Flatten Your 5DMarkII image
I hope you find this article as awesome as I do. There is really none better than Stu at imparting his pearls of wisdom on the relationship between production and post for grading images:
Flatten Your 5D
Readers of The DV Rebel’s Guide know that I like to set up my cameras to record as much dynamic range as possible, resulting in a low-contrast, low-saturation “digital negative” that allows more flexibility for grading in post. If you’ve seen any video I’ve shot with the Canon 5D Mark II lately, whether in the Red Giant TV tutorial or on fxphd, you may have wondered how I set up the camera to achieve this. The answer comes in the form of some in-camera Picture Style settings.
I posted a while back about using Canon’s PictureStyleEditor software to create these custom Picture Styles. Since then I have found that the controls in the camera are more than sufficient for creating a more post-friendly look for the 5D’s video files.
Starting with the “Neutral” setting, I make the following modifications:
- Sharpness all the way down
- Contrast all the way down
- Saturation two notches down
Save that as on of your User Defined Picture Styles. Then hop over to the Custom Function menu, select C.Fn II: Image, and enable Highlight Tone Priority.
Your settings should look like this:
This will remove the contrasty, video-like tone curve from your future recordings, and eek out a little more highlight detail. Here’s a shot made with the default settings:
You can see the reduced contrast, the increase in shadow and highlight detail. It’s closer to a raw image with a linear tone curve. Zoom in and you can see the difference in highlight handling on the reflections:
You’re going to put all that contrast and most of that sharpening back in post of course, but in your own way, and with more control, and after any shot-to-shot evening out or clever power windows. The ability to design a “zeroed out” or CINE_LIKE-esque Picture Style is one of the things that makes the 5D Mark II’s video dangerously close to usable.
I recommend assigning this setting to one of your Custom notches on the mode dial, so that you don’t inflict these settings on your stills. They don’t affect raw files of course, but they do get baked into the JPEG previews that accompany those raw files. I have the above settings registered as C3 (along with manual control and a 1/60th shutter), so I can quikcly pop into my ideal movie capture settings.
