Improving GH5 colour - comparison with 5D3 RAW

[hyalinejim]

I've been using 5D3 Magic Lantern RAW for a few years now and it's my personal gold standard for image quality as I'm very familiar with it, can predict the results I'll get in various situations and have developed my own look that I like using in post. I do a lot of documentary and corporate stuff and wanted to do more handheld, so I got the GH5 for its IBIS, 10bit V-Log, 4K and general ease of use. Although the GH5's colour is an improvement on its predecessors, the 5D3 is nicer looking to me. So I wanted to see if I could tweak the GH5's VLog colour to be more similar to the colour I get from Magic Lantern Cinelog-C, processed via Adobe Camera Raw (other debayering workflows will give different results).

I shot a chart with both cameras, extracted the squares and put them side by side in Resolve. V-Log on the left, ML on the right:

 

 

I used Hue v Hue and Hue v Sat to line up the signal on the vectorscope:

 

 

Here you can see the effect of this correction.This is accurately white balanced V-Log (default colour) with a curve and saturation added:

 

 

And here's the same shot with the colour correction applied:

 

 

Skin goes from green-ish to pink-ish. Reds become more saturated, blues are pulled back. Foliage separates out into varying shades of yellow to green to blue-sh green, rather than being one big block of pure green. So next, I wanted to test this by comparing the same shots to Magic Lantern RAW. Would this correction really turn my GH5 into a handheld and more usable version of my 5D3?

I stuck the GH5 on top of the 5D3. I shot the 5D3 at 3520 x 1320 (the maximum resolution I can get that's both continuous and at a sensible aspect ratio) - this has a crop factor of 1.63x. ISO was 100, and aperture at f5.6 on the Canon 24-105. The GH5 was 10 bit V-Log, Cinema 4K, ISO 400, aperture f4 (roughly equivalent) on the Leica 12-60. I used shutter speed to control exposure, so motion blur is different between shots. It seems like the GH5 has around 0.66 stops more info in the highlights at the same exposure as the 5D, so I shot it one stop over to maximise DR.

 

 

First I corrected the 5D shots to the way I wanted them to look. Then I tried to get the GH5 to match. It's not a perfect match by any means, there are individual hues that tend to go awry a little, especially in the first shot. But for me the exercise is a success: the GH5 footage looks more like Canon Magic Lantern than it would straight out of the camera. And I would be happy to intercut the two, or to use the GH5 in situations that are more suited to its features. The take home message is that V-Log has a lot of grading potential - you're not necessarily stuck with Panasonic's colours on this camera.

A nice surprise for me was how much detail is in the 3.5K 5D files compared to Cinema 4K GH5, especially when sharpened. However, it's not very practical to shoot in its high resolution modes at the moment, due to the slow refresh rate of the LCD preview.

If you want to check out the files yourself, here are a series of matched pairs of 5D DNGs, and GH5 V-Log TIFFS.

FOLDER:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1exEpCRAfgFdi1FZ3hma09YZms

ALL FILES ZIPPED:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwzsbjMgrAwzTFJZby0xSTV6VmM

[tweak]

Nice work dude!

[hyalinejim]

Sharing settings are changed so downloads should work directly now.

[majoraxis]

Thanks for sharing this!  On the video, what is the order of the camers?  Thanks!

[hyalinejim]

Oops! I forgot to mention that!

[deezid]

Is this shot with -5/-5 sharpness and noise reduction?

Your approach to correct colors is actually quite similar to mine on the GH4 using V-LOG. Cool

[Don Kotlos]

Can you export it as a LUT and share it as well? 

When & if Panasonic allows baked-in LUTs, it would make this really useful. 

[Deadcode]

Everyone is waiting for the reveal to tell AFTER that: "5D has waaaay better colours" :P Awesome job hyalinejim! I hope some day you will get a Sony camera in your hands!

[hyalinejim]

27 minutes ago, deezid said:

Is this shot with -5/-5 sharpness and noise reduction?
 

Yes, on the GH5. 5D3 in my video has 0 luma NR and 20 colour NR in ACR and 0 sharpness.

12 minutes ago, Deadcode said:

Everyone is waiting for the reveal to tell AFTER that: "5D has waaaay better colours" :P Awesome job hyalinejim! I hope some day you will get a Sony camera in your hands!

[deezid]

Your tiff screenshots look way better and less processed than the video uploaded in the GH5 vs. BM46k thread. Am wondering now.

[TheRenaissanceMan]

8 minutes ago, deezid said:

Your tiff screenshots look way better and less processed than the video uploaded in the GH5 vs. BM46k thread. Am wondering now.

Post workflow maybe? Resolve handles the files better?

[deezid]

1 minute ago, TheRenaissanceMan said:

Post workflow maybe? Resolve handles the files better?

I guess the other guy used internal sharpening, while these here are unsharpened. I can certainly live with that.

[hyalinejim]

I just used Resolve to build the correction. I used After Effects to do the grading and to export the VLog TIFFs (which are identical to the MOVs in a Rec709 workspace).

[TheRenaissanceMan]

Interesting. Does AE edit the GH5 clips natively? I was under the impression Adobe didn't support them yet.

[hyalinejim]

Yes, but it's a bit slow to import the files straight out of camera, so I use the rewrap method posted by @Orangenz

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nt2uqr5pp9xi1st/GH5 10 bit fix.pdf?dl=0

 

 

[deezid]

Thanks @hyalinejim

I finally think about considering the GH5 again. These don't look terrible and oversharpened and some further colorgrading and filtering leads to really nice results (with good skintones actually).
 

 

[Emanuel]

3 hours ago, deezid said:

I guess the other guy used internal sharpening, while these here are unsharpened. I can certainly live with that.

Where? Acquisition? He said no. No information on NR though. Where over processing stands.

[Fritz Pierre]

4 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Oops! I forgot to mention that!

OK...I'll bite??5D first....GH5 2nd....regardless your grade looks good!....it also shows just how well the GH 5 10bit holds up against the 14bit?? In ML 5D

[Emanuel]

1 minute ago, Fritz Pierre said:

OK...I'll bite??5D first....GH5 2nd....regardless your grade looks good!....it also shows just how well the GH 5 10bit holds up against the 14bit?? In ML 5D

LOL Funny and meaningful. But, that black sun couldn't be part of Panasonic offer :-D

[Fritz Pierre]

9 minutes ago, Emanuel said:

LOL Funny and meaningful. But, that black sun couldn't be part of Panasonic offer :-D

Well...we'll just have to wait for the reveal...do I sense a wager for a beer in your response???

agreed on black dot in sun by the way...it's in the first clip...in the GH5 clip (2nd if I'm right ) it's blown out because it's the sun!...whatever camera that is, the detail maintained in the shadows in that shot is interesting...ok who owes who a beer here?