How to Film in LOG: A Beginner's Guide

This is your beginner's guide to filming in LOG! What is LOG? How do you properly expose your footage? When and why should you use it? We'll answer these questions and more!

0:00 Intro
0:16 What is LOG?
0:51 How to Expose LOG Footage
2:45 Is Shooting in LOG Better?
3:20 Final Thoughts

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[BandH]

What are your questions about shooting in LOG?

[RKV]

Such Great Explanation In Such Short Time, Thanks For This.

[jodybruchonphotovideo]

I left this comment on the B&H article where this video was embedded: The best way to shoot in log is: don't. Simple math says why not: you're taking a limited range of values (usually with 12 or more bits of depth per channel, representing 4096 levels), scaling them to a different and smaller set of values (8 or 10 bits of depth, or 256-1024 values) that's drastically different from the set used by the 8-bit (256-value) final product. In the case of 8-bit footage (as most Sony cameras and almost all sub-$1000 video-capable cameras and bodies put out), the problems become obvious quickly, because the mismatch between raw footage and final output values can be quite large, meaning that by shooting in log, you've quite literally just thrown away a lot of crucial image data. With 10 bits, you have quadruple the precision available, so the "compression" of the log curve can't "crush" the lower bits of precision so easily since there are more of them, making a shift back to normal more practically possible. Unfortunately, this only avoids most of the damage; you still have burdened yourself with a more complex workflow and the difficulty of converting back to normal. In all cases, the AVC or HEVC compression used on all cameras today will exacerbate the problem due to the artifacts caused by macroblock compression, and chroma subsampling has also already discarded between 50% and 75% of the color information even before the compression further mangles everything. Shooting log is setting up for failure, and people don't produce good products BECAUSE of log, they do it IN SPITE of log.

The math behind this stuff is why midtones (especially skin tones) look like garbage when shot in log or "flat" profiles and then get pulled back to a more normal image. This is a very common problem that newbies especially face: people will tell them how great log is, with the mythical promise of "more latittude in post, " then when they've committed a shoot to log footage and can't simply re-shoot it, they persist in trying to repair their plastic skin tones, ugly midtones, and weird color and jagged-edge artifacts. The pros use log, after all, so surely it's their fault that they're failing! The truth is that log is a good idea in theory and a bad idea in practice.

The correct thing to do is always to get it right in-camera and worry more about what you're putting in front of that camera than what magic setting will make your $5 production somehow look amazing. You can't trick the camera into being a more powerful camera with clever camera settings. 8-bit 4:2:0 AVC-compressed data doesn't care what the professionals told you; it sees the much lower contrast of log curve footage as a giant field of opportunities to discard the subtle gradient detail in a lot more low-contrast areas, so a progression from 0, 1, 2, 3 might become 0, 0, 2, 2 because that's how lossy video compression works: it throws out these little things you won't notice...only you do notice them, because you have to stretch the data back out (particularly in the midtones) for it to be usable, and that 0, 0, 2, 2 sequence might not be 0, 0, 4, 4 instead of something like 0, 1, 3, 4. BOOM! Now you have little blocky edge artifacts in your image and smooth colors like the curved skin of a human face look like a bunch of flattened bands instead.

Even worse, all that extra (noisy) shadow data and extra highlight data that you compromised your midtones to record is just getting compressed right back, so you threw out your midtones to get more highlight and shadow data, and you threw that extra data out too. It's ridiculous. I don't understand why anyone does this. I have never once seen an example of corrected log profile footage and corrected (to visually match) normal/neutral profile footage where the log footage looked better. Even worse, people tend to not sufficiently restore the contrast to log footage because of the aforementioned problems with artifacts and loss of transition details, so corrected log footage video all too often looks like low-contrast, washed-out garbage. Alternatively, recognizing the problem, some log wanderers go the opposite route and over-correct, cranking up saturation and contrast and applying effects to make the problems caused by log footage look like an intentional, stylistic choice, often followed by them making a YouTube video bragging about it and selling their LUTs for $20.

tl;dr: don't shoot log or flat, you're ruining your footage. For more discussion, there's an article "YouTube video experts don’t understand why flat/log footage on 8-bit cameras is a bad idea" out there with a more visual explanation.

[StevenSmith-nqxe]

Terrific video—as fun and funny as it was informative. Thanks Dean and team!

[nikabel]

Best explanation I've found so far - thank you!

[fideldog]

I was trying to find out what those gray videos are all about and I finally found it!

[ANSWERTHECALLOFJESUSCHRIST]

I like that even really young people could understand this video. Such a digestible format. Great (and funny) stuff! 😏

PS: Dean's a cool bean! 😃

[djcvision]

Great tips! I’m trying out false color right now.

[Peter-ueiz]

what I don't understand is why some people just upload raw log videos, unedited in post production. do they think that makes their videos look more professional?

[NicolasLunaFilms]

Generally how many f-stops/chroma can you achieve in log? ... I know there's different color sciences for every camera makers' log setting

[dennismbecker]

The color of the false colors will depend on the monitor manufacturer. My Feelworld monitor is pink for 75 IRE, but my OSEE monitor is green for the same exposure.

[jodybruchonphotovideo]

Some observations specific to this video. In your over-exposure demonstration to justify log shooting, at 0:33 it is obvious that your head and the sky are solid white meaning the over-exposure is quite extreme, but then in the switch to the log profile, you've dropped the exposure significantly. Clicking between 0:33 and 0:43, the trees in the back become much darker and a lot more detail is apparent, plus your head's outline is visible. You didn't expose both images in a similar way, so this example is not apples-to-apples and therefore is useless. The section where the LUT is applied turns everything green; it's not visually attractive, so not a great example to tout the supposed benefits. In general, the indoor clips look too dark and have an orange/green cast (I pulled a snapshot into IrfanView and did -5 red, -5 green, 1.15 gamma correction, +20 saturation and it looks way better). This video is also an excellent demonstration of why shooting on full-frame cameras (or just shallow depth of field in general) isn't a great idea: the focus is locked on your glasses, and the acceptable focus depth is so shallow that your mouth, eyes, nose, and really your entire head is all blurry by comparison, except for your hair on your upper lip when you say certain things. That tiny millimeter slice is tack-sharp, but everything else is really soft. (Yes, I'm viewing in 4K on a big IPS HDR monitor.)

[watermelonsugarfilmevents-]

I shot in log 2 and am struggling getting the depth back in a yellow lit room without losing all skin tones! Any advice ?!

[Eymard_Drops]

When shooting in LOG, do you recommend having the White Balance on the camera on Auto or setting it manually?

[dlanska]

Very interesting. So is there a LOG approach or application (or benefit) to photography as well as videography? You can get around overexposure issues with bracketed exposures, NDFs, etc, but, for example, could a LOG profile be useful to decrease noise in photography so that when one processes the image the overall noise is decreased?

[СвоёМнение-эт]

Somehow from my tests log does not save highlights, only shadows. For blown highlights it does change values from white to less white, but they are still blown out and no information can recover.

[stefanbernhard]

Great. How on earth can I get a log profile on older canon dslrs like 5d mk4 and 6d mk2. Been shooting luxury properties in normal mode and it's just not cutting it. Thx!

[timoneisold]

Can you also film in Log on your phone? Because I dont have a camera but really want to get into color grading and stuff like this.

[kevinshabach]

Should I over expose in s log 2? How much? Thanks! (Sony cameras)

[AJ-on-youtube]

So it's kind like of a way of getting RAW-like flexibility when you can't shoot in RAW?