How I expose in LOG for clubs and festivals.
Episode 3 of the fundamentals series 🎥
Scrap the meter on your camera - it’s useless. The most common advice I hear is overexposing by 1.3 or 1.7 on the exposure meter, but in nightlife, that meter is incredibly inaccurate and inconsistent.
Monitor your footage in Rec.709 (using a monitoring LUT or gamma display assist), and use zebras to highlight any regions that might be overexposed.
Accurate, fast, and practical enough to actually use 👌🏻
Everyone goes through a phase of trying Cine2, S-Cinetone, bog standard Rec709 - just trying to find something they can work with without grading it. I did the same thing. Don’t get stuck there.
8-bit camera like the A7 III → S-Log2. 10-bit like the A7S3 or FX3 → S-Log3. Color gamut → S-Gamut3.Cine.
No CineEI menus? You can get to all of this through the picture profiles instead. They’re fully customisable, and you can adjust the gamma curve, color gamut and detail manually.
Next one covers how to actually expose LOG correctly - which is where most people go wrong after they’ve sorted the settings.
LOG looks terrible on the monitor, and you should use it anyway.
In nightlife you’ve got a massive range of light and shadows in a single frame, and it’s constantly changing.
When you shoot in Rec.709, your camera is throwing a lot of those highlights and shadows away before it stores the file on your card.
LOG squeezes more of that information in and lets you decide how to process it in post. It’s an extra step, but it gives you full control over that dynamic range.
It’s a steep learning curve, but every high-end workflow uses LOG when dynamic range matters.
Follow for part two, I’ll be sharing my exact settings in a couple of days 👌🏻
I’m starting a new series going back to the fundamentals - LOG, exposure, colour correction, audio. The things that come up the most when I’m giving feedback in the DMs.
Drop a comment or shoot me a DM if there’s anything specific you want me to cover. Episode one drops tomorrow 👌🏻
Nine years of muscle memory and I’m editing like I’ve never touched a timeline before. It’s humbling.
This episode is about keyboard shortcuts, the last piece of the puzzle before I can jump into an edit and start learning on the job.
Davinci Resolve does a lot of the work for you, with a fully pre-configured keyboard mapping that emulates Premiere Pro, but I still felt completely lost without some of my own custom mappings. It’s a step worth doing before you try jumping into the timeline.
The saga continues.
The UI is starting to feel familiar after the first hour or two. There are a lot of parallels with Premiere, and once you’ve spotted enough of those similarities, you could just about power through a basic edit without any issues.
Ultimately, I’m enjoying it. An unexpected benefit to this switch is the novelty of using new tools and new workflows - which is a godsend when you’ve done the same style of edit three times a week for seven years.
I highly recommend giving Resolve a shot if you’re in a similar situation; it’s free after all.
It’s a slow start.
I’m moving to Resolve, and the only way I can do that is by figuring out the basics before I get lost in 30 different nodes in the colour page.
Between FLOORONE and touring, I get through around 200 projects a year, and all of that needs to feel organised and structured. With that said, I think I’ve got a plan for databases and project management.
Please let me know in the comments if I’m royally screwing this up. It feels unnecessarily complicated.
They got me folks. I’m switching to Davinci Resolve.
I’ve been using Premiere Pro for nine years, and it works. I can’t complain, but we all know Resolve is better.
Thing is, when you’re using Premiere as a tool and you have professional work to do, you look at the software debate in a whole different way.
It doesn’t matter that Resolve is better, you just need something that works and gets you to the finish line as quickly and reliably as possible. That, for me, is Premiere Pro.
I won’t be leaving Premiere until I’m confident that I can use Resolve as well, if not better. I’ve made a list of absolutely everything I need to know, and when that list is complete, I’m making the switch. I thought I’d document the process.
It’s been a good run, but I finally caved in.
Part two of the audio breakdown - this one’s all about where to put your ambient mic.
There are many ways to approach it, some straightforward, some more involved. Front of house is the easiest starting point - low barrier, reliable, anyone can pull it off. From there it’s the booth, rigging around the stage, and if you’re on a bigger production, overhead mics built into the show itself.
If multichannel audio is new to you, part one covers the concept and how to capture a clean feed - worth a watch first.
Remember, many of the things described in these videos require advancing, permission, or both. Please don’t touch the DJs mixer without confirmation from the artist’s team and the stage manager, you’ll probably get kicked off the stage.
The festival audio deep dive 🔉
An on-camera mic is still a very valid option for a lot of shoots. It’s how everyone starts, and the workflow still makes it a great fit for a lot of run and gun club and festival shoots today.
That said, multichannel audio is becoming a standard in a lot of high end nightlife productions, taking a clean feed from the desk and mixing it with ambient sources. The result gives you a much fuller and cleaner sound, with the clarity of a dry signal with the energy and atmosphere of a well placed mic.
So, here’s an extended breakdown of how you can set something like that up. This was supposed to be a three minute video and the final edit came in just under ten minutes - so I’ve split it into two. Let me know if you want more of the deep-dives, because it’s way easier than cramming this into a 60 second viral reel.
Part two covers all your ambient source setups; that’ll be tomorrow 👌🏻
When I started scaling my productions and pushing into bigger shows, I had friends and mentors I could turn to.
I could call someone and ask how they rigged a camera in a certain spot, or how they approached a particular setup.
I was lucky to have that, but not everyone does.
So, I brought a videographer to Flanders - 23,000 capacity, 11 cameras - and we captured footage showing all the stuff I’d have wanted to see when I started.
Camera placements and rigging, coverage planning, full post-production screen recording, two different audio setups mixed down in real time.
This is the Production Breakdown.
It’s inside The Multicam System, and launch pricing ends tonight.
Link in bio.
An open call for any accessibility requests that would make The Multicam System and any future FLOORONE resources work better for you.
The best place to send them - where nothing gets missed - is my email ✉️
[email protected]
