Yeah, it’s a bit of a ‘Holy Grail’!
MANLY – Kearon de Clouet’s V-LOG test on the LUMIX GH4 from Kearon de Clouet – Director, DoP on Vimeo.
Many DSLRs ‘crush’ the data in the blacks and whites, giving you what looks like a more ‘final’ image, but at the expense of your video file – see, you have now lost the nice rolloff in the blacks and whites – making the image much harder to colour grade in post production.
So, how do we capture all the nice bright and dark bits on a DSLR? You use a colour setting that DOESN’T throw away all the data you want to keep. Something that doesn’t look right in-camera, but will make your post-production colourist offer you a beer. Or a case of beer.
With Panasonic releasing a firmware update to give the GH4 a couple of extra stops of latitude by utilising an ‘s-log’ type of exposure curve, I went down to Manly Beach to give it a test in some extremely bright light conditions. I was pleasantly surprised – while I expected the V-Log colour space to hold up in the usual 25fps 100mbit shots, I didn’t expect it to hold up so well on the 96fps slo-mo shots. Not bad at all.
Shot on Panasonic Lumix GH4, Firmware update 2.4 (around 12 stops of latitude using V-Log)
Lens: Lumix X series 12-35mm
Editied on Final Cut Pro x (in an hour, no less!)
Graded in FilmConvert Pro, using the Kodak 5207 Vision 3 film setting.
Music: ‘Polaris’, by Jordan Critz, courtesy of The Music Bed.
Now go out and shoot something!
Kearon de Clouet, content producer, videographer.
kearondeclouet.com
