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That's true. Would that mean that it would be 420 colour? That's what the 5K mode is currently. Maybe it will happen and then I'll be happy I switched to 1080 - it's not like YT is good enough to tell between 4K and a 1080p up-res anyway....

Actually it's both. The original has quite a lot of blue in it, and the reference images have no objects in them that are blue and all the colours in the reference image are in completely the opposite direction in terms of colours. You can pull a key and neutralise out the blues, but then you end up with some salmon tones, which you then need to fix, and in the end you end up with a background that is bland and may as well have been desaturated. The reference images all have darker green foliage in the background, the footage has a bright orange/blue city in the background.

LUTs can be tricky, and it's impossible to make them completely general purpose. I'm not surprised that when you light a scene you can get great results but that it wouldn't work so well on less manicured situations. On a controlled scene there are certain conventions that can be assumed: subject skintones will be at a certain IRE, the background will be slightly or a lot darker than the subject, there will be no heavily saturated objects, etc. When designing a LUT for a situation like that you can assume that anything warm and above 50% is skin tone highlights, and anything not skin tone and bright can be much more heavily processed, and that non-skintone darker areas can be desaturated and the colours all played with, etc etc. Take an image shot anywhere else where there are bright and saturated objects in the background and the LUT will make a screaming and clipped carnival memoire of the whole scene. Of course, if you assume there could be anything from 110 IRE down to -10 IRE then you're immediately screwed because most LUTs only go from 0-100, but even then if you can pull those things back into legal range then you'll end up with something that looks flat and awful on controlled and low-DR scenes. I have found that exposing the GH5 can be a challenge if you want to do it technically, but shoot creatively and grade each shot individually and you're fine. The more I learn to grade the more I'm learning that it's actually very simple, but with a range of techniques for solving various problems and few cool tweaks to make the image pop a little more. Of course, the biggest improvement to my colour grading has been learning to use my equipment better to capture the images in the first place. I'd still be very interested to see a before/after of the Noam Kroll LUT if you have time.

That's a good strategy, although it makes me a little confused as to why you would comment in a colour grading thread that there's a magic button that will match any shot to any other shot and then it can just be converted to a LUT and you're done.... Kind of like a colourist telling a cinematographer they can just take their cell phone out of their pocket and wave it around to get cinematic images, but when told why that won't work they just reply "oh I just hire people for that, I'm not interested in learning anything new...".

You may have read that more keyframes gives better motion cadence, which I suspect is true, but only on extremely extremely compressed files. I tried to replicate motion cadence issues but failed completely to do so. Here's the thread: The editing thread linked above showed that the difference between a cut one frame ahead and one frame on the beat is decent, but the cut ones frame ahead and the cut two frames ahead of the audio wasn't nearly as large, and there's a decent tolerance for thing being ahead, so I'd suggest doing a few test uploads and seeing how far ahead of the beat looks best. BTW: YT moves the image one frame ahead of the audio when you upload, and seemingly more than one frame on smaller resolutions. Check out the great videos by John Hess linked in the Editing thread above.

That would mean that shooting on the GH5 in MFT 4K was a downsampled image from 5.2K, and then shooting on the GH6 in MFT 4K would be a straight 4K and not downsampled. Ie, a downgrade.

WTF, that first one is totally not the emoji I picked!

What do I think? I think you should give it a go..... everything looks easy until it's your turn 🙂 Shade works too, but it's a pretty simple equation, if you want what they got then do what they did. If shade was the same as a diffusion panel and the shot-matching feature did 90% of the work then why would those things exist? 😬🤔🤔

Ultimately, the best thing to apply for this look would be one of these:

Here's the result of that Shot Match feature, just so you're aware: I think the video you're looking for from Aram K is this one:

A few thoughts: Look at your scopes - look at what the waveform monitor is telling you about the levels in the image, and their colour balance. Check this out: You can see that in the shadows there is pink below green, that means that there's green in there. You can see in the middle and on the right there are much higher levels where red is highest and blue is lowest with green in the middle, that means warm tones at a higher luminance, which in this case is the girls skin tones. Put a global adjustment over your reference image and your grade turning the saturation right up, it will make your vectorscope much easier to see, and will accentuate all the colours so they're easier to see. It's like colour grading with a magnifying glass. Match the colours like that and turn it off and it will be a much better match than it looked when you were doing it. Apply an outside window and pull gain down to zero to crush the whole image (except for your window) then look at the scopes to see what just that part of the image looks like. Hover the window over the skin tones and see what the vectorsope is telling you - where is the centre of the hue range? how much hue variation is there? how saturated are they? Hover over other parts of the image too. Use a glow-style effect to bloom highlights to match the reference before you apply any other adjustments - they radically effect your shadow levels and contrast overall. When playing with shadow levels and black levels, crank the Gain right up so that most of the image is clipping and you've "zoomed into" the shadows - now 10 IRE might be up to 100IRE and you can easily compare your reference with your grade. All these are useful for grading your own footage in reference to itself too.

Attempt number one. Reference: Grade: and the node graph which quite obviously shows that this is the wrong way to go about such a thing: Attempt 2 Reference: Grade: Node graph - simpler but still awful: The absolute best way to match scenes is to get any camera and point it at something that looks like your reference.

