You bought a LUT pack. You dragged a "cinematic" preset onto your A7S III footage. Instead of looking cinematic, the shot now looks muddy, washed out, and slightly green. You blame the LUT, write a one-star review, and go back to color-correcting from scratch.
The LUT was probably fine. The problem is the order of operations. Specifically, you applied a creative LUT to log footage. Almost every "this LUT is broken" complaint traces back to this one mistake. Once you understand the workflow, the fix is automatic.
What Rec.709 Actually Is
Rec.709 (sometimes written BT.709) is the international standard color space for HD broadcast and web delivery. It defines two things: a color gamut (the range of colors your footage can contain) and a gamma curve (how bright values are mapped from sensor data to display data). Every video you upload to YouTube, every TV broadcast, every Netflix stream, every Instagram clip is delivered in Rec.709. Your monitor is calibrated to display Rec.709. The final mastering color space for almost all non-HDR work is Rec.709.
The important detail: most consumer cameras (phones, mirrorless in standard picture profiles, action cams) record directly in Rec.709. What goes onto the SD card is already in the display color space. You can drop it on the timeline and it looks right.
What Log Footage Actually Is
Log footage is recorded in a logarithmic encoding designed to preserve maximum dynamic range. The camera spreads its sensor data across a much wider tonal range than Rec.709 can display, then compresses that range into a 10-bit or 12-bit signal. The result looks deliberately flat, desaturated, and washed out when you play it back on a normal monitor. That is the point. The flatness is data preservation, not a finished image.
Each camera manufacturer has its own log profile: Sony has S-Log2 and S-Log3, Panasonic has V-Log, ARRI has LogC, Canon has C-Log (and C-Log2 and C-Log3), Blackmagic has Film and Extended Video, RED has IPP2. None of these are watchable on their own. All of them are starting points that need a transform to become Rec.709 before any color grading happens.
Why Creative LUTs Expect Rec.709 Input
A creative LUT is a transformation: take this input color, output this color. The LUT designer has to assume something about the input. Almost every creative LUT (anything sold as a "look" or a "style") assumes Rec.709 input, because that is the only standard that is consistent across every camera on earth.
When you apply a creative LUT to log footage, you are stacking two transforms that were not designed to combine. The math is wrong. The math being wrong produces footage that looks vaguely correct but feels off: shadows are crushed in the wrong places, skin tones have a weird cast, highlights blow out where they should not, and the whole image reads as muddy. Every editor has hit this wall.
The Fix: Two-Step LUT Stack
The correct workflow is two LUTs (or one LUT plus a built-in transform), applied in order:
- Log to Rec.709 conversion. This is camera-specific. It is provided free by your camera manufacturer.
- Creative LUT. Apply the style you want on top of the converted footage.
In Premiere Pro Lumetri: Effects > Lumetri Color > Creative > Look > load the conversion LUT. Then add a second Lumetri instance above it and load your creative LUT in its Look slot. In DaVinci Resolve: Color > Node graph > one node with the conversion LUT, then a serial node for the creative. In After Effects: stack two Apply Color LUT effects in the correct order.
The output is now in Rec.709 space when the creative LUT runs. The math works. The shot looks like the LUT preview promised.
Where to Get the Conversion LUTs
- Sony (S-Log2, S-Log3): download from pro.sony / Sony’s Creators Cloud. Search "Sony LUT library".
- Panasonic (V-Log, V-Log L): on the Panasonic V-Log support page. Free with proof of camera ownership for GH/S series.
- ARRI (LogC, LogC4): arri.com/LUT generator. Pick your camera and target gamma.
- Canon (C-Log, C-Log2, C-Log3): cam.start.canon LUT downloads.
- Blackmagic (Film, BRAW): DaVinci Resolve has the input transforms built in. Set the clip’s input color space and the conversion happens automatically.
- RED: IPP2 pipeline in Resolve, or REDCINE-X for export. Both handle log conversion automatically.
- Phones / GoPros / drone in standard profile: already Rec.709. Skip step 1, apply the creative LUT directly.
How to Tell Which Mode You Shot In
If your raw footage on the timeline looks flat, grey, and desaturated before you do anything to it, you shot log. If it looks like a normal, contrasty, saturated image already, you shot Rec.709 (or some Rec.709 picture profile like Cine, Natural, or Standard). Phones and consumer cameras default to Rec.709. If you had to navigate three menu levels deep to enable a picture profile called "Log" or "Cine-D" or "V-Log L", you are in log territory.
The One-Sentence Version
Convert log to Rec.709 first, then apply the creative LUT on top. If you shot phone footage or a consumer camera in standard mode, you are already in Rec.709 and the creative LUT goes on directly. That is it. That is the whole post.
If you want to see what a creative LUT looks like applied correctly (the previews on every Filmit category page bake the math in the right order so you can preview before downloading), browse the full LUT library. The previews on Filmit category pages bake the math in the right order so you can see exactly what each LUT does before you download.
Filmit Studio. $20/month. Every LUT included.
Tech Noir, Teal & Orange, Hollywood, 90+ more categories. Plus every Filmit plugin, overlay, and course.
