Tips for LOG shooting

[Andrew Reid]

The problem with LOG is first of all that the gamma assists are a bit rubbish.

(Aside from the Panasonic S9 and cameras where you can load on a LUT and monitor with it, without resorting to some shitty external monitor)

But on the more common and better specced cameras you can't do that...

Nikon Z9, Z8, Sony a1, a7 IV, GFX 100, Z6 III, EOS R6 II and so on.

Secondly you should never really shoot it WITHOUT a gamma assist.

Contrast, tonality and light are a really important judgement in cinematography and you can't really see any of that with a very flat display.

Sure you can toggle LOG profile on/off quick in the menu and judge... but doing so is a PITA every time you want to see the real contrast and lighting.

The gamma assists are all quite bland looking and flat with not very much pop, I find.

Then we come to the LOG profiles themselves...

EOS R6 Mark II / R5 / R3 all have C-LOG3, which a lot of people complain about but I don't mind. One of the better ones and easier to grade. C-LOG2 is reserved for the Cinema EOS line. C-LOG3 is closer to the original C-LOG on the 1D C, I seem to remember.

Sony a7 IV has S-LOG2 and S-LOG3, they offer the widest dynamic range of the bunch but you still have to get exposure perfect for optimal image quality. Gets noisy really fast if you under expose.

N-LOG on the Nikon cameras needs the most colour correction, otherwise you have very green-olive skin.

By the way, there is a very small difference in image quality between 50Mbit/s 10bit 420 H265 on the Sony a7 IV and the higher bitrate LOG formats in range of 200-500Mbit... yes even in S-LOG3!

So you can save a lot of money and card space there.

With standard gamma picture profiles you don't need to shoot 10bit... 8bit will look the same.

People tend to overestimate higher numbers on the specs sheet.

So those tips in summary:

• Don't shoot from a flat image off the back screen
• Nail exposure to get the maximum dynamic range benefit from LOG
• With modern codecs like H.265 in 4K/24p - don't bother with the higher bitrates in most cases, the laws of diminishing returns apply big time (Although if you're shooting 8K or high frame rates then 200-500Mbit/s is recommended)
• C-LOG3 is easiest to handle, with N-LOG last
• Hope that in-camera LUTs/monitoring becomes a common thing, it's really bad that it isn't even 12 years since LOG first came on the mirrorless camera scene.

[MrSMW]

I like shooting with my custom LUT burned into V-log on my S5ii.

Solves all the problems I had shooting log previously.

The lack of being able to do this with Nikon is actually THE primary thing regarding why I am still sitting on the fence flipping to Z6iii.