Do ND Filters Ruin Your Footage?
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- Опубліковано 8 лис 2016
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Hi all, people often say to me that ND filters (particularly variable ND filters) ruin the colour in your footage...I HAD to find out if this is true! Don't forget to sub and more importantly, enjoy :)
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I'd be lost without my ND filters, I do lots of shooting outdoors, and find using cine 4 with a min iso of 200 works well for me. I love the shallow DOF one can achieve with ND's and I find if there's colour disturbances, it's pretty easy to fix in post, what with all that dynamic range we have when shooting in LOG or CINE.
Thanks Harv, I love your videos, always light hearted and informative.
Same here. Was shooting Cine 4 at a wedding when the sun came out as the bride was walking around the grounds. Was able to use the 70-200 at f4 and 1/125th using the Tiffen variable ND with minimal correction to be done in post (there is always a slight colour cast). Only other option would have been perhaps f10 and 1/500th which would have produced jerky foorage.
Which Tiffen variable ND did you get and how much? Definitely interested in one.
WoDewCiKZ WoZ ERe BLAdeRE FamEIER INiTE rhe rohu
Thanks, Harv! I look forward to these videos. I just got a 3 stop reduction ND filter for my 1.8 55mm Zeiss. I was out on some super bright days without one and needed to set the aperture to f16 with a standard profile and even still have a little zebra areas. Running around with my kids outside, I typically want to use f5.6 or even f8 so I thought 3 stops would be great. I think the filter footage looks perfectly fine... I'm not worried about loss of quality and it's white balanced anyway. My filter isn't variable though so I'm not sure if you can really see hatching but I seriously doubt it. FUN!
I bought a Tiffen 77mm Variable NDFilter and at certain point, it does changes your colors a lot. It gives you a strong blue or green tint depending on which direction you turn it. I think it would be worth mentioning it also depends on the quality of the filter, as I am sure there are ones available that will not give you this tint!
Thanks for all your info, Harv. Keep it up! Greetings from Mexico!
I'm using a set of 3 Haida filters, providing 3, 6 and 10 stops down, and really love them. I'm not using variable filters though, to avoid degrading the quality. I never noticed any issue with my ND filters. It's just a big cumbersome to change filters, but in situations where I can't handle it (like family vacations...) I just use cine 2, which is my favorite non-log profile (PP6 on the AS7ii). Great videos Harv, keep them coming ! Cheers. Franck
Love your videos ! I have a question: Can you make the same test, but with a normal Landscape shot? (without shallow depth of field ) And if possible a few examples :) would be so amazing !
When I ordered my A7S II, one of the first I brought with it was the Vizelex ND throttle adapter for Slog 2. I liked the idea of having a ND filter adapter as that was as close to having a built in ND filter as i was going to get with the camera. I did some tests with that and a dumb adapter - there was no noticeable colour shifts BUT the image appeared a little bit softer without an ND filter. I don't mind sharpness drop off too much as i'm often shooting 4K these days, but yeah, I read somewhere that most ND filters will introduce some sort of defect.
Correcting for exposure is sort of half the effect. I use almost exclusively to control the depth of field. Putting an ND on will allow you to shoot wide open aperture. If you were going to compare, you would want to change only the shutter speed so the DOF remains the same. Or is there something I don't understand?
You probably have a video that tells me this, but do you color grade in premiere? I'm wondering if you'd be able to grade the slog footage in final cut good enough or if you need the color tools that Adobe offers.
+TheInvisibleCactus I actually only use Final Cut Pro x for these videos, you can get plugins that rival the adobe tools :)
On my zoom lens 24 to 240 when i zoom all the way in with my filter on the image is so soft almost like blur. variable nd filter, im gonna get a non variable and check to see if it helps
Great channel my friend
NDs are great - but in today's cameras that have built in NDs - it often is an electronic process not a high quality piece of glass... also the new SONY ND feature is variable ND - I think I better do a test too !!! as usual - thank you Harv for bringing up the issue. :)
Utilizing both schott glass, white water glass, and resin filters both 4x4 and 4x5.6 in size I have found little to no noticeable difference in footage image quality provided you have quality filters. NEVER buy a cheap shitty ND (the fotga is aight because it uses I believe white water glass) most vari nds use garbage cheap glass that introduces horrible yellow and green color shifts. So far the only ones that are Lens mountable vs a mattebox I've found that have literally 0 color shift is the Genustech Solar ND & and the Genustech Eclipse ND (once you rotate it to maximize the polarity, otherwise you get like brown hues and tones in your footage unlike the Solar ND which has this ability built in to maximize polarity while the Eclipse you have to screw onto a polarizing ring so you can rotate it). Your video looks fine. It WILL look fine, it's just variable nds can mute your tones and cause "smoothing" and slight detail loss even in LOG. Check out Aron J Andersons video describing this. Love your videos Harv, keep up the good work and continue the discussion amongst your community :)
I love getting really intelligent and insightful comments, thank you :)
disagree about Fotga----I had to replace all of mine due to severe softening---Tiffens have worked out just fine; nice & sharp
B+W are even better!
why is there a minimum iso value with log profiles? what would happen if you filmed with let's say 100ISO in S-Log 2 or 3?
