GH2 film modes

mozes

that clip is just a short part.
the differences with the nr, you only see in the shadow parts
without adjusting the contrast it is indeed harder to see.

Keep all settings in 0 is the save site for daylight.
For low light, the i go to the -2 settings.
But to be honest, i am also still looking for a default profile.
Nature, standard and dynamic, are the one's i use the most.
I film a lot off sports, and thats color rich, and i like it when the colors pop out.

bentman

Mozes - Thanks for sharing this

Brian_Siano

Definite thanks again, Mozes. I'm looking for a good set of settings that'll give me some extra power in color correction. I started looking at the Nostalgic setting, mainly because according to the dpreview page, it had the widest dynamic range of the film modes... but the colors are a lot less rich than in, say, the Dynamic setting.

(I also ought to find a setting that's close to what my Panasonic TM700 shoots, so I can work with a two-camera setup without really glaring differences.)

Brian_Siano

Also, this forum discussion has a note that asserts that the subsettings have little or no effect. http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1041&message=40468755

I don't agree, but I don't have the techie expertise to appraise this comment.

_gl

@Brian_Siano, if I read him right he's not saying that they have no effect, but that they don't affect the captured RAW white balance or exposure.

oneday

any news about development of Film Modes Hack?

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@oneday

It is one of top priorities, just reqires big amount of work and time. Hope we could make it.

thepalalias

Here are my two cents.

I understand people wanting really vibrant colors, etc. but (if we are not talking about post but just what you can actually see without correction) the dynamic range advantage of modes like smooth and nostalgic do have an advantage over vibrant. I was shooting some shots before sunset over the weekend and in it was apparent even on the LCD how there was a wider range contained between the darkest shadows and the blown out highlights. Vibrant did not keep up and I do not use in scenes where I want to preserve a wide dynamic range.

Now, I am perfectly open to there being more information there to pull out in post, but I tend to shoot situations where the lighting gives VERY strong colors naturally and I often want the less saturated elements recessed in terms of viewer attention anyway. In other words, vibrant operates almost opposite to what I want: the bright colors in the sky start to clip too early and I start to lose dynamic range.

If you are shooting a scene where the colors are less bright to begin or there is a narrower dynamic range, I totally understand. And maybe there are advantages in post. But just in terms of what I see when I am looking at un-graded footage, I would choose standard or smooth to get closer to the look I wanted, without tweaking, in those situations. There is a simplicity to the workflow with that for me, but to each their own.

That is why almost everything I have shot for the last month has been done in either the standard or smooth profiles.

Once again: I am not saying that these hold up the best to grading. I have not been testing that. I am saying, if you are shooting things where you are already bringing saturation down to -2 in smooth or standard to keep the colors from clipping or are already getting the saturation level you want (or more) without boosting in other modes, you don't gain anything by using vibrant and you seem to lose dynamic range (at least before grading).

thepalalias

And here is the comment where @OnionBrain posted some great tests and thoughts on film modes.

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/47232#Comment_47232

modernhuman

@thepalalias first off, thanks for guiding me to this thread and for the audio enhancements.

If you don't plan on grading then, by all means, use the profile that looks best in camera. I do agree that Smooth might offer a slight advantage, with regard to dynamic range. But if any kind of serious grading is happening, Vibrant pretty much destroys everything else. It has so much color and the colors are a lot truer to reality. In grading, once you start to boost midtones and shadows, you start to lose saturation and the colors get weird. But because Vibrant is so color rich to begin with, the colors stay more pure after some serious adjustment.

I've been doing profiles tests at high ISO, high dynamic range scenes, heavy grading, etc. and Vibrant (-2,-2,0,-2) just holds up the best to everything. I also compared the 5D (Neutral profile -2, -2, 0, 0 and Technicolor -2, -2, 0, 0) to the GH2 and thought it looked overly washed out and maybe favored green a bit too much. The GH2 color is way more accurate, actually. It kind of reminds me of Kodak film vs Fuji.

I've only had my GH2 for a month, but I can't believe this camera isn't getting more attention (or maybe it's a good secret). It's really amazing. This camera is 700 dollars!

No_SuRReNDeR

Personally, I have the best results -for a flat film look when I'm gonna grade- with Nostalgic... bit of a tinge to it true, WB adjustment x/y can comp that.....but it seems to have more DR than smooth. I shot a feature entirely in nostalgic -2 all. That's just me and I'm weird apparently.

PixCanFly

@modernhuman Is color profile relative to a particular patch? Or are we saying Vibrant holds up the best to everything regardless of which patch you use?

feha

Here i did some film mode test, using cake 2.0 HBR PAL

Kihlian

@PixCanFly Settings with matrixes like sedna influence the colors.

modernhuman

@PixCanFly I'm currently using Sedna AQ1 A, primarily 24H (some 60SH), mainly Leica R lenses, and I'm using Sandisk 95MB/sec 64GB cards. Sedna gives you a little more room to play in the low level details. Which makes the more contrasty Vibrant hold up to grading better. The only reason I might use Smooth, at this point, would be if I knew I wasn't going to grade and / or I wanted a more desaturated look, and / or I wanted sort of an off sickly look (do some tests and look how it handles greens especially).

