Sony A7S3 Camera Setup and Tips

hey everyone the Sony a7s3 that I'm filming on right now is an amazing camera but it can be a bit overwhelming if you've just got it or you're struggling to set it up and you don't really know what best settings to use to get the best possible video quality out of this camera in this tutorial I'm going to show you all of the major things that you need to know to set up your camera and start filming amazing looking video so let's kick off this tutorial by looking at some of the essential things that you need to set up when getting started with this camera after you've attached the lens inserted a charge battery and put in a memory card turn the camera on and open out the screen then go and turn the control dial around until you get to movie mode press the menu button the first thing you're going to want to do is decide on if you want pal or ntsc frame rates available to you for example if you set the camera to ntsc you can choose 24 30 60 or 120 frames per second if you set it to Pal you can choose 25 50 or 100 frames a second the available frame rates will also depend on other settings but don't worry about that for now if this sounds a bit like gibberish to you and you're not shooting a project for a specific client or a client that has specific frame rate requirements just go and set the camera to ntsc and choose 24 frames per second the next thing you need to do is choose what kind of video file will be saved to the memory card you can choose to shoot in HD resolution or 4K resolution HD will be easier to edit if you don't have a powerful computer but 4K will give you crisper looking footage HD files will be smaller 4K files will take up more space on the memory card 4K files will let you zoom in a little bit during editing without losing as much video quality you also need to choose how the video file will be compressed in the camera xavchs will write smaller video files but they'll be a lot harder to edit unless you've got a powerful computer xavcs will create larger files but they might be a bit easier to edit xavcsi will create big files but they'll be the easiest to edit with to start off we're going to set this to xavcs 4K remember that there's a lot of different things to think about when choosing these settings and this is only a beginner's video as you become more experienced and learn more you may need to go and tweak these settings next in movie settings set the recording frame rate to 24p this means 24 frames per second next in the record setting menu choose what quality you want the video to be 100m means 100 megabits for every second of video you record 6dm means 60 megabits per second 100m will create larger video files that will be harder to edit on your computer without using something like proxies but that's another discussion for another video the numbers after the M dictate how much color information will be stored choosing 42210 bit will give you the absolute best color data in the video file but may be extremely hard to edit on your computer four two zero eight bit might not be as hard to edit on your computer but you might not be able to edit the colors quite as well because we're setting the camera up for maximum image quality in this video we're going to choose 100m 422 10 bit color there's a few different ways the camera can record color and brightness information into the video files in this video we're going to set up the camera to be able to record the maximum range of dark to light information head to the exposure color menu and choose color tone under picture profile choose pp8 and tap ok this will set your camera up to use something called s log3 when you set your camera up to use slog3 it's going to record a flatter low contrast looking video file that you can then bring back in the editing to really get the maximum dynamic range out of the camera I'll show you how to do this later in the video when we come to look at editing because s-log 3 will look flat in the monitor to get a better idea of what the final video will look like head down to the setup menu choose display option and turn on gamma display assist now the monitor will look a bit more normal this doesn't affect the recorded video file it's just to help with monitoring next we're going to look at exposure and metering under the shooting menu shooting mode setting set the exposure mode to manual and hit OK change the iso to 640 and then set the shutter speed to 1 50th of a second you can now change the aperture until the meter reading says about plus 1.7 this means we're over exposing what the meter thinks we should do by 1.7 the reason for this overexposure is to get the best noise performance from the pp8s log 3 setting we chose earlier your lens might also have an aperture ring on it setting this to a will let you control the aperture with the camera dial now press the FN button and choose white balance you can choose a manual one such as daylight if you're shooting outside and it's sunny you can also set this to AWB which means Auto white balance using this setting the camera will try and guess what the white balance setting should be ideally though you want to use a manual setting because in the studio here I'm using daylight balanced lights we're going to set this to Daylight and hit OK now just choose whether to use manual or auto focus on your lens and press the record button to start shooting so you're not always going to be able to keep that meter reading exactly stable and still at a specific setting unless you're working indoors with fixed lighting like I am now if you're Outdoors perhaps you're vlogging then you're going to see that meter reading moving around all over the place if that's the case then you're going to either want to set an exposure so you get a kind of average meter reading somewhere within that range or you might have to turn on some of the auto exposure features such as auto ISO the a7s3 has some really useful features that can make using it for video so much easier let's take a look at 11 of these next normally when you're recording you just get this little indicator here you can make it more obvious what you need to do is go to the menus head down to shooting display choose M for disp during record turn this on and now next time you record you'll get this big red box making it a lot easier to see if you're actually recording or not this is going to make sure you're actually recording and don't miss any Shots Out of the Box whenever you start or stop recording you get a really annoying noise if you want to turn these recording noises on and off come into the menu go down to settings scroll down go to sound option choose audio signals and then set this to off the a7s3 has dual native isos so for example in s-log 3 the base ISO is 640 this is what it looks like this is where you're going to get the least noise and for s-log 3 the Dual base ISO is at 12 800. I've got an entire video dedicated to this which I'll link to in the description if we just go slightly underneath the second base ISO of 12800 for example 10 000 ISO notice we've got more noise here but as soon as we switch to 12800 that noise disappears if if you've made loads of customizations to your a7s3 you may want to back up the entire camera settings to an SD card come into the menus head down to settings choose reset or save settings choose save load settings choose save choose save new enter a file name and then choose save this will save your settings to the SD card you can then load the settings at a later date just choose load choose the file choose OK this will reset the camera and load the settings file with all of your customizations you can use this to share settings between friends or have multiple setups for different jobs if you're liking these tips so far and you want to support the Channel please go and subscribe and turn on notifications if you're running multiple different cameras you can customize how the file names are recorded to those cameras by default we just get this c number followed by a sequence number to change this go into the menus head to the shooting menu choose file choose file settings choose file name format and here you can choose between the standard which is just to have a c and then a sequence number or you can choose title date plus title or title plus date choose title and then head into title name settings here you can set a prefix for the file name so for example you could set this to a7s3 choose OK choose OK again and the next time you record a clip the file name will be prefixed with a7s3 you can customize how quickly the camera transitions between different auto focus points to do this head into the menus head into the focus menu choose afmf and then choose AF transition speed a setting of one is the slowest and 7 is the fastest so at a setting of one notice how slowly the autofocus Transitions and Back Again and if we choose the maximum of seven notice how quickly the autofocus changes now if you're working with manual focus and you want to double check that the focus is bang on head into the menus head into the focus menu head to focus assistant choose Focus magnifier and then you get this red box you can move this around on the screen tap the middle of the dial and this will zoom into that area and then you can use manual focusing to check that you're spot on if you're making use of iaf the autofocus system will automatically lock onto either the left or right eye if you're using a lens with a shallow depth of field you might want to select a specific I just so you focus on the near side or the far side eye depending on the look you're going for to do this head into the menus choose the focus menu choose face iaf choose right left eye select and then you can select either the right or left eye and the autofocus point will stick to either the right or left eye once again this can be useful if you're working with a shallow depth of field you can customize the autofocus system in the a7s3 and decide how responsive it is to changes in subjects or how much it stays locked onto a single subject to do this head into the menus head into the focus menu head into afmf choose AF subjects shift sensitivity and choose a value of 1 to be more locked on this will make it less responsive to changes in subjects so you can see here the book is actually not focusing at all now it's trying to stay locked on to my face which is behind the book and you can see it stayed locked onto my face there if we change this to the maximum value of 5 it's going to be more responsive now to changes in subject so it's tracking my eyes hold the book up it switches to the book switches back to my eye so that's highly responsive autofocus subject Shifting the a7s3 has a feature called shockless white balance which allows you to set how quickly changes in white balance are reflected in the video here it's set to off if we have a look at this and we'll go and make some changes to the white balance here notice that when we change the white balance setting the change is almost instantaneous in the video so this can be quite jarring to the viewer if we set shockless white balance to slow it's going to be a more gentle transition between white balance changes once again we'll make some changes in the white balance notice when I shift white balances that the change is more subtle now and it gradually changes to the different white balances the a7s3 has a USB C input which is behind the store here and this USBC input also allows you to provide power to the camera over USB so let's plug this in and you can see up here that we're providing power with this little icon this means you can shoot for longer if you've only got one battery the battery will discharge more slowly just bear in mind that you do actually need a battery in the camera for this to work you can't just plug a USBC power delivery Cable in without a battery and as an added bonus you can also charge the battery when the camera is turned off via USBC if you've got an appropriate cable AC adapter or power bank so zebras or zebras are depending on where in the world you're from allow you to set up your exposure with a bit more certainty basically they show up like the pattern that you'd see on a zebra for specific areas of specific brightness when you're looking at your LCD or through the viewfinder there's a couple of options you can choose from when setting custom zebras in the camera let's take a look at these next what's the difference between lower limit and standard plus range modes let's go and take a look at this first thing you need to do is head into the menus for your camera and then head down to zebra settings in the a7s3 here you need to come down to the exposure color menu head across and then come down to zebra display make sure zebra display is turned on here and then head into zebra level you can see here that you can choose from a number of predefined zebras from 70 all the way up here to 100 plus and you've also got this custom one and custom 2 zebra setup let's head into custom one and notice here you can set two different modes you can either set lower limit or standard plus range mode let's start off with the lower limit mode when you're using lower limit you can set a zebra value all the way up to 109 Plus and all the way down to 50 plus so what does this lower limit mode do basically the lower limit mode will show zebras for anything in the scene that's above the limit that you set so we've set a lower limit here of 50 plus if we just okay that and come back to our view you can see we've got zebras on most of the lighter areas if we go and increase the exposure of this image for example with ISO notice that as we increase the exposure zebras appear on more and more areas of the image and that's because it's going to show us zebras for anything more than 50. and as we continue to increase the exposure we get more and more zebras and if we keep going we'll eventually get zebras covering the whole screen let's just reset this back to ISO 640 let's head back into the menu and once again into zebra level and this time rather than lower limit mode we're going to choose standard plus range mode once again we're going to set the zebra level at 50 but notice here we can actually go lower here all the way down to zero but we'll set it at 50. we also get this additional option this plus or minus value let's start off with plus or minus one basically what this will do now is it will show zebras at 50 plus or minus one so basically from 49 to 51 let's hit OK we can see we've got a few zebras here let's once again go and increase the exposure by increasing the iso but notice now as we increase the iso we're not getting zebras cover the whole screen we're just getting zebras in that band of exposure 49-51 and once again we can keep going up and we're only going to get zebras for that band of exposure and if we go all the way up here notice we don't have zebras covering the screen let's just head back to ISO 640 and we'll head back into the zebra setup rather than choose plus one let's instead choose a wider range and we can go all the way up to plus or minus 10. what we're going to get now are zebras for anything at 50 plus or minus 10. so basically anything in the exposure range 40 to 60 we're going to get zebra show up let's hit OK notice now we're getting a lot more zebras on the screen because we've increased the range of exposure where zebras will appear once again let's increase the exposure by using ISO and as we head up here we see zebras covering more of the scene anything from 40 to 60 will show zebras so that's the difference between lower limit and standard plus range modes when you're selling custom zebras on your Sony camera the a7s3 has some great stabilization features built into it which means sometimes you might not even have to use a gimbal when you're filming handheld the camera's got three main stabilization settings steady shot standard steady shot active and you can also use gyroscopic stabilization steady shot standard uses the Ibis in the camera and basically moves around the sensor a little bit to try and remove some of those micro shakes or micro Jitters the steady shot active mode can be used when you've got a bit more motion or a bit more activity in the scene or the cameras moving around a bit more for example if you're walking and doing a vlogging type shot just bear in mind that