Parker

I will say (about to play my bragpipes here) that seeing Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX at the Chinese Theatre in downtown Hollywood — the largest traditional IMAX screen in the world — was truly mindblowing; the sound mix was beautiful, no problems hearing the dialogue at all. 

I'll have to catch in a regular cinema and see how much worse it is in comparison. Huge improvement over Tenet though, which was so loud it actually hurt my ears, and I couldn't understand the majority of dialogue. Although, let's be honest, even with crystal clear mixing and subtitles, that plot is still completely unintelligible anyway. 

I thought Barbie was pretty bad though. Beautiful production design, solid performances, but a lot of jokes that didn't land at all, and a didactic, preachy mess of a script in my opinion. Fun weekend at the movies all around though, regardless of which one you saw. Definitely felt like "movies were back." Hope it stays that way! 

I will say (about to play my bragpipes here) that seeing Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX at the Chinese Theatre in downtown Hollywood — the largest traditional IMAX screen in the world — was truly mindblowing; the sound mix was beautiful, no problems hearing the dialogue at all. 

I'll have to catch in a regular cinema and see how much worse it is in comparison. Huge improvement over Tenet though, which was so loud it actually hurt my ears, and I couldn't understand the majority of dialogue. Although, let's be honest, even with crystal clear mixing and subtitles, that plot is still completely unintelligible anyway. 

I thought Barbie was pretty bad though. Beautiful production design, solid performances, but a lot of jokes that didn't land at all, and a didactic, preachy mess of a script in my opinion. Fun weekend at the movies all around though, regardless of which one you saw. Definitely felt like "movies were back." Hope it stays that way! 

@Djangoyou can also get a huge pixel-to-pixel crop mode if you're shooting in 1080p, handy in a pinch sometimes if you need some insane zoom.
Also, re: custom modes, the c3 mode let's you have an unlimited number of "virtual custom modes" so you just spin to C3 and then pick from a menu of your saved modes, I'm up to like C12 or something like that on my S1, it becomes very handy to have individual presets saved for different scenarios, I.e. Different ProRes raw or B-Raw output modes, anamorphic ibis and desqueeze settings, high frame rate modes, etc., so that you can switch very fast on a shoot and not be digging through menus. Easy to rename them too, so you're not having to memorize a number, it's nice and clean. 
Panny loves to make their cameras basically infinitely customizable. Long-holding any button on the camera will immediately bring up a full menu of all possible camera option/setting/toggles under the sun that can be used as a shortcut, very handy. Then you can save all of those unique shortcuts to different custom modes as you see fit. 

@Djangoyou can also get a huge pixel-to-pixel crop mode if you're shooting in 1080p, handy in a pinch sometimes if you need some insane zoom.
Also, re: custom modes, the c3 mode let's you have an unlimited number of "virtual custom modes" so you just spin to C3 and then pick from a menu of your saved modes, I'm up to like C12 or something like that on my S1, it becomes very handy to have individual presets saved for different scenarios, I.e. Different ProRes raw or B-Raw output modes, anamorphic ibis and desqueeze settings, high frame rate modes, etc., so that you can switch very fast on a shoot and not be digging through menus. Easy to rename them too, so you're not having to memorize a number, it's nice and clean. 
Panny loves to make their cameras basically infinitely customizable. Long-holding any button on the camera will immediately bring up a full menu of all possible camera option/setting/toggles under the sun that can be used as a shortcut, very handy. Then you can save all of those unique shortcuts to different custom modes as you see fit. 

@Djangoyou can also get a huge pixel-to-pixel crop mode if you're shooting in 1080p, handy in a pinch sometimes if you need some insane zoom.
Also, re: custom modes, the c3 mode let's you have an unlimited number of "virtual custom modes" so you just spin to C3 and then pick from a menu of your saved modes, I'm up to like C12 or something like that on my S1, it becomes very handy to have individual presets saved for different scenarios, I.e. Different ProRes raw or B-Raw output modes, anamorphic ibis and desqueeze settings, high frame rate modes, etc., so that you can switch very fast on a shoot and not be digging through menus. Easy to rename them too, so you're not having to memorize a number, it's nice and clean. 
Panny loves to make their cameras basically infinitely customizable. Long-holding any button on the camera will immediately bring up a full menu of all possible camera option/setting/toggles under the sun that can be used as a shortcut, very handy. Then you can save all of those unique shortcuts to different custom modes as you see fit. 

