kye

I do.. in fact I am right now

A Hollywood blockbuster grade just for fun..

Just reading an article on lowepost about colour grading for Peaky Blinders and they had this to say: Link is behind a paywall, but here it is if you're a member: https://lowepost.com/color-grading/case-studies/peaky-blinders-r9/ One of the things I like about the GH5 is that it has a bit of grain and it looks like film, rather than looking artificial. Obviously it depends on what look you're going for, but if you want a super-clean modern look then you need to be carefully lighting your scene so that there aren't any bright highlights and then using ETTR and then doing heavy grading in post. Alternatively you could just apply some noise reduction in post and clean it up that way. $2k for a GH5 is a lot of money, but in video camera terms, it's not even the price of a single high-quality lens, so you have to manage your expectations

I've had two pivotal moments in my colour grading. The first was a Lightroom video where a guy edited a photo of a little Italian town with the sunset in the background. It looked OK, but nothing special. He did the usual curves and saturation and a graduated filter to bring the sunset down but what really brought it to life and made it look magical was he put very yellow power windows on all the little ornate street lights, and faked a candle on all the tables with people sitting on them, and did other local adjustments. In the end it looked like the best romantic little town in Italy fantasy anyone has ever had. I'd never seen anyone use 50-100 local adjustments in LR before so it was a new approach for me. The second experience was when I was looking at what editing package to go for, and as I was evaluating them finding out that Resolve could do the same local adjustments but it could track them for movement. Basically a light-bulb went off and I realised that Resolve was LR for video. After seeing that, PP and FCPX didn't stand a chance and I realised that in the way you darken and lighten things in photo editing to control the composition and the viewers attention in a photo could also be applied to video. If only he was shining a torch up from under his chin... ".........and then they heard a scraping sound coming from the empty cupboard!!"

I tried to get into birding, and setup a bird bath in my backyard, but unfortunately there isn't a lot of tree cover where I live (due to housing development and the overall location) so nothing visited and I pretty much gave up. Also, birding from sitting on my back patio sounds attractive but having to actually go anywhere for it is a lot less so

Great response everyone, interesting to see what people do with the same clip @KnightsFan @heart0less the setup for a colour grading suite is very particular, from memory: Colour calibrated display (of course!) No daylight - completely artificial lighting Neutral coloured walls Nothing bright behind the operator (so no reflections in monitor) nothing next to the monitor - you have to be able to see the walls around the monitor A light behind the monitor creating a kind of halo around the monitor Wait for the lights to stabilise before grading The light behind the monitor combined with the neutral coloured wall gives you a constant grey reference when grading so your eyes don't adjust to your grade. You spend thousands on this setup, then hours and hours grading properly, then the client goes and looks at the result on their grandmothers 15 year old TV and goes ballistic on the phone to you that you've screwed up the grade and you have to educate them that every display is different and there's nothing you can do about it, but somehow it was still worth the money to grade it professionally anyway. I just compared Resolve to the exported JPG in Preview (Mac) to Safari to Chrome and Resolve had darker black levels, Preview and Safari matched, and Chrome had the lightest blacks, so was furthest from Resolve. Of course, all of this is system, monitor and colour profile dependent. Basically, it's a nightmare, and welcome to the world of colour grading. Your computer should be smart enough to have separate colour profiles for each monitor, so I'm not sure your logic is correct? Regardless, I get the impression that basically the pros calibrate their reference monitor and then just expect that everything else will look different and just deal with it. Interesting side-note - Resolve is designed to work with the BM output devices and they include their own colour management and calibration functionality for that setup. One of the reasons they don't have the best UI for grading on your system monitor is that they say you can't properly guarantee you can calibrate it because the OS gets in the way etc, and they have absolute control over their devices in a way that they don't have over the system monitor. There may be a bit of "buy more of our products" but it's an interesting thing.

Then head on over - the first image is up, and people have been busy!

Yeah, plus all the "other" stuff like knowing where to point it, etc.

