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Has anyone used the new Sony low-con base LUT yet?


IamOakley

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new low-contrast base LUT from Sony. Josh Pines has got to be the the most wonderfully eccentric colorist in the world -- so it's worth a read just to watch a few clips of Tanya Lyon's

with him!

Basically, Picture Shop’s Chief Color Scientist, Josh Pines, Manager of Imaging Science Chris Kutcka, and Senior Colorist Jason Fabbro got together to create new kind of "base" LUT.  The base LUT functions as a definitive, indestructable starting point by beginning with a built-in S-curve.

I'm looking to shoot something in January and keen to experiment with the low-con base LUT. But it will be my first chance to use it, and I was wondering if any of you talented cinematographers on here have had a chance to try it out already?

If you have, and you can offer any advice or feedback, especially on your workflow, I'm all ears!

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I just grabbed a used Venice 1 and the first thing I did was download those luts. I'm armed and ready and they're in their folders. I just need to have some stuff to use them on. From my initial reaction, they're a great base. For you, that may be perfect. For me, I like to get a bit more help with my look rather than creating it from scratch. You should slap it on some old footage you have.

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I just grabbed a used Venice 1 and the first thing I did was download those luts. I'm armed and ready and they're in their folders. I just need to have some stuff to use them on. From my initial reaction, they're a great base. For you, that may be perfect. For me, I like to get a bit more help with my look rather than creating it from scratch. You should slap it on some old footage you have.

Julien, congratulations on the new Venice.  I have given it serious consideration on many ocassions but still not pulled the trigger.  I already have an R7 and plenty of AXM and SxS cards that I use with my F55, so it is very tempting. Very tempting.  Let us know how it goes.

 

 

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Thanks for the heads-up. i wasn't aware of the new LUTs but I look forward to downloading them and experimenting with footage I already have in the can.  I will report my opinion after I have one. 🙂

What about you?  Have you tried them, and what did you think?

Okay, I had some time last night to download the new LUTs and play around with them in Resolve with some FX6 S-LOG3 footage I'd already graded once before. In addition to the Low-Contrast LUT, mentioned above, there are four others in the group from Mr. Pines:   HI CON; 50-50 LUT; LOOK 1; and LOOK 2.

My favorite LUT for the past couple of years has been a Venice LUT called called: S-Log3-S-Gamut3.Cine_To_s709_V200, so that is what I wanted to compare to the new LUTs.

I stripped off all the grading from my previous session and started fresh. I duplicated a few shots on the timeline and then applied the various LUTs to the exact same scenes. I then jumbled them up so I didn't really know which one was which, unless I made the effort to dig into the settings.

LO CON and HI CON are just supposed to provide a base to work from, so you can't really judge them on their own without further grading.  And that makes comparisons a little harder to do. 

Nevertheless, my conclusion after poking around for about an hour, was that four of the new LUTs were okay and would make a good baseline to start grading from.  The only one I didn't like was LOOK 2 because it was way too warm.  I like warm footage, but this was too warm even for my taste.

However, most of the time when I preferred one LUT over the others it turned out to be the old trusted V200 LUT.  I don't see any compelling reason to change to the other LUTs, so V200 wins again . . . in my opinion.  If someone else did their own testing and preferred one of the other LUTs I'd not try to talk them out of it.  The differences are there, yes, but once you do the rest of the grading the differences don't matter too much.

I hope that helps someone!

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I'm not against LUT's, but I prefer not to use LUTs anywhere in my grading process if I can. It must be remembered that 3D LUT's break the image into a number of steps or ranges. Either 33 steps or 65 steps (if it is a camera LUT it may be as few as 17, but most camera LUT's are 33x). If you are not very careful these steps can become apparent in the image either as steps or bands across near flat surfaces or the sky or as minor posterisation on skin tones. Better quality grading tools will attempt to interpolate between the various steps in the LUT, so any issues shouldn't be visible, but this can never be guaranteed. 

 

A very important aspect of using a LUT such as a Lo-con LUT as a grading starting point is that you really must make all you additional corrections "under" the LUT if you want to work with everything that was captured rather than the limited range the LUT will convert the footage to. Doing any corrections after or on top of the LUT risks enhancing or exaggerating any imperfections in the LUT output and and addition you will be working with any range restrictions that the LUT has created. But the problem with grading before the LUT is that the LUT will include some form of toe or knee to move the 14+ stops of the S-Log3 material to the 6 stop Rec-709 viewing range. When you grade before the LUT, the LUT's fixed highlight and shadow roll off cannot be overridden, so you will often end having to make exaggerated corrections prior to the LUT if you want to make the highlights or shadows different from the way the LUT was designed. 

 

Because of these issues using a LUT that is some way from the way you want your final image to look is rarely a great way to work. It is much better to use a LUT that approaches more closely where you want to end up as then you can be more certain that the LUT is performing a more appropriate colourspace transform for the output you want and that the 33x or 65x steps are evenly distributed across the whole of the output. 

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