kye

If you export 1080 stills they're a lot smaller That's definitely a node tree and a half! My grade was much simpler: Node 1 is contrast and Node 2 is CST from rec2100 to rec709. What I do is setup the conversion Node 2 and then reduce contrast in Node 1 using contrast/pivot until I get the whole DR into legal values. Node 3 adding Saturation Node 4 soft-edged window around guy increasing contrast Node 5 soft-edged window around whole frame decreasing Gain for a vignette I just did an A/B where instead of lowering contrast before the conversion I just use Luminance and Saturation mapping (which rolloff the extremes) and I tried removing the contrast after the conversion and it doesn't work, you end up with something that looks contrasty and flat at the same time in comparison. Interesting. I just love the DR of the GH5 and being able to push the image far enough to keep highlights but still expose mid-tones correctly without the codec breaking. I guess it gives me that high-DR cinema camera feel. I'm still learning the camera but that's a technique that I found early on and really liked.

It's like that only you can adjust every hue separately, so you can raise red and green but lower yellow. I had a play with it and it seems like you can't make something B&W and play with that curve before the B&W conversion with only one node, so I think you can't do it with the free version?

So get to it. I want a finished edit on my desk by Monday morning!!

Totally agree. In a sense it's like choosing between purified water or cordial. If I'm thirsty then I'd choose cordial because I like it and I might put it in a cake, but if I was baking bread or making soup then I wouldn't want the cordial in there at all! I've gone totally nuts into learning about lenses recently, vintage vs modern, organic vs sharp, fast vs slow, etc and one thing I stumbled upon was that people have a modern set and a 'character set' or 'vintage set' and they choose the right one for the particular project and the aesthetic they want. I have the Sigma 18-35 and it is a phenomenal lens - it is legendary for good reason. But the CY Zeiss lenses are also legendary, precisely because they don't look like the high end modern lenses. Modern lenses are great because they are purified water, and vintage lenses are great because they add flavour.

I totally agree - just make stuff. I am only aware of two ways to really succeed. Get absolutely great at it or get to know a bunch of people and be great to work with. Considering you're not physically around other people the second one is more challenging, but can still be done (youtibers collab all the time without meeting each other). In terms of the first one, getting great, you have to find your inner voice. The shortcut to doing this is to make lots and lots and lots of films. I know that's not a shortcut (ha ha) but the real shortcut is that they don't have to be long, they only have to be long enough. The person who makes a one minute film every week will learn truck-loads more than the person that makes a 52 minute film each year. I'm assuming you're young (because of college and no car) so assuming that's the case you'll also still be trying to figure out who you are. I'm over 40 and I figured out who I thought I was, but am now trying to get rid of some of those ideas, so I'm still at it. Finding yourself and your voice just takes work, but the upside is that it only takes work. If you make 100 short films then it's almost impossible not to learn a lot about yourself. Another shortcut is to try things that make you uncomfortable and you've never tried. Film yourself, make a musical, make a historical reenactment, make a documentary, make a mockumentary, make a fake news report, make a stop-go animation, make a film with planning and no editing, make a film with no planning and only editing, make a silent film, make a film with no music, make a film with only music, make a B&W film, make a film in hyper colour, make a film about a colour, make a film about someone you know, make a film about someone you don't know, make a film about you trying to make a film and failing, make a film about you making a film and succeeding, make a tutorial, make an abstract film about a lost sock, make a film about what it's like to be you, make a film about who you would have been if you had been someone else, make films for other people, make a film that you will never show to anyone else and have a premier with only you and then delete it afterwards, make a film for money, make a film about the people you care about and give it to them as a gift........... Learning is accidentally doing things that are great often enough to work out how to do them on purpose.

One thing you can try is the old B&W conversion trick is to adjust the brightness of the different channels underneath the B&W conversion. This can help to bring in more contrast, especially in the sky where the conversion loses a bit of punch. In Resolve, you'd play with the Hue vs Luminance curve.