I think it's about viewing angle. When I was getting my 32inch monitor I looked up the TXH and SMPTE specifications for viewing angle and it's quite wide, with the 32inch display being in-between the two specs when at arms length. If you're looking at a 55 inch TV at 10 feet then you're no-where near that viewing angle and won't see anything like the detail I'm seeing, or would be seen in theatres. From TXH (https://www.thx.com/faq/😞 For your viewing distance you'd need a 100 inch TV...

This feature, as I understand it, talks to the lens and then just crops into the sensor to only use the image circle that the lens covers. There are some issues: Doesn't work with non-native lenses, or lenses that don't talk to the camera (ie, all my lenses) The GH5 has a 5K MFT sensor. To have the same pixel density it would need 7.4K S35 or 10.7K FF. If it didn't have that resolution then there would be less pixels in the MFT image circle and I'd effectively get a downgrade.

That would rule it out for me. I've already invested in a lens collection that is at my preferred focal lengths, I don't want to have to re-buy my lenses to keep the same FOV as what I have (or in the case of the 7.5mm Laowa I simply cannot replicate the FOV as there is no equivalent lens). Your suggestion is half-way to suggesting a FF GH6, which exists - it's called the S1H.

We already have 5K in the GH5. There's only one mode that uses it, but it's there and is used for downscaling in most of the other modes of course. I'm much more interested in a camera that does 4K and 1080p better. I'd take Dual-ISO or eND over any increase in resolution any day of the week. We already have 400Mbps 4K 422 10-bit ALL-I, there aren't many people who can claim much benefit for a "better" output file than that, especially considering that the 4K killer mode is also already downsampled. EOSHD seems to be one of the most technically savvy and demanding community of GH5 users and have a look at how we're delivering. Resolution is not the answer.

I have a 32inch UHD display and the differences are obvious between 4K and 1080p. Having said that though, the differences between YT 4K and a 1080p Prores HQ export are slim, with the Prores having the advantage of course. It's all about bitrate, not resolution.

I think framerate is an artistic choice and I'm not much of a fan of the 60p look. I used to be pretty insensitive to it, but the more I get into film-making the more I see and now it looks strange and video-y. My internet is fine with 4K but can't do 4K60, so I notice whenever something is uploaded in 4k60 and the only ones I've seen that are have been shot in 60p too. Maybe others are frame-doubling but I haven't seen any. Here's a video uploaded in 1080 that has both:

True, but for each combination of resolution/framerate/DR there is very little you can do - that's what I mean by a brick wall. True, but probably not very useful. If you upload at a higher resolution then that resolution will have a higher bitrate, but the other resolutions don't. ie, if you upload at 1080p and watch at 1080p you get a certain bitrate, if you upload at 4K and watch at 1080p you get the same bitrate as before. You're only catering to the people with higher resolution displays, or those who manually override the resolution settings to stream in a resolution higher than their display. Exporting and uploading at a higher framerate probably hurts the aesthetic more than the extra bitrate helps, so that's not a particularly useful thing. I guess you could upload at double the framerate you shot at and just have every second frame the same in the file, but they'd move because the compression would make them different so it would still be a strange effect. Higher dynamic range is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how you guarantee the same colour grade between those watching in HDR vs 709, so that's probably a wild-card too. YouTube is free, and the quality is "good enough". I think the strategy is to do our best and just work around it. It's not bad, and the content is what matters, rather than the image, after all 🙂

How on earth would that happen??? WTF are people doing with their SD cards.... wow.

It sounds like this is your workflow: Shoot and record in either 4K Prores RAW or 4K Prores 422 or 4K 420 Edit / grade and export to 4K h264 Upload to YT If so, I suggest you consider the bitrates involved. 4K YT is something like 30Mbps. People suggest that you want to upload around 100-200Mbps h264 to YT to get the best results, but that any more than that is just wasting bandwidth. So shooting 4K Prores 422 would mean shooting 471Mbps to export in 100-200Mbps for YT to stream in 30Mbps. In this sense there's a pretty limited return on investment for shooting a higher quality acquisition format. The other consideration is that 8-bit and LOG formats aren't a good combination, so I'd suggest you either shoot 10-bit 422 and LOG, or shoot 8-bit and a more rec709 profile. Here's a reference for codecs and bitrates / bit depths / etc: https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/13/50-intermediate-codecs-compared/ and here's the thread where the YT quality and bitrates was tested: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=85016

That lens looks familiar.... I think I paid $20 for it, including shipping.

Welcome to the forums.. no need to lurk for so long, most of us don't bite 🙂 Reframing in post is one of the (few) valid reasons for "needing" 4K, and grabbing stills for PR isn't a bad application either. I've been editing 4K footage on a 2016 MBP 13inch which is only a dual-core, so not particularly powerful. It does well if you render proxies, but the online/offline workflow is a bit of a PITA. Another thing to consider if you're filming yourself is to get multiple cheaper cameras and have more than one angle recording at once. You already have several lenses, so with a dumb EF-MFT adapter you could easily get a second angle for little extra cost.

@Anaconda_ @newfoundmass YT is pretty much a brick wall when it comes to quality. You can give it higher quality files, but the quality bump is almost negligible. I haven't done exhaustive testing because it's been covered pretty well in this thread (look for the posts by Bryan Worsley): https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=85016

The plot thickens.... YT delays the audio by an additional amount, and at the lower resolutions delays the audio by more. Turns out that due to YT delay, the video above from John was actually one frame ahead of the beat and TWO frames ahead of the beat. John has this followup, which includes an adjusted comparison, and I think there's much more of a difference now: