hyalinejim

this project ended up not being graded and ended up discarding some of my favorite parts. Here are some of my favorite screengrabs from that though.
 

Good points and they strike me as mirroring the workflows of Cullen Kelly and Walter Volpatto, the only two professional colourists who I've heard break down their workflow.
The broad process for both of them seems to be:
Import footage and get things setup (or, in our cases, edit the footage!) Setup the colour management correctly so everything is well behaved Setup the global 'look' If required, setup any specific looks for groups of shots Then start reviewing the shots individually (in passes) to even things out, troubleshoot, and then to really polish things up Of course, I tend to bounce between 1 and 2, because for me the colour and visual appeal of the shots matters in terms of which ones I choose.
This is in complete contrast to how all the people that play 'colourist' on YT do it - they spend 10 minutes on one shot, whereas pros often only get 1 minute per shot, or less, so would be screwed if they didn't start broad and narrow down.
I also particularly like Cullens approach, or at least the approach he's taken to his more professional LUT pack, which is that it's modular, so there are separate LUTs for contrast, saturations, hue rotations, split-toning, and other look adjustments, with there being several options in each of these categories.  He recommends mixing and matching and applying them and adjusting the opacity of each to taste.
For me, considering I tend to shoot and grade the same sort of material, I'm developing my own default node tree with everything all setup and ready to adjust as required.  On many projects it's just a matter of applying the overall look and then just going into the Lightbox mode which shows all your shots at once and then just adjusting any that stick-out and then exporting it and doing a final watch-through.  The BM grading panels are a bit of a clue as well, having Next Node and Previous Node buttons, but not buttons to create new nodes, on the smallest one at least, which implies to me a default node structure already applied to each shot.
I've been meaning to go back and re-watch the Walter Volpatto masterclass now that I've actually gotten my head around colour management etc.  Colour Management was the biggest breakthrough for me.  Shooting on cameras that didn't have profiles in ACES/RCM meant that I had a really hard time adjusting levels or WB without the mids and highlights/shadows moving in different ways, but convert to DWG and grade and convert to 709/2.4 and then grade in DWG and all the controls magically do what you'd want them to do.

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

The problem is that there is only one conversion, the V35 to V709, but it's not accurate for all cameras because there are different sensors in them. I don't know if it was even accurate for the V35! Ideally, Panasonic would either calibrate the V-Log colour for each model so that it matches the input that the LUT expects (there is an internal transform from RAW to V-Log), or else create a custom conversion that's specific to each model.
If you want an accurate as possible conversion for the S5II or S5IIx then LumaSweet Lifelike will do that job.
From what I've seen of other cameras (GH5 and GH6) they're all significantly different from each other, and there's no real pattern to it, other than they all share bright, desaturated blues (though not to the same extent). Reds are all over the place between the three models. People complained about magenta skintones on the GH5. The GH6 has much brighter skintones (which looks nicer) but it's too far towards orange to be accurate. The hue of S5II skin is fairly accurate but it's so dark as to cause blotchiness.
The only scope Panasonic has for calibrating colour across models under their current system is in the internal RAW to V-Log conversion for each camera. They're stuck with the problem of varying sensors (or colour filter arrays, IR filter, or whatever other hardware is causing the colour variations). They're stuck with a single conversion LUT. I guess the only thing they can tweak is the matrix that converts RAW colour to V-gamut. This is just a grid of numbers and is a very general kind of correction. Its effect on colour can be a bit like herding cats. And I would guess that this is why the colour varies so much between models. I'd love to know if it's the same problem with Canon and Sony, or whether their implementations of log are a bit more consistent.

Lol, @kye the amount of time it took me to make that simple video is just ridiculous! And I make videos for a living. I should have known better 😂
I am proud of the colour conversion though. I spent a long time trying to get it as close as possible without breaking the image. And that's the kind of stuff I do actually enjoy. For me, it's the digital equivalent of pottering around in the garden shed.
 

Great use of the Luma Colour Checker shirt Jim 👍
The only question I have is why a massive company like Panasonic are SO SHIT at doing this themselves?!
I don’t know anything about this kind of thing but it’s my mission to understand more over this Winter and once this season is done, I think I’m going to need to give your LUT a whirl at the same time as learning Resolve.

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

GH6 noise is supposed to be slightly worse than GH5, according to CineD as far as I remember.
In the shots above, the lens was mounted to the tripod, not the cameras. So it is a real difference in FOV!

