Phones with Log recording (ACES)

Log recording is a professional capture profile that shoots video to be colour-graded later: the image is deliberately written with a flat, low-contrast tone curve. That washed-out look is not a flaw but the design — detail in the bright and dark regions is preserved in the file instead of being crushed.

It pays off at the edit desk: a colourist can pull the look they want out of log footage without fighting crushed shadows or blown highlights. For someone who shares videos as they were shot, it is unnecessary — this profile exists for footage that will be worked on.

ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) is the colour-management standard developed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: it brings footage from different cameras into a common colour space, so that a phone and a cinema camera used in the same scene match. A phone recording into an ACES workflow means the footage can enter a professional pipeline directly.