Very nice video! Colour is done very nicely, but if you want to learn more then come over the to this colour grading thread... You've done well with the Helios - I don't think it matches my GH5 quite as well as it seems to match the P4K, but it might be that Melbourne overcast light that helps it along perhaps The audio is quite good. I didn't really miss a mic, which is great considering that audio was featured in the video. Of course, always pack a mic by default

Unprocessed image: My first attempt. Nothing drastic, just trying to make the footage look nice, but keep a semi-organic non-digital feel. Be nice

Welcome to the free peer-to-peer colour grading course! ??? The idea is that we all have things to learn from each other, so we all grade the same clip and then you explain what you did if someone is interested in your grade. These are the rules: No criticism. NO CRITICISM!! Seriously. If someone asks for constructive feedback then sure, give a few helpful pointers (and not an essay), but this thread is about learning from each others strengths, not pointing out each others weaknesses. We are here because we are not professional colourists, and some of us only do this for fun and aren't pros, so give us a break. If we criticise then no one will grade, and... If no-one grades, no-one learns anything. You don't have to grade to participate, but please do if you are able to. You can post multiple grades if you want. Try different looks, see what works and what other people might like. Grading is subjective. Anyone is free to post a clip/still to grade, BUT, You must post two grades of other clips before you post your clip for grading. Otherwise we'll have a thread full of clips and no grades. See rule #2. If you post a clip, please include what colour/gamma profile it was shot in. This helps to transform the colour space. Please post the file SOOC if possible (if it's not too large a file size) or at least a completely ungraded unprocessed clip from that file. Be sure to maintain bit-depth and resolution. Please post relatively nice clips, not ones that are impossible. Try to remember that we're trying to learn colour grading, not show off our troubleshooting skills. Don't be an asshole. Seriously, just play nice and get along I am serious about Rule #1. Posting your creative work is an act of courage - criticising others is an act of cowardice. If you are an asshole I will call you out, and I will not be polite about it. All that said, here's clip number one. Have at it! https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D8480669_08693060_6029821 Clip shot with GH5 in 150Mbps 4K HLG, shot with sharpening turned all the way down. I have reason to believe that the HLG on the GH5 is neither rec.2100 nor rec.2020, but rec2100 is probably good enough to get a decent grade. I shoot auto-WB so it probably needs adjusting, and there's a bit of noise too, but it's not too far gone - I shoot in way worse conditions than this. The clip is from a tour of a traditional village temple in Nha Trang Vietnam.

Totally agree @kaylee I think this is a go. Now to find a nice clip to kick things off. Unless anyone has one they're happy to share?

You may do things that are great just because you're not seeing them in the same way. It's not a critiquing session where we talk about what doesn't work, it's about gathering the bits that do Resolve is wonderful, and I'm probably much more guilty than the next guy of making fun of the other platforms for not having as extensive a toolset, however the secret is that a great colourist will be able to make very good colour grades with only a few tools. Think about photo editing when photoshop only had the basic adjustment tools like curves - magazines were still full of stunning images. A good grade should be useful to everyone as a reference. Knowing that the person applied a conversion LUT, then custom contrast curves, then desaturated the shadows, etc etc should be useful information to everyone. Sure, if someone goes nuts in Resolve it might be difficult to replicate in PP/FCPX but I don't think that killer grades rely on these fancy tools very often. The point is to replicate the grade and figure out how it works so you understand it. Otherwise it just becomes another preset and you may as well have just bought a LUT pack. In terms of who participates, it's whoever has time and energy

Nice stills. I'm confused as to why in the first place anyone would have thought that RAW 12MP stills wouldn't be any good. I mean, we regularly see great looking compressed 4K stills, or even 1080 stills.

The big review I posted yesterday had the Revuenon 55/1.4 in it and it was sharp across the frame, but the bokeh was very hard and kind of distracting for me, so I'm curious to see how you find the 1.2. Of course, I have read that Chinon, Revuenon, Rikenon, Mamiya-Sekor may all be the same lens or had some kind of rebranding going on, so they might have completely different heritages

In case anyone wants to DIY their own lens.... This channel is great - he does all kinds of fun things. It's also a great example of content vs cameras - who cares what he shoots with, it's interesting

Here's my idea for a free perr-to-peer colour grading course for all of us. We have a bunch of people with skills here, so I imagine we can learn a lot from each other. Idea: Someone films one or two short clips and uploads the files SOOC People have a go at grading them and upload results We comment on what we like about people's work (someone might be good at tone, others at colour, others at something else) The people who did the grading share what they did so the rest of us can learn from it Repeat I'm happy to record some nice clips to get it started. It would need people to actively participate though. If only a couple of people actually grade anything then it won't work because they won't have other work to learn anything from. Who would be interested in actively participating by grading and sharing their results?

