GH3 - Shooting Flat

[/p/]

Just hoping someone could help me out with a good "picture profile" for color grading on the GH3, be it the best preset one or the best choices for the custom one. I am only just beginning to get into color grading my footage so I'm not sure how far to drop the settings (Sharpness, Contrast etc) in the custom profile..

 

Thanks.

[nahua]

So far I've gone to -3 contrast, -5 sharpness, -4 saturation and -5 noise reduction.  That might seem extreme, but after shooting ISO 1250 and 1600, I can use Neat Video to remove a lot of unwanted noise and get fairly clean footage.  Or course you should try it out yourself and see how much you have to work the video.  I'm only using fast color corrector in Premiere CS5.5, but I just add a little saturation here or there, and if I need to a little sharpening.  But the most improvement is noise characteristics.  Default settings produced some real crap, but being able to dial it down has helped significantly.  Feels very much like a hack for the GH2, even the Flow Motion (although I find the Flow Motion hack has more detail for very high ISOs, 3200+).  As for the profile, I still use Vivid although you can go very flat with some of the others.  Good luck!

[/p/]

So far I've gone to -3 contrast, -5 sharpness, -4 saturation and -5 noise reduction.  That might seem extreme, but after shooting ISO 1250 and 1600, I can use Neat Video to remove a lot of unwanted noise and get fairly clean footage.  Or course you should try it out yourself and see how much you have to work the video.  I'm only using fast color corrector in Premiere CS5.5, but I just add a little saturation here or there, and if I need to a little sharpening.  But the most improvement is noise characteristics.  Default settings produced some real crap, but being able to dial it down has helped significantly.  Feels very much like a hack for the GH2, even the Flow Motion (although I find the Flow Motion hack has more detail for very high ISOs, 3200+).  As for the profile, I still use Vivid although you can go very flat with some of the others.  Good luck!

 

Thanks Nahua, so you customize the vivid profile itself to ""-3 contrast, -5 sharpness, -4 saturation and -5 noise reduction" instead of using the custom profile? Any particular reason why you decided to customize the vivid setting instead of one of the others or just using the custom picture profile?

 

Thanks.

[nahua]

When I put these values in, it saves it as the custom profile.  Same with any of the other profiles.  I just chose Vivid because I wanted it to match the GH2s I shoot with.  You can go with Smooth or whatever, your choice.  As always, test it out to see if you like it.  So far I'm happy with it since I usually to multi-camera shoots.

[/p/]

bumpin to see what others are using. Having good results with Nahuas settings so far.

[MOONGOAT]

Are you the guy who made the thread on /p/ about getting the GH3 a week or two ago?

[MaxAperture Films]

I've been shooting -5 Contrast and -5 Noise Reduction in the standard color profile and I like the results thus far.  I like to retain all of the color information so I leave saturation at 0.  The rationale with saturation is that it's always easier to desaturate in post than to recover color information that has been lost during the capture (8 bit baked-in image).  I leave sharpness at 0 because I personally like seeing more detail and I can always soften in post.  Sharpening in post from an artificially soft image has a greater chance of introducing artifacting.  Softening in camera is still a good idea if you prefer that look and are interested in keeping your post processing workflow to a minimum.

 

The above settings are just my thoughts, everyone will eventually create a profile that appeals to their own taste and lenses.

[Joseph Moore]

Thought I'd chime in with my settings. To each his own, but I did a ton of testing in a lot of different conditions (outdoors, tungsten and LED) and I've found that -5,0,0,-5 consistently yields the best results that I could come up with. (Sounds like what MaxAperture is doing as well.)

 

I started with everything at -5 to give the flattest image with the least chance of artificial signal enhancement, but in my tests -5 sharpness and -5 saturation actually harmed the image by throwing out actual picture information.

 

I then have a recipe of filters than I run on all footage (Neat Denoiser, SC Sharpen and finally FilmConvert) that I feel gives everything a very nice, natural look before I grade for style.