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I'm pretty much a noob to grading as well, but this is my usual CC workflow (all just using native FCPX colour board etc., no LUT's or FCPX presets). Bring up the luma waveform (I find it really important), and go to the exposure board: Bring the highlights as close to 100 as possible without blowing anything. If there is just one small highlight that has a way bigger spike than all the rest, I sometimes ignore it and let that get blown (bring the others up to 100) Bring the lows down to "0", then I always notch it up quite a bit (between +2 and +10 probably). I then use the midtones to darken the image in the shadows. If I can get the balance right, I find that this tends to give detail in the shadows without sacrificing contrast. It also allows a little colour into the shadows, which seems to give a greater sense (illusion?) of dynamic range. I don't bother with scopes for saturation: I drag the global slider all the way up then gradually bring it down to where the colours don't look garish. Then I finesse with the high/mid/low sliders. Very often I find desaturating the shadows, bumping the mids a little, and really pushing the highlights (creating a diagonal pattern) results in a natural but punchy look that I like. Less regularly I will push the shadows and highs, and drop the mids (creating a "V" pattern). I only use the scopes for the colour board if I'm trying to get an accurate skin tone: I almost always leave the global slider where it is and play around with opposing the highs and lows (complimentary colours). This is the part I find least formulaic - what works is completely dependent on the specific shot. Its fun though. I also watch out for the image breaking up if I'm being very enthusiastic with the sliders. I'll then usually go back to the exposure board and push it around until I like what I see, without worrying too much about the waveform. The above was my workflow for my D5300 slow-motion test (which I know you've already seen Skip). It's very heavily graded, and I'm actually really pleased with how it came out. Shot with the in-camera 'Neutral' profile with contrast right down:

I was trying to keep them all to four letters, dammit! :D But I think BMPCC is probably better (and certainly used more), you win.

One other thing I wish was a bit different about this forum is I wish people would post examples from their own work/tests more. I think this would be particularly helpful/useful on this thread. I also think it might lower the likelihood of threads descending into polarised battles over who is right and wrong about this or that so much. It takes a bit of humility to open your work up to criticism/analysis and hopefully people would be more constructive in their criticism, and acknowledge that taste comes into the equation a bit more often. Just a thought.

The best sharpening tool is the one in Neat Video & it also de-noises the best as well. In Motion there is an Un-Sharpen tool (& loads of other options/filters that aren't in FCPX), which you can make into a plugin or go to Alex4D's site & use his free one. Also, remember that applying contrast to a scene will also sharpen up your footage, especially Local Contrast (but i don't think FCPX has that tool, maybe its in Motion). There's lots of debate about how much sharpness to use in-camera & i found it all depended on the type of shot: Close-ups - no sharpening Medium Shots - +1/2 from off Wide Shots - +2/3 from off (This was Canon & not GH) Testing is the sure fire way to see what you like or what works best. There was a video where someone showed the different options & i think they concluded that completely off was not the way to go (holding breath & waiting for the expert detractors to jump down my throat).

I am not the biggest fan of full frame video. Perhaps because it has been overused since the Canon 5d2 when we came from one extreme (small sensor camera) to another extreme with full frame. The habit of completely blurring the background until the subject was like floating in a mist and more than often being out of focus if he moved 5 cm in front or back was really annoying. I think that the Apsc Cine 35mm look is a good balance between subject isolation and focus. If an actor is in an environment he should at least be part of it.

Depends on the camera. Make your own tests. There is a free Motion template (to be used as an effect in FCP X) that can be used subtly (not like in this demo), and it seems to sometimes do better than just "sharpen":