when you're using steady shot active it does kind of zoom in a little bit and it adds a 1.1 crop so your wider angle image is going to look a little bit narrower you might also get some weird jumps with steady shot active if you move the camera around too quickly the third form of stabilization that the camera supports is gyro or gyroscopic stabilization this method of stabilization actually records the movements of the camera into the video file you can then use that data in the video file during editing to stabilize the footage in this video I'm going to show you the four different stabilization options available in the Sony a7s3 so you can decide which one you like the best [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] let's have a look now at some side by side examples of the running test check out how good the active and Gyro stabilization is here and as a bonus example take a look at this version where I've added extra stabilization in post I've used warp stabilizer in Premiere Pro here notice how it Smooths out things a bit more but it also does crop in a bit more as well as a quick tip if you're using a lens on this camera that doesn't automatically send data such as the focal length to the camera so for example a manual focus vintage lens then you're going to have to go into the menu system and you're going to have to choose a manual focal length for the steady shot settings otherwise the stabilization might not work how you expect it to if you want to use the gyroscopic stabilization feature that this camera supports you're going to need to use a free bit of software from Sony called Catalyst browse let's take a look next at how you use this software to stabilize footage so the a7s3 can capture gyroscopic data as part of the video recording this data can be used to stabilize the footage later on this is different from using something like warp stabilizer in post to stabilize the footage Because the actual physical camera movement can be used during the stabilization process warp stabilizer on the other hand has to try and guess what the movement of the camera was normally when shooting video your shutter speed will be roughly double your frame rate so for 24p you'd be using about 1 48 of a second for your shutter speed this is to create a pleasing motion blur in the video if you plan on using gyro stabilization in post you'll need to shoot at a higher shutter speed to actually reduce motion blur for the stabilization process for example this footage was shot at 24 frames per second with a 1 200th of a second shutter speed this means the footage doesn't look as pleasing to the eye but later in this video I'll show you a trick on how to add the motion blur back in if you're planning to use gyro stabilization you should also turn off stabilization in the camera so once you've shot locked your footage with a high shutter speed you'll need to go and download and install Catalyst browse from Sony creativesoftware.com this will let you access the gyro data and stabilize the footage so here we are in Catalyst browse the first thing you're going to want to do is navigate to the folder containing your Clips so I've got this gyro tuck folder here this first clip was shot at 24 frames per second with a shutter speed of 1 50th of a second so it's going to have the normal amount of motion blur also notice these icons here this tells you that the clip contains some kind of stabilization metadata so let's go and try and stabilize this first clip to do this just click the stabilization button down here we want to analyze the clip and then apply the gyro stabilization so if I try and play this back it might be a bit jerky at first so the version on the right is the version with the stabilization applied in Catalyst browse you probably can't see it too well on YouTube but because we shot it at the regular shutter speed we're getting a lot of kind of crazy jerky motion let's just close this come back to our Clips this clip on the other hand was shot with gyro stabilization in mind and if we have a look at the metadata down here it was shot at roughly 1 200th of a second so a lot faster than 150th so we won't get much motion blur in the clip if we try and stabilize this version it's going to look a lot better we'll have a look at a full screen version in just a minute but this version because we shot it at a higher shutter speed doesn't have the same amount of weird jerky movement so you can see on the left is the original clip and on the right is the one with the stabilization and it notice it's a bit zoomed in you can tweak this by clicking the manual button here and then choosing a different cropping ratio so you can zoom all the way out and zoom in a bit you can play with this to get the right balance of stabilization and cropping we're just going to stick with Auto for now and once you're happy with it come up to the top here and click this what looks like a share button this will give you some rendering options you can come down to the bottom here and choose some different transcoding settings so for example you can choose from these render presets because I shot this video at 100 megabits a second I'm going to choose to Output it at 100 megabits per second so once you're happy with all those settings just click export down here and you can see at the top here it's rendering this clip so once the footage is rendered this is what it looks like notice that we don't have much motion blur so it looks a bit unnatural with that soap opera TV effect we'll go and fix that in just a moment so here we are in Premiere Pro with the rendered clip imported into this timeline and if I just play that you can see that the clip is now stabilized once it gets going there we go so we've got the gyro stabilization applied but notice it does look a bit jarring because we've got no motion blur because of the high shutter speed so what we're going to do is actually use after effects to add some motion blur back in so I'm just going to right click on the clip and choose replace with After Effects composition this will open up after effects for us we'll just choose a name for the project we should see our clip now in After Effects what we're going to do is come up to the effects and we're going to search 4 pixel motion blur we'll grab this pixel motion blur effect and drag it down onto the clip there's loads of things that you can change here we've got the option to manually change the shutter angle shutter samples in Vector detail I'm not going to worry about any of that I'm just going to leave it as the default effectively what this is going to do is it's going to add motion blur back into the video once you're happy with that I'm just going to click save and close after effects to head back to Premiere Pro so I'm just going to render this and here's what it looks like in full screen and here's a side by side with and without the extra motion blur [Music] when you're using this camera you can choose from lots of different picture profiles and they all record video that looks slightly different some of these picture profiles record video that you can use basically straight out of the camera without needing to edit the colors some of them do require some extra work in post-processing to make them look like an image you'd see on a normal TV also all of these different picture profiles have slightly different exposure requirements let's start with an overview of all of these different picture profiles and their exposure requirements and then we'll dig into the s-log 3 picture profile in a bit more detail first we'll look at how to reduce Noise by choosing the right base ISO for the picture profile you're using next we'll see what modes give us the most dynamic range and finally we'll see how to set zebras for the different picture profiles to avoid overexposing important things in the scene principles I'm going to talk about in this video apply to all Sony cameras and I'll be using the Sony a7s3 in the examples each of the different picture profiles or Gammas such as cine1 or s-log 3 have different base isos a base ISO is where the camera produces the cleanest image with the least noise take a look at this footage which was shot in s-log 3 at the base ISO of 640 this is from an a7s3 you'll need to search online to see what the base ISO is for your specific Sony camera notice that the noise is pretty good here the a7s3 actually has a second base ISO for s-log 3 it's at 12 800 ISO take a look at this footage which was shot at just under the second base ISO at 10 000 ISO notice how much noisier this is compared to 640 ISO let's now switch to ISO 12800 notice that this second base ISO the noise is so much better all those three examples were shot using s-log 3 and overexposing by about one and two-thirds of a stop different picture profiles or Gammas have the ability to capture a greater or lesser range of Lights to darks or highlights to Shadows this is known as the dynamic range you can see in this table here sorted from best to worst that the picture profile or gamma you use will greatly affect the final image a wider dynamic range can potentially give you a more cinematic looking image with more Shadow and more highlight details these numbers for usable dynamic range are figures published by Gerald undone who by the way is one of my favorite YouTubers at the moment and you should definitely check out his video as he goes into so much more detail I'll put a link to his awesome video in the description below there are some differences in color accuracy with these different picture profiles and also some of them like s-log 2 and s-log 3 require more time in post-production editing to get them to look good the final thing we're going to talk about in this video is the different zebra settings for the different Gammas different Gammas will clip the video signal at different levels and result in blown out highlights you can set the zebra level in your camera by using one of the preset values or choosing a custom value in the a7s3 menu you can find the zebra settings here so now you know that anywhere these zebras appear will be blown out and you'll lose details in those highlight areas as you can see from this chart the maximum zebra point is different for the different Gammas with some even exceeding 100 this means the whites can go above 100 and then be pulled down in post s-log 3 is a gamma curve which records data from the camera sensor to try and capture the widest possible range of Lights to darks in the image Sony themselves describes s log 3 as having characteristics that represents scanned film it does however require some additional post production editing or color grading to translate it to more normal looking footage that can be displayed on a TV or monitor color grading s-log 3 footage is a big topic so I won't be going into too much detail in this video but if you want to see a future video on color grading s-log 3 make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications if you are shooting in s-log 3 on the Sony a7s3 then you'll probably want to shoot in 10 bit 422 color just so you can maintain as much quality during color grading because when you're shooting in slog3 you're always going to have to do some color correction or color grading work in post you can set your exposure in camera during shooting to take full advantage of the benefits of s-log and that's what the rest of this video is about so what creates noisy looking s-log 3 footage well s-lock 3 doesn't necessarily have any more or less noise than other Gammas or picture profiles when shooting s log 3 you want to make sure your exposure is as high as possible above the noise floor of the camera the noise floor is basically where the camera sensor starts to introduce the most noise into the image if your exposure is set too low and it's in the noise floor area then you'll see more noise when you color grade especially if you're going to try and raise these shadow areas during color grading if you're using the official Sony Lut to convert s-log 3 to rec 709 then the Lut expects a certain exposure to work optimally I'll put a link in the description below to the official Sony alert just so you don't have to search for it yourself the official Sony expects zebras to show on an 18 middle gray card when the zebras are set to 41 in camera the problem with this is sometimes if you set this exposure up 41 zebras on a middle gray card then you're going to get some noise in your footage this is most likely when you have a dimly lit scene or a scene with a lot of contrast especially where you'll have Shadow areas that fall in the noise floor area the solution to this is to actually over expose where middle gray is by setting your zebras to something like 55 basically you want to aim for about one to two stops of overexposure in your s-log 3 footage for every eight percent you add to your zebra value you're adding about One Stop of exposure so one stop above 41 zebras will be 49 zebras and two stops above middle gray will be 41 plus eight percent plus another eight percent which will be 57 zebras showing on an 18 middle gray card as a general rule if you want to over expose s-log 3 to reduce noise then set your zebras to 55 so that they show on a middle gray card also to minimize the possible noise you should shoot at one of the two base isos on the Sony A7 S3 so that's 640 ISO or 12 800 100 ISO one compromise to be aware of however is that if you over expose middle gray you might actually reduce the total dynamic range available to you I'll show you an example of this later in the video so here we are in Premiere Pro let me just make this a bit bigger and you can see I've got some test shots shot in the studio here so this first shot was set at 41 middle gray and you can see up here I've zoomed in 400 if I just play this back full screen you can see a little bit of noise here this next section was actually shot at 55 zebras on the middle gray card I'll just play this back full screen without zooming in and you can see the blacks in the background and the Shadows are pretty Noise free if we zoom into this the same 400 percent you can see that we don't have much noise in the shadows here once again this is at 55 here's another example at 55 and notice that the blacks in the background here and the shadow areas are pretty Noise free so basically what I've done here is I've used this middle gray section on this color Checker passport video I've set the zebras in the camera to 55 and I've adjusted the exposure by brightening or lowering the key light until the zebras appear on this middle gray section here so in this case we're over exposing middle gray because this should be set to 41 zebras if we have a look at some side by sides and I'll just go full screen here I'm just going to play this back in a second but pay attention to the difference in the blacks and the Shadows on the left compared to the right on the left we've got the 55 zebra overexposure and on the right we've got the technically correct 41 zebras for Middle gray okay let's play this back and I hope you can see this with the YouTube compression that you've got a lot more noise on the right hand side here's another example in this case I've boosted the Shadows by plus 100 using lumetri and hopefully you can see some differences here pay attention to the side of my cheek here and also the noise in the color Checker Let's just play this and hopefully there you can see some differences in the noise especially on my cheek area the next clip here what I've done is boosted the Shadows by 100 and also the exposure by plus one so you might find yourself doing this if you want to brighten up the shadow areas or the exposure in s-log 3 footage but notice what happens with the 41 Zebra version we're getting a lot more noise now and in the 55 zebra version we're actually getting a little bit of noise but it's nowhere near as bad as the 41 version let's just play this back and finally in this side-by-side comparison I've boosted the Shadows by 100 and the exposure by plus two and straight away you can see a lot more noise in my cheek area here and also in the black background whereas with the 55 zebra version it's not as bad I shot all these samples at the base ISO of 640. so in a controlled environment indoors or in a studio you can take advantage of the fact that you can actually shape and control the