Some lighting ?

I think you´ll get approximately what you want by using picture profile smooth or standard and dial down contrast, sharpening, saturation and noise reduction.. Some use -2 on all, but you have to try yourself to see what you want. Great link from Gabel, too.

Don't forget that movie productions use vast amounts of lights, bounce materials, light blocking materials, color gels, ND materials, time of day, etc, to get things to look good. Don't expect to get anything even close without at least using some of these.

In the case of movies, dynamic range is totally overrated. Dynamic range isn't what makes things "pop", that's "contrast" that does that. contrast can be as small as lighting up a face to make it brighter than the body or background. In effect, you are actually DECREASING the dynamic range of the frame but introducing more contrast.

However, in that clip, you can clearly see that the girl's face is illuminated by something from the left. Probably a bounce card or small light, or light from a building.

If you want it to look like Technicolor's "Cinestyle" then you'd expose properly and then raise the midtones with a levels adjustment in post. There's detail in the GH2 shadows (see video below).

The real question is why you'd want it to look like Cinestyle. Cinestyle isn't supposed to be a look for delivery -- it's supposed to retain detail in shadow areas and highlights for work in post.

@qwerty123: Very true, you loose a lot of dynamic range from using AVCHD straight.

@Fohdeesha I think one false suffices :-)

@Gabel You don't loose dynamic range. The dynamic range is what it is (about 8-9 on the gh2). You could get the same luminance rendering (aka "cinestyle look") as 5dtoRGB with adjustments in post.

@Sangye While I'm not a big fan of the high contrast, over-saturated look either did you use Cinestyle when shooting an already very flat scene? A friend uses Cinestyle exclusively on everything and some of his stuff looks quite dull even after post if he has shot a low contrast scene with it. It can be hard to pull reasonable blacks and whites without screwing up the mids if it is too flat.

@qwerty123: Allow me to rephrase that, using a Quicktime based editor (Premiere Pro, Final Cut) with AVCHD does "lose" dynamic range, in that it can't handle all the info. So the dynamic range from the camera is the same.

So my statement wasn't untrue, it was just worded badly, as Quicktime based players or editor won't be able to get the full luminance curve, hence the dynamic range is "smaller" unless you either convert or fix it (as info is lost otherwise).

@Gabel -" Allow me to rephrase that, using a Quicktime based editor (Premiere Pro, Final Cut) with AVCHD does "lose" dynamic range, in that it can't handle all the info. So the dynamic range from the camera is the same, but in post, some is lost unless you convert it or use this fix Andrew came up with..."

Sorry, but with that claim, you're only digging your hole deeper. While Quicktime has had a history of gamma pitfalls, that did not cause any loss in dynamic range, only an incorrect interpretation of image data. Neither Premiere Pro nor Final Cut 7 are "based" on Quicktime; they use it only as a codec interface mechanism. To get a deeper understanding of these issues, I'd suggest delving further into the documented history of Quicktime's problems:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams/story/quicktime/

Shooting during the "magic hour" or on an overcast day helps. It's natures diffuser.

@Gabel - "Using AVCHD straight for grading leads to loss of information."

LOL, I'll leave you to your "loss of information".

@Gabel

I haven't had time to investigate this myself. So I can't comment one way or the other.

I haven't observed this, but I never work in 8bit, which these numbers clearly come from.

@Gabel Andrew had not done his research in that article, although he touches on an interesting subject. 5dtoRGB does a gamma lift.

Premiere works in .709 - you don´t loose anything, except for worse output rendition (from h264) in versions prior to 5.5 (and it might be advisable to export through AE and / or do 5dtoRGB conversion for IQ critical projects). For instance you can notice interlace-like artifacts in high contrast areas on the red channel. You´ll notice how the detail is there, quickly, if you do a lift in premiere on a native h264; voilá enter shadow detail. There is also a feature in Premiere I recently learned about but have not explored fully; "Maximum Render Quality" which is set to off per default in the timeline. I usually select it in the export options but some tests would be appropriate for it.

Output rendition is tricky and a bit erratic, directly from Premiere. The most reliable way to do it (if you do it the quick way) IMO is to export to prores and do a compressed file from that in media encoder or similar software.. But that is not "scientifically proven" to yield the best results in any way; it just has the least hitches in my experience.

If you output a .709 file and display it in a full range player it will look washed out (compared to what you see in the editor); the blacks not really black..