This is a very interesting topic and I agree that it would be nice to see more discussions about this kind of stuff rather than (or in addition to!) the tech side of things on here. I recently made the switch from a Canon 600D to a Panasonic GH3. I really like the results so far but I haven't had any chance to play around with different camera settings, grading etc. I often shoot out in the nature as I'm focussing on Mountainbiking right now. So I often shoot in dark forests yet the sky is very bright, so dynamic range is a big issue and the sky is almost always blown out if I want to keep details on the ground/trail. So here's my workflow (FCPX) so far... any tips to improve the workflow would be greatly appreciated! - I try to avoid blown out skies and too contrasty scenes altogether and I tend to expose to the right - I also use a very flat picture style, although I don't dial sharpness down quite as much as I used to - after importing the files, I make minor exposure adjustments to sort of balance the footage - then I add the Teal and Orange-filter that is integrated in FCPX - the filter is usually too strong for my taste, so I dial down the intensity a bit - then I take another look at exposure, saturation and colour and make some more minor adjustments until I get a pleasing result - I usually tend to bring up the exposure in the highlights a bit (this boosts the brightness of the entire image) and also boost the saturation in the midtones a bit (so that the rider pops out a bit more) - last step is to add a little bit of sharpness (usually around +3 in FCPX) Recently I also tried to emulate the Teal and Orange-filter by pushing the shadows into cyan and highlights into yellow/orange. This resulted in a slightly nicer image because this doesn't crush the midtones as much as the built-in filter. Now my problem is that when adding the filter, the blacks and dark colours get crushed so there's not a lot of detail left in these areas (which in my case tend to be the trail and the trees). When I bring up the dark areas by adjusting the exposure, there's a ton of noise in these areas. Also, I'm not too happy with the sharpening tool of FCPX. Would it be better to dial up the sharpness in camera a tiny bit (from -5 to -2 for example) as long as the footage isn't moiré-plagued? I don't have experience with LUTs at all, never used them before. How does the workflow change when using LUTs? As far as I understand, the camera needs to have a specific profile to properly work with LUTs (cinegamma for example, which is only found in more expensive cameras) but having a flat picture profile in a cheaper camera (GH3, T3i etc) will work the same? Do I apply the LUT after doing the colour adjustments INSTEAD of using a colour correction filter such as Teal and Orange? Or do I apply the LUT IN ADDITION to the colour correction filter? Looking forward to hearing your feedback... thanks a ton in advance! -Moritz

I found out for myself: Grading luma (my first primary CC step as well) is easier for me when I have a grayscale image. Where should the midtones be? Since I know the old Color well and played around with Resolve (guided by vanHurkman's Lynda tut), I know that it's best to follow the processing logic of primarily optimizing all values. In the first step ("Color 1") I want to see every detail. In a later step ("Color x") I decide whether I go for a pseudo HDR look or i.e. crush the blacks for effect. Therefore I first go to the saturation tab and pull all color from the image before switching to the exposure tab. I also tried LUT utility and Osiris. Like skiphunt, I found a mix of some LUTs with my pre-"graded" images pleasing. Not sure what to think about that. Whatever helps? My goal is to be able to find the right look all by myself. I think color is the most demanding craft, and I'd like to know what it's all about (see controversial discussion >here).

A lot of the film look has to do with 3 trucks worth of lighting, modifiers, gels, cranes and dollies. It has to do with set designers who carefully pick colors and furniture. It has to do with story-board artists who pre-visualize what will best convey the intent of the scene. It has to do with colorists, or film graders. It has to do with actors hitting their marks. It has to do with wardrobe. I would make an argument that any camera only contributes 5% to the "film" look.

Here's some more readings. Cheers. http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?300214-Canon-1DC-crop-modes-surprise! The 4K mode is quite sharp, it didn't show any aliasing and while only 8bits (too bad) it becomes a 444 signal once resampled to 1080p, which isn't bad right?

What does chocolate taste like? Sweet? What does sweet taste like?(not trying to sound rude) You know it when you taste it. I would say that filmic, which is a term I use a lot when talking about video is: Has A Surreal feel to it, dream like, definitely not in the present, different from real life Unlike the immediate presence of being "live" whether being live in person or on something like television or video. Plus the other qualities mentioned above DR, sometimes shallow DOF etc.

Monday.

I recently re-watched them as well & it was good to refresh my memory. I haven't used any LUTs, but will upgrad my OS & give his plugin a go. I always start by getting the Exposure levels & WB how i want them. Then if i add a preset/plugin or LUT, in your case, you can go back a tweek stuff to your taste. Just don't forget to use the scopes etc... Also, you can make your own custom plugins for FCPX in Motion. This guy has some really good free plugins: http://www.alex4d.com/ http://blog.alex4d.com/fcpx/ Really like some of his colour effects plugins.

