Quick a6000 settings question

[norliss]

From the tiny bit of filming I've done with it thus far, I've used the Neutral, -3, -1, -1 setting which gives a flat-ish look and it grades reasonably well.

I'm doing a small amount of filming later for someone on a quick turnaround and the footage won't be graded, so does anyone have any recommendations on settings to use for the best in-camera results?

[Blue Fox]

If you aren't going to grade it, I would use neutral -1 +1 -1 or -1 0 -1.

The sharpness variable depends a bit on the lens. With the 16-50 E kit lens, I've to turn the sharpness down to -3 to avoid halos when sharpening in post. It seems that the radius of the in-camera sharpening is too large. It's a shame you can't adjust it. But with some careful sharpening in post, most of the halo problems can be 'repaired'. It also depends on the scene: if there's a lot of detail I prefer not to turn down the in-camera sharpening too much (so I use -1) as otherwise the detail gets lost in the codec. But I think simple edges and details get best resolved (without halos) with sharpness -3 and then a lot of deconvolution sharpening afterwards. But this also sharpens all the codec artifacts/damage... so not perfect for scenes with movement.

In general the neutral -3 -1 -1 (aka Philip Bloom?) setting tens to work very well but it indeed looks a bit dull ungraded. However in most occasions I don't (yet) do too much hocus pocus with the colors so I set the saturation to 0 (or +1). This gives slightly less colored codec artifacts in post. Sometimes I set DRO to +5. This retains a lot of DR in the shadows!

For higher ISOs, you might want to use a higher sharpness value as the noise reduction can't be turned off and blurs the footage.

The sharpness value can be easily set by first bumping contrast, saturation and sharpness to +3 and then zooming in to 1:1 in video mode. If there are too much halos, decrease the sharpness value and check again.

During daylight neutral -3 +1 -1 looks very flat (at least, the luma channel) but for a theater recording or other scenes with a lot of DR it may look great even ungraded (at least, on a screen with a high contrast ratio :)).

You can also try neutral 0 +1 -1 with DRO 2 or so.

If you want to try achieve a 'special' look, you might want to try the 'portrait' or 'autumn leaves' settings. For the rest, make sure you get the WB just right (AWB messes it up sometimes). For slightly warmer, a bit Nikon-like colors you can put the color square (WB fine tuning) one or two steps to magenta and then set the kelvin value.

Take this with a grain of salt, I'm also still learning :).

 

[norliss]

Thanks @Blue Fox I'll give some of these settings a whirl.