Picture Profile Recipes

[Rob Collins]

I like that one too. For now I'm happy to shoot with PP off and use Magic Bullet Looks. I will be happy though when someone gets just the right settings for something like my old DVX100 gave me on factory F5!

[Michael H. Stevens]

Here is a post I just up on the Vegas Forum which is more relevant here. I'm just overwhelmed by the vast possible adjustement in the Picture Profiles.

My EX1 comes Monday so I've been studying the manual and what tutorials I can find (which are few) and there seems enough possible adjustment to hang yourself! A 200 point adjustment, from +99 to -99 in each of these categories:

Matrix Level
Matrix Phase
RGB combos
Color5 Correction (specific area)
*Target Width
*Level
*Phase
WB offsets
Detail level
Detail Frequency (I don't even know what this means)
Detail Crisping
H/V Ratio
White Limiter
Black Limiter
Knee APT Level
Skin Tone Level
Skin Tone Saturation
Skin Tone Phase
Knee Point
Knee Slope
Knee SAT Level
Gamma level
Black level
Black Gamma level
Low Key SAT

In my math that's 25 x 200 shriek which is about 5 followed by 28 zeros of combinations!

No wonder my Vortex Media training DVD says forget all this and stick to CINE4 + High SAT and Black -2!.

How are you EX1 owners dealing with experimenting with all these PP combos?

Mike

[Sami Sanpakkila]

I'm looking for mostly to get a lot of latitude (or the appearance of it).

I think Cine4 is nice when you have overexposed areas in the image like car head lights, lamps etc. But if you're shooting at grey sky, smoke or subjects that are white to almost white you loose a lot of the latitude. So for these kinda shots I think picture profile off is good.

I did one shoot yesterday in a snow storm with big white snowflakes falling and a grey sky in the background. I forgot to change the PP from Cine4 to off. It did kinda mess up the shot a bit. Would have been more dramatic with PP off I think. But I have to do more tests to see if this is really the case and in which situations it works and doesn't work.

Sami

[Bill Ravens]

First blush inspection of the EX1 color balance showed weak green/cyan and a fairly narrow dynamic range. The histogram filled only about 3/4 of the x axis and tended to be on the underexposure side of things. Granted, I don't have a 3 color histogram, so, this is really an approximation. My goal was to increase the dynamic range, improve the exposure without blowing the hi-lites and muddying the shadows. I, also, wanted to bring up the weak green/cyan.

Anyone familiar with Paolo Ciccone's True Color calibration for the JVC HD100 knows the procedure...
http://www.paolociccone.com/hd100-calibration.html

I repeated his process with the EX1, HDRack, and a DSC Labs Camette chart v8.1. Here's my procedure and results:
1-Light DCS chart with 600w quartz halogen lamp
2-white balance the EX1- result of the WB=2700k
3-zoom EX1 onto 5-step gray chart on camette and look at the WFM.
4-adjust aperture so white step shows 100IRE
5-adjust black and black gamma so black step shows 0IRE.
6-adjust knee and gamma so middle gray sits at 50%IRE and all grey steps are evenly spaced
7-Now the hard part-zoom out to show the color bars on Camette. Turn on Picture profile mode and set MATRIX to ON.
8-adjust global and local phase angles to put all the color bursts within the vectorscope targets

Here's my results:
Matrix---------------------on
Select---------------------hisat
Level...............................0
Phase..............................+6
R-G................................+75
R-B................................0
G-R................................-18
G-B................................-23
B-R................................-33
B-G................................+11

Color Correction..............off
White.............................off
Detail.............................on
Detail Level.....................0
Detail Freq......................0
Skintone.........................off

Knee..............................on
Auto knee......................on
Point.............................90
Slope............................0
Knee SAT level...............50

Gamma Level.................0
Select...........................STD3
Black............................-15
Black gamma.................-9
Low key sat..................0

It would be great to have someone validate my results. I'll redo more fine tuning as I go on. For the time being, my latitude is increased above the factory settings, my saturation is more lifelike. The histogram now displays a range from near 0 to 100%. Peaks are well distributed over the range without favoring lows or hi's.

I'd be glad to post some frame grabs if a server was available.

Time to go test in the real world.
I hope this helps out.

[Steven Thomas]

Bill, thanks for performing this DSC calibration for the EX1. I'll give it a shot and report back.

I noticed you used the standard 3 as opposed to the cine curves. Did you give Cine 4 or 3 a try?

[Bill Ravens]

Steve...

yeah, I tried all the gamma presets. All the CINE presets really compress the dynamic range about 30-50% of the available range. I suppose you could boost the LEVEL, but, then, I think you're manually putting the gamma back in the STD preset(I think).

[Steven Thomas]

Ok thanks Bill. I'm looking forward to checking it out.
How well did the calibration go? Were there any problems?

[Paul Joy]

Thanks for looking at this Bill, I've been waiting for somebody who knows their stuff with charts and monitors to try and get the most latitude from the camera.

I just tried your settings and an initial test indoors produced very saturated and overly red results (compared to PP off). I'll give it a look in the daylight tomorrow.

regards

Paul.

[Steven Thomas]

Yes, during the quick indoors test, I did notice there is a lot of saturation.

[Paul Cronin]

Thanks Bill I will try tomorrow if there is some sun.

[Raymond Schlogel]

Bill, you can post screen grabs here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/gallery/

- Ray

[Ray Bell]

Your probably going to have to do some testing with different levels of illumination... It would be interesting to see how the RGB curves handle
gain variation...

This could affect the color saturation points a different illuminations...

might need to setup a profile that you like that coveres the histo like you have it set, but with different ND filters in place also......

[Adam Simpson]

Bill,

I just plugged your settings in one of my EX1s. Initially it looks great. Amazing difference. It looks alot like the rough preset I made to match my HVX before I sold it, but better. I will test it out n the next few days while I have a project to see how it looks. I even named it the "Bill R" preset in your honor. Look forward to more testing from you.

Thanks,

Adam

[Bill Ravens]

Setting up dynamic range is very easy. Setting the colors is much harder. It's pretty much of a trial and error method to get the rotations so everything lines up. Push in on one color and the complement goes out. Needless to say, it's time consumming and tricky to get all 6 color bursts into their target boxes on the vectorscope.This initial matrix I posted was fairly close, but, not perfect. I'll try again when I have more time to experiment.

Since the entire matrix was balanced under incandescent(2700K), I then went outside and re-white balanced for 5800k, but, kept the matrix unchanged. Be sure to white balance before you test this out. By the way, the entire test was run with ND2. I wanted to keep the aperture f4<x<f2.8

Yes, saturation is up. That was part of the goal. The factory colors, IMHO are too unsaturated for my taste. I may still need to dial the red down. It was the predominant color before I started out.

Ray...
Thanx. I'll post some frame grabs tomorrow.

[Carroll Lam]

So far I like your profile, Bill. The standard Sony setting is completely "bland". That's why I started the "HISAT" profile in this thread. I need to do more shooting with your current profile but it seems very clean.

Carroll Lam