I have travelled with the XC10 which was 24-240mm equivalent and also the APS-C Canon 18-55 and 55-250 but found that I don't do a lot of long zoom shots, or if I do they don't tend to make it to the final edit. My films are really about where we are and what we're doing, rather than the people waaaaay over there Just an individual style thing I guess. All those lenses are normal adapters, so 2x equivalent. I saw that Zeiss 35-70mm 3.4 and tried to work out how I'd use it but it's just too slow for me. I film in natural / environmental lighting and a lot at night so need all the light-gathering I can get. People are critical of having super-fast lenses because shallow DOF is so yesterday and Hollywood only uses 2.8 and they're difficult to focus and blah blah blah, but I've been really happy that my 17.5 goes to F0.95 because it takes the ISO down and reduces noise and brings the colours to life. I also understand that there's an aperture dial and I can set it to something other than wide open ? If I could afford it I'd probably have all 0.95 MFT lenses, or go 1.4 FF + 0.64x SB for the same effect. Yeah, my 40/1.8 Konica Hexanon is 80mm equivalent so I'm looking forward to that. I previously only travelled with 35mm and 116mm equivalents, so I haven't used an 80mm equivalent in real life yet. TBH I'll be happy to get past thinking about lenses and actually learning the ones I have decided on. All your contributions of 28mm lenses has kind of put 'learning a focal length' onto my radar - I think I knew it was a thing but hadn't really thought about it seriously.

I haven't really tested it, but there was a comparison pic here by @jase: The 5K isn't All-I, but if you're shooting anamorphic there's a 3.3K 4:3 10-bit 422 10-bit 400Mbps All-I mode that might be of interest, and it supports HLG too, and remember that it's 400mbps h265 so may be better than h264. Long-GOP h265 gets about 2x efficiency compared to h264 but I'm not sure about All-I. 3.3K might even match the Alexa better than the normal 4K mode. I should do a comparison video.

I agree. I have two sets of lenses: Travel and general stuff: 8mm f4 // 17.5mm f0.95 // 40mm f1.8, which gives equivalents of 16mm f8 // 35mm f1.4 // 80mm f3.6 Sports and wildlife stuff: 135mm f2.8 // 200mm f3.5, which gives equivalents of 270mm f5.6 // 400mm f7 I'm missing a 80mm lens which would sit in-between the 40 and 135, but I haven't really had the need for one yet. Maybe for sports, but I'll only consider getting one if that happens. If I am travelling I don't think I'd take either of the longer lenses, just the main three lenses.

It also lowers (disables?) the sharpening, enables h265 200mbps codec which reduced file sizes and SD card costs (the 400mbps codec for 4K requires UHS-II cards that cost a fortune), so there are tradeoffs in both directions. I'm not convinced I'll swap over permanently, but folks who do anamorphic shooting may be very interested in the GHa LUTs combined with that anamorphic look. The GH5 is great value for money, but if you want to shoot 10-bit anamorphic with de-squeeze and without an external monitor it becomes the bargain of the century, and the Alexa colour combined with the big-screen aesthetic would be a spectacular match.

Those are some very impressive looking stills indeed! Beautiful tones, and the motion blur of those birds is just great

I remember something from my stills photography days that went something like "An image should only be in colour if the colour ads something to the shot. Colour is like everything else in an image - if it's not helping the image then remove it".

Yeah, I've seen some interesting attempts at 360 video, 3D video, and VR (which can be either of those, or interactive) and we're kind of yet to really crack the basics. I've seen a few VR 3D films where they're attempted to move the camera, to varying effect. The main challenge for content creators is that we can't make sure the person is pointing the direction we want them to be, or noticing what we want them to notice.

Just found this huge and very thorough comparison of 50mm lenses... http://hispan.hu/50mm-lens-test/ It's in Hungarian, but is well worth translating different sections. There are test charts, sharpness tests, bokeh tests, flare tests, etc for every lens at every aperture. Very impressive and useful

I'll pick a few lenses and go out and shoot something, so I'll try and get some lights into the lenses when I do. I was going to have a light in the background for bokeh but ended up with the specular highlights on the plastic bag in the background instead.

That looks cool, I like it being on that line, it integrates it in a funny-sort of way. I'd move it to the left so it's not crowding the guy, although it does have a bit of that person-looking-straight-at-edge-of-frame kind of trapped vibe. I really like it as the frame for the poster too. @mercer is really getting good with those 28mm lenses!! (I'm assuming that's a 28 shot?)