Hello hard video and welcome back. Today for you I'm going to answer the question, what is log? I've made lots of videos about log, specifically about Sony's version, called Slog2 and Slog3, so it's no surprise that I get the question, what is log? A lot. In this video I'll break it down in Layman's terms, so I'm not going to get super technical or anything. I'll also link to all the other relevant videos I've done on the subject so you can really get your teeth into it. So what is log? Well put simply it's an extremely low contrast setting for video that's built into some cameras that tries to retain more detail in the bright highlight areas and dark shadow areas in your footage by reducing the contrast in a really pleasing, interesting way. But how does it work? Well log is short for logarithmic gamma curve and put simply that means the darker the area in your footage, the more the log settings will stop it from getting too dark and the same goes for the highlights, the brighter the area in your video, the more the log curve will react and try to stop the highlights from getting so bright and blown out that they become pure white no matter what you do with them. What you end up with is a pretty uninspiring looking, very low contrast image that needs color grading to get it looking good. But have seriously, why would you use log if it adds more times to your workflow? Well for many reasons you might not want to but log can give you lots more detail in the shadow and highlights that you otherwise might not be able to capture. It's a look that's often associated with that filmic feel. Let me demonstrate. Okay I'm here in my office and it's a sunny day. I'm using a linear profile and as you can see outside is completely blown out. It's quite sunny. So what if I try and recover some of the detail? Yeah it doesn't work. So in that case I have to use a lower exposure and try and bring up the shadows on my face. That's the other way I could do this. Let's do it now. And so here we go. I'm again using a linear profile and I've exposed so you can see the background outside. It's kind of exposed almost perfectly and the result is my skin tones, my all of me and the interior of this room are too dark. So if it brings some shadows up it doesn't look good does it? So let's switch now to a log profile. So here we are using Sony's S-log 2 and I've exposed somewhere in the middle of what my skin tones should be at and how the exterior should be exposed. I'm trying to meet somewhere in the middle so that I can do something with the highlight areas and something with the shadows and kind of the equal it all out and make it look a bit more pleasing. And this is what it looks like. I've done a simple grade. I've added a look at table and yeah. Taking a look at these side-by-side it's quite obvious that none of these clips are perfect and really what it needs is internal lighting. The first clip which is using a standard profile has massively overexposed highlight areas. The second clip which is the under exposed standard profile has really noisy looking shadows and the third clip which is the S-log version is a bit more balanced but still far far from perfect. My spitter-defeated light in this room would make this shot look really good. Earlier in this video I made reference to log footage and that kind of filmic cinematic aesthetic. So at this point I imagined some of you are thinking, are you saying you can't get cinematic looking footage without log? Well of course I'm not saying that. Take this shot for example which is shot in the very very flat S-log 3 Sony profile and in this case the profile is so flat and colourless that I can really go wherever I want with the colouring. I really wanted the colour in this video to be steered in the direction of being punchy but interesting because we've got graffiti behind our subjects and I really wanted it just to pop. Of course the other things I did to make it look a little bit more cinematic was to add widescreen bars and I added a little bit of a vignette. So does log make a footage look more cinematic? Well no not really but it does help with things like the colouring and it gives you more dynamic range for sure. After all the majority of films are shot in some form of log profile. So when should you use log? Well for me I like to use it in almost any situation apart from low light. It's a personal preference but I do prefer the way that it grades or prefer the way I can manipulate the colours a bit more easily. But the answer but simply is in high dynamic range situations. Take this scene for example this was shot in cine1 which is a standard profile and you can see it's an extremely bright day. Now I'm going to give this a little bit of a tweak just so it looks as best so I'm going to add some contrast and a tiny bit of saturation and then we'll see how it compares to a log example and here's the same clip but in log. As always log looks rubbish when it's straight out of the camera but when I add a grade and a lookup table it really starts to pop. Personally I quite like both examples they both look pretty good to me once tweaked but let's look at them side by side. Looking at them side by side the first thing I notice is that I prefer the colour from the log example but that's entirely unfair because I have used a look up table. In this case I'm using the phantom lookup tables which I'm going to emulate an ari style colour palette. If you're interested I did review these lots which are linked below as well and I did manage to get a code for you if you're interested in staffing them up. Zooming into 300% and actually I was very surprised by what's going on in the standard profiles shadow areas. A standard example on the left shows aliasing in the shadows which was really surprising considering I've actually lowered the exposure of the shadow areas which in theory should make them even cleaner. Looking now at the sky we can see that the standard example on the left actually I prefer the natural colour that we've got and leaves compared to the log version. The other noticeable thing we can see on our log example on the right is that our lookup table is actually keeping the highlight areas much darker than on the standard version. This is a known characteristic of the lookup tables they're known for having lovely roll off of the highlight areas but in terms of detail I mean they're fairly similar but I think I can see a little bit more detail in the trees on the log example. You've heard me mention lookup tables a lot in this video so far they are an essential component to working with log footage. Log footage needs lookup tables to tell it what the contrast curve should be doing and what the colours should look like. Luckily there's a lot of good ones out there and you can find them for either not very much money or free. I'll link the video about some of my favourite lookup tables below if you're interested. In the meantime I'll show you three of my absolute favourites from different packs. This is the one I'm using on this video it's the Phantom Lutz Utopia lookup table. Love it it's quite nicely accurate but slightly filmic at the same time. This is the Velocore Aspen Lut which you all know I really love. It gives you a lovely pastel kind of peachy kind of colour and yeah it's beautiful I love it and finally this is Train Films Drive lookup table and it's super punchy super saturated and really nice looking. I've done tutorials about how to grade log footage if you're interested I'll link some below for you. So there you go putting the answer into words is surprisingly tricky but if you can do it then I encourage you to let me know your thoughts in the comments section and that's it for now thank you so much for hanging out with me today I've got a large backlog of videos about video on this channel of which YouTube recommends this one for you and my latest upload will be just below. If you're not already subscribed then definitely do it hit the blob that's just over my shoulder and until next time let's help each other out and shoot better video. See you guys.