The technical craft behind Sony's Cinema Line — the settings, levels and workflows that decide how your footage looks long before it reaches the grade.
Alister Chapman works through the FX9, FX6, FX3 and A7S III in the order you'd actually meet these decisions on a shoot. You start with exposure: reading zebras, the histogram and the waveform, and the reference levels to work to for a grey card, white card and skin tones across different gammas and LUTs. From there you set up the recording itself — full frame, Super 35 and 4K DCI scan modes, the real trade-offs between intra-frame XAVC I and the long-GOP codecs, and how to pick media that won't let you down. Then time becomes the variable, using S&Q motion and interval recording to calculate slow-motion factors and build timelapse sequences.
The focus then shifts to look and finish. S-Cinetone is explained from the ground up — the Venice-derived colour science behind it, and how a small shift in exposure becomes a creative contrast control. Stabilisation covers optical SteadyShot, in-body IS and Sony's metadata-based workflow in Catalyst Browse. It all comes together in Cine EI on the FX6: outputting a LUT to the viewfinder, exposing S-Log3 with confidence, and using EI offsets to trade highlight headroom for cleaner shadows. By the end you'll be making these choices deliberately, with numbers you can trust, rather than fixing them later.
