How I Expose & Color Grade Sony Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) - My FAVORITE a7III a7RIII Picture Profile!

What's going on, hybrid shooters? It's Jason Vong, and today I'm gonna show you how I personally shoot and edit the hybrid log gamma profiles found in the Sony a7 III and a7R III. So a couple months ago, I made a video talking about how I don't shoot with the Cine4 or the S-Log profiles from the Sony cameras, and I won't force you to watch that video. I'm just gonna summarize it here. So in that video, I mentioned I shoot mainly with picture profile one, which is the default movie profile found in the Sony cameras, and for the most part, it looks great. But nowadays, I actually don't even shoot with any picture profiles. I actually put the creative style to standard and have my dynamic range optimizer on auto, and it usually just looks great right out the gate. And a lot of you guys actually commented on the colors of some of my videos, like for example, the Zeiss Bodice 135 review and the Sigma 16mm f1.4 review. Those are shot with no picture profile, dynamic range on auto, and it looks really good. However, more often than not, we always find ourselves shooting in a very high contrasty scene where the skies are really bright and your subject's in the shadow, and when you expose for your subject in the shadows, your skies will be blown out. So whenever that happens, I usually switch to hybrid log gamma, which is default PP10 in your camera. And what I really like about hybrid log gamma is that the highlights are better retained. Not only that, but it's much easier to shoot and grade compared to S-Log2 and S-Log3. Now, whenever you shoot with S-Log2 or S-Log3, your ISO, your base ISO ends up being about 800 to 1600, and in some of the older Sony cameras, it's 3200, which is a little too high when you're in situations like that and it forces you to use an ND filter. But with hybrid log gamma, you actually start off at like 200, I think. Nevermind, it actually starts at 100, even better. And it's also a lot easier to grade because I feel like the colors are already really, really close. So it's much easier to put it back into Rec. 709 as opposed to S-Log2 or S-Log3. So first, I'm gonna show you the profile settings first in camera, and then we're gonna jump into Premiere and show you how I grade it. So I personally have my hybrid log gamma profile in picture profile 10, and I use HLG2. Now, the difference between one, two, and three, one actually reduces more noise than hybrid log gamma two, but it has a much narrower dynamic range. So not much to work with there. HLG2 has a balance between dynamic range and noise reduction, whereas hybrid log gamma three has a much wider dynamic range, but the noise level will obviously be much higher. So I would opt for two, but you can choose whichever one you want. And for color mode, we have it at 709. And that's pretty much it. And the way that me and Vivian shoot, or sorry, expose, we generally have it about a stop over like plus 0.7 or plus one. All right, so here we are in the Lumetri panel in Premiere Pro, and this is the sample footage that we'll be working with for today. And this came from one of our recent Cuba videos, specifically the Tamron 2075 review video. I got a lot of compliments about the colors for that. So I figured, why not? This will be a perfect demonstration to sort of demo how I grade my hybrid log gamma footage. And this scene is perfect right here because we often deal with the high contrasty scenes in Cuba with the bright skies and the dark shadows. So I approach grading log footage like how I normally approach editing a photo in Lightroom. So I add a little bit of saturation first and maximize the dynamic range in this scene. Oh, and with the whole saturation thing, it's just an arbitrary number right now. I will mess with this by dialing up and down, up or down later when this is all said and done. So again, I like to mess with my blacks and my white levels first by simply looking at my Lumetri scopes right here. I put it in the parades graph and start dragging down my blacks until these points right here meets zero. And that's looking pretty good. And I will up my whites until these points here hit 100. And that is looking pretty good. I'm just turn this off to show you what it looks like before and after. So not too bad, but I feel like me as a host here is looking pretty dark. So I'll go ahead and just move this curve right here up like this, boost my mids up a little bit. And that's looking good. And sometimes I like to add a bit of contrast. Oh yeah, and save your project as well. Sometimes I like to add a little bit of contrast to it. Nothing too much, maybe like, yeah, 15 looking pretty good. And that's it. Like I said earlier in the video, Hyper Log Gamma, the colors in it are really, really close. You just have to add a little bit of saturation and sort of mess with your exposure a little bit. And in that video, I did use a LUT. So let me just show you with an adjustment layer. And my favorite LUT is actually the Codec 005 from the Overlook DLUTs pack. And what I really like about this LUT is that it adds a little bit of warmness to your footage. And I found this LUT to work best with my skin tone. Well, obviously right now it's a little bit oversaturated. So I'm gonna come back down here and lower it back down so I'm not too orangey, 105. Yeah, okay, that looks pretty good. And I'll go ahead and leave a link to the LUTs pack in the description box below. P.S. I am not affiliated with the creator in any way, nor am I making any sort of affiliate commission. I purchased these packs on my own and just found this one particular here works really well for me. But as you can see, there's a whole mess of LUTs in that pack as well. They have the favorite orange and teal look that everybody likes. This is the Sam Coder look. So if you're a fan of him, you might enjoy this pack. But this creator also has other different orange and teal looks. So you can purchase the pack and kind of just mess with all these other looks if you want. But personally for me, since my video is more sort of documentary kind of style, I want the colors to be true to life, as true to life as possible. So I like the Codec 5 for the stuff that I shoot with. Just to show you guys a bit of before and after, here's the one with the LUT and here's the one without the LUT. And here's our original straight out of camera footage. Bam. All right, so just to show you guys one more example, again, you can see right here, the colors are already right there. So I'm just gonna go ahead and add the saturation first, mess with my blacks, boost my whites, and maybe just add a little bit of contrast. You know what, actually, I'm gonna boost my mids a little bit. And because I'm dragging this middle part only, it also affects my black, which I don't want. I'll just anchor my blacks right here and push my whites up here. And that looks pretty good. Maybe just a little too contrasty, just a little bit of contrast. And that looks really good. So let me go ahead and show you what it looks like before and what it looks like after. And maybe the highlights are a little bit, needs a little bit more toning down. And just to show you guys with the LUT, drag this back in, drag the adjustment layer, I mean, and then add the Kodak 5. And again, since Kodak 5 kind of saturates my footage a little bit, I don't need to saturate it with the bottom layer. What did I tell you? Easy peasy, right? By the way, we use different LUTs for the weddings that we shoot. And if you guys want me to make a video talking about that, drop in the comments down below. Guys, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.