Hello Harv here and welcome back, good buddies. I get a lot of questions through this channel from you guys and by far the most common question is I'm having problems when I use S-log 2 or S-log 3. How do I use it and not get noise or other issues? So here are my five simple tips to improve the results from your S-log footage. When we get started if you like that track it's part of my royalty free music packs on bias but I think they're awesome so definitely check them out below. Last thing before we jump in don't you think it's just so cool that Sony give us these awesome tools to use in their mirrorless cameras just please keep that in mind before a few of you reached your keyboards to tell me that log profiles are pointless when using an 8-bit codec just appreciate that we're able to use these pro-filming features and a lot of us will use them and love the results. I know it's a very fashionable thing to write in the comments but you know this is a negativity free zone where you can prefer whichever picture profile you like. One, expose correctly you'll hear this from everyone. These log curves need overexposing to get the best out of them. In fact the bulk of the useful information in your footage can be found in that top half of the gamma curve. It takes a bit of practice but the trick is to never use auto ISO obviously as your camera doesn't need to the exposure brilliantly in the log modes so don't trust it. Also wherever possible keep your ISO at its native minimum for maximum dynamic range. Here we have s2 and this is what I consider to be a good exposure. It does look pretty bright and pretty washed out as it should do. Remember to ignore the meter on your camera which at this point should be saying plus two stops overexposed it's nonsense ignore it. I've used exactly the same exposure settings for s3 as I have for s2. It does look a little bit brighter because that's the nature of s3 it does just look a bit more washed out. If you're using a histogram to expose this obviously make sure that it's nice and bright on the right hand side of your histogram. If your footage looks like this however I guarantee you will run into trouble when you come to grade it. This is absolutely underexposed by at least two stops. Now it's time to put a simple grade on them and see how they look. Back with s2 and all I'm going to do is bring the exposure down just a tiny bit and then add a lookup table which converts it to rec 709. There we go it's looking good good colors punchy lots of dynamic range and no issues with noise etc. Next we're going to grade the correctly exposed s3 footage and I'm going to use the same effects as I did for s2 except I'm going to add a tiny bit of a curve because it has less contrast. There we go. s3 doesn't have to be difficult to grade it just takes a little bit more practice than s2 here we have no noise and no issues. However when I tried to grade the underexposed footage I had issues as I expected I would. I added all the same effects as the previous examples but I ran into lots of problems with noise and massively reduced dynamic range. This is especially obvious when we compare it to the correctly exposed version. 2. Don't use s2 or 3 in the high frame per second mode as the codecs are super lightweight and therefore kind of fragile trust me you will notice some aliasing issues when you grade your high frame grip clips. Let me show you what I mean right now. So this extremely interesting shot was shot in cc4 and of course it's going to need a little bit of saturation and contrast to look at it's best. Once I've done you can see it looks okay it's not as clean as I'd like it but still it's acceptable and I think if I was filming something like a moving subject you wouldn't notice it would still look good. Now in s2 and I can instantly see that it's going to be more noisy you can have a look in the the shallow areas around the colour board you can see it's going to be noisy. So now I'm going to add a lot to convert it to rex709 and I'm just going to add a little bit more saturation. So there we go it's actually not too bad that's the great thing about s2 is you can see noise when it's ungraded and then you grade it and it's just sort of disappears. However you will start to notice some odd things going on with the colours. Now switching to s3 and you can see there's going to be even more noise. So to colour grade it I'm just going to use the same lookup table to convert it to rex709 and then I'm going to use curves to introduce some contrast and just add a little bit of saturation on top. There we go and oh dear god it looks horrible look at the black around the colour card just to see how much aliasing that is and that is aliasing. Hopefully you'll be able to see this after it's gone through youtube compression but here's all three together so you can really just have a look and let me draw your attention to the very top part of the image where you can see the black background. What's the word disgusting? Three I prefer S-gamert 3 cine colour space or one that's smaller. I actually did extensive unscientific testing on this and found that the super big colour spaces like S-gamert 3 and S-gamert produce the weirdest results when grading and you're way more likely to run into codec problems such as aliasing and colour shifting. Don't get me wrong S-gamert 3 cine is still relatively large but I still I definitely wouldn't want to go any larger than that. If in doubt try cinema or pro or even rec 709 you know these smaller colour spaces that you know basically just give you really punchy colour. So I chose this scene again because it has quite nice colours it's got the natural green of the trees and the blue of the sky so with all of these examples I've tried to grade them as naturally as possible to get the truest image. That way you can just judge the one you like the most however as I mentioned I don't like the gigantic colour spaces like S-gamert the largest that I go is S-gamert 3 cine which you're still considered a large colour space but it's one that I find the most pleasing once graded. Guys there's no right or wrong just try which one you like and use that for when you're grading your log footage add curves rather than just boosting the highlights and shadows and I say this because log footage needs almost sort of decoding to get the best out of it and the way to do that is to use curves that way you can get that nice gradation in your highlight and shadow areas. Here we are again with S-log 3 and once again I'm going to need to use a lookup table which converts it to rec 709 and then all I'm going to do is tweak the highlights and shadows to add some contrast. At first glance I look at this and I go well it looks pretty good I'm quite happy with that but now let's compare it to the same clip but with curves instead and bam what happened there I bet you're thinking what just happened it is kind of subtle and it's hard to tell from you know switching from one clip to the other so now let's look at them side by side and now you can see a difference the clip on the left you can see her face looks a lot more flat and sort of two-dimensional on the right with the curves you can see it really does look much more three-dimensional you can actually see a lot more detail in her face and you can see more of that sort of shadow roll off and when we punch in you can see this is even more obvious particularly on the key light side of her face where you can see the highlight roll off is so much nicer and all I did was just manipulate the curves from the built-in plug-in in Final Cut Pro if you'd like to see a video about how to use curves or how I use curves anyway drop a comment below and let me know number five always apply a lookup table or lutt whether it's just simply a log to rec 709 lutt or something more exotic this is for a similar reason as the need to use a curve if you're using a really big color space like escam at three-sini you will need a lookup table to sort of decoder and tell your footage what needs to be what it needs to be doing color wise if you try and just add saturation you'll no doubt be disappointed with the results so get yourself some lutt luckily there are lots of great ones out there and I'd recommend checking out my lutt's video where I talk about my favorites linked below and lastly as just a bonus point I would also say to use s log 2 and s log 3 if you need them if you're seeing there's two dynamic try s log 2 if you still need more dynamic range try s log 3 but you might just be fine with something like cine 4 or your standard profiles and that's it for now hopefully this answered all your questions about how to use s log 2 and 3 thank you so much for hanging out with me today and I've made a huge amount of videos similar to this so I'll pop a couple of particularly good ones over this side and if you fancy sticking around and you're not already subscribed definitely do it hit this blob on this side and until next time let's help each other out and shoot better video see you guys you