LOL. yeah, I know! Seriously, read that thread on reduser, it's got heaps of info all the way through. IIRC there were at least three companies (or brands?) involved, Helios, Tair, and Jupiter. I believe they were made across multiple factories over the time, so it's more complicated than just the three. That guy made a set with all three, but they have a lot of lenses that overlap, for example there are both Helios 44 (58mm f2) and Helios 77 (50mm f1.8), as well as Tair-11A (135mm F2.8) and Jupiter-11A (135mm F4), so there are many options. The USSR was an entire other isolated economy during that time.

There is. The Russians didn't just hang around drinking vodka during the Cold War http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?152436-Russian-Soviet-USSR-Lens-Survival-Guide and here are some samples from the set: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNtAbAeqHYSKyOnPbE-3AuIxzmeVFZCbWCspWF1jCuvHBihhbHbMULc5rMa1xtdBA?key=YWd5QW1tYm5OOERoeHpBSHg1TlJiUEptOGVKSmNB

Sounds about right being students. Sports is an exception, but everyone knows that the 'pro' bodies are bought by amateurs trying to get pro results, and the real pros use older/mid-tier equipment because they know what it is that makes pro images, and they know it's not having the latest tech

oh noes!!! no rush, it's cool ???

I agree. I see three different 'levels' of determinism in virtual worlds. The first is where you have no control because everything is pre-planned (like watching a film). The third is where the player has total control and whatever happens happens, and the world is generated completely by algorithms and probabilities. The second is a hybrid, like you're in a virtual world that has certain rules but at a specific point you will transition into a different phase with different rules, kind of like going through the acts in a film. Games typically exist in the second type where they have seasons, or specific items you have to find or monsters to conquer or whatever to drive the plot forwards. I'm just gearing up for VR development and am thinking about this stuff a lot recently. I think VR (and then AR) has a huge future and I want to be part of that. I've consistently been disappointed with what computers can do vs what developers actually build, so I'm basically going to try and create the things that I want someone else to do.

Anyone feel like taking our own advice and making a bunch of >1 minute films? It would support Zach, but it would also be a bit of fun. I'm in if others are.

Punchy! It really makes the subject and the writing pop. Nice What kind of film / genre / mood would you use such a grade for?

I had to read your post about three times because I have been having exactly the same thought and my brain was assuming that I'd written the above statement and you were somehow quoting me! In fact, the whole big lens shootout I just did was to get a 70-80mm equivalent lens on my GH5. I'd mostly gone a different way and was trying 35-40mm lenses without a SB, but one of my goals was low light performance and the 50-60+SB combination gives an extra stop of light without narrowing the DoF which is useful. In the end I went with the Konica 40mm f1.8 because it was fast, had good contrast and had very little distortion around the edges of the frame when wide open. I prefer it to the Helios+SB combination even though that is one stop brighter because the Helios has such soft/smeared edges wide open, and the SB makes it worse (because the Helios is sharp in the middle but gets worse towards the outer edges). To go brighter again would require the 50/1.4+SB combination you're chasing, and that combo would match the brightness of my 17.5mm f0.95 main lens which would be great. There are a ton of fast 50mm lenses. I don't know if you saw this link I posted earlier to a big 50mm comparison? http://hispan.hu/50mm-lens-test/ It's in Hungarian, but the pictures pretty much speak for themselves and it's a very comprehensive test. It's interesting you didn't like the revuenon, as that was one of the better performers in that test, especially at edge sharpness, although I didn't care for the "bubble" bokeh as I think it's too distracting for use except as a kind of special effects lens, or unless you can carefully control the background and eliminate any specular highlights or sharp edges. Good luck on your quest, your problem is the sheer number of options, which takes work but at least you will end up with something good at the end. There are worse problems to have! Keep us updated Interesting. I did wonder about that. IIRC you didn't used to be able to, so maybe they changed it. That's really cool.

I've gone to my usual spots and didn't find anything, except an entry saying that that lens is m42 mount, which the pictures in the ebay ad clearly show it is not. If you're dead set on that lens then maybe looking for an adapter to go to something else, that you can then adapt to EF? I couldn't find any info on that lens mount, so no idea on flange distances. Probably the better question is why choose an obscure lens mount to buy a 55/1.4 that isn't that cheap. Plenty more accessible lenses and lens mounts in the sea..

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