Leaderboard

Finally some proper color correction tools! It comes with LUT support as well. https://www.macprovideo.com/hub/news/apple-announces-final-cut-pro-x-104-heres-whats-new https://www.provideocoalition.com/final-cut-pro-10-4-announced-demoed-fcpx-creative-summit/

Yeah, and I just want to say, I love what you're doing artistically too! But... I think I understand. I get bent out of shape because there's a fair amount of snake-oil sold out there in the way of color profiles, etc (which I know you're not doing) which actually hurts the footage that new filmmakers take. This is a very interesting subject to me because, like you, I LUST after a low-contrast look. Nothing beats a RAW workflow in my book. It's just beautiful. But I'm lazy, like everyone else, and want a short-cut. So I've tried, like you, to make LOG work. But I couldn't for most situations. After some experimentations I figured out why it is impossible. But in the back of my mind, I'm still hopeful. So when I read your post I'm like, maybe he's done it! But I need to see certain things addressed to be convinced. So, all good. I'm enjoying this!

On a side note to sharpness. Same thing goes for every new iteration of a camera. I've got a 5DIII and I'm yet to produce something which looks remotely close to what some folks have already produced with this camera or even worse cameras and much worse glass than I own. I've given up on upgrading until I actually use my camera to the full potential and definitely going to skip everything until canikon release their FF mirrorless cameras. Until that, I've got a ton of other things I must improve on... Once this is sorted I hope I'll find a product which has the following: 8K RAW (for cropping to 4k) + lighter options, 5-axis IS, usable ISO 25k, DPAF 2.0

Just going back to BOAN quickly, just like to say that I've studied film (to PhD level) and lectured on film at University level & BOAN never came up as a film to be studied or watched as an example of anything worth while. The one time that it did come up was to do with it's blatant racism & not to do with any other qualites that people come up with. Perhaps its held with some regard in the US, but in Europe not really. The one film that everyone cites as the film to watch if you want to be a filmmaker is Citizen Kane - it has every shot type that you could possible ever want to use in a film & that's not even taking into account the editing or narrative construction. BR2049 hasn't bombed at the box office & it is just about to get released in Asia, so still more revenue to come. This sums up BR2049 quite nicely: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/oct/09/blade-runner-2049-slow-burn-blockbusters-denis-villeneuve

No problem @kidzrevil - I think people nowadays really need to have it hammered into their brains that this sort of complicity really needs to be addressed. I mentioned Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will in an earlier post; just because the film looks great (the lighting, camera angles & the Hugo Boss uniforms etc.) & has loads of innovative cinematic techniques can never outweigh the fact that it is a piece of Nazi propaganda - propaganda that enabled a World War & millions of Jews to be exterminated! To state that we know it's racist, but that's ok because of what it might have given future filmmakers just simply isn't good enough. People need to wake up! You know what, i think the Blade Runner fans are completely befuddled by the new film as they are used to a disposable product that normally doesn't mean anything past the spectacle aspect of a Hollywood film. This new film rests within a more Eurpoean model, where art & ideology mix to form a deeper experience - a film that can be watched numerous times & interpreted on numerous levels - it's a tough film to understand if you were expecting an all action spectacular ride. One thing no one has mentioned is how inportant the 3 short prequal films are to the main film itself - to be watched in the following order: Anime first, then the other two. As far as BOAN is concerned, no one is saying it should be banned, but just understood within its context of being a racist film. Yes, it uses cinematic techniques that have influenced future Hollywood films, but these techniques helped propagate a racist naarative & that can never be a good thing. Another point to make, is that whilst it might have influenced future Hollywood films, it certainly didn't influence the rest of the world in quite the same way, if at all. In fact, Non-American films have had a far greater influence on modern filmmaking than Hollywood can ever have hoped to have had on the rest of the world. Hollywood has plundered & copied other nations filmmaking styles far more than the reverse, which is the real elephant in the room when talking about film history. If you want to look at innovation in filmmaking, Hollywood is the last place to look for or find it. There are so many great films that aren't American, films that you can learn style & technique from in a way that you simply can't do with the watered down versions that find their way to Hollywood productions. If your top 5 favourite films have more than 2 American films in it then you simply haven't watched enough to appreciate the magnitude of the world of cinema, or should that be world cinema.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm super happy to hear I've helped anyone get into Magic Lantern RAW. I currently have a 7D with ML RAW and agree, compared to those day, wow, not difficult anymore. You're right, I'm not caught up to Nikon. One day! I have a a6300 and see what you see. A monster camera, image IQ wise. It's the ease of use thing that stops me from fully embracing them as video cameras. I bought a used C100 and it gets me exactly the image I want right out of the camera at a reasonable file size. I'm now as passionate about Canon's Cinema line as I was about RAW those years ago Anyway, will try what you suggest with my A6300 the next time I shoot with it!!! Thanks for the tip!

