- Hey guys, my name is Matt
Johnson with whoismatt.com. And today I want to share
with you how to quickly and easily film with the
SLOG3 picture profile in your Sony camera. So if you're a run-and-gun
filmmaker like me, that films weddings or documentaries where you don't have full
control over your lighting and you don't have time to use
something like a gray card, this video will show you
how to get great exposure very fast. To save you time though and to make this picture
profile super easy to film with, I've actually created
a set of video presets called WhoisMatt LUTs, that I've created and tested specifically
to work with SLOG3. I will link to those LUTs
down in the video description. I also want you to know that I'm working on an
easy color grading tutorial specifically for SLOG3, so please subscribe if
you wanna see that soon. Getting started now, first off we need to answer the question, can your camera handle filming in SLOG3? Because this is important. Even if your camera shows SLOG3
as an option in the menus, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's capable of properly recording with the picture profile. In short, if you're using
one of Sony's newer cameras, like the a7S III, FX3, FX6, a1, et cetera. Basically any Sony camera that's capable of recording video in 10-bit, your camera can handle SLOG3. But if you're filming
with an older Sony camera, like the a7 III, a6600,
a6500, a6400, et cetera, I would not recommend SLOG3. And I actually have a
different picture profile that I would recommend for you. I will link to my video
about that picture profile in the corner and down
in the video description. Now that you know your camera is capable of recording in SLOG3 properly, let's dive into the nitty
gritty of this picture profile. Grab your Sony camera, in my case, I'm using the a7S III, navigate to the picture profile menu, and the first thing you
should do is make sure that your camera is set to PP8, and that for gamma it says SLOG3, and the color mode says S-Gamut3.Cine. If it doesn't say that,
scroll down to the bottom to the option that says reset, and reset PP8 to its default settings. I would highly recommend filming with PP8. But if you've scrolled around
in the picture profile menu you'll notice that PP9 also says SLOG3, with the only difference being
the color mode says S-Gamut3 instead of S-Gamut3.Cine. Well, there's not a huge difference between these two picture profiles. It's going to be easier for you to color grade footage
filled with S-Gamut3.Cine. So that's why I would
recommend PP8 instead of PP9. Moving on, let's talk exposure. One of the biggest complaints that I've heard from
filmmakers over the years is that SLOG3 is a noisy picture profile. Filmmakers will record footage in SLOG3, but when they color grade it,
the image looks really noisy. Almost like the camera is at a high ISO, even if the ISO is set quite low. If this has happened to you, the reason you're seeing
this noise even at low ISOs is because you have not
exposed SLOG3 properly. Unlike a standard picture profile that already has saturation
and contrast baked in, SLOG3 is a log picture profile,
meaning that it's flat, and you're going to need
to add that contrast and saturation later,
whenever you color grade. So how do you expose SLOG3 so
you don't get a noisy image? Well, this may seem a
bit counterintuitive, but you actually want to
overexpose your footage when filming. Then when you color grade, you bring the footage exposure back down when you add contrast and saturation. The reason many filmmakers
are seeing noise with their SLOG3 footage is that they're doing
the opposite of this. They're filming their footage too dark, and then bring up the exposure which is going to introduce
noise to the image. Going back to your camera now, looking at the bottom of the screen you're going to see your
shutter speed, lens aperture, and the letters mm, and a number. In my case, it says 0.0. This mm, stands for multi metering, and it tells you how bright the image is that your camera is recording. If your camera doesn't say mm here, open the menu and go to exposure/color, metering, and set your
metering mode to multi. With a traditional camera picture profile, you would want your camera's
metering number next to mm to read 0.0, which means
the image it is recording isn't over or underexposed. If your camera says -1.0, it means that it is one stop underexposed. If it reads +1.0, it means
it's one stop overexposed. But remember, we're shooting in SLOG3, and you need to overexpose it to make sure it's properly recording. So you're actually going to
want your camera's metering to read between 1.7 and 2.0 stops over. This is going to look
bright, but I promise you this is how your SLOG3
footage will look it's best. Also be careful because when
I say 1.7 to two stops over, you're going to wanna make sure that that two isn't blinking. If it's blinking, that means
that it's over two stops, and that's a bad thing
because it's too bright. Now to help you out with exposure and make sure you aren't
overexposing your footage, I would highly recommend using zebras, and not the African animal, I'm referring to the zebras
setting of your camera. Zebras will tell you if
your footage is overexposed by putting these nice
black and white lines that kind of look like zebra stripes on the overexposed parts of your image. You will need to calibrate
these zebra stripes to work properly with
your SLOG3 footage though. Incidentally, if you've
watched my Sony camera menu and custom buttons set up videos, and downloaded my Sony presets you already have your
zebra set up for SLOG3. If you haven't watched those yet, I will link to them up in the corner and down in the video description. In case you haven't downloaded
those settings though, here's how to set up your zebras properly. Go into your camera's menu, go to exposure/color, zebra display, and for zebra level, you're going to want to go down to C2, so you can set a custom zebra level. Press right and select lower limit, then press right again and
change the number to 94+. Next make sure zebra
display in the is turned on. And as you start to bring up
the exposure of your camera, either by changing your aperture or ISO, you're going to notice zebra lines appearing on the overexposed
parts of your footage, because you set your zebra level to 94+, that number matches up
with the maximum brightness the SLOG3 footage can handle
before it clips the highlights, overexposes them, and
they cannot be recovered. So as you're filming with your camera, I would first look at your metering and make sure it's between
1.7 and two stops over. And then I would look for any zebras to appear on the screen. If they show up, that could be an issue, but it really comes down
