Need help with gamma settings

[Adam Paul]

This is the same thread I had up on the Sony forums but as it has been there for a couple of weeks without any replies I thought I would bring it out here to the general high definition forum in hopes more people would see it and maybe reply.

I was hoping some of you have experience with both the bigger Sony cameras ( F900R or F330, F350 XDCAM etc) and smaller Sony cameras ( EX1 or EX3). I?m mainly interested in knowing how similar the cinegammas in the EX1/EX3 are to the hypergammas in the F900R and F330/350 ( I think all these shoulder cameras have the same hypergammas. Possibly the F23 too). The reason is I?m trying to establish which cinegamma is best for low light, which is best for high contrast like days exteriors and which captures the widest dynamic range.

For what I could gather there seems to be some who say the cinegammas are identical to the Hypergammas (like this article: http://digitalcontentproducer.com/ca...ex/index2.html

that says; ?For those who would like to tackle greater dynamic range, EX1 provides in addition to four standard preset gamma curves, four CINE Gamma curves identical to those in the F330/350 and, for that matter, F900R and F23 where they?re known as HyperGamma curves 1-4. For some reason, the ordering is scrambled in the F330/350 and EX1. CINE1 with a 108-percent white clip is the same as HyperGamma 4.?)

while I have read people saying they are not the same at all since all cinegammas are the same going from 0 to 109% except cinegamma 2 which goes from 0 to 100% and that they don?t seem to to have any difference in highlight handling (the clipping point of the highlights remains the same) and that just the mid tones change. If this is true, the cinegammas cant possibly be similar to the hypergammas, since there are 4 types of hypergammas. Two go from 0-100% HG 1 &2) and two go from 0-109% (HG 3&4) and among these one set is for low light (HG 1&3) and the other is for high contrast (HG 2&4).

If you have used the F900R or the bigger XDCAMs and also the EX1/EX3, I would love to know what you think about how cinegammas and hypergammas relate. The reason is that I?m having a very hard time knowing when to use which cinegamma and there are no articles or guides online to advice on the cinegamma use in the EX1/EX3. But there are several good articles and papers about how to use Hypergammas (like these: http://www.sony.co.uk/biz/view/ShowC...=1219237429204

http://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/assets/f..._factSheet.pdf) which could be put to good use if it's confirmed they indeed behave the same way.

 

Guides like these are a very useful rule of thumb for a guy without any video engineering background like me and they are all over the net since the F900R is so widely used.

So knowing how this info can translate to the EX1/EX3 would be really useful and I couldn't really find any solid confirmation on how close the Cinegammas are to the Hypergammas so I thought I would ask here if anybody know and also if you have been shooting with the EX1/EX3 what gamma curve you are using for low light and for high contrast like shooting talent in the shade with a sunny background.

The link bellow has a picture comparing the gamma curves of the EX1, F900R and F790P in case somebody who haven't used both the big and smaller cameras want to take a crack on it just by looking at the curves. They look rather similar to me.

 

http://img516.imageshack.us/my.php?image=g...onydigitly0.jpg

 

 

Thanks in advance.