Atomos just released a firmware update for the Ninja V
that allows you to do this.
And this little toggle is something I've been asking for
for a very long time.
Let's get undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and you spin right round, baby, right round.
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So, if you've been following me for a while,
you probably know that as much as I love the Atomos line
of products, every time I review one,
I complain that they don't handle
the log recordings correctly
and it comes down to the difference
between full and legal range.
The Ninja V treats everything as legal or limited range,
which has values of 16-235 for 8-bit.
16 is as black as it gets and 235 as white.
Then, when you bring these clips into your NLE,
the editing software will scale them up and expand them
to fit the entire working space of 0-255,
which is full range,
or full data levels as its sometimes called.
This works the same way in 10-bit,
but the numbers are bigger. They're 0-1023 for full range
and 64-940 for limited/legal range.
The limited range is sometimes also referred to
as video levels. Now, this doesn't present a problem
most of the time because most camera profiles
are based on legal range,
but log recordings are a different story
and are intended for full range.
This is why your image always looks more contrasty
on your Atomos compared to your camera screen
when set to a log profile. And, it's not just a Sony problem.
It happens to Panasonic V-Log, Fuji's F-Log and so on.
Now, when you record log internally on an SD card,
the camera either writes the metadata to either
treat it like its full range or the NLE just knows to treat
those recordings as full because of the way
the editing software has been programmed.
But, that's not the case for the Ninja recordings,
either due to insufficient metadata
or because the NLE is accustomed
to treating ProRes and DNx recordings as limited,
but the NLE does that same scaling that it does
to all the limited files, but this time,
it causes the log recording to clip
because it's taking something that was already fully scaled
to the waveform and pushes it to the outside.
Now, if you've dealt with this before,
you know that there's different ways to solve this
depending on the editing software you use.
In Final Cut and Premiere, it's a bit trickier
because you either have to reassign the values
using a corrector or apply a conversion LUT
that goes from full range to limited range
so that the NLE scaling is useful once again.
In DaVinci Resolve, however, it's more elegant.
You can just tell it to treat the clip as full range
without the need for all that conversion.
Okay, so now that we know all that, what did Atomos do?
What I wanted them to do was do what Resolve does.
I wanted them to add an option to just treat the recording
as full range and write something in the metadata
that tells the editing software to do the same,
but they didn't do that.
What Atomos did instead was give you the option
to legalize your recording,
which is basically the equivalent
of applying the full to limited conversion LUT
that you use for Premiere or Final Cut,
but done right in the recorder now to save time in post
and make it easier for users
that are confused by all this stuff.
And this approach has other added benefits now as well.
First off, you can now correctly monitor log footage
as it'll it be appropriately flat and it won't be
really contrasty with the clipped whites
and crushed blacks.
Second, you can use the HDMI output port to deliver
this now legalized log signal directly from the Ninja,
which could be great for live events or streaming,
and these are benefits that would be removed
if Atomos had instead gone the metadata route.
However, there are cons to this approach too.
Converting your footage to legal range
means that LUTs and transforms like ACES
will not be mapped 100% correctly
because they were built on full range.
To show you what I mean though, let's jump into Resolve.
[Batman trumpet fanfare]
Alright, I've got a bunch of clips here to show you
and a lot of them are blue skies because I was testing
to see if the gradients were affected by converting
to full to limited in the recorder. If it would have
a negative impact on stair-stepping in 8-bit,
but there's also a few other things I noticed
while I was doing this.
So, first off, these first pair of clips here
are for "Legalize Off", so this is recorded the way
you've been recording all along with your Ninja V
and with each pair, the first clip is going to be
the internal recording, that's the H.264
and the second one, the DNx file will be from the Ninja V.
So, if we first just look at what happens if you don't
do anything to the original recordings.
This is what it looks like normally and you can see
it's pushed up, it's close to clipping
and it doesn't reflect the internal recording at all.
This has been an ongoing problem with the Atomos products.
And in Resolve, like I said, the most elegant solution
is you just right click on it, go to "Clip Attributes"
and change it to "Full" and then it looks pretty much the same.
And you get pretty good results
and there's minimal colour shifting and if you look
at the waveform here, they look pretty much the same.
However, with the new "Legalize On" function,
which is what we have for this next pair,
this is the internal recording
and this is the "Legalize On" recording,
we can see these sharp, segregated, jagged spikes
in the waveform. And, if we look at the overall colour,
it does shift the blue just a little bit.
It's definitely usable and overall, a fine image
and for the most part, I think most people aren't going
to be able to tell when you deliver this content,
but I do think it is worse than the full conversion in Resolve
and it's a sloppier workflow
because you're doing extra steps.
And now, if we jump over here and look at this pair over here,
and this was done using the Leeming LUT by the way,
so that's just applying the LUT, but I also did one over here
using ACES and it's the same idea.
This is the ACES applying to the internal recording
and for the ACES, I was doing "Sony SLog2 (Daylight)"
into "Rec.709". Now, if we look at that one
compared to the legalized
external recording with the Ninja,
we get the same separate spiked kind of thing here
and the blue tone again has shifted a little bit.
