One of the concepts that’s sometimes hard to understand is why mid range exposure is so critical with most video cameras, even cameras with extended dynamic range. Cameras that use Cinegammas, Hypergammas or even log curves like S-log or Arri Log may give you great dynamic range and extra latitude but it’s still vital that you get your mid range exposed correctly. In many cases, the greater you cameras ability to capture a wide dynamic range the more critical mid range exposure becomes. I’ve often heard comments from users of XDCAM cameras complaining that they find it harder to work with cinegammas and hypergammas than the standard REC-709 gamma.
So why is this, it seams counter intuitive, surely a greater dynamic range makes exposure more forgiving?

First lets take a look at a standard gamma curve. These graphs are not accurate, just thrown together to illustrate the point. The standard gamma for HD, REC-709 can be considered to be near linear. Certainly in terms of “what you see is what you get” the idea behind REC-709 is that if the camera is set to 709 and the TV or monitor is 709 compliant then we will get a linear 1:1 reproduction of the real world. However REC-709 is based on the gamma curves used at the very beginnings of television broadcasting where TV’s and cameras had very limited dynamic range. True REC-709 only allows for about 6 stops of dynamic range and as a result the version of REC-709 used in most video cameras is tweaked somewhat to allow a greater dynamic range in the region of 8 to 10 stops while still producing a pleasing image on most TV’s. Another way of increasing dynamic range is to introduce some form of signal compression. The simplest form of this in common use is the cameras knee circuit. This simply takes anything above a certain brightness level (typically between 80 and 95%) and compresses it. We normal get away with this compression because it’s only affecting highlights like clouds in a bright sky or a bright window or lamp in the shot. Our own visual system is tuned primarily to mid tones, faces, plants and things like that so we don’t tend to find highlight compression overly obtrusive.
When considering your post production workflow and grading in particular, it’s important to remember that in most cases whenever anything is compressed then some of the original data is being discarded. In addition if the amount of compression is non-linear (increases or decreases with amplitude) then when we add a linear function to that, like adjusting the signal gain the non-linearity is also increased.
Based on these assumptions, you should be able to understand that anything exposed in the linear part of a gamma curve will grade very well because there is no extra compression and gain adjustments will behave as expected. Now if you look at the graph of a typical standard gamma curve (as above) you can see that everything below the knee point is pretty linear, so anything exposed in this range will grade easily and well (assuming it isn’t actually overexposed). For this reason standard gamma can be very forgiving to small over exposure problems as a slightly bright face should still be in the linear part of the curve. However overexpose to the point where the face starts to enter the knee area and all is lost, you’ll never make it look natural.

Now look at the curve for a typical Cinegamma or Hypergamma. You can see that this curve starts to become more curved and less linear much earlier than a standard gamma. This is how the extra latitude is gained. Compression is used to allow the camera to record a greater brightness range. This extra compression though comes at a price and that is linearity. The further up the exposure range you go the less linear the response (it’s actually becoming logarithmic). The result is that even though you have more dynamic range, if you do overexpose faces and skin tones by even just a small amount they will start to creep into the non linear part of the curve and this makes them harder to grade naturally. You may be less likely to get those ugly blown out highlights on a shiny face typical of video knee compression with cine/hypergammas, but you must still be very careful not to overexpose.

Now if you look at a typical Log curve you will see that compression starts almost immediately. The name of the curve also gives us a clue. It’s Log so it’s not linear to start with, there is almost nowhere on the curve that is actually linear but it is worth noting that the best linearity is lower down the curve. That’s why when you shoot using log your exposure levels are normally considerably lower than with standard gammas. Middle grey should be 38%, faces will be around 45-50% as opposed to the more typical 65-70% of standard gamma. This lower exposure keeps faces and skin tones in the more linear part of the curve where they will grade better. In addition when you do go into the grading suite with your log material do try to use correction tools that will apply log gain instead of linear gain. Most dedicated grading tools should have this option, certainly Resolve does.
So there you have it. Greater dynamic range does not necessarily equate to more exposure tolerance. In fact it’s often the opposite. You might get better highlight handling, but you may find you need to be even more careful with how you expose. As we go forwards (or sideways at least) and linear raw becomes more common place then you will be able to shift you mid tone exposure up and down with a lot more flexibility as with a linear raw camera the last stop of exposure has the same linearity as the first, so in theory your mid tones can sit anywhere in the exposure range. Sony’s F65 is a great example of this. It has 14 stops of linear dynamic range. A face lit with a 3 stop range could be placed in stops 11-14 and would grade down to wherever you want just perfectly.