Lol, @kye the amount of time it took me to make that simple video is just ridiculous! And I make videos for a living. I should have known better 😂
I am proud of the colour conversion though. I spent a long time trying to get it as close as possible without breaking the image. And that's the kind of stuff I do actually enjoy. For me, it's the digital equivalent of pottering around in the garden shed.
 

If it helps,the two cameras using the same lens on a tripod collar:
GH5:

 
GH6:

 
This was a while ago and I think the light might have changed and I adjusted a Vari-ND? Looking at the skylight the pattern of polarisation changes. But it still should serve as a sharpness/detail comparison.

It's interesting to note the slightly wider FOV of the GH6! It must be a slightly bigger sensor, or it uses more of the sensor than the GH5.

Well done on getting such a great match...  and the video too.  Your career as a camera influencer has begun!!

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

Drum roll please....
I've finally got around to creating and releasing a LUT that gives accurate colour on the S5II and S5IIx. Big thanks to @Andrew Reid for allowing me to post about this.
It's available here:
https://lumasweet.com/shop/p/lumasweetlifelikes5ii

I'll get around to doing a write up on it at some stage. In the meantime, here's a YT video (don't laugh!) that I made about it. This might also be of interest to anyone who's interested in camera colour science in general, even if you don't have this camera.
 
 

Well, I think that skies that are more cyan than purple are nicer but I'm not sure that lighter is better for things like sea and sky. When it comes to skin, darker reds and yellows is definitely not good as it makes skin blemishes more obvious. This is a specific problem of the S5II, though. It has darker reds than the GH6, for example. The GH5 has lovely bright reds, they're just too pink!
 
Fuji emulations - I haven't looked into them at all, other than seeing some examples online that looked nice. I'd expect that the manufacturers of some of the most famous film stocks in the world, as well as some of the most famous digital colour workflows (I'm thinking of the much-praised colour output of the Fuji Frontier film scanner) would be able to create some pretty decent film emulations! But who knows! Maybe they're erring on the side of caution a bit too.

But it's great to see a manufacturer offering an interesting colour profile for video. Panasonic's set of creative LUTs for V-Log are disappointingly crap.

 
Yes, it's a very interesting question. For me, the colour palette is the first thing to get right. Then, do I want the split-toning (as he calls it) or not? All films have a colour cast in the highlights and shadows, none is perfectly neutral. And it varies from one stock to another, and it varies with exposure level. If I'm doing something stylised, then I'll keep it, if it's a nice cast (for example, Portra 400 exposed at +2 has extremely pink highlights such that some labs tell people not to shoot it like this). But if I'm doing a corporate video I definitely want neutral greys all the way through from shadows to highlights.
When it comes to grain, I love it for still images. But for video it will get lost unless you can view a very high bitrate file, so I usually don't bother.

I really like halation, but I haven't found a good way of accurately emulating it. Part of the problem is that it proceeds from highlight levels so bright that it exceeds the dynamic range of a digital sensor.

Here's a GH6 Iscorama video that I've posted before, with film colour emulation, split toning (in this case blue shadows and orange highlights from Kodak Vision 3 - and I'd guess this particular stock is the source of the orange-teal look, as all speeds of the film seem to have it) and grain that didn't really survive the transition to Vimeo. You can download the original if you're a grain fetishist!
 

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the results I can get, at least when it comes to still photography when shooting RAW. Here's Portra 400 at box speed and a digital RAW still with a custom emulation that I made:


I can get pretty close with 10 bit log as well, and I use a slightly cleaner variant of this for my corporate videos. It's probably overkill for my clients who would be happy with a digital look, for sure, but it makes the colour grading part of the job much more enjoyable for me.
I've mentioned this before, but I think that the people who are delivering colour to the consumers have been playing it safe. They're more concerned with providing colour that is free of artifacts and problems than they are with accurate colour. For example, in Camera Raw and Lightroom the default color profile for each camera is Adobe Standard (the others, Adobe Color, Adobe Neutral etc. are all based on this). Adobe Standard for all cameras has seemed to me get a lot more anaemic looking over the last 10. The reason for this, I would guess, is to avoid ugly colour artifacts like colour blocking, clipping etc. The Canon DSLRs used to have very accurate and properly saturated colour, but they would sometimes demonstrate colour problems in extreme conditions like concert lighting. There was a big thread about this on the Magic Lantern forum at one point. Nowadays, Adobe Standard is a lot more conservative. It's instructive to go to DP Review and download RAW samples of earlier DSLRs and compare them to recent models. I know that the Pacific Northwest (where recent samples were shot) is a bit grey, but so is London (where earlier samples were shot) 😂
Recently, I've been looking at Panasonic's V-Log to V709 conversion LUT which, presumably, is a good starting point for a grade. It's significantly inaccurate for recent Lumix cameras. In this image, the circles are an overlay of the reference colours according to X-Rite:

