Colormatching the FS7 II to the Canon 5D4

leGreve

Full time photographer and film maker omnifilm.dk
Nov 6, 2010
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So I own both, but I somewhat like the colorscience of the Canon better. Mind you, I've shot loads with the FS7 alone and have no issues handing over that footage.

But I wondered if it might be possible at all to match up the two cameras in cases where it would be fun to use two angles at the sane time.
So off into DaVinci and play around.

First thing I notice with the raw footage is that their differences in color science is limited to specific colors. It's not that either Sony or Canon decided to just tweak the color temp or hue... they actually twist individual colors and some colors not at all...

The main difference that really sticks out is the Canon red. Sonys red has a bluish tint which I find quite un-diserable to be honest. But besides that, they seem to differ in greens, yellows and ever so slightly in caucasian skin tone and blue.

The image below has the Canon chart up top and the Sony chart below. Check out the hoops I had to go through to match them up as well as I could. It's quite a lot... the labels on the nodes are references to column and row number.
The node labelled General Sat was reset at the end... so it doesn't do anything.

But basically I did a slight offset of the c-log footage, since it was 1/3 stop overexposed and did a custom white balance with a curve. That's it.
Then I did the same with the Sony footage and started working on individual colors. This was done completely with hue vs hue, hue vs sat & hue vs Lum. There were no power windows / masks involved.

But I think I got pretty close to something useable. My biggest worry now is if the Sony footage can hold up to further grading after this.

Ended up exporting a lut, tried applying it to some HMI footage I shot in a premiere project and it worked beautifully.....
Will be making an opposite lut to match the 5D4 footage to the FS7 as well...

Gear used:
- 5D4 with 24-70 2.8L II - c-log completely desaturated
- Sony FS7 II with Fujinon MK 18-55 2.9 - cinegamma s-log3

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leGreve

Full time photographer and film maker omnifilm.dk
Nov 6, 2010
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LDS said:
Did you try to match them using a color reference card and let DaVinci perform the job? (I can't see the charts you're referring to)

https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/davinci-resolve-tip-using-a-color-chart-to-match-your-shots/

Just tried the colorchart matching for the heck of it... it doesn't get nearly as close as the manual version I did. Annoying really. Although it's probably asking too much of that function.

It still messes up those particular colors between the two cameras.

EDIT:
played a bit around with the settings... got quite close to something useful. But there are still slight differences that requires a bit of tweaking. But it's certainly more useful than I thought.
 
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hne

Gear limits your creativity
Jan 8, 2016
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The cameras have different colour filters. Because of this, colours will react in different ways depending on light spectrum. You'll theoretically need one lut per light type but in practice I think you'd get good enough results with just tweaking for daylight and your main type(s) of artificial light. I'm using daylight only for matching Canon with GoPro video and for stills I sometimes pull out a profile for incandescent, but the rest of the light varies too much (different manufacturers, models and age) for me to bother try create profiles and instead I'm just tweaking colours as needed.
 
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leGreve

Full time photographer and film maker omnifilm.dk
Nov 6, 2010
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The Canon c-log is surprisingly un-loggy imo... it still goes close to top and bottom in the wave form. Unlike Sony which ends up covering an area from around 35 to 75 or so.
In the case of matching the FS7 footage to the canon footage, the only thing I did to the Canon footage was just offsetting it slightly because I had it a little overexposed.
And then doing a quick WB by pulling the red and blue points in a curve to the green.

I didn't de-log it...

So after these two are matched up, you could apply another lut / look across the timeline if it fits. Just tried applying a Fuji look and it holds up on both clips.

The below is another match where I tried to get the 5D4 footage as close to the de-logged Sony footage as possible. So again... the sony footage in this case is only added manual contrast and WB and then nodes stacked up to get the 5D4 to look a bit more like Sony.
Sitting here looking at both, I must admit I do like the Canon footage the most in terms of color.
 

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leGreve

Full time photographer and film maker omnifilm.dk
Nov 6, 2010
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hne said:
The cameras have different colour filters. Because of this, colours will react in different ways depending on light spectrum. You'll theoretically need one lut per light type but in practice I think you'd get good enough results with just tweaking for daylight and your main type(s) of artificial light. I'm using daylight only for matching Canon with GoPro video and for stills I sometimes pull out a profile for incandescent, but the rest of the light varies too much (different manufacturers, models and age) for me to bother try create profiles and instead I'm just tweaking colours as needed.

Yep, a bit annoying. But if I have a spare moment, I might end up doing it just for the practice.

Still bugs me why Sony would use the filters the way they do... I mean, some colors look fine, but others like red and skin are just weird...
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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leGreve said:
I didn't de-log it...

It could be easier to match colors if you first apply the LUTs to convert the LOG formats to a common one, see for example: https://www.videomaker.com/article/c01/18793-a-guide-to-working-with-luts . Probably trying to match two different LOGs, and then apply two different LUTs for final output, may still deliver noticeable different colors.
 
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leGreve

Full time photographer and film maker omnifilm.dk
Nov 6, 2010
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LDS said:
leGreve said:
I didn't de-log it...

It could be easier to match colors if you first apply the LUTs to convert the LOG formats to a common one, see for example: https://www.videomaker.com/article/c01/18793-a-guide-to-working-with-luts . Probably trying to match two different LOGs, and then apply two different LUTs for final output, may still deliver noticeable different colors.

Looks like I still have to fiddle a bit around with the individual colors afterwards. Add to that, going from Canon log to Red709 and slog 3 to 709, the blues start to differ little as well.

I wish all brands would normalise colors to a standart in camera. But I guess they need to set themselves apart patent wise sometimes.
 
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