A great feature few have really talked about so far is that the Panasonic GH5 will allow LUTs to be loaded onto the camera.
Although the details of how this works are still a bit sketchy, filmmaker friend Andy Lee is illuminating the way about this feature on the EOSHD Forum here. Andy is a long-time EOSHD Forum mod and one of the most enthusiastic professional users of the cameras, now a Panasonic Ambassador as well who will be shooting his next feature with it.
A LUT file will allow you to preview the final look in terms of colour, contrast and exposure when shooting V-LOG rather than the horrible low-contrast ‘negative’.
I will find out exactly how Panasonic have implemented this feature when I get my camera.
If it is just for monitoring, I think Panasonic absolutely should extend this functionality to make it more useful –
- There could be an option for baking-in the look of the LUT to the recorded footage.
- If that were the case then Panasonic should make it so the LUT can apply to any in-camera Photo Style such as Standard or Cinelike-D (not just V-LOG) so that filmmakers gain additional colour controls over the standard profiles beyond the simple contrast and saturation sliders in-camera.
- This way EOSHD Pro Color could be used to Panasonic’s colour science in-camera as per the Sony cameras, without requiring additional steps in post.
- A feature to record the V-LOG original to one card slot and baked-in LUT proxies to the other card slot would greatly speed up the edit and workflow in post
- Hopefully Panasonic will make it so that multiple LUTs can be stored in the Photo Style menus so they can be toggled between just like the usual Photo Styles
Imagine having a folder of LUTs on your memory card and flicking between them on the camera! Wonderful!
I very much doubt it does all of that in the current day-one firmware but I am very much looking forward to using it!
Another thing I would like to see on the GH5 is anamorphic de-squeeze in-camera for monitoring, because nobody likes to monitor from a distorted 4:3 box. The option should be there to apply the de-squeeze to the footage itself as well, depending on the type of lens used (2x, 1.8x, 1.5x, 1.33x) to avoid mistakes when it comes to the edit and what scaling percentage to enter in the NLE to get the right aspect ratio. Ideally the GH5 would have an additional option over how to present the de-squeezed image – crop to the new aspect ratio or add black borders within a 16:9 frame which is useful for YouTube and Vimeo. Of course we can do all this in the edit but this would save time and your CPU.
Roll on Wednesday!