For now, Vibrant is king for any kind of post workflow, IMO. YMMV, gather info, test, see what works best for you, and throw away the rest :)

sdbest

While the testing is all very appreciated, but speaking as someone who learned cinematography with film, digital video is, in fact, a data acquisition process. It's not "photography". And, thank the gods for that. The key, I suggest, is not so much getting the best color or mood from the shot, as it is with film, but rather gathering as much data as possible--data that can then be manipulated in post. This data acquisition task should inform lighting and exposure decisions. To that end, to my eye "Smooth" seems to work best. Just sayin'.

RRRR

@modernhuman I'm continuing our discussion here since driftwood's thread is perhaps not the best place to elaborate..

Concurring - In my experience (and I've used Nostalgic and Smooth a lot). They are both great if you want a natural looking shot. You can easily make a preset curve to remote the slight green tinge it has.. Vibrant on the other hand favours reds (just like the Canons), and for a natural look (landscapes) one has to work the red channel. It's a bit like the difference between Canon and Leica/Zeiss. Maybe it's a geographical issue (more essentially the color of light) but to be the germans give more natural looking images. At least outdoors.

Vibrant is good if you go for heavily saturated, warm looks and want to shoot stuff with a lot of reds, oranges, yellows in them.. There has been quite a lot of testing of the profiles on here and smooth seems to be the best in terms of DR (with a slight noise tradeoff), whilst standard seems like the "middle ground" (overall clean or base profile), and Vibrant has little noise for what it does with saturated colors (pushed red channel) but also has less DR. I've shot with all and I still keep a similar workflow, because I don't have to fear going up in terms of ISO. Obviously this won't yield the best results in all circumstances, certainly not the best looking out-of-the-cam footage, but I know that the footage will be usable (which isn't always the case when underexposing, especially at higher ISOs). Needless to say I don't like the look of footage with a lot of applied noise reduction..

All this of course is also dependent on the kind of image your optics make. Certain optics favour certain hues. My Zeiss can behave oddly in warm artificial lighting (tungsten/halogen or similar) combined with smooth PP. It gets a very heavy yellow, greenish tint; even with correct WB. Nice for an "eastern europe" kind of look.

To conclude: In my opinion there is no easy way out like; this is THE best setting. If it looks good, it looks good - but it's good to keep in mind the overall pros/cons with each profile and try out accordingly for a particular means.

cbrandin

There is another way to look at this. In-camera adjustments are made before encoding to AVC (and therefore to 8-bit). Capturing the most data doesn't improve things if you end up discarding much of that data in post. It seems to me the best thing to do is capture using settings that get as close as possible to what you want in-camera so that post adjustments are correspondingly minimal - because you only have 8-bits per channel from the camera to work with and those bits should contain as much USABLE data as possible.

RRRR

@cbrandin That is true; and IMO it does strengthen the horses for courses-conclusion.. And it does also highlight the need to do it right from the off - however, there are also implications due to the lack of custom profiling. And I guess that is why we have the discussion at all - how do we solve the in-camera adjustments in relation to an intended end product that cannot be achieved directly out of the camera? And, how do we choose to get leverage to make changes in post that we want to make (without making footage deteriorate / or improve on what we can get out of the cam)?

itimjim

I don't think anyne will ever agree :-)

No_SuRReNDeR

I agree that no one will agree!

thepalalias

@RRRR When you said "whilst normal seems like the "middle ground" (overall clean or base profile)," I think you meant "standard." Is that correct?

RRRR

@thepalalias yes, you are absolutely right.. Sorry for mixing things up.

(I edited my previous post to make it less confusing)

7pc

As it seems there are a lot of names for the Film Modes out there that cause confusion I start a list that might be completed bei the owners of the other localisations of the GH2

In Germany the film modes are called MEIN FILM 1 MEIN FILM 2 MULTI-FILM CINEMA STANDARD DYNAMISCH WEICH NATÜRLICH NOSTALGISCH DEKORATIV STANDARD B&W DYNAMISCH B&W WEICH B&W

thepalalias

@7pc Good idea. Here are the equivalents in English.

MEIN FILM 1 = My Film 1
MEIN FILM 2 = My Film 2
MULTI-FILM = Multi-Film
CINEMA = Cinema
STANDARD = Standard
DYNAMISCH = Dynamic
WEICH = Smooth
NATÜRLICH = Nature
NOSTALGISCH = Nostalgic
DEKORATIV = Vibrant
STANDARD B&W = Standard B&W
DYNAMISCH B&W = Dynamic B&W
WEICH B&W = Smooth B&W

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