' on the HDR screens naturally (in terms of luminance and dynamic range). It was a very natural way to grade I found - although it does require the colourist to understand what their tools are doing so that they can select the right tool for the job. Some tools/systems only work in the data range between 0-1. If you're happy to work linear (which is what your cameras 'see' and what is usually what VFX prefer to work with) then some systems aren't able to work with Linear material that goes beyond 1 (hence why we still have all of the different Log flavours to deal with). Most of my experience with HDR has been on a Mistika for grading, although I've done a small amount on a Resolve, and some more on a Baselight. In all of these cases I found that it was the colourist that was the limit of the creativity. If the cinematographer had shot and exposed the image well then the colourist should have no problems working with that image in HDR or LDR (low dynamic range). Its just important that the colourist and the grading toolset be able to work directly on the Linear Light material if that's the way you want to work. It's also important to have access to Colour Management tools that aren't limited to 0-1 ranges like most LUTs are. Tools like Mistika's UniColour and Baselight's Truelight Colour Spaces work using mathematical shader transforms that are non-destructive (so that you can reverse them later) and are not limited to a range (for most camera transforms like LogC, CLog, SLog3, etc). I haven't had the pleasure of grading to a Dolby projector but I have seen Star Wars at the Dolby cinema in London. That was using a 107 nit projector (as opposed to the normal 48 nit that we're all used to). As well as being brighter the main thing that I noticed was that the blacks were indeed blacker than usual for a projector (due to light bleed from the lamp in normal projectors). The blacker blacks and the brighter whites did indeed result in a dynamic range that was more than just a simple doubling. It's the monitors that really change things in terms of displays in my opinion. Even just the 1000 nit ones create a huge difference. And I'm sure you can imagine how bright 4000 nits displaying a sunny exterior can be.