If you get handed a drive full of LOG footage, you could of course slap on the respective camera LUT and be done with it, right? Of course you can do that, but it’s very easy to manually grade LOG video and that gives you much more creative control. LOG grading in Final Cut Pro X. Image credit: cinema5D The purpose of using LOG gamma is to record as much of the Dynamic Range a camera sensor produces into the file that gets recorded to card. This file is a normal 8- or 10-bit file that is recorded in the camera’s codec and must not be confused with RAW data (which is a completely different beast). If you look at the image below you can see that the Dynamic Range of the scene is smaller than the Dynamic Range the codec could record. Thus leaving “headroom” below what was black in the scene (blue line) in front of the camera ad what was white (red line). In a way, the camera redistributes (squeezes) brightness values together towards the middle of the histogram. Typical Histogram of Video recorded in LOG If you put footage that has had it’s brightness values distributed on a LOG curve (like in the image above) into a timeline that expects blacks to be at 0% (green line) and white at 100% (orange line), then it’s perfectly clear that the “scenes blacks” are way above (and thus grey) the “timelines black” level and the “scenes whites” are...
Published By: CineD - Saturday, 11 July, 2020