Now, because we're recording externally,
our image is actually, still, maybe a little bit better,
even with the legalize. If we switch over to the vectorscope,
you can see what I mean by-- if you look at the smoothness
of the blue gradient here on the vectorscope
and then we look at the internal recording,
we're getting a lot more jaggies, and this is probably
a 4:2:0 versus a 4:2:2 thing because we are getting
a better colour resolution externally.
There are those benefits and I think that if we look
at the banding here, you probably won't be able to get
a good sense of this on YouTube.
It's probably extra banded for you, but I would say
I can see maybe 20, 25 bands across this section,
where here, I only really see like 8-10
and then the next 10 are much smoother.
So, we are getting better results in general
just from recording externally.
It's minor and once you upload to something
that's like an 8-bit thing online,
it's going to mitigate it,
but it is a little bit better. Anyway, if we now instead
look at these two, which were done just by
manually using a curve, there's no LUT applied whatsoever,
and we compare the two, you can see that the waveform
looks exactly the same and the colour tone, I would say,
is pretty identical too. Now, we only have upside,
where for me, I can see the banding is more pronounced
on the internal and a little bit less pronounced on the external.
So, if you grade manually, there's no real con
to the legalize option, but if you use your favourite LUT
or you use an ACES workflow, you will notice
that it changes a little bit from the internal recording.
So, if you're trying to match internal to external,
the legalize option will make it slightly more difficult
to match. You'll have to do an extra step
that you wouldn't have to do if you grade by hand
or if you just didn't use Legalize
and instead used the "Clip Attributes" option
and got Resolve to set the data levels to "Full".
Now, there's one important thing to keep in mind
with this new toggle: don't turn it on
unless you're using a proper log profile.
If you use it with a standard profile,
it'll incorrectly scale your footage and you'll have
an overly flat image that'll suffer even worse issues
when it comes to applying LUTs and transforms.
So, to put it more simply,
do not use this for Cine-style profiles
like Cine2 on Sony or Cinelike-D on Panasonic.
Do not use it on HLG profiles on any camera
and definitely do not use it on full contrast profiles
like standard or portrait. Only use it on proper logs
like C-Log, V-Log, N-Log, S-Log, F-Log, et cetera.
Also, if you're a Resolve user, I probably wouldn't use
this option either, other than for monitoring
because it causes unnecessary conversion.
There's no need to go from full to legal,
back to full for editing and then back to legal upon export
and introduce potential remapping errors
and possible artifacts when you can just tell Resolve
to treat it like full all the way through the process.
So, for Resolve users, I think it's better to upload
the full to legal LUT onto the Ninja and just use it
as a monitoring LUT, which will give you
similar monitoring capabilities,
but won't impact your recordings.
You can use the legalize option, but it will likely
increase the chances of you forgetting you enabled it
and then recording it that way.
It's not the end of the world if you do,
it just won't be as clean of a workflow.
But, I'll put a full to legal LUT in the description below
that you can use to install on your Ninja.
By the way, does anyone know how to delete LUTs
that you don't want on your Ninja anymore?
I can't find a way to do this
and it's not mentioned in the manual.
Perhaps that's something for Atomos to consider
in future firmware updates. Anyways, all that previous
advice is just for Resolve users. For everyone else,
Premiere users, Final Cut users, live streamers
and event casters that are using log,
the option to now enable legalization while recording
is a time saving feature that is much appreciated,
at least until Premiere gives us the range control options
that Resolve has because any issues
that this conversion would introduce,
you'd introduce yourself by converting it in post,
but with more steps. So, this has the same cons
but saves time and lets you monitor better.
Also, when it comes to monitoring,
this update has brought several other
much appreciated additions to the Ninja V.
First off, and my favourite one, is now with "False Color",
you have a legend that runs along the side
that tells you the IRE values, the exposure values
for the different areas in the scene.
So, if you see that this area here
is a certain light blue colour
and you don't really know what that means,
well now, you can use the legend and go,
"Oh, it's between 58 and 77." So, it's much more efficient
for skin tone, especially if somebody has never used
False Color before. It's much more convenient
to have it right beside than have to use your phone
to look it up. Also, they've added some new anamorphic modes.
So, if you go through here. The "2x" was always there.
Now they have a "1.8x" and I believe the other one
that they added was a "1.25x". So, that's great.
There's also some new frame guides and grids.
So, if we go in here, I think one of the new ones
is this "1.91:1", which is good because I think
that's the width of a phone screen.
I think that's what the target is for that one
and then there's also...
"1:1", which is obviously square video
for Instagram posts and that kind of thing.
And then, "4:5", which is for the full size,
like, vertical posts for Instagram,
and then they also have "9:16", vertical video.
And they've also added a complete rule of thirds grid,
which is great and wasn't there before.
I always feel obligated to make videos like this,
in a good way, because you can't just complain
about something for two years on video
and then not make a video about it
when they finally do something to address it.
So, good job Atomos.
Overall, this is a fantastic firmware update
and I commend you for making it.
So, go update your Ninja Vs now if you haven't already.
But that's going to be it for me.
I hope you found this video entertaining,
or at least helpful.
And if you did, make sure to leave it the ol' thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already,
but if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
then it's probably your range that's limited.
Alright... I'm done.