How To Shoot With "S-Cinetone" On The Sony A7S III

In this quick video independent broadcast and video professional Paul Ream (founder of the Youtube channel extrashot) shares how he was able to get the “S-Cinetone” look with his Sony a7S III camera.

Let’s start with some background. For many years Sony has been criticized for the look of the colors coming straight out of their cameras and how “uncinematic” (this is not really a word, we know) they look. This changed with the introduction of the Venice Cinema camera a few years back which included a completely new color science.

Jumping forward in time, both the FX9 and the more recent FX6 includes the S-Cinetone color mode which uses the same color science as the Venice (although it is not a 100% perfect match because the hardware is not identical – see some notes on this here).

For whatever reason, until now Sony had kept the S-Cinetone color mode to its Cine line of cameras and did not offer this option to any of the A7/A9 cameras. For those working with an A7S III as a b or c camera on set alongside an FX9 or FX6 and shooting with S-Cinetone, this can pose an issue when trying to match colors in post.

Ream, after doing lots of in-depth testings seem to be able to set the A7S III in a way that will very closely (we don’t want to oversell it so we won’t say identically) match the S-Cinetone on the FX6/FX9 cameras and he was kind enough to share these settings in this video for everybody to try (and maybe even improve upon).

Here are the settings for the A7S III (starting from 5:18 in the video above).

Black Level: -10
Gamma: Cine4
Black Gamma: Range Wide, Level -1
Knee: Mode Manual, 100%, Slope 0
Color Mode: Pro
Saturation -1
Color Phase: -1
Color Depth: R: +1 G; +2 B: 0 C: +1 M: +1 Y: +1
Detail: Level -7

Many thanks to Ream for this work – let us (and him) know how close he got this. And we can only hope that Sony will eventually come up with a firmware update for the A7S III that will give us a true S-Cinetone on the A7S III.

You can watch more HDSLR and video techniques on our dedicated HDSLR channel here on LensVid.

* Special thanks to our friends over at newsshooter for introducing us to Ream’s great channel through their post.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.