Andrew Reid

The difference: The in-camera picture profile is extremely basic and not designed to deliver results compatible with professional colour grading methods. It has a few sliders - contrast, saturation, tone, that is about it. Resolve it isn't!! A LUT applied to the image in post is much more advanced than the Photo Style. This is a 3D matrix of a huge amount of numbers. Look at the complexity of DaVinci Resolve's entire user interface and compact it into a LUT file. As Hene1 pointed out above, the Rec.709 image out of the GH4 is not LOG and needs to be made compatible with this 3D LUT for you to benefit from that kind of control over colour and mood. If you dial contrast all the way down and try to make it too flat in-camera it looks terrible. Contrast -5 is a big no-no because it kills tonality, skin tones and colour. It is better to use the optimised EOSHD Cinema settings for this and keep as much colour information as possible, then the LOG conversion uses a very sophisticated 3D LUT to convert the file into a gamma curve and overall Canon-LOG style profile that is compatible with the final Output LUT. The final output LUT is whatever you want it to be. It could be one of James Miller's excellent DELUTS for example, or you can use the beautiful 1D C LUT which I included with the download. That really does wonders for warmer skin, healthier looking actors, no more weird yellow casts, and highlights look more cinematic, colours have more impact, it overall looks more stylistic than without. It sounds complicated but in practice it is easy, as the guide that comes with the files will show you. Aside from the advantage of basically being able to choose your "Photo Style" in post (rather than being stuck with the crappy ones in-camera) from a range of thousands and share your own "styles" online, you really are getting a drastically more cinematic image out of the camera by using this workflow.

Calm down sir. It is only a way of explaining it which makes sense. If it had a LOG profile in-camera yes you would get around half a stop of maybe 1 stop extra dynamic range as it would optimise the image processing for the sensor. The conversion in post gives you all the other benefits of LOG.

No only the GH4 actually The G7 doesn't have the advanced in-camera picture controls to make it suitable for the LOG Converter.

Yes all correct sir. Also you can apply the LOG LUT in the transcode, then you get the LOG ProRes as if it has come straight from the camera as LOG. I prefer to edit ProRes to H.264. 4K bogs down too much in H.264 on my Macbook Pro. In actual fact you don't need to understand any of this, or anything about LOG and LUTs as the instruction manual that comes with the EOSHD LOG Converter has a beginners tutorial on this stuff.

Nice to have LUTs working with the GH4. Who needs V-LOG now

Here's a quick example - fixing yellow cast of original shot by converting GH4 footage to LOG in Premiere (based on Canon LOG) and applying my 1D C LUT. Forgive my rather crowded LUT folder

I'm working on an edit as we speak. It transforms skin tones. Much less yellow cast to warm hues.

More details here

Great, glad Vegas users can join the party. Does it support both an Input LUT and Output LUT or just one at a a time? What is it with these NLEs like FCPX and Vegas that don't have the absolute basics built in? And Vegas comes from Sony whose cameras shoot LOG!

Personally I would take the GH4 if it were similarly priced to what you would spend on that A7R! It's not a great image.

That's more like it. You need to shoot some more colour though, too much green!

Haha amazing shot.

Thanks for trying it. 25fps for 25p is realtime encoding so actually rather good... was that for H.265 to Prores?

Useful to know, thanks Mattias

Yep that's all. It is explained in the book for Windows users with Premiere. If anyone can point out a good transcode tool for H.265 which can apply a LUT like EditReady but for Windows, do let me know as I am mainly on a Mac and my PC is Windows 10. This wasn't compatible with 10. Anyone with 7 may wanna give it a go and report back - http://hdcinematics.com/convert-V2.html

Thank you for drawing it to our attention.

I don't use any of the Samsung S zooms... too big an investment just for one camera when I have so many other lenses I'm afraid. 16-50mm F2.0-2.8 is nice. I just don't think it is particularly good value for money. Video below is how to apply a built in REC 709 LUT to LOG footage in FCPX. Note you will need to use EditReady to apply the custom GammaDR2LOG LUT that I created, then select S-LOG 2 or Canon LOG in FCPX, then grade it in the colour correction effect. Let me know if it works. Alternatively there are LUT plugins for FCPX like this one: http://www.colorgradingcentral.com/lututility With that you can load any LUT you like and are not restricted merely to turning LOG footage into Rec.709 which is what the presets built into FCPX do.

Yes but the zoom barrel is very wonky so image jumps about...so not artistic

Second video is much nicer. Wow. That is one hell of a clean 1080p image going on. Wonder why Canon themselves talked it down?! Clearly they want us to buy the Cinema EOS cameras for video, don't they. Even to the point of them claiming their flagship DSLR has moire... when actually it looks to do far better full frame internal 1080p than the 1D X, 1D C, GH4 and 5D Mark III put together.

The 10mm is the best, especially for 2.3x crop 4K. Both very cinematic looking lenses with character and very good build quality. If you want to avoid the fly by wire Lumix focus rings it's also a good choice.

Yes Wolf but I am pretty sure all cameras have hot pixels on long exposures in the darkest blacks 3 stops under, it is just removed in software and because ACR hasn't caught up yet it is not doing the job right or even at all for the A7R II.

This is interesting. I will try a few wider lenses with the RangeFinder and see how it goes. I briefly tried the FM. Wasn't impressed. The Retilux looks better than I expected from Zak's test that's for sure! The Zeiss 80mm F1.8 Jena DDR was backed onto the Speed Booster XL for this shoot.

My criticism still stands. You're saying it's a problem. Not in the real world.

Killer nightscape beast sounds like a good film idea

What are you using to convert from H.265 by the way? Some apps crush the blacks even further.