By Christo Montes, Cameraman/Cinematographer – Auckland New Zealand

The new Sony FX6 is out and I consider myself lucky as cameraman since I was able to grab one of the first to arrive in Auckland, New Zealand. I immediately put it alongside my trusty FS7 and started shooting on it with excellent results. However, it did take a bit of time to get used to some different ways of doing things, one of which was the MLUT handling.

The FX6 does not follow the traditional system of the F5, FS7, FX9 of applying MLUTs in CineEI mode. It doesn’t even follow the traditional Sony way of doing things in Custom mode either and Alister Chapman has a very detailed and in depth post of how that has changed here .

The big difference is that now both CineEI mode and Custom mode have the same menu setting for changing the look and it’s conveniently named… Base Look/LUT.

In this new menu you will find the first 3 slots marked by the P in the beginning which contain the 3 stock Sony looks, S-Cinetone, 709(800) and Slog3. The next slots marked from 1-10 are the custom slots where you can load your LUTs from the SD card and keep there for using BOTH in Custom AND CineEI modes.

Base Look/LUT can be found under the Paint/Look menu option,

Paint/Look -> Base Look

or on page 5/10 of the touch menu

So don’t go looking for an MLUT menu or a way to load LUTs for CineEI. There is none any more. All image manipulating is now done with LUTs that are loaded in this new space (Base Look/LUT) that is used BOTH for Custom AND CineEI modes. But as Alister Chapman explains in his post, in custom you have the ability to change the look of the image while the LUT is on it, whereas in CineEI you can not. So the Hyper and 709 gammas of previous professional cameras are no longer there as options, but instead have to be loaded as LUTs. The cool part is that those same LUTs can be used as monitoring LUTs when you are in CineEI mode too.

And while I mention monitoring, in CineEI mode you can now choose your MLUT options independently from the LUT On/Off option in the Shooting menu. You can apply the LUT on the outputs, the VF/Proxy/Stream and the recording (for burning the LUT in) and this setting will also apply to S&Q and playback.

This took me a bit of time to figure out myself and admittedly it threw me off at first, coming from an FS7, but with the flexibility and ease of how LUTs can be created nowadays I find it an extremely simple and effective way of customizing the look of the camera and definitely the way to go forward.