light Overexposed to 55 zebras and then adjust the lighting accordingly let's take a look next at some of the different methods for setting exposure when shooting outside so there's a couple of different scenarios you might find yourself in when shooting outside in daylight in the first scenario you have an 18 middle gray card that you can make use of and in the second scenario you might not have an 18 middle grade card with you let's take a look first at the examples where we do have an 18 middle gray card here I'm using this middle section of the color Checker Pro if the scene is well lit then you might get away with 41 zebras on a gray card and you could also check that nothing's clipping by setting the zebras to 94 and checking that there's no zebras in the image so let's take a look at this first example I'll just go full screen and play this back the clouds are very slowly moving here so this is ungraded footage with zebras set to 41 for middle grade the meter was reading plus two flashing and once again this is an ISO 640. next up we've got the application of the official Sony Lut and this is what it looks like with no additional color grading this version is once again with zebras set at 40 21 with the official Sony Lut applied plus some additional color grading that I performed and finally I added some extra color grading just to try and reduce the brightness of the sky I just pause it there for a moment notice that we've actually got some detail in the sky still it's not completely blown out so all of those examples were set with zebras at 41. let's take a look next at zebras set to 55 just go full screen and we'll just start playing this back once again the clouds are moving very slowly so this is ungraded footage and this is what it looks like with the official Sony Lut applied just going to pause it for a moment here one thing to bear in mind is the official Sony Lut will expect middle grade to be at 41 here it's at 55 percent so you might need to lower the exposure in post prior to applying the official Sony Lut and you can see already that the sky is blown out here let's continue playing this this is with the official Sony Lut applied and reducing the exposure prior to applying the Lut this gets it more in line with what the Lut expects let's just keep playing and this is with some additional color grading applied after adding the Lut this version is once again applying some additional color grading with a mask to try and bring back the sky but notice here that we can't actually recover hardly any detail in the sky and that's because we've Overexposed the image so this is an important thing to bear in mind even though the Sony a7s3 with s-lock 3 has a good amount of dynamic range you're always going to have compromises in this case you need to ask yourself what the subject of the scene is the subject in this scene is actually the color Checker card here and not the actual background or the sky so you can imagine a person in place of this color Checker card in that case the person would probably be the subject in the frame and you'd want to expose that person correctly doing so with zebra set to 55 will mean that you'll blow out the sky here so there's a compromise to bear in mind here when trying to remove as much noise from the subject as possible and that's that you might blow out other areas of the image such as the sky here let's take a look next at a side by side noise comparison on the left is zebra's set to 41 with the Sony Lut color grading and the sky grade applied and on the right here is zebra set to 55 once again with the Sony some color grading and the skygrade and you can see in this side by side example the difference in the sky in both of these cases the exposure for the subject the color Checker card is correct I'll just go full screen and play this back so you can see the difference and I'll just skip ahead to this version when I've zoomed in 400 on the color Checker card so the version on the left was correct exposure with zebra set to 41 and on the right zebra's set to 55 the focus is a bit different on the right so I apologize for that but you can see the noise difference if I play this back check out the noise in the Shadows on the left first is the noise in the Shadows on the right hopefully you can see that with YouTube compression so even though the version on the right is a bit out of focus there's a definite Improvement in the noise with zebras set to 55 but as we saw in this version with zebra set to 55 we're going to blow out the sky the other scenario is that you're shooting outside and you don't have access to a gray card just going to open up this other sequence what I've done in this example is to set zebras to 92 in camera the maximum is 94 for s-log 3 but I've set this to 92 to allow for a bit of safety in the exposure then what I did is I exposed it so that the sky just starts to have zebras appear and then lower the exposure a tiny bit so the zebras just disappear this will basically expose the image as hot as possible which will also raise darker areas further away from the noise floor alternatively in an evenly lit scene where the camera meter will give you a pretty good reading just adjust your exposure until the meter reads between plus 1.7 and plus 2.0 non-flashing and have your Zebra set to 94 so you know if any tasting is going to be Overexposed so this version is with zebra set to 92 this is set to 92 with the official Sony Lut applied without any color grading just have a look at this playing back full screen this is with the official Sony Lut plus some additional color grading applied and this is with the additional skygrade so this looks a bit unrealistic a bit HDR like but you can see that we've got a lot of detail in the sky still in this example I set zebras to 55 and then I adjusted the exposure so zebras mostly covered my face this is the ungraded version this is with the official Sony Lut only this is with the official Sony alert plus some additional color grading that I added and this is grading using the film convert nitrate grading plugin so basically if you're shooting outside and your subject as a person set your zebras to 55 and then adjust your exposure so the zebras just start to cover most of the face it's all about if you're shooting at night I've got this test footage here that I shot at this Harbor this first version this is ungraded and I've set the exposure using the meter only and I've set the meter so it reads 0.0 at ISO 12800. this is ungraded footage you can see a little bit of noise in the sky let's have a look at this footage that's been graded just using the official Sony Lut doesn't look too bad so we've got this version that's using the official Sony Lut plus a little bit of extra color grading sorry about the wobbling of the image it was pretty windy when I was shooting this footage here's a zoomed in version at 400 percent and you can see a little bit of noise here but we are at 400 percent next I tried to over expose this scene so I set the zebras at 92 and adjusted the exposure until the zebras just started to appear on those bright street lights and then backed off the exposure a little bit so the zebras disappeared to get this exposure I had to boost the iso up to 32 000 so we've moved away from the second base ISO of 12 800 here so we're going to get a little bit more noise just from the iso this is the ungraded footage and this is the footage graded just using the official Sony Lut can see a little bit of noise in the orange glow in the sky at the right hand side here this version is with the official Sony Lut plus a little bit of extra color grading that I applied and if we have a look at this version this is zoomed in 400 percent you can see a bit more noticeable noise here for this next version I use the camera meter and I Overexposed using ISO until I hit a value of plus 1.7 on the meter to do this I had to boost the iso again to 64 000. so once again we're moving further away from that second base ISO so we're going to get more noise if we just play this back this is the ungraded footage there's definitely a bit more noise now this is the same footage with the official Sony Lut applied and you can definitely see more noise in the sky here you can see a few more stars I think maybe and this is the version with the Sony let's applied plus some extra color grading that I performed if we zoom into 400 percent we can definitely see some noise especially in the orange glow area on the right hand side I've done a few side by sides just so you can see the comparisons on the left here we've got ISO 12800 which is the second base ISO this is the iso and these examples with the lowest noise in the middle we've got the zebras set to 92 and Overexposed by plus 0.7 and on the right Overexposed by plus 1.7 to my eyes the worst example here is the middle example where we've only Overexposed by plus 0.7 if I just play this back so you can have a look at it in motion notice on the right hand version where we've Overexposed by plus 1.7 even though we've had to boost the iso again I think that this footage looks a bit better than the middle footage doesn't look quite as Noise free as the left hand side though I also shot some additional test footage of this ship this is the ungraded footage for some reason they chose a really horrible orange light to light this ship not sure why this is 12 800 ungraded meter reading of 0.0 looks pretty good here's the same footage with the Sony Lut applied got that lovely orange glow and this footage looks actually pretty nice to my eyes this is the same footage just with a little bit of extra color grading once again I think this looks pretty good from a noise point of view this version is ungraded and I Overexposed to get a meat reading of plus 0.7 to do this I had to increase the exposure or the iso to 32 000. there's definitely more noise in this version but if we have a look at a graded version doesn't look too bad but there's definitely a bit of noise in this one this is the same version with a bit of extra color grading we've also done some side by sides of these shots on the left is ISO 12800 and on the Right iso 32 000 and if we zoom in we can see the right hand side definitely has more noise here so I think this version the left hand side actually looks a bit better I didn't actually perform this test at a meter reading of plus 1.7 so it would have been interesting to see how that compared just going to come back to the harbor version So based on these results if you're going to overexpose S log 3 at night you probably don't want to go much farther than 6400 ISO otherwise you might get some ISO related noise but if you are going to overexpose you're probably going to want to make sure that you overexpose by about 1.7 and not just 0.7 as we can see in the middle here this middle version definitely looks the worst to my eyes so which picture profile should you choose well if you want to use the video files that come straight out of the camera without needing to do any extra color editing work then standard or S7 tone are pretty good choices just bear in mind if you use these you're not going to be getting the maximum dynamic range that this camera is capable of and dynamic range basically means how far into the dark or Shadow areas you're going to see and how much of those highlights or brighter areas are going to be lost in the final video as an example let's compare s cinetone to s-log 3. the first thing to think about is ISO the base isos for these two picture profiles are different on the a7s3 that I'm filming on now s-log 3 has a base ISO of 640 whereas s cinetone has a base ISO of 100 that means if you're filming in bright daylight and you don't have an ND filter and you also don't want to change the aperture or overcrank the shutter speed then s-cinotone in this example might be a better choice that's because sinotone's base ISO is lower than slog3's base ISO so it's going to be a lot less sensitive to Bright Light however if you're filming in Darker conditions then s-log 3 might be a better choice with its higher base ISO of 640 also on the a7s3 here the picture profiles have two base isos where the noise is at its lowest with s-log 3 having a whopping 12 800 for its higher base ISO as ciner tones higher base ISO is only 2 000. so for low light or dark situations s-log 3 might be the better choice especially if you're going to use that higher second base ISO the second thing to think about is what colors you want and also your editing effort in post-production you can think of as cinetone as having its own color grade built into the video file itself which can either be a good or bad thing depending on your preferences the good thing about sinatone is that you can use the footage straight out of camera without needing to know how to do color grading with s-log 3 on the other hand you will have to do some color grading in your editing software if you want to use the footage properly you can still do some color grading with a cinetone if you want to but you don't have to if you really want complete control over how the color look and you don't mind doing color grading then slog3 will give you a better starting point than S cinetone s-log 3 is going to give you a more neutral starting point basically if you want to record and get videos out as quickly as possible with little or no editing and snotone is a better choice than s-log 3. the third reason you might want to choose s-log 3 over a cenotone is dynamic range dynamic range is basically the size of the difference between the darkest and the lightest parts of the image that you can capture in your video the bigger the dynamic range the more detail you can get in the shadows and highlights if you want maximum dynamic range then you'll want to use s-log 3. you can see here that s log 3 gives you more dynamic range than S cinetone see how there's more detail in the sky here if you decide you don't want to use s-log 3 but you don't quite like the color or the look of a ciner tone then you could maybe try picture profile off with a creative look of standard or neutral if you want that quick editing turnaround and you don't want to do color grading the sinotone picture profile is designed to give you movie-like colors straight out of the camera with no color editing required if you do decide to use S cinetone there's a few different ways that you can set up your exposure let's take a look at this next the tone gives you cinematic looking footage straight out of your camera with pleasing skin tones with no color grading required you can just go into the picture profiles and see if you've got picture profile 11. if you don't see picture profile 11 showing up then you'll probably need to go and update the firmware on your camera just head over to Sony and follow the instructions so once you've updated the firmware head into the picture profiles and choose picture profile 11. this is the S cinetone picture profile the next thing you want to do is set your ISO the base ISO for sinotone on the a7s3 is 100 and if you're shooting at night time or in low light you might want to choose the higher native base ISO and that's ISO 2000 you should use these two isos for the best possible noise performance so now you've got your camera set up let's look at the four different ways you can set your exposure when using S sinotone the easiest way to set your exposure for S cinetone is simply by using your eye using the viewfinder or the screen on the back of the camera and judge the exposure by what you see unlike some things such as slog3 which requires color grading in post you can use snotone footage straight down out of the camera so what you see in the viewfinder or on the screen is a good indication of what you'll actually get this first method also means you don't have to worry about going into the menus and setting up zebras this makes it super quick to shoot with sinotone but you might end up over exposing or under exposing skin tones or blowing out and clipping important highlights one disadvantage to this approach is that if it's a really bright day you might not be able to see the screen properly and you might not be able to judge the exposure correctly in this case you could always go and use the electronic viewfinder instead the second method is basically the same as the first method except this time we're going to use zebras