Featured Customer | Jose L Ramos Serrano Color Grading Red Sea Corals

This video features some amazing dives from the south route of the Red Sea, in Egypt. More remote than the north route, the corals and wildlife here is even better. Video shot with the Sony a1 and Zeiss 16-35mm f/4 and Ikelite 200DL housing.

Color Grading

In the color department, I feel like I have nailed down the right exposure for the color profile SLOG 3. Having the footage exposed correctly gives you a more precise and wide range of color for correcting in post. With the 200DL housing and Sony custom button mapping I was able to adjust settings pretty quickly in the field.

I also tested the color mode of the Sony a1 S-Gamut3.Cine, instead of the default S-Gamut3. My impression is that the greens are pretty wild and hard to color correct with the default S-Gamut3, being S-Gamut3.Cine a little easier to adjust on Premiere.

White Balance

Another key aspect that I think I have improved is the white balance. There wasn’t much time to do custom white balance on the field, so I relied on the Sony a1 “underwater auto.” One important step was to lock the white balance, to avoid having the white balance changing during my shot. This is especially important when recording things that move through the light like sharks or dolphins. To work around this I mapped “lock white balance” to the AEL button of the Sony a1. This button is very easily accessible from the 200DL rig.

Once the white balance is stable, finding the desired white balance in post is totally doable with the Sony a1 XAVC S-I file format. Not raw but with very little compression, this is a good compromise without having to add an external monitor.

Color grading the Red Sea beautiful corals is a treat. The fact that they are so colorful makes you push the grading to get the different tonalities between them.

This is my second trip with the Sony a1 and Ikelite 200DL rig. I can’t be more in love with this underwater housing and the compact dome. Everything is where I want it to be, and the compact dome is so agile that even free diving with dolphins was easy and fun.

Jose L Ramos Serrano is a computer graphics artist. As a child he was introduced to 3D animation software and he's been passionate about it ever since. Jose began his career as a freelance artist and now works for Pixar, his dream come true. When he's not in the animation studio you can find him underwater diving and developing his newest passion - underwater videography. He uses the Sony a1 inside an Ikelite Underwater Housing with the Sony Zeiss 16-35mm f4 lens inside the Compact Dome. Check out more of Jose's animation work on his website, and follow his Instagram @jlramos3d for more of his underwater adventures.