How Far Can You Push Sony ZV-E1 Footage in DaVinci Resolve?

Technology is getting so small and the quality is getting higher. So let’s see how the new vlogger camera from Sony is in Resolve. Let’s take a look at the rumored specs.

If they could bring this down to around $1500, I think it would disrupt the market.

Let’s get into it. So this was shot in SLOG3.

It was generously provided by the Instagram reels king, Jason Morris Photo.

Now in Resolve, I’ve already gone ahead and prepped my node tree, so let’s go through it.

We started with our CST to transform to DWG.

Then we are taking DWG to rec.709 gamma 2.4.

This gives us the un-altered log to rec.709.

Next, I will drop on my show LUT, which makes it look really wrong at first, but just be patient. The rec.709 needed to be really balanced first, before we can go anywhere with it.

One reason I chose this LUT was to see how far we could push this camera.

So now in my second node, I am going to use my offset (global) in the HDR palette, to correct the balance. And then I am going to drop the overall exposure a bit as well.

Now everything looks so much better. The skin is sitting where it needs to be, the image is balanced, with a bit more of a warm look, so the image is sitting in a good place. Then I am going to use my lift to drop it a bit and make it a bit more dramatic.

Everything is good now, so I am going to go to my look adjustment and go under my HSL curves and swing my yellow to get rid of the gunky yellow to get more of an orange. Then I am going to pull down on my greens to bring more of a teal look into the image.

Everything is looking good and we are creating a lot of color separation as well. We are also keeping our anchors clean, but still creating a nice split-tone image. Then under our luminance vs saturation, to clean up the blacks even more, we are going to pull down on the darker part, then grab it from the middle-ish and pull it up. And the goal is to just push it and see how much we can get out of it.

Then in my texture node, I am going to turn it on and it adds so much to the image.

So just like that, we are done. We did so much and pushed it so far, and the footage held up really well.

Just think about how far technology has come. This camera is smaller than my hand and shoots images that looks like this. If the MSRP is right, this will be Sony’s latest mega-hit. But with that, work hard, get obsessed and get possessed.