I was just in the middle of making a different video
on LUTs and general grading tips that you guys
have requested when I came to the conclusion
that there are a lot of complications when it comes
to exposing the Blackmagic Pocket 4K correctly,
and a lot of the information that's out there
can be quite conflicting. So, today I'm hoping to bring
a little bit of clarity into the mix.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and I feel the need... the need for speed.
So, I was shooting some test charts today
for that video I've been promising you guys on LUTs
and colour grading and for these test charts,
I wanted to make sure that I had the exposure perfect.
But here's the thing- getting perfect exposure
on the Pocket 4K is tricky. Let's say that you wanted to use
the middle grey method. Well, the ideal values
for exposing for middle grey
actually shift depending on which ISO you select.
And if instead you tried exposing to the right,
well, you have a similar problem
where the maximum clipping point actually lowers
as you lower your ISO. Now, if you're shoot in raw,
you can adjust a lot of this in post, and in there,
the "Highlight Recovery" tool can be quite beneficial
for this purpose. But unfortunately,
a lot of the information that I've seen
on that Highlight Recovery tool doesn't seem to be
accurately explaining what it's doing.
And if you shoot in ProRes, you won't even have
any of these options.
For instance, if you shot in ProRes at ISO 100
thinking that you would have
the same maximum highlight range of 100%,
you'd be wrong, and your highlights would actually be
clipped much lower at, like, 83%,
and that clipping would be baked into the image,
and you wouldn't have any of the capabilities
that the raw has in order to correct it.
But let me show you some samples on how to get around
these potentially confusing hurdles. First,
let's start with exposing to the right.
Generally the principle here is that you want to set
your exposure as high as possible without clipping.
But, as I was saying, the clipping point on this camera
actually changes as you change your ISO,
and doesn't reach the full 100% potential
until ISO 400 and beyond.
This is easy to test and demonstrate.
Here, I have a shot of a flashlight being shined
pretty much right down the lens.
It's super bright, and as you can see over here
on the scopes, we're reaching all the way up to 100%,
and this is with the ISO set at 400.
Now, look what happens if we bring the ISO down.
So, this is ISO 200.
And now you can see that we're set to
probably about 92, 93%, and that's the maximum point.
And if, we go down to ISO 100,
now we're down to that 83% that I was talking about.
It doesn't matter how much brighter
you make the flashlight, it will never get above that 83%
when you're ISO 100. I went through and tested
all the ISOs and I made a chart of all of the approximate
clipping point values for ISO 100 to 1000,
and then this resets once you go above ISO 1000
and starts again at 1250,
where 1250 has a lower than 100% point.
And it doesn't actually get up to 100% again
until ISO 4000. Now, this is a part of what makes
the ISO 400, the "native" ISO,
because it's the lowest noise level
that can still reach all the way up
to the 100% clipping point, so it's, like,
the best-balanced ISO. But unfortunately,
on the higher amplification scale,
this doesn't quite work out to be the same.
The native ISO up there is ISO 3200,
but 3200 doesn't actually reach all the way up to 100%,
it only reaches to about 97 to 98%,
and you have to go up to ISO 4000 in order
to get that 100%. Now, I think that maybe
they made this the native ISO because
ISO 4000 actually goes over a little bit,
and so ISO 3200 is as high as you can go
without going over at all. But if there was an ISO 3800,
that would probably be the sweet spot
in the native ISO. And you can see this
when you look at the dynamic range chart,
because ISO 400 has the four stops over middle grey,
and you don't achieve those four stops
over middle grey on the second gain
until you get to ISO 4000.
But anyway, now that we have this down,
we can learn two more things:
what exactly the Highlight Recovery tool is doing,
and how to ETTR. Let's start with Highlight Recovery,
because despite recommendations to the contrary,
this tool is not designed to help
with overexposed image, when you jacked your ISO up
too high and now you blew out your highlights.
Checking off Highlight Recovery isn't going to bring
everything back into spec and save everything.
Instead, it's designed to remove that artificial cap
that's placed on the lower ISO ranges--
like we said when you're at ISO 200
and you can't go above 90%-- it removes that cap.
Here, let me show you in-- we'll go back to Premiere Pro.
By the way, if you don't know how I'm doing
the Blackmagic RAW in Premiere Pro,
I made a whole video on using that.
I'm using that BRAW plug-in,
but I've also got DaVinci Resolve open here
and we can do the same thing over there,
it's really no difference.
Anyway, if we look over here now, this is set to ISO 100,
and we can see that the cap is set to--
like we said, about 83%.
If we check off "Highlight Recovery,"
we'll see that immediately it goes all the way back to 100%.
And we can see this just by looking at the flashlight.
So if we uncheck this...
see the clipped highlights all throughout here?
And if we check it back off...
the highlights are no longer clipped.
Now, this doesn't affect anything above ISO 400
to any kind of positive way.
So, if we set this up to ISO 400 now
and then uncheck "Highlight Recovery,"
you can see that the flashlight is already the way
that it looks 'cause we're already up to 100%,
and checking this box on and off
doesn't really change anything in the flashlight.
It does kind of give the image an overall,
like, hazier look. And I think this might address
some of the recommendations out there
that you have to be careful when using Highlight Recovery
because it can monkey up your image.
It only does that if you're using it at the wrong times,
which would be when you're using it at ISO 400
and higher or 4000 and higher,
when you don't need it. So, for instance,
if we take this image here and increase the ISO
all the way up to 1000--
well, yeah, now we get some more information
in the background there.
And over here on the scopes, we can see that our--
you know, our noise is much wider
and we're occupying a lot more space down there.
Now, if we check off "Highlight Recovery,"
we're not getting anything back on the flashlight.