to check that we're not blowing out or clipping important highlights just set your custom zebras to 109 plus using their lower limit zebra mode set your exposure based on what you see in the viewfinder or on the screen and then just reduce your exposure if you see zebras on any important highlight details the next simplest method is to just use the meter in the camera adjust your exposure until the meter reads 0.0 and then just hit record no meters perfect so in a heavily backlit scene or a bright scene such as a beach or snow you might get an underexposed image just relying on the meter you can try overexposing or underexposing based on the meter to get different looks one of the benefits of acinotone is the nice skin tone colors it can produce straight out of camera if you've got people in your shot you'll probably want to use this next method to make sure your human subjects look good this method makes use of zebras and you'll want to set your zebras to 65. to set this up head to your camera zebra settings choose custom standard plus range set the range to plus or minus three and set the zebras to a value of 65. now simply adjust your exposure until you start to see zebras on the brightest parts of your subject's faces depending on the look and the mood that you want to create and also on your subject skin tone and complexion you might want to try and set zebras at 55 or 60 for a darker and more contrasty image or you can go the other way and set your zebras somewhere between 70 to 75 for a brighter flatter look so it was at 55 there's a little bit of highlight a little bit of zebras there meter reading minus zero point seven by this is he was at 65 a little bit of zebra's there a little bit there there's 75 zebras here a little tiny tiny bit there all right this is zebrasive 109 plus whatever it is and I've just there's just a very tiny tiny tiny bit of zebra there but basically no zebras so s log 3 is the absolute best picture profile to use on the A7 S3 if you want to get the maximum dynamic range out of the camera it does however mean that you'll need to do some additional color grading work when you edit your video let's see how to do that next we're going to jump into Premiere Pro in just a minute just give you a quick overview of what we're going to do what we're going to do is we're going to use lumetri color to apply the color grading effects and we're going to actually use multiple instances of lumetri we're going to use them for different purposes this will form a chain of processing for color correction and color grading and it will help you to organize what should go where so let's head into Premiere Pro now and we'll have a look at this first clip so here's a clip I recorded in the studio the first thing we're going to do is in the effects here we're going to search for lumetri color and we're going to drag a lumetri color instance onto the clip here and we're conceding the effects I'm going to right click and rename and call this first lumetri color instance pre-cst I'm going to go and add a second lumetri color instance here once again right click and rename all that one CST add a third instance call this one host CST I'll explain what these are going to be in just a minute We'll add a full volumetric color instance called grade and finally a fifth instance and we'll call this sharpen just going to expand the program window a bit more so you can see it a bit better here and we're already in the color workspace and you can see in the lumetri color panel here we've got all of our lumetri instances so this first pre-csc lumetri instance is going to be used for correcting any exposure differences before applying the official Sony Lut this version of the clip was shot with zebras at 41 on this middle gray section here so this is about the correct exposure for the Lut in the second lumetri color instance here we're going to apply the official Sony Lut you can find this official Sony alert at the Sony website here what you need to do is come down to Sony Lux click on download Sony look profiles and click download here once it's downloaded you'll get this folder which contains these four Lux files these first two will convert s-log 3s gamut 3 cine into Rec 709 notice that these have got the LC in the file name this stands for low contrast so we'll have to add some contrast back in after applying the Lut so once you've downloaded this alert make sure you're in the CST lumetri instance and in the basic correction input look here just choose browse and select this s gamut 3 cine s-log 3 to lc709 alert open net and you can see straight away the image is looking a lot better that's because we exposed it correctly in the first place if I go and add the crop effect to this clip and I'll just adjust it until we can see these three exposure bars and if we come over to the lumetri Scopes you can see this middle bar is roughly at 41 here and that's the correct exposure for slog3 or at least the correct exposure for the official Sony Lut just going to disable the crop effects so once we've applied the official Sony alert remember that we did that in the CST limited instance we can now move to this post CST lumetri instance here we're going to add some contrast back into the image we're going to tweak the exposure if we want to and we're also going to perform any color correction that we need to do so let's start off with adding some contrast back in I'm going to set this probably somewhere around 26. this is a matter of personal taste we can also go and correct any exposure if I re-enable this crop and head back to lumetri scopes for this color Checker card we want middle gray about 41 we want this White Strip to be somewhere around 90 and we want this black strip here to be somewhere in the zero to ten percent range so for example what we could do in this post CST limiter instance we could modify the exposure this can do this very quickly so it could bring up the whites here if we wanted to that's also going to arrange middle gray a bit though or we could use the curves here to do the same kind of thing I'm not going to spend too much time on that and if we undo the crop and toggle this off and on [Music] or toggle the entire post CST limiter instance we can see the difference in exposure there we can also use this post CST section to do any color correction I'm going to re-enable the crop and I'm going to change it so we can see these color chips and if we head back to lumetrioscopes I'm going to enable the vectorscope yuv so because we've got the color Checker we know roughly where these things should be these lines should Point towards their respective colors and they should all be about 50 between the middle and this box here you can see that red might be skewed a little bit you can see that magenta here might be skewed a little bit Blue's looking okay Green's looking maybe a bit skewed and cyan's looking okay too so we can use the Hue saturation curves and the Hue versus Hue curves to make any changes for color correction I'm going to do is put points in at each of these intersections here foreign so let's start off with the red I'm going to hold down shift and move this red point up and down holding down shift just makes it move vertically up and down and it won't accidentally go left or right and you can see if we increase the exposure red is shifting a little bit to the left you can do the same thing in the Hue versus Hue once again holding shift and we can adjust where that red line fits we also want to make sure that it's about halfway between the center point which is probably somewhere about there let's do the same thing for magenta going to increase the saturation you can see that it's traveling a bit to the left of this box you can use the Hue versus Hue just to bring it back in line and then bring this down to about halfway between the middle and the Box have a look at the bloom just going to increase the saturation this is traveling fairly well so we're just trying to get it about halfway across and we might need to just very subtly tweak it something like that cyan is looking like it's lining up quite nicely hitting the Box bang on so we'll adjust it so it's about halfway between the middle and the box next have a look at green this is traveling a little bit to the left of the box so we'll just bring that around a little bit and just check it with the Hue here it's about halfway maybe just tweak it a little bit more the cyan looks like it's a little bit too far out so I'll just bring that in a little bit to about 50 and we'll also adjust the Hue down here just so it lines up a little bit better just going to increase the saturation so you can line it up a bit better and bring it down to about halfway between the center and the Box let's come back to the effect controls and disable the crop and I'll just toggle off and on this curved section and I'm actually going to just tweak this tiny bit there and now in this post CST lumetri color instance we've added some contrast we've tweaked the exposure and we've performed color correction there's a couple more lumetri color instances here the next one in the chain is this grade this is going to allow us to perform any artistic grading that we like and this final one is going to add some sharpening so we want to add Sharpening at the last point in the chain so you can play with one amount of sharpening you like and typically at the minute applying about 15 to s-log 3 footage so in this grade section we can pretty much go crazy if we want to we could use one of these creative Luts built into lumetri color we could add some saturation or remove some saturation and a vignette and any other creative artistic changes that you want to make in this second clip I'm actually Overexposed this s-log basically if I exposed this gray bit here at 55 zebras what I'm going to do is right click this first clip and choose copy and come down to the second clip and choose paste attributes I'm going to make sure all of the lumetri instances are checked and also the crop and we'll just apply that what I'm going to do is leave the sharpening as it is I'm going to reset the grade instance going to reset the post CST instance I'm going to leave the CST as it is this is where we've applied the Sony Lut but we're going to actually use this pre-cst instance now to reduce the exposure before it hits the Lut let's start off by turning off the Lut just disable this lumetri instance come back to pre-cst and once again we'll make use of the lumetri Luma waveform let's make this a bit easier once again we'll use the crop and notice this time middle gray is not at 41 it's kind of almost a 55 which is the zebras that I set so what we need to do is we need to bring this middle gray exposure down to about 41 before we apply the Lut in the next part of the chain to do this I'm just going to use the exposure here and bring this down to about 41 come back to effect controls turn off the crop and come back to the CST instance and re-enable the Lut transform we can now continue with the same steps we did before we can add some contrast perform any color correction and any exposure tweaks to save time I'm not going to bother color correcting this footage and then in the grade we can apply some kind of creative style if we want to for example we could add some faded film effect here increase the Vibrance looks pretty horrible and then once again the final step is this sharpening which is set at 15 minutes one of the other things this pre-cst instance is for is to set the white balance if you need to the final clip we're going to look at is this outdoor clip once again I'm going to right click choose paste attributes paste all the lumetri effects and the crop Olive sharpening enabled I'm going to disable the grade disable post CST or leave the color space transform active and we can also make some changes in this pre-cst so for example we could change the white balance here I could try doing this by clicking the eyedropper or I could do it by eye something like that then in the post CST once again post CST we could add some contrast in the grade section here just reset that we can do something creative so I'm going to go and add some saturation in you'll notice I can't pull down the highlights here in the sky what I could do is come back to the pre-csd transform and drop the highlights here and that just offers you a different approach once again this grade section is for more artistic or creative choices so you could do something like this so that's a five-step process to color grading s-log 3 footage start off with this pre-cst lumetri instance in here do white balancing and any exposure correction such as bringing middle grade down to 41 ire in the CST lumetri color instance just apply the official Sony Lut in the post CST lumetri color instance once the lut's applied you can add some contrast tweak the exposure and perform any color correction and now you've got correctly exposed and color corrected footage in the grade instance here you can go to town and get artistic and the final step is to sharpen the footage if you're wondering what CST stands for it's an acronym that stands for color space transform and it's basically converting one color space or one picture profile if you like such as slog3 into something like Rec 709 which is what the standard definition TVs use for an even easier way to color grade slog3 that tries to simulate those Hollywood Blockbusters you can use a specific Lut the first thing you need to do is make sure you're shooting in s-log 3 and S gamma 3 cine for example on the Sony a7s3 this will be picture profile 8. next head over to the Sony professional website and then scroll down and hit the download button there's two different downloads that you can choose here the 33x or 33 grid versions which you might have to use and there's also the 65x or 65 grid versions which are going to offer you better quality so what I would suggest is download the 65 versions first and if you have any problems in your editing software then you might have to revert back to the 33 versions once you've downloaded the package open it and you'll see all of these Cube files these are the Luts I'll come back to what these file names mean in just a minute you'll want to copy these Cube files from the zip file over to your computer somewhere next you'll want to open up your s-log 3 footage in whatever video editing software you're using the cube file should work in all major video editors for example in Premiere Pro head over to the color grading workspace and in the lumetri color panel load in one of the cube files that you just downloaded and Bam instantly you'll see your footage given that Hollywood Blockbuster look so which of these Cube files should you be using for your footage depending on whether or not you have Overexposed or underexposed your s-log 3 footage you'll need to choose the appropriate Cube file so if you Overexposed your footage by 1.5 stops use the negative 1p50 Cube file this will reduce the exposure by 1.5 stops and if you underexposed for example by One Stop use the plus 1p00 Cube file to increase the exposure by one stop and so on so we've covered a lot of ground in this tutorial so far and there's been quite a lot to remember so what I went and did is created some free cheat sheets for the Sony a7s3 but you can find more about in this video please subscribe hit that notification Bell like the video and I'll see you in the next one

