Hey guys,
I wanted to see if I could get some opinions and perhaps guidance. I have recently switched over from Epic to Alexa.
I am loving the camera but noticing that when using the built in LUTs, the image puts so much of its DR toward protecting highlights and thus has a little more noise than i might like in some scenarios. I have read a lot about shooting 400 ISO and from what I can tell it costs about a stop overall. That said, I have been doing some tests where I am exposing hotter than my waveform would suggest (monitoring in rec 709 and commercial) but without clipping in LOG. I find that once corrected the highlights usually still look amazing but the noise is much more like what i am looking for.
I am wondering if there is a way to take the ARRI rec 709 lut down a stop and load it into the camera so that I will naturally expose a bit thicker of an image with cleaner shadows, without gaining down to 400. Of course, also open to opinions on why this might be a flawed idea, or whether it is essentially the same thing as shooting 400 haha. I just find my taste leans toward less noise in mid and shadows, and with the alexa image holding highlights so nicely, i'd prefer to "expose to the right" a bit more without having my images coming in so hot in premiere when the LUT is applied.
Any thoughts/suggestions?
Thanks,
Steve