My god it better be good or the internet will explode with rage! Lumix cameras will be burnt in their dozens (according to the latest sales figures), Panasonic reps will receive several hate tweets (now permitted) whilst the remaining doubters will be carried over onto the populist march to total dominance by Sony.

For the past year or so I have been shooting almost everything in ProRes Raw on my S1, (the normal mode, not the HQ) I think it is somewhere around 2 Gbps, which is pretty insane, but shooting with one of the 2TB Angelbird SSD's to my Ninja V still gives me more than enough room, even over multi-day shoots.
I used to shoot with Red cameras quite a bit, and I did get used to the easy flexibility of the R3D files, so the ProRes Raw was such a huge upgrade for me on the S1. I love being able to dial in ISO and WB in post, and the image just has a thickness and creaminess to it that I just don't see with the internal codecs. Granted it's also generally quite a bit noisier, and completely unsharpened, so it all requires more work in post. 
The only time I don't use ProRes Raw is for interviews — the internal 5.9k hevc does the trick, and is nice and small — or for certain anamorphic shooting where I prefer the 6k, 3:2 open gate recording, for better use with my scopes, a mode that sadly doesn't have external Raw support. I've also been using it a lot lately for social media work, when clients know they want both vertical and 16:9 versions of edits, the extra headroom of the open gate makes the reframing so much easier. 
I back everything up to my Unraid server — it's sitting at 60 TB right now, with six 12-TB HDD's, and 4TB of SSD cache for really fast writing to the server, this is probably the most economic way of storing data. If you're okay with a little tinkering, I highly recommend it. Easy to just buy used PC parts, and Unraid has a ton of community support. I run a 10gbit thunderbolt 3 connection to either my 16" mbp or my M1 mini, and I just edit straight off the server without a problem. 
With Unraid, unlike other storage solutions, it's very easy to just keep adding new drives to the array as necessary, so I'm really not too worried about space. In the long run, I may end I'm just batch-exporting archived project B-roll to hevc or something similar, but I'm not really too concerned about it right now, as I still have oodles of space. 
 

Nothing fancy; just some Bose companion II satellite speakers and a subwoofer connected via USB-A.

@Ty Harper I have the same set-up that is perfectly capable of editing 6k multicam edits (S1+S5) in Final Cut. RAM usage gets a little tight sometimes with only 16 gigs, if you're bouncing between multiple applications open at the same time, video editor, photoshop, browser with lots of tabs, etc., but overall it has been a pretty reliable machine for me. 

I also have a totally maxed out M1 Max laptop and, at least for the edits I do (which is generally your basic talking-head multicam in a 4k project with b-roll overtop) I don't really notice a huge difference between the $4k laptop and the $800 Mac Mini, so I wouldn't be in a huge rush to go splurge on a Studio unless you really want to. 

I do wish the mini had more thunderbolt IO. I use one port to go to my LG 5k display, and the other port gets used by a 10 gig adapter to my server, so that's kind of limiting, vs the newer apple computers with more IO for connecting fast peripherals, but for the price, it's definitely a good bang-for-buck purchase. 

@Sage I'm still absolutely loving this LUT, and it just keeps getting better and better! 

I use it for pretty much every single project I shoot, S1 for A-cam and GH5 for b-cam, but lately, combined with anamorphic and pro res raw, it has felt extra tasty. I just love what it does to greens, especially. These screenshots are some standouts from the past couple weeks. Thanks for all your hard work! I recommend your Alexa LUT to all my lumix-shooting friends 👌🏻

I haven't been active on the forum very much recently, but I've still been reading and following discussions with interest. The main reason I haven't been around much is because I've been busy trying to emulate the colours of 35mm film for digital. I've focused on contemporary photo films (as opposed to motion picture film), trying to get as close to filmic colour as possible in Lightroom/Camera RAW. I've got quite good at it now: I can get a pretty accurate match. And I can use the same method to create LUTs for video that are also pretty accurate. However, post processing photos is a bit different to colour correcting video and I'd like to ask the forum's help in trying to figure out a few things in the LUT design.
(To date, I've only tested my technique on GH5 VLog, as that's what I shoot. But the LUT should work on VLog from any Panasonic, although colours will be slightly different as each model has a slightly different colour response.)
There are a few different components to my method:
1.  Match overall contrast
2. Match hue and saturation of colours
3. Match colour shifts in the shadows and highlights
Here is an indicator of its accuracy. On the top is VLog with my LUT and the bottom is the film scan (Portra 400 exposed at +1 stop)