hey everyone the Sony a7s3 that I&#39;m filming on right now is an amazing camera but it can be a bit overwhelming if you&#39;ve just got it or you&#39;re struggling to set it up and you don&#39;t really know what best settings to use to get the best possible video quality out of this camera in this tutorial I&#39;m going to show you all of the major things that you need to know to set up your camera and start filming amazing looking video so let&#39;s kick off this tutorial by looking at some of the essential things that you need to set up when getting started with this camera after you&#39;ve attached the lens inserted a charge battery and put in a memory card turn the camera on and open out the screen then go and turn the control dial around until you get to movie mode press the menu button the first thing you&#39;re going to want to do is decide on if you want pal or ntsc frame rates available to you for example if you set the camera to ntsc you can choose 24 30 60 or 120 frames per second if you set it to Pal you can choose 25 50 or 100 frames a second the available frame rates will also depend on other settings but don&#39;t worry about that for now if this sounds a bit like gibberish to you and you&#39;re not shooting a project for a specific client or a client that has specific frame rate requirements just go and set the camera to ntsc and choose 24 frames per second the next thing you need to do is choose what kind of video file will be saved to the memory card you can choose to shoot in HD resolution or 4K resolution HD will be easier to edit if you don&#39;t have a powerful computer but 4K will give you crisper looking footage HD files will be smaller 4K files will take up more space on the memory card 4K files will let you zoom in a little bit during editing without losing as much video quality you also need to choose how the video file will be compressed in the camera xavchs will write smaller video files but they&#39;ll be a lot harder to edit unless you&#39;ve got a powerful computer xavcs will create larger files but they might be a bit easier to edit xavcsi will create big files but they&#39;ll be the easiest to edit with to start off we&#39;re going to set this to xavcs 4K remember that there&#39;s a lot of different things to think about when choosing these settings and this is only a beginner&#39;s video as you become more experienced and learn more you may need to go and tweak these settings next in movie settings set the recording frame rate to 24p this means 24 frames per second next in the record setting menu choose what quality you want the video to be 100m means 100 megabits for every second of video you record 6dm means 60 megabits per second 100m will create larger video files that will be harder to edit on your computer without using something like proxies but that&#39;s another discussion for another video the numbers after the M dictate how much color information will be stored choosing 42210 bit will give you the absolute best color data in the video file but may be extremely hard to edit on your computer four two zero eight bit might not be as hard to edit on your computer but you might not be able to edit the colors quite as well because we&#39;re setting the camera up for maximum image quality in this video we&#39;re going to choose 100m 422 10 bit color there&#39;s a few different ways the camera can record color and brightness information into the video files in this video we&#39;re going to set up the camera to be able to record the maximum range of dark to light information head to the exposure color menu and choose color tone under picture profile choose pp8 and tap ok this will set your camera up to use something called s log3 when you set your camera up to use slog3 it&#39;s going to record a flatter low contrast looking video file that you can then bring back in the editing to really get the maximum dynamic range out of the camera I&#39;ll show you how to do this later in the video when we come to look at editing because s-log 3 will look flat in the monitor to get a better idea of what the final video will look like head down to the setup menu choose display option and turn on gamma display assist now the monitor will look a bit more normal this doesn&#39;t affect the recorded video file it&#39;s just to help with monitoring next we&#39;re going to look at exposure and metering under the shooting menu shooting mode setting set the exposure mode to manual and hit OK change the iso to 640 and then set the shutter speed to 1 50th of a second you can now change the aperture until the meter reading says about plus 1.7 this means we&#39;re over exposing what the meter thinks we should do by 1.7 the reason for this overexposure is to get the best noise performance from the pp8s log 3 setting we chose earlier your lens might also have an aperture ring on it setting this to a will let you control the aperture with the camera dial now press the FN button and choose white balance you can choose a manual one such as daylight if you&#39;re shooting outside and it&#39;s sunny you can also set this to AWB which means Auto white balance using this setting the camera will try and guess what the white balance setting should be ideally though you want to use a manual setting because in the studio here I&#39;m using daylight balanced lights we&#39;re going to set this to Daylight and hit OK now just choose whether to use manual or auto focus on your lens and press the record button to start shooting so you&#39;re not always going to be able to keep that meter reading exactly stable and still at a specific setting unless you&#39;re working indoors with fixed lighting like I am now if you&#39;re Outdoors perhaps you&#39;re vlogging then you&#39;re going to see that meter reading moving around all over the place if that&#39;s the case then you&#39;re going to either want to set an exposure so you get a kind of average meter reading somewhere within that range or you might have to turn on some of the auto exposure features such as auto ISO the a7s3 has some really useful features that can make using it for video so much easier let&#39;s take a look at 11 of these next normally when you&#39;re recording you just get this little indicator here you can make it more obvious what you need to do is go to the menus head down to shooting display choose M for disp during record turn this on and now next time you record you&#39;ll get this big red box making it a lot easier to see if you&#39;re actually recording or not this is going to make sure you&#39;re actually recording and don&#39;t miss any Shots Out of the Box whenever you start or stop recording you get a really annoying noise if you want to turn these recording noises on and off come into the menu go down to settings scroll down go to sound option choose audio signals and then set this to off the a7s3 has dual native isos so for example in s-log 3 the base ISO is 640 this is what it looks like this is where you&#39;re going to get the least noise and for s-log 3 the Dual base ISO is at 12 800. I&#39;ve got an entire video dedicated to this which I&#39;ll link to in the description if we just go slightly underneath the second base ISO of 12800 for example 10 000 ISO notice we&#39;ve got more noise here but as soon as we switch to 12800 that noise disappears if if you&#39;ve made loads of customizations to your a7s3 you may want to back up the entire camera settings to an SD card come into the menus head down to settings choose reset or save settings choose save load settings choose save choose save new enter a file name and then choose save this will save your settings to the SD card you can then load the settings at a later date just choose load choose the file choose OK this will reset the camera and load the settings file with all of your customizations you can use this to share settings between friends or have multiple setups for different jobs if you&#39;re liking these tips so far and you want to support the Channel please go and subscribe and turn on notifications if you&#39;re running multiple different cameras you can customize how the file names are recorded to those cameras by default we just get this c number followed by a sequence number to change this go into the menus head to the shooting menu choose file choose file settings choose file name format and here you can choose between the standard which is just to have a c and then a sequence number or you can choose title date plus title or title plus date choose title and then head into title name settings here you can set a prefix for the file name so for example you could set this to a7s3 choose OK choose OK again and the next time you record a clip the file name will be prefixed with a7s3 you can customize how quickly the camera transitions between different auto focus points to do this head into the menus head into the focus menu choose afmf and then choose AF transition speed a setting of one is the slowest and 7 is the fastest so at a setting of one notice how slowly the autofocus Transitions and Back Again and if we choose the maximum of seven notice how quickly the autofocus changes now if you&#39;re working with manual focus and you want to double check that the focus is bang on head into the menus head into the focus menu head to focus assistant choose Focus magnifier and then you get this red box you can move this around on the screen tap the middle of the dial and this will zoom into that area and then you can use manual focusing to check that you&#39;re spot on if you&#39;re making use of iaf the autofocus system will automatically lock onto either the left or right eye if you&#39;re using a lens with a shallow depth of field you might want to select a specific I just so you focus on the near side or the far side eye depending on the look you&#39;re going for to do this head into the menus choose the focus menu choose face iaf choose right left eye select and then you can select either the right or left eye and the autofocus point will stick to either the right or left eye once again this can be useful if you&#39;re working with a shallow depth of field you can customize the autofocus system in the a7s3 and decide how responsive it is to changes in subjects or how much it stays locked onto a single subject to do this head into the menus head into the focus menu head into afmf choose AF subjects shift sensitivity and choose a value of 1 to be more locked on this will make it less responsive to changes in subjects so you can see here the book is actually not focusing at all now it&#39;s trying to stay locked on to my face which is behind the book and you can see it stayed locked onto my face there if we change this to the maximum value of 5 it&#39;s going to be more responsive now to changes in subject so it&#39;s tracking my eyes hold the book up it switches to the book switches back to my eye so that&#39;s highly responsive autofocus subject Shifting the a7s3 has a feature called shockless white balance which allows you to set how quickly changes in white balance are reflected in the video here it&#39;s set to off if we have a look at this and we&#39;ll go and make some changes to the white balance here notice that when we change the white balance setting the change is almost instantaneous in the video so this can be quite jarring to the viewer if we set shockless white balance to slow it&#39;s going to be a more gentle transition between white balance changes once again we&#39;ll make some changes in the white balance notice when I shift white balances that the change is more subtle now and it gradually changes to the different white balances the a7s3 has a USB C input which is behind the store here and this USBC input also allows you to provide power to the camera over USB so let&#39;s plug this in and you can see up here that we&#39;re providing power with this little icon this means you can shoot for longer if you&#39;ve only got one battery the battery will discharge more slowly just bear in mind that you do actually need a battery in the camera for this to work you can&#39;t just plug a USBC power delivery Cable in without a battery and as an added bonus you can also charge the battery when the camera is turned off via USBC if you&#39;ve got an appropriate cable AC adapter or power bank so zebras or zebras are depending on where in the world you&#39;re from allow you to set up your exposure with a bit more certainty basically they show up like the pattern that you&#39;d see on a zebra for specific areas of specific brightness when you&#39;re looking at your LCD or through the viewfinder there&#39;s a couple of options you can choose from when setting custom zebras in the camera let&#39;s take a look at these next what&#39;s the difference between lower limit and standard plus range modes let&#39;s go and take a look at this first thing you need to do is head into the menus for your camera and then head down to zebra settings in the a7s3 here you need to come down to the exposure color menu head across and then come down to zebra display make sure zebra display is turned on here and then head into zebra level you can see here that you can choose from a number of predefined zebras from 70 all the way up here to 100 plus and you&#39;ve also got this custom one and custom 2 zebra setup let&#39;s head into custom one and notice here you can set two different modes you can either set lower limit or standard plus range mode let&#39;s start off with the lower limit mode when you&#39;re using lower limit you can set a zebra value all the way up to 109 Plus and all the way down to 50 plus so what does this lower limit mode do basically the lower limit mode will show zebras for anything in the scene that&#39;s above the limit that you set so we&#39;ve set a lower limit here of 50 plus if we just okay that and come back to our view you can see we&#39;ve got zebras on most of the lighter areas if we go and increase the exposure of this image for example with ISO notice that as we increase the exposure zebras appear on more and more areas of the image and that&#39;s because it&#39;s going to show us zebras for anything more than 50. and as we continue to increase the exposure we get more and more zebras and if we keep going we&#39;ll eventually get zebras covering the whole screen let&#39;s just reset this back to ISO 640 let&#39;s head back into the menu and once again into zebra level and this time rather than lower limit mode we&#39;re going to choose standard plus range mode once again we&#39;re going to set the zebra level at 50 but notice here we can actually go lower here all the way down to zero but we&#39;ll set it at 50. we also get this additional option this plus or minus value let&#39;s start off with plus or minus one basically what this will do now is it will show zebras at 50 plus or minus one so basically from 49 to 51 let&#39;s hit OK we can see we&#39;ve got a few zebras here let&#39;s once again go and increase the exposure by increasing the iso but notice now as we increase the iso we&#39;re not getting zebras cover the whole screen we&#39;re just getting zebras in that band of exposure 49-51 and once again we can keep going up and we&#39;re only going to get zebras for that band of exposure and if we go all the way up here notice we don&#39;t have zebras covering the screen let&#39;s just head back to ISO 640 and we&#39;ll head back into the zebra setup rather than choose plus one let&#39;s instead choose a wider range and we can go all the way up to plus or minus 10. what we&#39;re going to get now are zebras for anything at 50 plus or minus 10. so basically anything in the exposure range 40 to 60 we&#39;re going to get zebra show up let&#39;s hit OK notice now we&#39;re getting a lot more zebras on the screen because we&#39;ve increased the range of exposure where zebras will appear once again let&#39;s increase the exposure by using ISO and as we head up here we see zebras covering more of the scene anything from 40 to 60 will show zebras so that&#39;s the difference between lower limit and standard plus range modes when you&#39;re selling custom zebras on your Sony camera the a7s3 has some great stabilization features built into it which means sometimes you might not even have to use a gimbal when you&#39;re filming handheld the camera&#39;s got three main stabilization settings steady shot standard steady shot active and you can also use gyroscopic stabilization steady shot standard uses the Ibis in the camera and basically moves around the sensor a little bit to try and remove some of those micro shakes or micro Jitters the steady shot active mode can be used when you&#39;ve got a bit more motion or a bit more activity in the scene or the cameras moving around a bit more for example if you&#39;re walking and doing a vlogging type shot just bear in mind that when you&#39;re using steady shot active it does kind of zoom in a little bit and it adds a 1.1 crop so your wider angle image is going to look a little bit narrower you might also get some weird jumps with steady shot active if you move the camera around too quickly the third form of stabilization that the camera supports is gyro or gyroscopic stabilization this method of stabilization actually records the movements of the camera into the video file you can then use that data in the video file during editing to stabilize the footage in this video I&#39;m going to show you the four different stabilization options available in the Sony a7s3 so you can decide which one you like the best [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] let&#39;s have a look now at some side by side examples of the running test check out how good the active and Gyro stabilization is here and as a bonus example take a look at this version where I&#39;ve added extra stabilization in post I&#39;ve used warp stabilizer in Premiere Pro here notice how it Smooths out things a bit more but it also does crop in a bit more as well as a quick tip if you&#39;re using a lens on this camera that doesn&#39;t automatically send data such as the focal length to the camera so for example a manual focus vintage lens then you&#39;re going to have to go into the menu system and you&#39;re going to have to choose a manual focal length for the steady shot settings otherwise the stabilization might not work how you expect it to if you want to use the gyroscopic stabilization feature that this camera supports you&#39;re going to need to use a free bit of software from Sony called Catalyst browse let&#39;s take a look next at how you use this software to stabilize footage so the a7s3 can capture gyroscopic data as part of the video recording this data can be used to stabilize the footage later on this is different from using something like warp stabilizer in post to stabilize the footage Because the actual physical camera movement can be used during the stabilization process warp stabilizer on the other hand has to try and guess what the movement of the camera was normally when shooting video your shutter speed will be roughly double your frame rate so for 24p you&#39;d be using about 1 48 of a second for your shutter speed this is to create a pleasing motion blur in the video if you plan on using gyro stabilization in post you&#39;ll need to shoot at a higher shutter speed to actually reduce motion blur for the stabilization process for example this footage was shot at 24 frames per second with a 1 200th of a second shutter speed this means the footage doesn&#39;t look as pleasing to the eye but later in this video I&#39;ll show you a trick on how to add the motion blur back in if you&#39;re planning to use gyro stabilization you should also turn off stabilization in the camera so once you&#39;ve shot locked your footage with a high shutter speed you&#39;ll need to go and download and install Catalyst browse from Sony creativesoftware.com this will let you access the gyro data and stabilize the footage so here we are in Catalyst browse the first thing you&#39;re going to want to do is navigate to the folder containing your Clips so I&#39;ve got this gyro tuck folder here this first clip was shot at 24 frames per second with a shutter speed of 1 50th of a second so it&#39;s going to have the normal amount of motion blur also notice these icons here this tells you that the clip contains some kind of stabilization metadata so let&#39;s go and try and stabilize this first clip to do this just click the stabilization button down here we want to analyze the clip and then apply the gyro stabilization so if I try and play this back it might be a bit jerky at first so the version on the right is the version with the stabilization applied in Catalyst browse you probably can&#39;t see it too well on YouTube but because we shot it at the regular shutter speed we&#39;re getting a lot of kind of crazy jerky motion let&#39;s just close this come back to our Clips this clip on the other hand was shot with gyro stabilization in mind and if we have a look at the metadata down here it was shot at roughly 1 200th of a second so a lot faster than 150th so we won&#39;t get much motion blur in the clip if we try and stabilize this version it&#39;s going to look a lot better we&#39;ll have a look at a full screen version in just a minute but this version because we shot it at a higher shutter speed doesn&#39;t have the same amount of weird jerky movement so you can see on the left is the original clip and on the right is the one with the stabilization and it notice it&#39;s a bit zoomed in you can tweak this by clicking the manual button here and then choosing a different cropping ratio so you can zoom all the way out and zoom in a bit you can play with this to get the right balance of stabilization and cropping we&#39;re just going to stick with Auto for now and once you&#39;re happy with it come up to the top here and click this what looks like a share button this will give you some rendering options you can come down to the bottom here and choose some different transcoding settings so for example you can choose from these render presets because I shot this video at 100 megabits a second I&#39;m going to choose to Output it at 100 megabits per second so once you&#39;re happy with all those settings just click export down here and you can see at the top here it&#39;s rendering this clip so once the footage is rendered this is what it looks like notice that we don&#39;t have much motion blur so it looks a bit unnatural with that soap opera TV effect we&#39;ll go and fix that in just a moment so here we are in Premiere Pro with the rendered clip imported into this timeline and if I just play that you can see that the clip is now stabilized once it gets going there we go so we&#39;ve got the gyro stabilization applied but notice it does look a bit jarring because we&#39;ve got no motion blur because of the high shutter speed so what we&#39;re going to do is actually use after effects to add some motion blur back in so I&#39;m just going to right click on the clip and choose replace with After Effects composition this will open up after effects for us we&#39;ll just choose a name for the project we should see our clip now in After Effects what we&#39;re going to do is come up to the effects and we&#39;re going to search 4 pixel motion blur we&#39;ll grab this pixel motion blur effect and drag it down onto the clip there&#39;s loads of things that you can change here we&#39;ve got the option to manually change the shutter angle shutter samples in Vector detail I&#39;m not going to worry about any of that I&#39;m just going to leave it as the default effectively what this is going to do is it&#39;s going to add motion blur back into the video once you&#39;re happy with that I&#39;m just going to click save and close after effects to head back to Premiere Pro so I&#39;m just going to render this and here&#39;s what it looks like in full screen and here&#39;s a side by side with and without the extra motion blur [Music] when you&#39;re using this camera you can choose from lots of different picture profiles and they all record video that looks slightly different some of these picture profiles record video that you can use basically straight out of the camera without needing to edit the colors some of them do require some extra work in post-processing to make them look like an image you&#39;d see on a normal TV also all of these different picture profiles have slightly different exposure requirements let&#39;s start with an overview of all of these different picture profiles and their exposure requirements and then we&#39;ll dig into the s-log 3 picture profile in a bit more detail first we&#39;ll look at how to reduce Noise by choosing the right base ISO for the picture profile you&#39;re using next we&#39;ll see what modes give us the most dynamic range and finally we&#39;ll see how to set zebras for the different picture profiles to avoid overexposing important things in the scene principles I&#39;m going to talk about in this video apply to all Sony cameras and I&#39;ll be using the Sony a7s3 in the examples each of the different picture profiles or Gammas such as cine1 or s-log 3 have different base isos a base ISO is where the camera produces the cleanest image with the least noise take a look at this footage which was shot in s-log 3 at the base ISO of 640 this is from an a7s3 you&#39;ll need to search online to see what the base ISO is for your specific Sony camera notice that the noise is pretty good here the a7s3 actually has a second base ISO for s-log 3 it&#39;s at 12 800 ISO take a look at this footage which was shot at just under the second base ISO at 10 000 ISO notice how much noisier this is compared to 640 ISO let&#39;s now switch to ISO 12800 notice that this second base ISO the noise is so much better all those three examples were shot using s-log 3 and overexposing by about one and two-thirds of a stop different picture profiles or Gammas have the ability to capture a greater or lesser range of Lights to darks or highlights to Shadows this is known as the dynamic range you can see in this table here sorted from best to worst that the picture profile or gamma you use will greatly affect the final image a wider dynamic range can potentially give you a more cinematic looking image with more Shadow and more highlight details these numbers for usable dynamic range are figures published by Gerald undone who by the way is one of my favorite YouTubers at the moment and you should definitely check out his video as he goes into so much more detail I&#39;ll put a link to his awesome video in the description below there are some differences in color accuracy with these different picture profiles and also some of them like s-log 2 and s-log 3 require more time in post-production editing to get them to look good the final thing we&#39;re going to talk about in this video is the different zebra settings for the different Gammas different Gammas will clip the video signal at different levels and result in blown out highlights you can set the zebra level in your camera by using one of the preset values or choosing a custom value in the a7s3 menu you can find the zebra settings here so now you know that anywhere these zebras appear will be blown out and you&#39;ll lose details in those highlight areas as you can see from this chart the maximum zebra point is different for the different Gammas with some even exceeding 100 this means the whites can go above 100 and then be pulled down in post s-log 3 is a gamma curve which records data from the camera sensor to try and capture the widest possible range of Lights to darks in the image Sony themselves describes s log 3 as having characteristics that represents scanned film it does however require some additional post production editing or color grading to translate it to more normal looking footage that can be displayed on a TV or monitor color grading s-log 3 footage is a big topic so I won&#39;t be going into too much detail in this video but if you want to see a future video on color grading s-log 3 make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications if you are shooting in s-log 3 on the Sony a7s3 then you&#39;ll probably want to shoot in 10 bit 422 color just so you can maintain as much quality during color grading because when you&#39;re shooting in slog3 you&#39;re always going to have to do some color correction or color grading work in post you can set your exposure in camera during shooting to take full advantage of the benefits of s-log and that&#39;s what the rest of this video is about so what creates noisy looking s-log 3 footage well s-lock 3 doesn&#39;t necessarily have any more or less noise than other Gammas or picture profiles when shooting s log 3 you want to make sure your exposure is as high as possible above the noise floor of the camera the noise floor is basically where the camera sensor starts to introduce the most noise into the image if your exposure is set too low and it&#39;s in the noise floor area then you&#39;ll see more noise when you color grade especially if you&#39;re going to try and raise these shadow areas during color grading if you&#39;re using the official Sony Lut to convert s-log 3 to rec 709 then the Lut expects a certain exposure to work optimally I&#39;ll put a link in the description below to the official Sony alert just so you don&#39;t have to search for it yourself the official Sony expects zebras to show on an 18 middle gray card when the zebras are set to 41 in camera the problem with this is sometimes if you set this exposure up 41 zebras on a middle gray card then you&#39;re going to get some noise in your footage this is most likely when you have a dimly lit scene or a scene with a lot of contrast especially where you&#39;ll have Shadow areas that fall in the noise floor area the solution to this is to actually over expose where middle gray is by setting your zebras to something like 55 basically you want to aim for about one to two stops of overexposure in your s-log 3 footage for every eight percent you add to your zebra value you&#39;re adding about One Stop of exposure so one stop above 41 zebras will be 49 zebras and two stops above middle gray will be 41 plus eight percent plus another eight percent which will be 57 zebras showing on an 18 middle gray card as a general rule if you want to over expose s-log 3 to reduce noise then set your zebras to 55 so that they show on a middle gray card also to minimize the possible noise you should shoot at one of the two base isos on the Sony A7 S3 so that&#39;s 640 ISO or 12 800 100 ISO one compromise to be aware of however is that if you over expose middle gray you might actually reduce the total dynamic range available to you I&#39;ll show you an example of this later in the video so here we are in Premiere Pro let me just make this a bit bigger and you can see I&#39;ve got some test shots shot in the studio here so this first shot was set at 41 middle gray and you can see up here I&#39;ve zoomed in 400 if I just play this back full screen you can see a little bit of noise here this next section was actually shot at 55 zebras on the middle gray card I&#39;ll just play this back full screen without zooming in and you can see the blacks in the background and the Shadows are pretty Noise free if we zoom into this the same 400 percent you can see that we don&#39;t have much noise in the shadows here once again this is at 55 here&#39;s another example at 55 and notice that the blacks in the background here and the shadow areas are pretty Noise free so basically what I&#39;ve done here is I&#39;ve used this middle gray section on this color Checker passport video I&#39;ve set the zebras in the camera to 55 and I&#39;ve adjusted the exposure by brightening or lowering the key light until the zebras appear on this middle gray section here so in this case we&#39;re over exposing middle gray because this should be set to 41 zebras if we have a look at some side by sides and I&#39;ll just go full screen here I&#39;m just going to play this back in a second but pay attention to the difference in the blacks and the Shadows on the left compared to the right on the left we&#39;ve got the 55 zebra overexposure and on the right we&#39;ve got the technically correct 41 zebras for Middle gray okay let&#39;s play this back and I hope you can see this with the YouTube compression that you&#39;ve got a lot more noise on the right hand side here&#39;s another example in this case I&#39;ve boosted the Shadows by plus 100 using lumetri and hopefully you can see some differences here pay attention to the side of my cheek here and also the noise in the color Checker Let&#39;s just play this and hopefully there you can see some differences in the noise especially on my cheek area the next clip here what I&#39;ve done is boosted the Shadows by 100 and also the exposure by plus one so you might find yourself doing this if you want to brighten up the shadow areas or the exposure in s-log 3 footage but notice what happens with the 41 Zebra version we&#39;re getting a lot more noise now and in the 55 zebra version we&#39;re actually getting a little bit of noise but it&#39;s nowhere near as bad as the 41 version let&#39;s just play this back and finally in this side-by-side comparison I&#39;ve boosted the Shadows by 100 and the exposure by plus two and straight away you can see a lot more noise in my cheek area here and also in the black background whereas with the 55 zebra version it&#39;s not as bad I shot all these samples at the base ISO of 640. so in a controlled environment indoors or in a studio you can take advantage of the fact that you can actually shape and control the light Overexposed to 55 zebras and then adjust the lighting accordingly let&#39;s take a look next at some of the different methods for setting exposure when shooting outside so there&#39;s a couple of different scenarios you might find yourself in when shooting outside in daylight in the first scenario you have an 18 middle gray card that you can make use of and in the second scenario you might not have an 18 middle grade card with you let&#39;s take a look first at the examples where we do have an 18 middle gray card here I&#39;m using this middle section of the color Checker Pro if the scene is well lit then you might get away with 41 zebras on a gray card and you could also check that nothing&#39;s clipping by setting the zebras to 94 and checking that there&#39;s no zebras in the image so let&#39;s take a look at this first example I&#39;ll just go full screen and play this back the clouds are very slowly moving here so this is ungraded footage with zebras set to 41 for middle grade the meter was reading plus two flashing and once again this is an ISO 640. next up we&#39;ve got the application of the official Sony Lut and this is what it looks like with no additional color grading this version is once again with zebras set at 40 21 with the official Sony Lut applied plus some additional color grading that I performed and finally I added some extra color grading just to try and reduce the brightness of the sky I just pause it there for a moment notice that we&#39;ve actually got some detail in the sky still it&#39;s not completely blown out so all of those examples were set with zebras at 41. let&#39;s take a look next at zebras set to 55 just go full screen and we&#39;ll just start playing this back once again the clouds are moving very slowly so this is ungraded footage and this is what it looks like with the official Sony Lut applied just going to pause it for a moment here one thing to bear in mind is the official Sony Lut will expect middle grade to be at 41 here it&#39;s at 55 percent so you might need to lower the exposure in post prior to applying the official Sony Lut and you can see already that the sky is blown out here let&#39;s continue playing this this is with the official Sony Lut applied and reducing the exposure prior to applying the Lut this gets it more in line with what the Lut expects let&#39;s just keep playing and this is with some additional color grading applied after adding the Lut this version is once again applying some additional color grading with a mask to try and bring back the sky but notice here that we can&#39;t actually recover hardly any detail in the sky and that&#39;s because we&#39;ve Overexposed the image so this is an important thing to bear in mind even though the Sony a7s3 with s-lock 3 has a good amount of dynamic range you&#39;re always going to have compromises in this case you need to ask yourself what the subject of the scene is the subject in this scene is actually the color Checker card here and not the actual background or the sky so you can imagine a person in place of this color Checker card in that case the person would probably be the subject in the frame and you&#39;d want to expose that person correctly doing so with zebra set to 55 will mean that you&#39;ll blow out the sky here so there&#39;s a compromise to bear in mind here when trying to remove as much noise from the subject as possible and that&#39;s that you might blow out other areas of the image such as the sky here let&#39;s take a look next at a side by side noise comparison on the left is zebra&#39;s set to 41 with the Sony Lut color grading and the sky grade applied and on the right here is zebra set to 55 once again with the Sony some color grading and the skygrade and you can see in this side by side example the difference in the sky in both of these cases the exposure for the subject the color Checker card is correct I&#39;ll just go full screen and play this back so you can see the difference and I&#39;ll just skip ahead to this version when I&#39;ve zoomed in 400 on the color Checker card so the version on the left was correct exposure with zebra set to 41 and on the right zebra&#39;s set to 55 the focus is a bit different on the right so I apologize for that but you can see the noise difference if I play this back check out the noise in the Shadows on the left first is the noise in the Shadows on the right hopefully you can see that with YouTube compression so even though the version on the right is a bit out of focus there&#39;s a definite Improvement in the noise with zebras set to 55 but as we saw in this version with zebra set to 55 we&#39;re going to blow out the sky the other scenario is that you&#39;re shooting outside and you don&#39;t have access to a gray card just going to open up this other sequence what I&#39;ve done in this example is to set zebras to 92 in camera the maximum is 94 for s-log 3 but I&#39;ve set this to 92 to allow for a bit of safety in the exposure then what I did is I exposed it so that the sky just starts to have zebras appear and then lower the exposure a tiny bit so the zebras just disappear this will basically expose the image as hot as possible which will also raise darker areas further away from the noise floor alternatively in an evenly lit scene where the camera meter will give you a pretty good reading just adjust your exposure until the meter reads between plus 1.7 and plus 2.0 non-flashing and have your Zebra set to 94 so you know if any tasting is going to be Overexposed so this version is with zebra set to 92 this is set to 92 with the official Sony Lut applied without any color grading just have a look at this playing back full screen this is with the official Sony Lut plus some additional color grading applied and this is with the additional skygrade so this looks a bit unrealistic a bit HDR like but you can see that we&#39;ve got a lot of detail in the sky still in this example I set zebras to 55 and then I adjusted the exposure so zebras mostly covered my face this is the ungraded version this is with the official Sony Lut only this is with the official Sony alert plus some additional color grading that I added and this is grading using the film convert nitrate grading plugin so basically if you&#39;re shooting outside and your subject as a person set your zebras to 55 and then adjust your exposure so the zebras just start to cover most of the face it&#39;s all about if you&#39;re shooting at night I&#39;ve got this test footage here that I shot at this Harbor this first version this is ungraded and I&#39;ve set the exposure using the meter only and I&#39;ve set the meter so it reads 0.0 at ISO 12800. this is ungraded footage you can see a little bit of noise in the sky let&#39;s have a look at this footage that&#39;s been graded just using the official Sony Lut doesn&#39;t look too bad so we&#39;ve got this version that&#39;s using the official Sony Lut plus a little bit of extra color grading sorry about the wobbling of the image it was pretty windy when I was shooting this footage here&#39;s a zoomed in version at 400 percent and you can see a little bit of noise here but we are at 400 percent next I tried to over expose this scene so I set the zebras at 92 and adjusted the exposure until the zebras just started to appear on those bright street lights and then backed off the exposure a little bit so the zebras disappeared to get this exposure I had to boost the iso up to 32 000 so we&#39;ve moved away from the second base ISO of 12 800 here so we&#39;re going to get a little bit more noise just from the iso this is the ungraded footage and this is the footage graded just using the official Sony Lut can see a little bit of noise in the orange glow in the sky at the right hand side here this version is with the official Sony Lut plus a little bit of extra color grading that I applied and if we have a look at this version this is zoomed in 400 percent you can see a bit more noticeable noise here for this next version I use the camera meter and I Overexposed using ISO until I hit a value of plus 1.7 on the meter to do this I had to boost the iso again to 64 000. so once again we&#39;re moving further away from that second base ISO so we&#39;re going to get more noise if we just play this back this is the ungraded footage there&#39;s definitely a bit more noise now this is the same footage with the official Sony Lut applied and you can definitely see more noise in the sky here you can see a few more stars I think maybe and this is the version with the Sony let&#39;s applied plus some extra color grading that I performed if we zoom into 400 percent we can definitely see some noise especially in the orange glow area on the right hand side I&#39;ve done a few side by sides just so you can see the comparisons on the left here we&#39;ve got ISO 12800 which is the second base ISO this is the iso and these examples with the lowest noise in the middle we&#39;ve got the zebras set to 92 and Overexposed by plus 0.7 and on the right Overexposed by plus 1.7 to my eyes the worst example here is the middle example where we&#39;ve only Overexposed by plus 0.7 if I just play this back so you can have a look at it in motion notice on the right hand version where we&#39;ve Overexposed by plus 1.7 even though we&#39;ve had to boost the iso again I think that this footage looks a bit better than the middle footage doesn&#39;t look quite as Noise free as the left hand side though I also shot some additional test footage of this ship this is the ungraded footage for some reason they chose a really horrible orange light to light this ship not sure why this is 12 800 ungraded meter reading of 0.0 looks pretty good here&#39;s the same footage with the Sony Lut applied got that lovely orange glow and this footage looks actually pretty nice to my eyes this is the same footage just with a little bit of extra color grading once again I think this looks pretty good from a noise point of view this version is ungraded and I Overexposed to get a meat reading of plus 0.7 to do this I had to increase the exposure or the iso to 32 000. there&#39;s definitely more noise in this version but if we have a look at a graded version doesn&#39;t look too bad but there&#39;s definitely a bit of noise in this one this is the same version with a bit of extra color grading we&#39;ve also done some side by sides of these shots on the left is ISO 12800 and on the Right iso 32 000 and if we zoom in we can see the right hand side definitely has more noise here so I think this version the left hand side actually looks a bit better I didn&#39;t actually perform this test at a meter reading of plus 1.7 so it would have been interesting to see how that compared just going to come back to the harbor version So based on these results if you&#39;re going to overexpose S log 3 at night you probably don&#39;t want to go much farther than 6400 ISO otherwise you might get some ISO related noise but if you are going to overexpose you&#39;re probably going to want to make sure that you overexpose by about 1.7 and not just 0.7 as we can see in the middle here this middle version definitely looks the worst to my eyes so which picture profile should you choose well if you want to use the video files that come straight out of the camera without needing to do any extra color editing work then standard or S7 tone are pretty good choices just bear in mind if you use these you&#39;re not going to be getting the maximum dynamic range that this camera is capable of and dynamic range basically means how far into the dark or Shadow areas you&#39;re going to see and how much of those highlights or brighter areas are going to be lost in the final video as an example let&#39;s compare s cinetone to s-log 3. the first thing to think about is ISO the base isos for these two picture profiles are different on the a7s3 that I&#39;m filming on now s-log 3 has a base ISO of 640 whereas s cinetone has a base ISO of 100 that means if you&#39;re filming in bright daylight and you don&#39;t have an ND filter and you also don&#39;t want to change the aperture or overcrank the shutter speed then s-cinotone in this example might be a better choice that&#39;s because sinotone&#39;s base ISO is lower than slog3&#39;s base ISO so it&#39;s going to be a lot less sensitive to Bright Light however if you&#39;re filming in Darker conditions then s-log 3 might be a better choice with its higher base ISO of 640 also on the a7s3 here the picture profiles have two base isos where the noise is at its lowest with s-log 3 having a whopping 12 800 for its higher base ISO as ciner tones higher base ISO is only 2 000. so for low light or dark situations s-log 3 might be the better choice especially if you&#39;re going to use that higher second base ISO the second thing to think about is what colors you want and also your editing effort in post-production you can think of as cinetone as having its own color grade built into the video file itself which can either be a good or bad thing depending on your preferences the good thing about sinatone is that you can use the footage straight out of camera without needing to know how to do color grading with s-log 3 on the other hand you will have to do some color grading in your editing software if you want to use the footage properly you can still do some color grading with a cinetone if you want to but you don&#39;t have to if you really want complete control over how the color look and you don&#39;t mind doing color grading then slog3 will give you a better starting point than S cinetone s-log 3 is going to give you a more neutral starting point basically if you want to record and get videos out as quickly as possible with little or no editing and snotone is a better choice than s-log 3. the third reason you might want to choose s-log 3 over a cenotone is dynamic range dynamic range is basically the size of the difference between the darkest and the lightest parts of the image that you can capture in your video the bigger the dynamic range the more detail you can get in the shadows and highlights if you want maximum dynamic range then you&#39;ll want to use s-log 3. you can see here that s log 3 gives you more dynamic range than S cinetone see how there&#39;s more detail in the sky here if you decide you don&#39;t want to use s-log 3 but you don&#39;t quite like the color or the look of a ciner tone then you could maybe try picture profile off with a creative look of standard or neutral if you want that quick editing turnaround and you don&#39;t want to do color grading the sinotone picture profile is designed to give you movie-like colors straight out of the camera with no color editing required if you do decide to use S cinetone there&#39;s a few different ways that you can set up your exposure let&#39;s take a look at this next the tone gives you cinematic looking footage straight out of your camera with pleasing skin tones with no color grading required you can just go into the picture profiles and see if you&#39;ve got picture profile 11. if you don&#39;t see picture profile 11 showing up then you&#39;ll probably need to go and update the firmware on your camera just head over to Sony and follow the instructions so once you&#39;ve updated the firmware head into the picture profiles and choose picture profile 11. this is the S cinetone picture profile the next thing you want to do is set your ISO the base ISO for sinotone on the a7s3 is 100 and if you&#39;re shooting at night time or in low light you might want to choose the higher native base ISO and that&#39;s ISO 2000 you should use these two isos for the best possible noise performance so now you&#39;ve got your camera set up let&#39;s look at the four different ways you can set your exposure when using S sinotone the easiest way to set your exposure for S cinetone is simply by using your eye using the viewfinder or the screen on the back of the camera and judge the exposure by what you see unlike some things such as slog3 which requires color grading in post you can use snotone footage straight down out of the camera so what you see in the viewfinder or on the screen is a good indication of what you&#39;ll actually get this first method also means you don&#39;t have to worry about going into the menus and setting up zebras this makes it super quick to shoot with sinotone but you might end up over exposing or under exposing skin tones or blowing out and clipping important highlights