LAM Guides · Pro tools
All four of these are borrowed straight from real cinema cameras, not invented by LAM. If you've seen them in a camera app and weren't sure what they actually do, here's the jargon-free version.
On a small phone screen it's genuinely hard to tell whether an eye or a face is actually in focus. Focus peaking outlines the areas with the highest edge-contrast in the frame — in other words, whatever's currently sharpest — in a coloured line, usually red or yellow, updated live. Watching that outline move as you adjust manual focus is the fastest way to confirm you nailed the subject, without zooming into playback afterward.
Zebra draws a moving diagonal stripe pattern over exactly the pixels crossing a chosen brightness threshold (usually set near clipping/blown-out white). It's how professional camera operators check exposure without reading a number — seeing zebra stripes crawl across someone's face means dial the exposure down now, before that area permanently loses detail that can't be recovered in post.
Where zebra flags one threshold, false colour recolours the entire frame using a reference palette (each colour maps to a specific brightness range — pink often means correctly exposed skin, red means blown out, blue means crushed shadow detail). Looking at a false-colour view tells the operator the exposure state of the whole scene at a glance, without reading a histogram.
24 frames per second is cinema's standard frame rate (as opposed to the 30fps most casual video defaults to) — shooting at 24fps changes how motion feels before colour even enters the picture.
LOG is a recording style that's deliberately flat and low-contrast — footage looks grey and unappealing straight out of the camera. That's not a bug: recording flat preserves more detail in both shadows and highlights than the camera would show if it applied full contrast live — that detail only "appears" once you grade it afterward. "Honest" here means the LOG file is genuinely flat by a measurable contrast curve, not a grey-tinted filter pretending to look "cinematic" while throwing away the extra detail it's supposed to preserve.
Why these four tools are free in LAM: they're measurement/monitoring tools, not aesthetic effects — they help you shoot correctly in the first place, they don't create a "film look" on their own. Kept separate from the paid catalogue (film stocks, LUT export) because they belong to a different category — technical tooling, not creative content.