Editing in log can slow down your editing

Shooting in log is a way of preserving as much of your dynamic range as possible, giving you more flexibility to achieve your desired look in post. Now that log profiles are available even on most prosumer cameras, it’s an extremely popular way to work.

The downside is that the image that comes out of the camera doesn’t look so great, so you need to add in a bunch of contrast and saturation in order to preview the image accurately.

This means that your editor will need to apply the appropriate LUT to all of the clips when editing. This can be annoying to manage, and it can also slow down the computer a bit, because it needs to first decode each frame and then apply the LUT before displaying it. It’s possible to avoid that annoyance by editing the log footage without any LUT, but it’s certainly not ideal.

The most common way to avoid this issue is by pre-baking the LUT into proxies. If you’re going to convert your files into proxies before editing them, then you can apply the LUT during the transcode process. That way, the editor is always working with footage that has good contrast and color and never has to bother with LUTs. Note that you should only do this if you are using a Proxy workflow, not a Mezzanine workflow.