@yak

Thanks for posting your LUT. I don't have many material recorded in CineD 0,-5-5-5,0 right now, but will try a few test shots soon and let you know what I think. Right now, my first impression is this LUT does a little 'grading'. Shot's seem a little 'dark mood style'. By accident I applied both your LUT and Noam Kroll's one and find the result very nice :)

Let me get more scenes. Again, thanks or sharing your thoughts and LUT.

I'm on Portrait. -5-3-5-3 0, 16-235, Shadows 0 Lights +1. It's the best compromise after 1 year of tests.

Yes.

If you shoot in MOV format, use either 16-235 or 0-255. If you shoot MP4, use 16-235. Premiere doesn't read MP4 files in 0-255 correctly.

Sure, but then you're not using the Rec.709 encoding function. You're using an a modified or adjusted version of the Rec.709 encoding function.

In typical production practice, the Rec.709 encoding function is completely ignored. The camera manufacturer comes up with whatever display rendering it wants and uses some aspects of the Rec.709 digital representation, for viewing according to Rec.1886 & Rec.2035, or according to sRGB. The rendering is different enough from Rec.709 that Rec.709 is not even mentioned.

There are cameras that actually start with the Rec.709 transfer function and then apply their own adjustments like contrast, knee, etc. When you set the adjustments to zero, you get Rec.709. These cameras for the most part list Rec.709 in their menus.

A display-referred color space, by definition, specifies the relationships between color values and the colors generated by a display. Rec.709 does not do this, and thus is not display-referred, implicitly or otherwise. Poynton was wrong to say it is. His confusion comes from the fact that images in a display-referred color space are supposed to be rendered for display. Rec.709 images are rendered for display. But that doesn't make them display-referred. He has conflated these concepts. Rec.709 is a bit of an oddball color space for being both rendered for display and scene-referred but not display-referred.

If you really care, I suggest reading https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html . Some of the numbers are wrong, but the explanation is correct, though hard to understand. I'd suggest also reading the RIMM/ROMM paper, http://www.photo-lovers.org/pdf/color/romm.pdf , which explains the difference between scene-referred and display-referred and also talks about display rendering. Note that neither RIMM nor ROMM are the analog of Rec.709: RIMM is scene-referred and unrendered; ROMM is display-referred and rendered. And if you care about color, make sure you understand the CIE 1931 XYZ color space really well. All of these other color spaces are defined in terms of XYZ.

Decided to get away from the CINE D profile and go with Portrait for this test. (Everything still dialed down to -4.) Many have commented that the Portrait settings renders caucasian skin better than CINE D. Anyway...aside from the god-aweful banding in the beginning moon rise....any and all input is welcome.

@balazer The GH4 shoots in sRGB or Adobe RGB colour space no matter what the contrast is. Colour spaces merely define the limits, not what is recorded. BTW gamma is not defined in rec709 but is commonly accepted as 2.35 for the EBU standard. I can't recall what is accepted for SMPTE standard.

"Shooting flat in REC709 space" is an oxymoron. The Rec.709 standard renders images in a specific way, with normal contrast. If the contrast is altered, it's not Rec.709.

The GH4 doesn't have any Rec.709 output option. Rec.709 is something you see on professional camcorders. Consumer cameras pretty much all render images in some non-standard way that the manufacturer came up with. That's part of the reason for each different manufacturer's cameras having a different look.

The GH4's Cinelike D is decidedly not Rec.709. It has reduced contrast applied in a funky way that will be difficult to correct without a LUT. So by itself, I'd say there's no advantage to Cinelike D. But good LUTs exist, to transform to a rendered image or to scene referred. So in that sense Cinelike D can be an advantage.

Getting a bit technical on Cinelike D, that was a gamma curve option on some older professional Panasonic camcorders. It has lower contrast than Rec.709, and all you need to do to transform it to a rendered image is to add some contrast with a curve. But Panasonic seems to have screwed up the implementation on the GH4. No curve can transform it to a properly rendered image. You need a series of curves and matrix transformations.

I notice that if I keep my shaprness at 0 the downscaled 4 footage looks good, if however I leave my sharpness at 0 and shoot footage at 1080p out of camera with no downscaling I do notice some aliasing. This change of resolution is something I have to do while on a shoot for slow motion but in these cases it may be worth turning the sharpness down to -3 for the 1080p footage that is not going to be downscaled?

I get aliasing when I downscale 4K footage until I bring sharpness down to -3. At this value, all my aliasing disappears - double checked on grade 1 HD broadcast monitors at work.

I'm a Sharpness Zero guy. I do play with other settings from time to time, but sharpness is usually left alone.