Shooting log, and when it helps
If nobody is grading your footage, Log is a downgrade you have paid for in care.
Somewhere in your camera menu there is a picture profile with log in the name, and somebody on the internet has told you to use it. You tried it once, the footage came out grey and lifeless, and you switched back.
That reaction was correct, given what happened next. Log is not a look. It is a way of recording that holds on to more of what the sensor saw, particularly in the bright parts and the dark parts, and it hands you a flat washed out picture in exchange. The information is all there. It is just not arranged yet.
Which gives you the decision immediately. If somebody is going to grade this footage properly, shoot log. If nobody is, do not, because ungraded log looks worse than the ordinary recording you would otherwise have made, and the ordinary recording costs you nothing extra to get right.
What is log, in plain terms?
Your camera has to compress what it sees into a file, and something always gets thrown away. A normal picture profile throws away the extremes: the sky outside the window goes pure white and loses its detail, the shadow under the desk goes pure black and loses its detail, and everything in the middle looks pleasant straight away.
Log spends the file differently. It keeps detail in those extremes and stores everything at low contrast, which is why it looks washed out on the camera screen. Nothing has been done to make it attractive because attractiveness has been deferred to somebody with better tools than a camera menu.
The trade is simple. Normal profiles make the decisions for you and the decisions are irreversible. Log postpones them and expects somebody to make them later.
When does log help?
Two situations, and both have to be true rather than either.
Somebody is genuinely going to grade the footage. Not apply a preset, grade it: correct it, balance it, treat the shots as material. Log gives that person room to work, especially in recovering a bright window or opening up a face that sat in shadow, and it makes matching several cameras considerably easier because there is more to move.
And the lighting is difficult. A room with a window in the shot, a kitchen with a bright hob and a dark corner, a stage, anywhere the range between the brightest and darkest thing in frame is uncomfortable. That is where the extra detail actually gets used. In a room with one lamp and a plain wall, there is very little at the extremes to preserve, so log is holding on to information nobody needs.
One thing has to be true underneath both. How much latitude log actually returns depends on the format it is written into: a ten-bit or raw recording gives a grade real room to move, while an eight-bit log profile, common on cheaper cameras, hands back far less than the name promises. If your camera only records eight-bit, test before you commit a shoot to it, because the detail you are shooting log to keep may not survive the file it is being stored in.
When does log hurt?
When nobody is grading, which is most of the time for most people.
Ungraded log is not neutral, it is worse. The picture is flat, the colours are weak, faces look unhealthy, and a viewer reads all of that as poor quality rather than as an unfinished file. Upload it as it is and you have made a worse video than the automatic setting would have given you, using more skill.
It also costs you care on the day. Log wants accurate exposure, and it is harder to expose by eye than a normal profile, because the flat image on the camera screen hides where the highlights and shadows actually sit. Cameras usually offer a preview mode that applies a rough correction to the screen only, so you can see something close to the finished picture while recording, and using it is not optional if you are filming yourself with nobody watching the monitor.
Two smaller costs worth knowing. Log files are often larger, and log footage almost always needs noise handling in the shadows, which is another job you have just given to somebody.
So should you shoot log?
Here is the rule, and it does not have an it depends in it.
If you edit your own videos and you do not currently correct colour, do not shoot log. Set a sensible picture profile, set white balance manually, expose properly, and put your effort into lighting. You will get a better result on every single video.
If somebody else is grading your footage and they have told you they want log, shoot log, and ask them which profile specifically, because cameras have several and they are not interchangeable.
If you are somewhere between, filming in a difficult room and learning to correct, shoot log on a test only. One recording, both ways, same afternoon, and grade both. That answers the question for your camera and your room, which is the only version of the question that matters.
Where does this decision actually belong?
Before the shoot, with whoever is going to do the editing, which is the general shape of every good post-production decision.
On one partnership here, raw footage arrived as ordinary .mp4 files for a long time. After a conversation with the partner's own crew it started arriving as log, and that single change is what made a real grade possible. Nothing was bought. Nobody learned a new skill. A setting was changed because the people filming and the people editing spoke to each other before the camera was switched on.
Which is the question worth putting to whoever edits your videos, before your next filming day rather than after it: what do you want to receive? If they have no preference, log is not going to help you, and that answer has saved you an afternoon.
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