Dynamic Range Perfect blacks Motion and, unfortunately for us digital shooters, just a certain magic that I can only put down to the chemical reaction.... it will never fully be recreated digitally.

All engineers for the broadcast industry strife to let their cameras (lenses, post-pipelines etc.) reproduce reality as best as possible. All fictional filmmakers try to make their images look as stylized as possible. The approach is different. Reality is where you park your car.

There is another tool that is being, or will be marketed by a professional colorist. Shian Storm is also, in a more limited way, doing some empirically derived filmstock transformations in his ColorGHear suite. It may not always be FC but there is a lot of "film conversion" going on, even in professional circles. Film and the way it renders tonality and color will haunt digital acquisition for a long time to come. They've yet to build a digital camera that can hold a candle to the best work being done in celluloid even today. Anyway, yeah, people asked for "raw" but people don't ask for the highly imperfect and incomplete log-to-lin setup that's most commonly being used. There is too much effort spent simply trying to manage up an honest and true rendition of what light the camera saw and the relative values present in a scene. Getting to an appropriate linear representation so that you can then grade from a place of awareness and creativity, a place where you can make meaningful decisions that are more than just trying to get it to not look like shit anymore, shouldn't be an ordeal, it should just be. It should be the first thing you see when you look at your footage. Seeing a meaningful representation of what you shot doesn't mean baking anything in or losing anything in the raw data. I got my first taste of that swapping over to ACES on this short I'm doing VFX for that was shot on the Epic. It's shocking how a manufacturer IDT that's universally regarded as "horrible" is still so much better than their own ability to meaningfully render their own native footage to the monitor. Anyway, the type of techniques that make FC possible are what will make mixing multiple cameras from multiple manufacturers on the same film as close to seamless as you will get until hitting their relative limits.

* Non-blown out highlights * Good shadow detail * Low frame rates * Scenes with low depth of field * Colors not oversaturated, and corrected to colors reproducible with film * Smooth gamma * Smooth camera motion * Good focus without mid-shot focus adjustments * Less obvious - picture grain * Images without over-sharpening * Wide shots without excessive lens distortion * Low on the "spoilers" such as moirés and aliasing There is certainly subtlety to all this, though, and it has been an interest of mine why some digital cameras subjectively do better at the film look than others out of the box. Having said this, I think 4K video may change the public's perception of what looks good. They may see very sharp 4K footage as preferable over the somewhat softer "filmic look" shown today. They may also like somewhat more saturated colors over time. I was in a TV store recently with two identical model TVs, one over the other on the wall, and a woman pointed to one of the TVs, and said, "What's wrong with that one?". The salesman replied, "It was calibrated." Michael

Alot of people think lens 'bokeh' is the filmic look and anything with a narrow DOF looks like film and anything shot f11 and below looks like video! this is the bain of many a camera discussion on this forum , nothing to do with the camera , all to do with how it was shot and what apperture was used , this dictates if people 'like it' as its filmic or hate it because it looks like video!! Deep Focus is great ................go watch Citizen Kane......all shot deep focus!! haha!! .

And here is a 4K framegrab graded by me from an original ProRes file from the Blackmagic Production Camera. It was graded to recreate a "real life" look, with enough blacks, lift/gamma/gain, saturation and local contrast CLICK HERE TO SEE IT IN 4K: '> The amount of detail IS amazing. You can see the dials from that womans clock. But then again, you need to bring it to life in post. If anyone is interested, I can share the original graded video, with no youtube recompression.

Hi, I'm not really going to defend Nikon on the way they design the D5300, yes controls are real shit. But over all I'm going to point out that image quality is really nice and you can shot a feature with it if you want to. SHIT I'M SHOOTING MY LAST FILM ON A D7100 AND D5200!!! Here I share a TEASER of it (IM SORRY IT STILL DON'T HAVE ENGLISH SUBS), its still private, the password is: teaser. Enjoy ;)