S-Cinetone coming to the Sony a7S III made this much-loved profile much more accessible. It’s a good option for getting a nice, pleasing image straight out of camera. On the other hand, the current S-Log3 profile promises outstanding dynamic range and now we have 10-bit recording to make the most of it. Is it possible to blend these two together?
From Harv Video/Audio Stuff is a video that seems to think it is possible. You should be able to get the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t have a camera with S-Cinetone he has a few words for you as well.
Interestingly, Harv found that many problems people have when using S-Log3 don’t have anything to do with the super flat look of the image. It has a lot more to do with the ultra-wide color space the profile works with. It’s tough to work with in post to get it looking “right,” especially when it comes to skin tones.
The practical how to is simply to go into your Picture Profile settings and under the Color Mode go and select S-Cinetone instead of the default S-Gamut3. In the initial tests it’s a little less simple as there aren’t many built-in LUTs to cover for this. You’ll have to add back in contrast and bring up the saturation. You can try some LUTs, but the results might be odd.
In some initial tests just applying some existing LUTs will likely show similar footage but with a lot more saturation. A lot more. Skin tones actually look quite nice still, even with the boost to saturation. Bringing down the saturation doesn’t quite fix things either.
If you want a natural setup I think the recommendation is to stick with a regular S-Log3 workflow or an S-Cinetone only setup.
Since S-Cinetone is only on a few cameras at this point there are a ton of people out there who might want to match up with S-Cinetone. Extrashot has a LUT that will take S-Log3 and give it a matching look, though you’ll likely want to pull down saturation.
Should you bother? Well, if you are shooting a lot of people you might want the slight boost there with S-Cinetone. For accuracy’s sake the regular S-Log3 workflow is better. If you do try this you should make sure saturation is brought to 0 or lower. Plus, since S-Cinetone doesn’t have as large a color space you’ll need to be more on top of your white balance.
As for workflow with the combination profile, you should either use a regular S-Log3 LUT and back off on saturation or just add your own contrast curve and saturation.
I don’t think it’s a super sensible workflow. Just pick one or the other. However, there might be some edge cases where this could be a worthwhile experiment.
What are your thoughts on this combination profile?
[source: Harv Video/Audio Stuff]
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