Here's a link to a folder with the LUT. It's for Panasonic V-Log and emulates the contrast and colour of Portra 400 overexposed by one stop and scanned on a Noritsu minilab scanner with slightly reduced contrast. However, I've removed the colour cast in the shadows and highlights for the sake of keeping the discussion simple, for now.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18RiY7dZ6AO87yMKArUvRDNKfouUVCu8H?usp=sharing
My first question for you guys is what do you think about the level of contrast? I've actually reduced it a little bit relative the scanner's default contrast level. But is this the right level of contrast for you?
Even though I've lowered the contrast level a little bit, it might still seem quite contrasty. That's because it's not designed as a "wide dynamic range" LUT that preserves much of the log signal, that you would then do further work upon. It's designed to give a "Rec709" level of contrast, so about 7.5 stops (which has traditionally been accepted as the average dynamic range of a scene). That means if you have a high contrast scene you might need to lower the contrast of the log signal before the LUT. Furthermore, it's designed so that middle grey as shot equals 126 RGB in Rec709 (almost 50 IRE) when the LUT is applied, which is what it should be. So any under or overexposure in the log footage will be quite apparent and require an adjustment before the lut. Basically, exposure and contrast and WB corrections should take place before, not after the lut. And, of course, it should be applied in a Rec709 colour space. If you can find a reliable way of making those adjustments directly on the log footage (you can in Resolve and After Effects, you can't in Premiere) then grading becomes very quick and easy.
Here are a few VLog stills with the LUT applied to show how it handles skintones, saturation and contrast.

Depends on what kind of filmmaker you want to be.  Most advice from these places will suggest technical skills development.  If your deposition is to play with the tools and make great images, then that's perfectly fine and fun.  
But, FWIW, I help run a small film festival. Almost every indy film I see now-a-days looks half way decent.  Getting the tech to do it's thing is pretty easy.  I honestly don't know what sort of advantage an IQ specialist is going to have moving forward in the business when literally everyone can make decent IQ.  
"All hat, no cowboy."  (Love that expression)
OTOH, only about 10% of the films I have to watch/endure throughout the submission season have the ability to hold my attention.
Story is key... Can you write?  Failing that, can you recognize a good story when you see it?  Can you develop the skill to elevate the words on a page?  It's freakin' tough.  Being a person that can do that is really remarkable.
I've taken to watching successful films that are 50-100 years old. If the story works without the spectacle of modern tech, then all you gotta do is pay attention to those sort of storytelling and acting fundamentals ...and figure out if you can develop the skills to facilitate them as well.
I find myself re-watching David Lean's early work at the moment.  That sort of inspiration is very valuable.

@Sage I'm still absolutely loving this LUT, and it just keeps getting better and better! 

I use it for pretty much every single project I shoot, S1 for A-cam and GH5 for b-cam, but lately, combined with anamorphic and pro res raw, it has felt extra tasty. I just love what it does to greens, especially. These screenshots are some standouts from the past couple weeks. Thanks for all your hard work! I recommend your Alexa LUT to all my lumix-shooting friends 👌🏻

@Wild Ranger looks awesome man, nice work! Gives me Robert Eggers vibes. 

@Wild Ranger looks awesome man, nice work! Gives me Robert Eggers vibes. 

Hi, I know this forum has been quiet for a long time, but I did not want to miss the opportunity to share this teaser of my next movie. All shot on a GH5 using GHalex.
This film began to be filmed in the middle of the pandemic, and now it is in post production to be released in 2022. I cannot help but thank @Sage for his work in creating this color matrix that has made my life easier.
Cheers!

