@RRRR @cbrandin I totally agree that getting close to the look in camera is key (it's another reason why Technicolor for the 5D is starting to make a lot less sense, given the codec).

For me, Smooth isn't usually 'close' to what I'm going for, in the final image. So in grading, I would 99% of the time be pushing the grade further, to get where I like, and that would result in less color (especially in the shadows), which I would then have to add back in. But that seems counter intuitive. I would much rather expand contrast slightly (the hack lets me do this easily), with colors naturally desaturating (from pushing grade in 8-bit), so that the overall color becomes more natural. Vibrant does that for me. Does that make sense? It's less overall manipulation and, with 8-bit 4:2:0, less is more.

Again, use what works for you. Certainly, great results can be obtained with either profile. I'm just glad there are so many knowledgable people, like you guys, sharing info for free.

Cheers :)

@RRRR it would be cool if we could modify the profiles a bit, but with careful exposure and grading, you can achieve, I think, incredible images. I've been using the Canon DSLRs for over two years and this camera blows them away, in nearly every aspect. People keep complaining that we don't have 4:2:2 12-bit, or 4k, but really this camera can do crazy things, it's remarkable, and it's here now. Instead of buying a Sony FS100 or Mark III, get a GH2 and put the same money into lenses, lighting, and / or a decent tripod.

Here are a few grabs from a test video I was working on. They are graded. Shots are Sedna A AQ1, 160 ISO, Vibrant, Pentax Super Tak 50mm or Leica R 90mm APO lens, graded in Apple Color, ProRes 422. Hopefully, in the near future, I will have some videos to upload. Right now, it's just testing, more testing, etc.

@modernhuman

the gh2 is a little beast, isn't it? :) re: profiles I'm guessing it will come, eventually.. and a lot of work will go towards squeezing as much as possible of the sensor into the stream.

I can really see why Vibrant makes sense for your workflow.. At least for the first 4 grabs! I guess you have quite different daylight than I'm used to. here is a short I made recently, where I happened to try out bkmcwd's 3gop settings and vibrant pp for the opening images:

In hindsight, vibrant wasn't perhaps the best choice as I could have had a bit of additional DR with smooth or standard for the extremely bright / high contrast shots (unfortunately, I wasn't carrying any NDs at the time) - although I would have been forced to choose how much of the highlights to clip anyway (boat / sea image). For the shot with the trees I had a hard time getting the greens under control without altering the orange hues in the tree trunks.. Suffice to say sunlight over here is very cold, in full daylight. On the plus side I had plenty of color information in the dark patches of ice (ice / running water shots).. I'll definately keep in mind vibrant for when I shoot things in late autumn / early winter, when there is basically only golden light, or late summer sunsets..

I used a 35mm zeiss flektogon for the water shots and a 28mm Lomo for the others.

@RRRR cool video. Not sure what the ungraded images looked like, but given your situation, I probably would have lowered exposure a bit, to grab a bit more highlight (the wide shot with the rocks, snow, and water, comes to mind). Then you could push up the shadows and still have a nice color density. But those are certainly challenging scenes to expose. Another trick is to low pass the image a bit, so that the whites aren't so intense, they become more grey (or even a color, if you low pass individual color channels). What are you grading with?

Overall looks good!

@jhero I used to use cinema for skin tones, but then I started noticing how I had to desaturate my highlights in post to deal with the yellow shift in them that just did not happen in modes like Smooth.

It seems like it could still be good if highlights are not an issue in the way you light the scene. But I try to use color profiles that are more flexible in terms of lighting.

I like how the highlights roll off real nice in smooth but I think it lifts the mid tones too much and you lose the "density" if you will, like a thin negative. I keep going between standard and cinema if I can control the lighting.

@modernhuman

They are not heavily graded.. Only moderately corrected. The shadows are already pushed.. basically the sun is coming straight at the camera on the left side, so it would be impossible to get the whole range of highlights (by exposing after the absolute highlights everything else gets close to black. I did manage to push around a raw still enough to get both highlight (most of it) and shadows (same place, not the same subject), so with a custom profile (with extended DR compressed into 8bit 4:2:0) it could perhaps have been possible to make it seem to contain the whole range. Low pass didn't work out so well with this scene (imo), but it does work sometimes.

Luckily clipped highlights wasn't wrong in the theme of the video! (I decided already whilst shooting that I could use them for this particular purpose)

These particular shots were graded in PPcs5.5, rgb curves and 3-wayCC only.. But I also use AE (ColorGHear) and Magic Bullet looks for some situations. It depends on how much time I have and the subject/the intended look.

Edit: I think another thing which made the still raw contain most of the highlights was the small aperture; diffraction tends to work as a diffuser.

@karl No experience with it, but the way I see it, your best bet would be using the custom Kelvin option in conjunction with the wb matrix.

Another way to go would be to preshoot some sort of water resistant gray card.

@Karl if you choose the custom WB setting, set it to 9-10k and then click "down" you can dial in more red/yellow manually. I think that will get you close without washing out your image. Also Infared can do weird things to an image like your talking about, maybe try a IR filter, or if you are using any kind of polarizer or ND filter without IR filtration it can give you a washed out look.

OK guys, but I would like to know what specically 'minus 2' in NR produces in the image: more resolution? more noise? less noise? less resolution? cinematic grainy? more or less details...? etc. Why not set it always to 0? Independent the other settings, lenses or patches, what is the goal of 'NR -2'? Thanks a lot. Paulo Leão from Brazil.

Hi Meierhans, thanks for your answer. I am doing a lot of tests while I'm filming a documentary (without a team, just my self to shot, capture and edit... and it's the first time I'm working with GH2...). It's hard! Sorry that my english isn't also so good. As I'm by myself, sometimes I need help and I find good answers 'here'. Now, the questions are: 1. If I'll have to do noise reduction in post, why I don't do this before with NR 0 or 1 or 2 in the camera? 2. The worst: I tried but I can't work with NeatVideo... I downloaded it twice but something don't works well and I can't reduce any noise with this software...

Hello BlueBomberTurbo! I'm using NeatVideo in SonyVegas 9Pro and I guess I downloaded two aproprieted versions to use whit it. But they don't work. Everybody says neatvideo is the best and I would like to clean a lot of images to see the results, but nothing happens... Thanks, friend!

Thanks, BlueBomeberTurbo! I was doing something wrong when using this software, but I found the solution last night. And now, with the tutorial that you send to me, I will work much much better.