The camera won’t let you shoot lower, it’s tricky explain why...but basically the equivalent ISO values on logarithmic gammas are generally much higher. So on my a7s2, 1600 iso is approximately equal to 400 on a linear gamma. That doesn’t necessarily mean more noise, but still I’d like to see native iso of 800 or even 400 in log in the next a7s
thanks, this will make me try saving what I thought was a load of creamy unusable shots from my last job.
Just incase it confuses anyone the caption is wrong at 9mins - Isn't shot 2 always WITH ND filter?
The problem arises when you have a scene where you're using different apertures for different DOF's, and you have to match the shots in post - that can be tricky. Also, Variable ND's can give bokeh that funky texture e.g. @ 6:20 - I'm pretty sure that's the ND doing that - not that it's the end of the world. Enjoying your video series.
Hi Harv. What transition do you use on this video?
Racoon Jack Morph cut
maybe I'm not understanding something here, but wouldn't a scene not catching the sunlight (favouring a filter) and a fixed distance (no wall helping the different apertures look similar ) be more useful as a test? Really like your vids btw :)
I use a £15 ND filter. I watched this hoping to put my mind at rest as to whether ND was damaging sharpness, colour etc. That might convince me to buy a £100 Tiffen. I'm very happy with the video I get and have never thought "ND must have been on for that scene" because it all looks really good. Only artefact I notice is coloured lens flares when panning with ND on, green sometimes red. They actually look a bit cinematic. BUT I do *wonder* Get your tripod out and do some more tests, choose a duller day, compare same aperture with no filter to with filter. Just bang shutter speed to 1/400 (not real world I know) but just to see ND effect, then do a split screen. You've whetted our appetite, we want MORE!
+Chris Longley hmm I could do that, I'm looking to get the genustech nd so I'm thinking a comparison could interesting too (cheap vs expensive-ish). This video was more about colour shift than sharpness, I'll give it some thought :)
I could do this test myself but 1) I'm lazy 2) you do tests 3) more people would get the benefit of the results. You've got a good channel and one day you will find your Chelsea and your channel will be complete :)
Hi Harv, thanks for a nice video. My exprience with Fotga variable ND filters is quite bad. They shift colors quite a lot and they are unusable for focal lengts greater than 80mm. The loss of deatail and then even distortion of the image is very harsh. Above 150mm the filter is totally unusable, you will get totally blurry image.
Nice test. ND´s just give you more options in F stop ( the shutter speed might not be a option in video )
Part of the colors changing also might be because it is polarizing the light. Your effecting the sky and the plants. it will also slightly saturate your colors.
How many stops of ND?
Plz test NISI ND filters. They are very good.
10:15 haha, brilliant
See I really like the videos you are creating that's why I have subscribed but a suggestion that please be precise and get to the point as quickly as possible.
Have you seen any recent uploads?
Harv Video/Audio Stuff yeah,sorry didn't really saw the date it was uploaded they have got better keep up the good work
I'm a photography beginner.
I don't get the point of ND filters...
If it's too bright, just increase the shutter speed. No blurry photos, and all is well exposed. What's the problem?
This vid is about video, the rules are slightly different with regards to SS
the fact that the a7 series cameras have log doesn't mean there's a lot of room for pushing color. on the contrary - there is extremely little room for that as the 8bit signal just falls apart when all that data is stretched back. i think an external recorder is a must if you're serious about shooting in log for any sort of job as it provides way cleaner blacks and a more robust codec, at least
+Artūrs Rudavs mmm I'm not so sure, check out one of Dave dougdales recent videos where his friend (a professional colourist) compares 8bit a7s2 footage with 12bit raw and says the a7S2 log footage is remarkable
Harv Video/Audio Stuff yes i've seen it. a really good video that is but it was a very basic grade. thats about as much as you can do with it really until you start seeing excessive artifacts. i have owned the blackmagic pocket and the a7s mark1 and i can testify that xavc-s holds nowhere near as well as the files from blackmagic. slog-3 is not usable at all, internally, at least, if you wanna give it a nice and punchy grade
Says who they make it better
Reference footage shot at f22. You're ruining it with diffraction with too narrow an aperture. Search online three words: narrow aperture diffraction - sorry to be bearer of bad news Harv. You should have just upped shutter speed, no motion blur to worry about being at 180 degrees or 1/50 etc
+Chris Longley I know what diffraction is, but in the real world (with motion in your shot) what are going to do? Change your aperture or bump your ss to 1/*000th sec? That's why I filmed it this way, everything was considered
Good point about the real world. I'd have liked to have seen the test done at f18 where diffraction has yet to have a negative effect v sharpness and wide dof just to find out if the ND was damaging sharpness.