Now I've "made friends" with the GX85, I'm now looking at its colour profiles.  I've installed the CineD / CineV hack from @BTM_Pix so are including these in my testing.
In these tests, I'll be:
Looking at what the colour profiles actually do, with a colour checker and scopes Comparing these profiles to the colour profiles of the P2K and Alexa Grading selected GX85 colour profiles to match resemble the P2K and Alexa Working out what the best combinations might be and just generally working out what setup I will implement First, what do the colour profiles actually do?
I took the GX85, 12-35mm f2.8 lens (at 35mm) in the 100Mbps 4K mode, and shot my colour checker in direct sunlight.  I then brought those into Resolve, cropped, and blurred a little for cleaner traces in the scopes.  
I actually clipped the white square on the checker a little, oops!, but no test is perfect and neither am I, however I think the results should still be useful.  Here goes.....
Natural - let's use this as the baseline.
For those unfamiliar with these kinds of tests, it is worth noting a few things though:
Firstly, this profile is NOT NEUTRAL.
Anyone who's seen a colour checker in real life can tell you that the colours in the two middle rows (the two below the greyscale) are all about equally saturated - ie, very saturated.  These are the colours that are meant to go in the little reference boxes on the scope.  Notice how the red trace almost reaches the R box?  Notice how the pink and purple boxes look really pastel? Overall the profile is much more saturated in the upper-left (orange) and lower-right (teal) directions.  This is a relatively typical colour palette that looks pleasing. Also notice how the colours are rotated towards those two directions?  it's especially noticeable in the teal direction where the blue is rotated clockwise towards the Cyan reference box, and the cyan is rotated anti-clockwise towards the Blue reference box. These characteristics give a nice starting point, and are very commonly seen in colour profiles in general, although as the name says, this is a relatively Neutral implementation of that look.

Scenery - it's basically the Natural profile with more saturation, except notice the green is pushed slightly towards blue to give a but more hue separation in the greens.  Oddly enough, that might help give visual interest with scenery shots!

Portrait: Similar to Natural but more saturation (less than scenery) but this one slightly compresses the skin-tone ranges, pulling the yellows towards orange and the reds slightly towards orange too.  This helps to mask blemishes and uneven skin.  Nice. 

Vivid is..... vivid.  Panasonic really deliver huh!  Like natural but with heaps of saturation.

CineD.  The legend.  Lots going on here!  Here's what I see:
Slight compression of skin-tones and desaturating right on that hue Higher saturation of all colours except yellow-greens (a hue I know I dislike) and mauve (a hue named after an old lady) Also slightly compressing tones in the teal direction
CineV which is obviously more contrasty with a much lower black level, and consequently is also more saturated than CineD, but is also slightly more "correct" with some hues being closer to their theoretically correct locations, for example, the Red is now almost perfect.

If you take CineD and pull the shadows down then you get something very similar to CineV, only with more saturation (contrast creates saturation).  If you then drop the saturation a touch to match, you notice that CineD creates more even saturation between the warm tones and cooler tones, whereas CineV has more saturation on the warmer tones and less on the cooler tones.  Note, this isn't a WB difference - this is with the WB set correctly on both profiles.
TLDR;  
Natural profile isn't natural, but is a moderate amount of a relatively common colour profile pushing things towards orange and teal, and compressing skintones for more flattering skin rendering.  Other profiles kind of build on this foundation and kind of do what they imply with their names.  
CineD and CineV are a bit more complex again, with the main difference being the amount of contrast.

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

Yeah, I've made that point a number of times, except relating to camera size, and it's frustrating as hell.
As soon as you want something smaller, it instantly comes with less.  Less bitrate, less bit-depth, less DR, less IQ, just... less.
It's like the logic seems to go:
Me: I'd like to have high image quality in a small and simple rig The world: Then use a large camera Me: You didn't hear me - I want a small simple rig The world: Then use a 35Mbps 8-bit 8-stop point-and-shoot Me: You didn't hear me - I want high image quality AND a small simple rig The world: Here's an FS5, cine prime, 7" monitor, matte box filter set on an easy-rig Me: No, I need something that is almost pocketable The world: Why do you need something so small? Me: In order to be able to take it where I want to film, which is places where "professional" filming isn't allowed The world: If size matters then why do you need high image quality Me: I shoot in uncontrolled conditions with no lighting or control and need lots of latitude in post The world: Well, if you want both then..  um..  err.. well..  you shouldn't.  You should want what is available. Me: Why don't you make something with high image quality in a small and simple rig? The world: No-one wants it! Me: *facepalm*

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 
Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 
My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking.