Canons Wide DR profile on a Sony Z90V?

[Chris Young]

A bit late seeing your post but I have successfully used HLG2 and 3 both of which give you a a fair bit more dynamic range than stock Rec 709. In PP10 by default the color mode is 2020 but if you set it to Rec 709 what you will find is that you are getting a much wider dynamic range compressed into a 709 color space. Pretty decent for straight out of the cam footage. The other setting that works quite nicely is setting a profile like PP9 to Gamma Cine 4 and Color Mode to Cinema as a starting point. Not quite as wide a range as HLG2 or 3 but it handles highlights very well. Especially in 422 50 HD.

With either of these PPs you can play around with black levels and chroma levels to taste but it’s best to double check that they are within the bounds of legal if you want a compliant Rec 709 file ready to hand off. I also use variants of these settings on the Sony A7III as it has a very similar range of PPs and we are getting some very nice results out of that.

One point to keep in mind is that HLG 2 tops out at 95% and HLG 3 at 100%. Check out the following URL PDF for info on that. Don’t worry too much about the noise comments re HLG 3 try it out for your self. In lower light where generally you have less dynamic range you can easily drop back to HLG2 if noise becomes an issue.

https://masquevideo.es/PXW-Z90.pdf

Chris Young
Sydney

[Cg Coffyn]

Thanks Chris! It’s never too late ☺ I’m always testing and adjusting things. So I really appreciate you taking the time to post. Early on I found various posts of people happily using HLG and others that said it was a delivery format only, not built for editing. But then I wondered if Sony puts it on the cameras, why? Is it just for those that want to stream or for traditional acquisition too?

I’m about ready to head off on a filming trip. When I’m back I’d like to do some tests with HLG. So I’ve downloaded that pdf. Thanks.

For now here’s a preset tweak I’m using: Black level: -5, Gamma: Cine 4, Black Gamma Range: High, Black Gamma Level: +7, Knee Mode: manual, Knee Manual Set Point: 105%, Knee Manual Set Slope: +5, Color Mode: ITU709 Matrix, Saturation: -5, Color Phase: 0, Color Depth: default, WB Shift: default, Detail level: +2, Zebra2: still playing with 80% to 90%. These settings were from an engineer and I tweaked a tiny bit based on over saturation on some colours & pure whites being a little blown out in bright daylight.

I generally like the settings, but we shoot in a fair amount of low light situations. These settings work best at 0db, high gain and I keep seeing more and more noise. At times I need to shoot wide open at 9db to 12db. It is only a 1″ sensor with fixed lens, but I’m open to other possibilities.