one disadvantage to this approach is that if it&#39;s a really bright day you might not be able to see the screen properly and you might not be able to judge the exposure correctly in this case you could always go and use the electronic viewfinder instead the second method is basically the same as the first method except this time we&#39;re going to use zebras to check that we&#39;re not blowing out or clipping important highlights just set your custom zebras to 109 plus using their lower limit zebra mode set your exposure based on what you see in the viewfinder or on the screen and then just reduce your exposure if you see zebras on any important highlight details the next simplest method is to just use the meter in the camera adjust your exposure until the meter reads 0.0 and then just hit record no meters perfect so in a heavily backlit scene or a bright scene such as a beach or snow you might get an underexposed image just relying on the meter you can try overexposing or underexposing based on the meter to get different looks one of the benefits of acinotone is the nice skin tone colors it can produce straight out of camera if you&#39;ve got people in your shot you&#39;ll probably want to use this next method to make sure your human subjects look good this method makes use of zebras and you&#39;ll want to set your zebras to 65. to set this up head to your camera zebra settings choose custom standard plus range set the range to plus or minus three and set the zebras to a value of 65. now simply adjust your exposure until you start to see zebras on the brightest parts of your subject&#39;s faces depending on the look and the mood that you want to create and also on your subject skin tone and complexion you might want to try and set zebras at 55 or 60 for a darker and more contrasty image or you can go the other way and set your zebras somewhere between 70 to 75 for a brighter flatter look so it was at 55 there&#39;s a little bit of highlight a little bit of zebras there meter reading minus zero point seven by this is he was at 65 a little bit of zebra&#39;s there a little bit there there&#39;s 75 zebras here a little tiny tiny bit there all right this is zebrasive 109 plus whatever it is and I&#39;ve just there&#39;s just a very tiny tiny tiny bit of zebra there but basically no zebras so s log 3 is the absolute best picture profile to use on the A7 S3 if you want to get the maximum dynamic range out of the camera it does however mean that you&#39;ll need to do some additional color grading work when you edit your video let&#39;s see how to do that next we&#39;re going to jump into Premiere Pro in just a minute just give you a quick overview of what we&#39;re going to do what we&#39;re going to do is we&#39;re going to use lumetri color to apply the color grading effects and we&#39;re going to actually use multiple instances of lumetri we&#39;re going to use them for different purposes this will form a chain of processing for color correction and color grading and it will help you to organize what should go where so let&#39;s head into Premiere Pro now and we&#39;ll have a look at this first clip so here&#39;s a clip I recorded in the studio the first thing we&#39;re going to do is in the effects here we&#39;re going to search for lumetri color and we&#39;re going to drag a lumetri color instance onto the clip here and we&#39;re conceding the effects I&#39;m going to right click and rename and call this first lumetri color instance pre-cst I&#39;m going to go and add a second lumetri color instance here once again right click and rename all that one CST add a third instance call this one host CST I&#39;ll explain what these are going to be in just a minute We&#39;ll add a full volumetric color instance called grade and finally a fifth instance and we&#39;ll call this sharpen just going to expand the program window a bit more so you can see it a bit better here and we&#39;re already in the color workspace and you can see in the lumetri color panel here we&#39;ve got all of our lumetri instances so this first pre-csc lumetri instance is going to be used for correcting any exposure differences before applying the official Sony Lut this version of the clip was shot with zebras at 41 on this middle gray section here so this is about the correct exposure for the Lut in the second lumetri color instance here we&#39;re going to apply the official Sony Lut you can find this official Sony alert at the Sony website here what you need to do is come down to Sony Lux click on download Sony look profiles and click download here once it&#39;s downloaded you&#39;ll get this folder which contains these four Lux files these first two will convert s-log 3s gamut 3 cine into Rec 709 notice that these have got the LC in the file name this stands for low contrast so we&#39;ll have to add some contrast back in after applying the Lut so once you&#39;ve downloaded this alert make sure you&#39;re in the CST lumetri instance and in the basic correction input look here just choose browse and select this s gamut 3 cine s-log 3 to lc709 alert open net and you can see straight away the image is looking a lot better that&#39;s because we exposed it correctly in the first place if I go and add the crop effect to this clip and I&#39;ll just adjust it until we can see these three exposure bars and if we come over to the lumetri Scopes you can see this middle bar is roughly at 41 here and that&#39;s the correct exposure for slog3 or at least the correct exposure for the official Sony Lut just going to disable the crop effects so once we&#39;ve applied the official Sony alert remember that we did that in the CST limited instance we can now move to this post CST lumetri instance here we&#39;re going to add some contrast back into the image we&#39;re going to tweak the exposure if we want to and we&#39;re also going to perform any color correction that we need to do so let&#39;s start off with adding some contrast back in I&#39;m going to set this probably somewhere around 26. this is a matter of personal taste we can also go and correct any exposure if I re-enable this crop and head back to lumetri scopes for this color Checker card we want middle gray about 41 we want this White Strip to be somewhere around 90 and we want this black strip here to be somewhere in the zero to ten percent range so for example what we could do in this post CST limiter instance we could modify the exposure this can do this very quickly so it could bring up the whites here if we wanted to that&#39;s also going to arrange middle gray a bit though or we could use the curves here to do the same kind of thing I&#39;m not going to spend too much time on that and if we undo the crop and toggle this off and on [Music] or toggle the entire post CST limiter instance we can see the difference in exposure there we can also use this post CST section to do any color correction I&#39;m going to re-enable the crop and I&#39;m going to change it so we can see these color chips and if we head back to lumetrioscopes I&#39;m going to enable the vectorscope yuv so because we&#39;ve got the color Checker we know roughly where these things should be these lines should Point towards their respective colors and they should all be about 50 between the middle and this box here you can see that red might be skewed a little bit you can see that magenta here might be skewed a little bit Blue&#39;s looking okay Green&#39;s looking maybe a bit skewed and cyan&#39;s looking okay too so we can use the Hue saturation curves and the Hue versus Hue curves to make any changes for color correction I&#39;m going to do is put points in at each of these intersections here foreign so let&#39;s start off with the red I&#39;m going to hold down shift and move this red point up and down holding down shift just makes it move vertically up and down and it won&#39;t accidentally go left or right and you can see if we increase the exposure red is shifting a little bit to the left you can do the same thing in the Hue versus Hue once again holding shift and we can adjust where that red line fits we also want to make sure that it&#39;s about halfway between the center point which is probably somewhere about there let&#39;s do the same thing for magenta going to increase the saturation you can see that it&#39;s traveling a bit to the left of this box you can use the Hue versus Hue just to bring it back in line and then bring this down to about halfway between the middle and the Box have a look at the bloom just going to increase the saturation this is traveling fairly well so we&#39;re just trying to get it about halfway across and we might need to just very subtly tweak it something like that cyan is looking like it&#39;s lining up quite nicely hitting the Box bang on so we&#39;ll adjust it so it&#39;s about halfway between the middle and the box next have a look at green this is traveling a little bit to the left of the box so we&#39;ll just bring that around a little bit and just check it with the Hue here it&#39;s about halfway maybe just tweak it a little bit more the cyan looks like it&#39;s a little bit too far out so I&#39;ll just bring that in a little bit to about 50 and we&#39;ll also adjust the Hue down here just so it lines up a little bit better just going to increase the saturation so you can line it up a bit better and bring it down to about halfway between the center and the Box let&#39;s come back to the effect controls and disable the crop and I&#39;ll just toggle off and on this curved section and I&#39;m actually going to just tweak this tiny bit there and now in this post CST lumetri color instance we&#39;ve added some contrast we&#39;ve tweaked the exposure and we&#39;ve performed color correction there&#39;s a couple more lumetri color instances here the next one in the chain is this grade this is going to allow us to perform any artistic grading that we like and this final one is going to add some sharpening so we want to add Sharpening at the last point in the chain so you can play with one amount of sharpening you like and typically at the minute applying about 15 to s-log 3 footage so in this grade section we can pretty much go crazy if we want to we could use one of these creative Luts built into lumetri color we could add some saturation or remove some saturation and a vignette and any other creative artistic changes that you want to make in this second clip I&#39;m actually Overexposed this s-log basically if I exposed this gray bit here at 55 zebras what I&#39;m going to do is right click this first clip and choose copy and come down to the second clip and choose paste attributes I&#39;m going to make sure all of the lumetri instances are checked and also the crop and we&#39;ll just apply that what I&#39;m going to do is leave the sharpening as it is I&#39;m going to reset the grade instance going to reset the post CST instance I&#39;m going to leave the CST as it is this is where we&#39;ve applied the Sony Lut but we&#39;re going to actually use this pre-cst instance now to reduce the exposure before it hits the Lut let&#39;s start off by turning off the Lut just disable this lumetri instance come back to pre-cst and once again we&#39;ll make use of the lumetri Luma waveform let&#39;s make this a bit easier once again we&#39;ll use the crop and notice this time middle gray is not at 41 it&#39;s kind of almost a 55 which is the zebras that I set so what we need to do is we need to bring this middle gray exposure down to about 41 before we apply the Lut in the next part of the chain to do this I&#39;m just going to use the exposure here and bring this down to about 41 come back to effect controls turn off the crop and come back to the CST instance and re-enable the Lut transform we can now continue with the same steps we did before we can add some contrast perform any color correction and any exposure tweaks to save time I&#39;m not going to bother color correcting this footage and then in the grade we can apply some kind of creative style if we want to for example we could add some faded film effect here increase the Vibrance looks pretty horrible and then once again the final step is this sharpening which is set at 15 minutes one of the other things this pre-cst instance is for is to set the white balance if you need to the final clip we&#39;re going to look at is this outdoor clip once again I&#39;m going to right click choose paste attributes paste all the lumetri effects and the crop Olive sharpening enabled I&#39;m going to disable the grade disable post CST or leave the color space transform active and we can also make some changes in this pre-cst so for example we could change the white balance here I could try doing this by clicking the eyedropper or I could do it by eye something like that then in the post CST once again post CST we could add some contrast in the grade section here just reset that we can do something creative so I&#39;m going to go and add some saturation in you&#39;ll notice I can&#39;t pull down the highlights here in the sky what I could do is come back to the pre-csd transform and drop the highlights here and that just offers you a different approach once again this grade section is for more artistic or creative choices so you could do something like this so that&#39;s a five-step process to color grading s-log 3 footage start off with this pre-cst lumetri instance in here do white balancing and any exposure correction such as bringing middle grade down to 41 ire in the CST lumetri color instance just apply the official Sony Lut in the post CST lumetri color instance once the lut&#39;s applied you can add some contrast tweak the exposure and perform any color correction and now you&#39;ve got correctly exposed and color corrected footage in the grade instance here you can go to town and get artistic and the final step is to sharpen the footage if you&#39;re wondering what CST stands for it&#39;s an acronym that stands for color space transform and it&#39;s basically converting one color space or one picture profile if you like such as slog3 into something like Rec 709 which is what the standard definition TVs use for an even easier way to color grade slog3 that tries to simulate those Hollywood Blockbusters you can use a specific Lut the first thing you need to do is make sure you&#39;re shooting in s-log 3 and S gamma 3 cine for example on the Sony a7s3 this will be picture profile 8. next head over to the Sony professional website and then scroll down and hit the download button there&#39;s two different downloads that you can choose here the 33x or 33 grid versions which you might have to use and there&#39;s also the 65x or 65 grid versions which are going to offer you better quality so what I would suggest is download the 65 versions first and if you have any problems in your editing software then you might have to revert back to the 33 versions once you&#39;ve downloaded the package open it and you&#39;ll see all of these Cube files these are the Luts I&#39;ll come back to what these file names mean in just a minute you&#39;ll want to copy these Cube files from the zip file over to your computer somewhere next you&#39;ll want to open up your s-log 3 footage in whatever video editing software you&#39;re using the cube file should work in all major video editors for example in Premiere Pro head over to the color grading workspace and in the lumetri color panel load in one of the cube files that you just downloaded and Bam instantly you&#39;ll see your footage given that Hollywood Blockbuster look so which of these Cube files should you be using for your footage depending on whether or not you have Overexposed or underexposed your s-log 3 footage you&#39;ll need to choose the appropriate Cube file so if you Overexposed your footage by 1.5 stops use the negative 1p50 Cube file this will reduce the exposure by 1.5 stops and if you underexposed for example by One Stop use the plus 1p00 Cube file to increase the exposure by one stop and so on so we&#39;ve covered a lot of ground in this tutorial so far and there&#39;s been quite a lot to remember so what I went and did is created some free cheat sheets for the Sony a7s3 but you can find more about in this video please subscribe hit that notification Bell like the video and I&#39;ll see you in the next one

Transcript for:Sony A7S3 Camera Setup and Tips

Transcript for:
Sony A7S3 Camera Setup and Tips