A6700 picture profiles for movies

maxzoom

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William
The A6700 has some big changes with reference to the picture profiles in A6500/A6600

PP1, PP2, PP3, PP4, PP5 and PP6 are present and defaults are unchanged.

The following are gone...

• PP7: [S-Log2] gamma

• PP8: [S-Log3] gamma [S-Gamut3.Cine]

• PP9: [S-Log3] gamma [S-Gamut3]

There is literally no PP7, PP8 or PP9 slots on the A6700.

All S-Log2 is gone.

There is no default picture profile for S-Log3, this is now handled by a Log Enable/Disable setting in the menu or you can select S-Log3 for one of the profiles 1...6, 10 and 11.

Any Picture Profile can be set to one of the following...

Movie, Still, S-Cinetone, Cine1, Cine2, Cine3, Cine4, ITU709, S-Log3, HLG, HLG1, HLG2 or HLG3.

PP10: [HLG2] gamma - This is in A6700, A6600 but missing in A6500

PP11: [S-Cinetone] gamma. This is new to the A6700

PPLUT1–PPLUT4 (only when shooting movies): Shoots and records movies with the user LUT applied. This is new to the A6700.

If you record using S-Log3 the A6700 places a default LUT on the SD card.
Hope this helps someone.
 
I'm looking forward to trying S-Cinetone; curious to see what the hype is all about. When I used to record videos using my a6400, I didn't use any picture profile, and I was still happy with the final results. So many new users can easily get swept up with youtuber trends for SLOG and color grading, but I doubt the majority of them really need it.
 
I'm looking forward to trying S-Cinetone; curious to see what the hype is all about. When I used to record videos using my a6400, I didn't use any picture profile, and I was still happy with the final results. So many new users can easily get swept up with youtuber trends for SLOG and color grading, but I doubt the majority of them really need it.
Brief answer I agree.

NOT BRIEF ANSWER...
My two cents if it's even worth that much.
The following is a gross simplification just to express my ideas. I'm trying to avoid a full scale tutorial.

The default profile is an approximation of High Definition digital broadcast television which is designed to be reproducible in hundreds of millions of devices. The production team understand and agree to work to the limitations of those devices.
This means a huge range of brightness levels and colors are not reproduced faithfully. Despite this REC709 represents a huge advance over the even more restrictive REC601 which is definitely that "television look" with lost blacks and clipped whites.

Most computer monitors can display a much wider gamut, much closer to P3, which is much less than the capabilities of a high dynamic range display.

Cinema has traditionally used negative film for capture which has a massive dynamic range way beyond what broadcast TV could manage. What happened when the film negative was printed to positive is literally a black art. The result can be a film noir look all the way to a high key.

The use of log gamma curves and custom LUTs is an attempt to achieve a cinematic look. Given what I said about the flexibility of the film process I find it laughable that there is one all encompassing cinematic look.

Everyone has the right to make their content how they wish. I feel most of the extraordinary efforts vloggers go to is totally unnecessary but selling LUTs seems to be a huge business.

I've some wedding videos the 'videographer' has burnt in a Godfather type look where black suits are sub black simply awful to my eyes.

For my hobbyist purposes I want footage that looks great out of camera.
In my experience the default profile loses too much in dark and light, but a large section of the population associates high contrast and vibrant colour with quality. This is directly against how most of us see the world.

I welcome S-Cinetone, it's a hybrid with saturated shadows and desaturated highlights and a latitude to over 400%. Not an intuitive combination but it seems very effective. But it does give an opportunity to tune the look in camera by slightly under or over exposing. Which is a trick film can do.

To me I'm going to use S-Cinetone to capture the majority of my footage on my upcoming holiday. When I want to capture a more extreme dynamic range I will switch to S-Log3 for example firework shows in a theme park, the fireworks are blindingly brilliant and the audience are barely visible.

With my A6500 S-Log3 was not really usable, 8 bit limitations, so I was limited to S-Log2 for high dynamic range and used Cine2 for everyday shooting to keep more detail in the shadows when compared to Cine4.

On my A6700 I've set movie memory 1 for PP11, movie memory 2 for PP6 and movie memory 3 for S-Log3.
The default LUT the A6700 provides for S-Log3 gives me a very good starting point for grading.

I've a month to do practice and tests but so far these seem to meet my anticipated needs.
 
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