Max, I learned so much from your eos-m raw videos and posts that it eventually led me down the ML path to a 50D and then finally a 5D3. The workflow is pretty simple now... and if you are used to converting footage before bringing it into your NLE, it is basically the same amount of time. If you use MLVFs it’s even faster. The 5D3 and Canon lenses with IS are as steady as some variants of IBIS. By utilizing the Raw histograms with ETTR Hint, it truly becomes a point and shoot cinema camera. Otherwise what Nikon has done with Video DR and their Flat Profile is nothing short of amazing, @Mattias Burling ‘s D750 tests almost look like Raw video to me. I also noticed the a6500 has a Raw like texture when shooting in sLog3 with the cinegamut. So IMO, if you want the Raw look with out shooting Raw, then try out a D5500 or D750 or if you want to try your hand at Log again, I think you may be surprised by the a6500 and sLog3 with cine gamut 3. But from reading your posts all of these years, I doubt I revealed anything to you that you didn’t already know. Duh, I forgot to write that with Auto ISO and manual lenses on the a6500, you can set +/- exposure compensation... so to correct my post... I would set the exposure compensation at +1.7 and then use a variable ND to ride the exposure when the Auto ISO couldn’t adjust higher/lower than the base ISO/my desired maximum ISO... respectively.

Panasonic mirrorless cameras AF is unusable for video. I want a good low light camera that also offers good low ligh video AF. Unfortunatelly Panasonic is having a hard time implementing it on their cameras

beautiful looking footage. But why am I thinking about this after watching your footage? Maybe it´s my love for the arts. Wowi wow wow:)

You're going to get a standing ovation from me for sure Being of that age, yes, I'm very familiar with rating film slower and developing long/shorter, etc. However, even in film, you make a trade-off. Shooting the grand canyon is different than shooting a portrait. One pushes or pull films based on what they're shooting. They aren't doing something smarter than the manufacturer who wants to optimize their product for most shooting conditions. LOG can give you benefits in challenging lighting. Never disputing that.

No I have never noticed any in your footage, it looks great.

I enlarged to 200% in width and heigth and put a contrast curve into play. IPB shows blocks, Intra hardly does. See image below. If not the 4k 400mbps Intra, the 200mbps Intra HD will be superior, that´s for sure.

I'll try to put as succinctly as possible. Sensor outputs data in the range of 4 trillion colors. The most accurate colors are within 5 stops of a certain (correct) exposure. Those 5 stops of most-accurate color take up 16 million values (the maximum that can be stored in an 8-bit-per-color-channel data container). When you shoot LOG, the camera throws out accurate colors for noisy ones, above and below the 5-stop center of best exposure. You cannot grade the center-best values back. One doesn't have to take the time to understand what goes on under the hood of their camera, so to speak. But one day they will make a fool of themselves when they shoot LOG for a client and the client can't match it to footage shot by someone else, that maximized the color sensitivity of the camera. When they try to bring color back, the contrast will appear cartoonish, when they try to match the contrast, the colors will look washed out. That's the corner you shoot yourself into with LOG in a scene that doesn't call for it. To add some technical facts... Why does it band? Because in a solid color, like a sky, you don't see just one color of blue. You see a range of them, say 1 to 1,000. The "stupid" manufacturers have tested their products so that when you shoot a sky, you get just enough colors, say 1,000, to accurately show the gradient sky without contrast between two neighboring colors. Contrast happens when you essentially see TWO DIFFERENT COLORS! Okay, so in LOG, it doesn't take 1,000 colors in that blue range say, it takes 250. Normally, one doesn't notice. But if you shoot a scene where there is a blue gradient sky and it shows it to you in 250 shades of blue, they will look like DIFFERENT COLORS next to each other. That's BANDING! Of course, they are different colors, but you don't want them so different that the brain says they're not connected! Sadly, many people don't want to follow the logic that if LOG creates banding; that is, if LOG distorts the image there, that it does it everywhere, though not as easy to notice.

What's really troubling is the way people seem to think that this film's Pros out weigh it's Cons, when really all it's innovation was done in order to propagate & enhance a narrative that is pure & simply racist to its core. It really is of little consequence whether he then made a film to appologise about what he had done. The facts are that he made a racist film & nothing can erase that - you've got to be pretty naive to think that he didn't know what he was doing or what kind of film he was making. You've got to remember that America fought a very bloody civil war over the question of slavery (between 6-800,000 people died, which is more than the other wars America has fought put together) & then 50yrs later a filmmaker makes a film glorifying the south & their ideology!? As I said before, this film is dangerous precisely because it used innovative techniques to advance its racist narrative - it should be a warning about how dangerous film can be & no excuses can ultimately change this fact. It doesn't matter if this film was the first to do this or that, what is important is that it did it in the service of reigniting & propagating a racist narrative/ideology & only 50yrs after so many people lost their lives in one of the most bloody civil wars in history. To defend this film is to continue to propagate an ideology that is repugnant, completely out of step & deeply troubling. Just because something like this exists, doesn't mean we should ever hold a torch up to it as something other than a warning about evil & the means by which dangerous ideologies will go to in order to re-enforce/normalise their message.

Thanks, I've been waiting for some tests like this. I can actually see quite a clear difference with some compression artifacts in the ipb. Having recently gone back to some of my old BMPCC footage I'm still amazed by the fidelity and weight of those prores images compared to anything coming out of the GH5 regardless of data rate. I'm not sure what the difference is. Perhaps the GH5 internal processing gives it that slightly brittle feeling?

You're right when talking digital sharpening, whether in camera or post. But that's because it's just a matter of increasing contrast (usually at high frequencies), which of course doesn't increase actual detail. A sharp lens actually means more detail is hitting the sensor. I was using the word sharp when I probably should have said "highly detailed." I never doubt companies have only one goal in mind, but in the case of lenses being able to see more detail, this is one instance where I've experienced the "resolving power" in many contexts and fully appreciate the benefits. Whether it's for punching in for an interview or cropping in on a still photo for products, a detailed lens makes all the difference. Bringing this all back to the A7R... There's not much point in pairing a camera with this kind of resolution if you're not going to put quality glass in front of it. All I'm really trying to say is that I've been more interested in upgrading lenses than worrying about having the latest oversampled sensor. ; )

My problem with slog3 was never the grading. It was the banding which is there in camera and after. Nothing to do about it really. And I wouldn't mind if it wasn't for the A7sii I had costing more than my complete Red package, a RX1rii + bmpcc combo, way more than a Leica Q and even more than my complete DSLR setup including great glass that I use today. If the camera was cheap.. then it would be ok imo.

Hey, if you get the image you want, great!!!! But I'm one of those people who are very critical of LOG profiles. I don't see what you gain using them in those shots because you crushed the contrast so heavily you even removed the noise inherent in the higher ISO the camera uses to achieve a LOG distribution of visual data. That is, you could have arrived at the same high contrast footage, with more color depth, shooting rec.709. The shot where she is on the staircase and part of the background is blown out, I could see LOG used there, but you don't use it to bring out the background, the dynamic range is severely narrowed in the end. LOG profiles only make sense to me when there is detail in part of the image (5+ stops away) that one wants even at the sacrifice of color saturation. One cannot get color back. Don't want to rain on your parade! I love what you did. Nice images, however you got them! But to be fair to yourself, shouldn't you have shot the scenes both in standard profile and LOG and THEN compared them? LOG trades higher saturation for higher contrast detail. There is no exposure trick to get your color back That footage can never be made to have more color depth. In short, if you want to show how you get the most out of a LOG profile, shoot a scene where you make a trade-off you can't get with rec.709. Why do you believe those scenes were better shot with LOG? Again, I know you put a lot of work into this! I enjoyed it! I think you should go out and do some more!

Who said anything about sharpness. And if we where talking sharpness its subjective anyway. And btw, ive used way sharper lenses than that sigma. But it doesn't matter. People can believe and buy whatever they like. Im not gonna debate some marketing bogus saying that my Tamron works on 40mp but not 41mp because it doesn't have the extra resolving power.. give me a break. They just want to sell lenses.

Yes, I'll confirm that my 1s recording issues are simply an issue of me doing a "double punch"

I agree with @Orangenz on this...it's very easy to do...I have a little Olympus TG5 where you can only trigger video from the movie button and it's always user error on my part....(1) there is a way to test for this...stop and start on the camera at home until you fill up the cards..3 second clips...trigger record from the main shutter release button, not the little movie button....if you can repeat the problem, you can contact Panasonic...(2) this is perhaps the most important....roll for a few seconds on EVERY take before action....that's what was done in the days of film when 5 seconds cost real money, but it allows sound to sink, everything to get up to speed and most importantly, you get to see that the camera is running properly for that take...it's good practice on any shoot and you get the take every time.

Mike, great job. I love how prolific you are. It’s truly inspiring. But more importantly, it was so well done. Great compositions. Amazing color! And really good example of 5D3 ML Raw in lowlight. Did you have to use any noise reduction in post? Also any BTS info... lenses used, audio, ISO, etc... would be greatly appreciated!!!

If Sony only had 64 couolrs would 58 of them be different shades of green/yellow?