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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

Why are some camera shots so dull? Is that a HDR problem?

Yes I noticed this for a lot of the ground shots - looks like they've made a mistake and we're seeing the uncorrected log curve output of the camera, and they've forgotten to load (or enable) a LUT (look up table) for the conversion to linear.

It's basically just missing half of the image processing, normally you'd only output to that to a recorder if you were going to apply all the grading later in post production (which obviously they're not doing here).

See this random article for a bit of a rundown - https://pixflow.net/blog/difference-between-raw-log-and-rec-...

The camera also lost focus on the jet during the record where it went transonic for the first time ever (around 1:01). It looks like they struggled for a while to recover focus against the featureless sky because I would guess they had their lens set to auto focus, which uses a spot or grid of consensus edge detectors. There's no circular polarizer filter equipped because you can see window glare, and that momentarily caused the AF grid to choose the window as the subject because there wasn't (any?) a good enough stabilizer. For a relatively stationary subject like this, it's more reliable to pull focus manually because the camera can be jostled without confusing an AF algorithm. Even better to periodically use spot auto-focus to acquire the sharpest focal plane, then flip it to manual.

Long tele lens - lots of air between it and the plane, I'd say.

It was actually fine for the air-to-air shots but all shots from the ground/drones were very washed out.

Likely LOG settings in the cameras, a color profile aimed at color correction. If LOG footage is not color corrected it looks like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ap8k564N_w

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_profile

Somebody must have forgotten to load a LUT into the camera!

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