What is a picture profile?
Before we look at which cinema profile is best for your needs, let’s take a moment to define exactly what we’re talking about and why it’s important. According to Sony’s definition, a picture profile is “a menu for adjusting and changing parameters that determine an image’s characteristics.” Basically, it’s the settings on the camera that determine the look and color of the image. Once you find a group of settings that you like, you can save them as a profile that you can apply to future shots as desired. There are a number of different parameters that can be adjusted, and they can be divided into four main categories. They are:1. Settings for contrast 2. Setting for brightness 3. Settings for color 4. Settings for the sharpness of image edges. Sony’s professional cinema cameras are known for supporting a wide range of settings that can be adjusted, which all together are known as the camera’s Picture Profile menu. When you’re able to change the gamma curve, color, and detail in camera, it means that you have much greater control over how your finished footage will look, rather than just leaving it up to the camera to decide for you. Finally, a professional videographer or colorist will want the in-camera image to have what is known as a flat profile. When you look at the footage straight from the camera, you’ll think it looks rather bland, with a muted color profile and soft edges. But in reality, the camera is actually retaining more information than it normally would, allowing for more color correction possibilities in post.
SLOG2 vs HLG3
When trying to decide which picture profile is the right one for your Sony camera, it depends on a lot of factors. Let’s start with the basics. If you’re going to shoot with sLOG2, you’re going to need a scene or set up that has plenty of light. This picture profile usually works best on sunny days or interior scenes that have a high dynamic range. HLG3 is similar to sLOG2 except that you don’t need to overexpose as much while losing only a little bit of dynamic range.When shooting indoors where you can control the lighting, my go-to is a picture profile with a natural setting. Then we can bump down the saturation by 1 and contrast by 1, giving us more options in post. When I do commercial shoots in a controlled environment, I usually prefer HLG3 because its color space is a bit bigger than rec. 709. This picture profile doesn’t have as much dynamic range as sLOG2, but it’s also way easier to color correct and you don’t need to overexpose. Grading this picture profile is a lot more forgiving. It’s also way easier to get a final image than with sLOG2. HLG3 is comparable to city profiles, but the highlights are much softer and look more natural on skin tones.When it comes to shooting at golden hour (the period one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset) I still prefer cine4. This style tends to be high contrast and I usually expose for the sun and the background to create a nice silhouette of my bride and groom. I will also use this setting when the bride and groom are next to a window in the bridal suites and I want to expose for the light outside. With the cine profiles you don’t have to overexpose as much as you do with sLOG2. This will give you a cleaner image when you don’t need the dynamic range of sLOG2.With 8-bit Kodak you can only do so much in color grading, so it is very limited on the Sony A7 iii. Once you start boosting the ISO you will lose dynamic range in the colors. This is a very flat image once you start pushing around colors and it can fall apart very quickly since it’s only 8-bit and not 10-bit. But on the flip side, you can recover a lot of details in the highlights and shadows since this is one of Sony’s flattest picture profiles.Here are my final thoughts on sLOG2. It is still my favorite profile to shoot in, as long as I have enough light. This works best for weddings when the subject is in the shade and I still want to capture the background, such as the sky and sun, because of its excellent dynamic range.
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