Anyway, I’ve been searching for a winning tripod combination for my second camera to pair with the Sachtler Flowtech / FSB-8 combination that I really love. But I didn’t want to have to pay the top dollar that combination demands.

I really wanted to like the SmallRig Potatojet first generation tripod that I tried, but ended up not loving the delay in the legs locking when you release the squeeze mechanism, and also it’s kind of a pain to really level the thing in practice. For me, at least, there turns out to be no substitute for a good old-fashioned 75mm bowl.

So I’ve been looking for a set of carbon fiber legs that can give me the same never-bend-over-again convenience as Flowtech 75 at a price point I could swallow. I ended up finding a very well maintained used FSB-6 fluid head on Ebay for $625 with a Touch-n-go plate (my favorite!). And after reading a lot of reviews, I bet the farm on a pair of YC Onion Pineta legs that have a very similar action to the Flowtech 75 at about half the price.

I wasn’t sure the 75mm bowl of the YC Onion with work with the Sachtler tiedown that comes with the FSB-6, but it turns out to work perfectly. These two are a match made in heaven!

With the Flowtech 75, you really need a mid-level spreader to lower the legs without fiddling with them (it’s a two-step: lift the spreader, with straightens the legs, then lower them). But I discovered right away that you don’t need a mid level spreader on the YC Onion to do this – the legs are super easy to incline together and lower without a spreader. And raising the YC Onion is just as fast as raising the Flowtech as both have a top-of-legs release point.

And the YC Onion is one smooth operator. Those legs are dreamy to raise and lower. And while they may look lighter than the Flowtech’s boxy legs, they are not. They weigh essentially the same, giving a very solid base to this tripod, which I love. This thing is rock solid, easy to deploy, and fully pro in every way. And I gotta say they just look f-ing amazing with that FSB-6.

The FSB-6 fluid head just fits into the case that comes with the tripod.

The padded fluid head pillow that comes with the Pineta case is a very nice touch!

All in all, very happy with this combination and plan to finish out my career with this guy taking care of me and smoothing out my soon-to-be 60-year-old hands. A solid tripod is more important to me than ever!

And comparing and matching with Canon C500mkii

After shooting with the Canon C400 for more than a year, mostly in XF-AVC, I hadn’t really noticed noise to be much of an issue. But recently I’ve been shooting raw a lot more often, and I’ve been surprised by the amount of noise, really ugly noise, that leaps out from the shadows when exposing “correctly” even at ISO 800.

This tends to show up, for example, in an interview shot like the one above where someone is wearing a dark outfit. Everything looks great except the dark outfit is bristling with noise on closer inspection (see 2x short clip below). This can be tamed in post by adding some de-noising, but it’s not a real solution and denoising in post always slows things down.

I did some testing and it turns out that a genuine fix is obtained by overexposing everything two stops. The best way to think of this is to set the camera at 3200 native iso, and think of it as being set to 800. To be able to work with the image in the monitor, I created a +2-stop compensation LUT to make it appear normal, and boom, problem solved. (Download link below).

At the camera’s native 3200 setting, the shadows are very clean when the raw footage is overexposed 2 stops. Even at 128000, while there is now some noise present in the shadows, it’s still very usable and organic. But 3200 is definitely the sweet spot here for shooting raw on the C400.

By way of comparison, I ran the same test on my C500mkii. This camera has just one base iso of 800, so if it needs overexposure compensation it will be more of an issue in low-light situations than the C400 with its higher triple-base ISO rating options.

Result: The shadows are about half as noisy, but it’s a finer less ugly noise than the C400. The C500mkii needs +1 exposure comp to clean up the shadows in a roughly equivalent way to the C400 with its +2 stop requirement.

So there you have it. To get clean raw footage and match these cameras when shooting raw, I now use a +1 exposure compensation LUT with the C500mkii, and +2 with the C400. When I bring the footage into Resolve, the first thing I do after setting up a color-managed workflow is to bring down the footage on each camera using the HDR global level control, which displays real f-stop values, -2 on the C400 and -1 on C500mkii. And away we go, sharp and clean.

Download my exposure compensation LUTs for C500mkii and C400. Note these both use the Canon Monitor Transform (CMT) version of the Canon LUT which is best for on-set viewing while shooting Clog-2.