Nevertheless, it's a conversion that is fairly robust. Colour integrity is pretty good in terms of colour blocking and clipping. (It's better on some cameras than others. In this pic, S5II, the reds get a bit blocked up, which you can see in the red lego block, appropriately).
I haven't investigated Canon and Sony's log conversions, but I assume that their colour is similarly on the conservative side. If so, it seems that manufacturers are for the most part playing it safe when it comes to colour and leaving it up to the user. This makes sense as it can be damaging in reviews to have a colour transformation that is accurate, or pleasant, but creates colour artifacts. And if a large proportion of users are happy with conservative colour, or don't notice that it is conservative, then why rock the boat?
I also think that the anaemic look is in vogue: contemporary TV drama sometimes looks like it's barely been de-logged. So, low contrast and low saturation is rife. In 10 years time this will be dated. It will be like the bleach bypass look of  early 00s TV, or the "piss filter" of 00s gaming, or the orange and teal look of blockbuster movies.
Of course, Fuji offers film emulations in-camera, so well done to them!
 

But what about the stills from Gimme Shelter, above?
"Albert ran the camera, shooting his subjects with a zoom lens from across the room; David did the sound"
https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/cameras-keep-rolling-at-maysles-films
That wasn't 500 people, if was 2, one of whom had a camera that shot film. If it had been a C300 or whatever, the documentary would be just as interesting, but it wouldn't look as good in my view.
We should celebrate the look(s) of film, and try to recapture some of the magic that has been lost in the gradual enshittification of colour that has transpired over the last 10 years. I blame log for this btw!

 
 

Just to pick one example that struck me recently, The American Friend, Wim Wenders, 1977





 
It's also interesting to consider documentary. The Maysles brothers were early proponents of cinema verite in the US  (or direct cinema, or run and gun you could call it!) So it would have been one of them with a 16mm camera and a sound recordist. Here's Gimme Shelter (1970):






 
If you're interested in cinema (as opposed to endless franchise regurgitations) then the Criterion Channel is incredible. Non-US users can Google how to sign up.
 

Yes, but if that movie had been shot on a digital camera it probably wouldn't have looked as nice.
I watch a lot of old movies on the Criterion Channel and am regularly impressed by how good film looked.

I dunno.
I honestly think that the same techniques and skill they were applying to work within the parameters of the medium then would have been adapted and transferred to work within the parameters of the new medium now.
Of course, I'm not saying it doesn't look good.
Far from it actually.
But, in my opinion, its because they are proper productions and, again, its the skills of everyone and everything from the back of the lens forwards that is making the biggest contribution to that.
In those terms, and its only my opinion of course, the difference made by what is behind the lens capturing the image is almost negligible compared to the difference that is made in what is coming into it.
I've shot absolutely horrible looking stuff on both film and digital so I should know 😉 

I'm also often impressed when I see something shot on film, but in addition to that, I'm often impressed by something that I think is shot on film, but when I look it up I see it was shot on something like an F35, which shot 1080p and was introduced in 2008.  
Often the things I see from pre-Alexa digital cameras are on TV shows, where they wouldn't have had the budget for a colourist to dedicate themselves to optimising every shot, so a lot of the look must have been from the camera.
Also, and to partly counter what @BTM_Pix said about it being a team effort, sometimes the shot that is more impressive will be an external shot in full sun, which is something that most of us are much closer than 499 people away from being able to re-create.
This is why I've turned my attention to colour grading - the camera companies are no longer trying to create the kind of images we're actually chasing.  So it's either shoot on film or you're on your own.

Just to pick one example that struck me recently, The American Friend, Wim Wenders, 1977





 
It's also interesting to consider documentary. The Maysles brothers were early proponents of cinema verite in the US  (or direct cinema, or run and gun you could call it!) So it would have been one of them with a 16mm camera and a sound recordist. Here's Gimme Shelter (1970):






 
If you're interested in cinema (as opposed to endless franchise regurgitations) then the Criterion Channel is incredible. Non-US users can Google how to sign up.
 

Yes, but if that movie had been shot on a digital camera it probably wouldn't have looked as nice.
I watch a lot of old movies on the Criterion Channel and am regularly impressed by how good film looked.