But look at all the weird banding that's appeared
in this noisy shadow area.
Off, on.
And some people have experienced this with
their actual set scenes, where they go,
"Oh, look at the fringing and the banding in different areas!"
And that's exactly what they're doing.
Don't apply Highlight Recovery!
The reason why I think that they think
that they should apply Highlight Recovery
is because they've already lowered the exposure
in certain ways and then they can put
the Highlight Recovery on. Let me show you.
So for instance, say that we set this to 400--
which, like I said, does not require Highlight Recovery--
but then if you change the exposure values in here--
like minus one stop-- this actually accomplishes
the same thing as if you only had the ISO set to ISO 200,
where, again, that same artificial cap is introduced.
400 minus one stop. Now, if we check off
"Highlight Recovery," we get that stop back
all the way up to the 100% and the image is fine.
So, perhaps when people are having bad experiences
with the Highlight Recovery, they're lowering the exposure
and then putting Highlight Recovery on,
or they're trying to create
some sort of artificial highlight roll-off
by clipping the whites and then, you know,
rolling it off and then enabling Highlight Recovery.
But that's not what it's for.
It's for removing that artificial cap,
because those ISOs-- the information is already there,
because the information is based on the native ISO
and everything else is just metadata.
So, this opens up an opportunity
to make exposing to the right a lot easier
if you shoot raw, because if you use zebras to expose
to the right, they're immune to that lower clipping point.
The zebras are if they always have
Highlight Recovery enabled.
What I mean is that, say you have your zebras set
to 95% but you have your ISO set to ISO 100,
and then you put something in the scene
that has a luminance value of 90%.
That 90% is actually clipping on your ISO 100
because it caps out at 83%,
but the zebras won't show up on it
because the zebras are based on the native ISO,
or based on the 100% clipping point.
So, you can still expose to the right
even if you use the lower ISOs
because you can always fix it in post
with Highlight Recovery or by changing your ISO
because the range is there, because you're shooting RAW,
and so you can still count on zebras
for exposing to the right. And in fact,
increasing your ISO all the way up to 1000--
or, if you run the second gain, all the way up to 6400--
won't change your zebras either,
because the zebras are tuned to the native ISO
of ISO 400. And so this makes ETTR easy
because you can basically just set your zebras at 95%.
The reason why we use 95% and not 100%
is because the channels don't always all clip
at the same time. So, maybe one of your channels
is clipping but the other ones aren't,
so it's safer just to use 95%.
But anyway, you can just set it to 95%,
and then even if you're using lower ISOs
that have a lower clipping point,
you can just check off "Highlight Recovery" in post,
and then your ETTR still worked out.
Here's a quick little demo of how ETTR works,
in case you didn't know.
So in the bottom left-hand corner,
we have our histogram, and we have our 95% zebras
across the frame here.
And if we look at the 90% bar on the left,
all we're gonna do now is stop down our iris,
which we can see at the top,
which starts at f/1.3. We're gonna stop that down
until we can remove the zebras from the 90% bar.
That'll let us know that that is no longer at 95%,
and that it's below that, which is probably
about where we want it, because we want it around 90%.
But, at least we'll know that nothing in this shot
is clipping because the brightest thing that we have
is that 90% bar, and so if it's not clipping,
nothing is going to be clipping,
and so we'll have a wide dynamic range
and we'll be able to correct it as much
as we want in post.
And so when you combine all this information,
you can see why I don't recommend shooting ProRes
on this camera, especially if you use expose to the right.
Because those artificial clipping points
that I talked about?
They'll actually get baked into ProRes
because you have no Highlight Recovery option in post.
And so unless you want to memorize
all the different clipping points for each ISO
that you might use, ProRes isn't really an ideal option.
But, if you do have to use ProRes for some reason,
I would suggest treating this camera
as if it only had two ISOs: ISO 400 and ISO 4000.
Because if you use an ISO lower than that
and you're not calculating for the fact
that your clipping point is now lower,
you might monkey it up and then clip some highlights
that you did want to pull detail from afterwards,
and you won't be able to. Let me show you over here.
For example, this clip here was shot in ProRes,
and as you can see, we started at ISO 400,
so it looks pretty similar to this shot,
but as I go through, I lower the ISO,
and as the ISO gets lowered down,
the clipping of the white point gets lower and lower
and lower. And at this point we're at ISO 100,
and we can see over here we're at that 83%,
but now there's no way to check off
"Highlight Recovery" because it's not raw,
so there's no way to bring it back,
so those highlights are just permanently clipped now.
Finally, let me share some thoughts on exposing
using middle grey. The ideal middle grey zone
for this camera is just below 40%.
I think it's, like, 38.4%, but good luck being
that precise with the waveform on your camera or monitor!
Anyway, you would want to set it there and then,
you know, expose based on that, based on your scene.
But the problem here is that, like I said,
middle grey actually shifts by up to three stops
between ISO 100 and ISO 1000 for what the targetable zone is.
Unless you want to go through and map out
each precise middle grey spot so that you know,
depending on which ISO you're at,
that's the right middle grey to achieve
if you want to maintain, you know,
your maximum dynamic range or whatever.
To me, it sounds like a nightmare,
which is why I do not recommend
using middle grey exposure for this camera,
and instead recommend using exposing to the right with raw.
However, if shooting ProRes and at ISOs lower than 400--
both things which I've recommended against--
then it's possible that using 38% as a guide
for middle grey might help you achieve exposure
a little bit easier than trying to memorize
the different clipping points for the lower ISOs.
But again, this is an unnecessary burden
when raw is such a better option.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
helpful, or at least entertaining.
And if you did, make sure you leave it
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feel free to hit the "dislike" button twice.
Alright...I'm done.