to what you're filming. If you're filming a person
standing in front of the sunset, and you have the super bright
sun and clouds behind them, you will probably see some
zebras in the background, and that's okay. But if you're seeing zebras
on the person's skin, that means that your footage
is definitely too bright and your exposure needs to be darker. I would highly recommend
filming some test shots with people lit by
different light sources, as you gain experience
with watching your metering and zebras, you should get a good idea of how the camera is
exposing and what looks good. All right, you've got
your metering set up, and your zebras, the second to last thing we
need to talk about is ISO. If you turn your ISO up,
your footage gets brighter. If you turn it down, it gets darker. But there are two very
important things to keep in mind when it comes to your ISO and SLOG3. Looking at the ISO menu of my a7S III, you'll see that I can actually set my ISO all the way down to 160, but all of these ISOs from 160 to 500 have lines on the top and
bottom of the numbers. But when we get to ISO
640, those lines go away. This is because for the a7S III, and its cinema camera variant, the FX3, whenever you're recording in SLOG3, the recommended base ISO is 640. This ISO 640 is the ISO
that Sony recommends if you want to maximize the dynamic range and footage quality that
you're getting from the camera. As I just showed, though, you
can go lower if you want to down to 160, but you're going to have two
issues once you go below 640. The first issue is going
to be very obvious. Here's my camera, I'm filming at ISO 640, with the zebras showing where
the image is overexposed. Drop the ISO to 500 now,
and you see the issue? The zebras are gone. Yes, if you set your camera
below the minimum base ISO, zebras will no longer work, and the camera will
not be able to tell you which parts of the image are overexposed. This is a huge bummer,
but not the only one. The second issue, which is
harder to see when filming, but arguably worse, is
that if you drop your ISO below the base ISO of 640, the camera's going to start
to electronically clip the highlights of your
footage at a lower level. Here's a clip filmed in SLOG3 at 640 ISO, where I lowered the
exposure from F4 to F8, and then brought the exposure
back up to the proper level by lowering my shutter speed. Notice the histogram on the lower right, indicating that the camera is
only starting to overexpose once the zebras start to appear at 94 IRE, and the camera's metering
says it is overexposed by more than two stops. Now, when I do the same thing, but I instead drop the
ISO from 640 to 160, and then bring down the
shutter speed again, the histogram on the bottom right now starts to clip the
highlights at a much lower level, leading to the footage
losing a ton of dynamic range and completely destroying the image. Strangely though, the camera's metering still only reads 1.7 to 2.0 stops over, even though the highlights
are completely clipped. So in short, if you drop your
ISO below the base ISO of 640, you will not have zebras, and the camera's metering
will no longer be accurate. Meaning I would never recommend filming with your camera below the base ISO. Adjust your aperture, your shutter speed, and consider investing in an indie filter before dropping your ISO. Got it? Okay, we've covered minimum ISO but we aren't quite done
talking about ISOs yet. If you have an a7S III, FX3, or FX6, this is going to be important for you, because we need to talk about higher ISOs with these cameras. See, these cameras all share
roughly the same sensor. And when you're recording in SLOG3, there are some ISOs that
I would recommend avoiding if you want your footage to look its best. Remember how I said earlier
that one of the main complaints filmmakers have about SLOG3
is that it can be noisy, I said that usually isn't due to ISO, but I do want you to be aware that ISO can sometimes be the culprit. See, this camera sensor
shared by these three cameras has what is known as a dual native ISO. This means there are two ISOs where the camera will look its best and give you the best quality footage. This dual native ISO will change depending on the picture
profile you're filming with, but in the case of SLOG3, these ISOs are ISO 640 and ISO 12800. We've already discussed ISO 640, but ISO 12800 is super important too, because while it is a relatively high ISO, it is also incredibly clean
with virtually zero grain. Here's my a7S III, with the
ISO at 2500, cranking it up, and as you'll see, it's getting
brighter but also noisier. Here at ISO 10000, it's the noisiest. But wait a second, switch
it to ISO 12800, and bang! The footage is clean and
doesn't have any noise. So as a final rule of thumb, I would recommend avoiding
some of the noisier ISOs when shooting in SLOG3, namely ISO 6400 to 10000. If you're shooting at ISO 5000 and you need to brighten things up a bit, skip a few ISOs and go up to 12800 so your image will be cleaner. Now we have one last thing to talk about, and this is a tool that
will really help you when it comes to properly white balancing your SLOG3 footage. Open your camera's menu, go
to setup, display option, turn gamma display assist type
to auto, if it isn't already, and then turn gamma display assist on. When you're filming in SLOG3, your camera will now show you
a preview that adds contrast and saturation to your footage, and shows you what SLOG3 will look like after you've color graded it. To be clear, this is just a preview, your recorded footage will
still be flattened to saturated. But if you want to see how it will look, this is a fantastic feature. Gamma display assist is also going to be super helpful to you when you're setting your
camera's white balance. Because SLOG3 is so desaturated, it can be difficult to tell if your white balance is set properly, especially if you were filming
in a mixed lighting scenario like a wedding or other run-and-gun
documentary style event. I have gamma display assist set to a custom button on my camera. So with a simple button
press I can enable it to increase the saturation of my footage and make sure my colors aren't
looking too warm or too cool. You can watch my a7S III setup videos to see how to set up this
custom button yourself, or you can save time and
download my a7S III setup preset, which will give you all of
my settings immediately, all into that preset file
and my setup videos below. All right, and that is
how to film in SLOG3 quickly and easily. I will also link down below
to my SLOG3 color presets, if you wanna check those out. If you combine those presets with these settings
that we've talked about, your footage is gonna look awesome. Thanks so much for watching
and have a great day.
