GH4 Essential Settings & Essential Post for GH4 Film Look

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filmguy123

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Sans Vlog, what settings will help the GH4 produce a more filmic look? CineD with -5 sharpness?

Should other settings such as NR, saturation, be brought down?

What essential post processes do you do? It seems FilmConvert could be a VERY handy tool in making GH images look more filmic.

How important is the added resolution that comes from shooting in 4K, even if delivering in 1080, to achieving higher end and filmic looking images?

What else can squeeze every once of a film look out of Micro43rds?
 
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For pure dynamic range with best colour, set Cine-D with Contrast 0, Saturation 0, -3 Sharpness (-5 if using Panasonic lens), NR -5, Hue 0. Make sure you set Highlight/Shadow OFF and 0-255 Luma, and turn other things like iDynamic and iRes OFF.

The colours will need a touch of fixing to be accurate (that's what my LUT is for), but you'll have a great starting point regardless.

More detailed info in my GH4 setup guide.

HTH!

Cheers,

Paul :)
 
To add to Paul's advice, protect your highlights. nothing screams video like blown highlights. When in post, yes, FilmConvert or any number of other finishing LUT's do a nice job of giving your footage a response curve similar to different film stocks.

Ultimately, if you don't light and frame your shot cinematically, none of the above will matter.
 
I will add, I read a lot of talk of exposing to the right, but in my experience (and Shane Hurlbut came to the same conclusion in his tests), the GH4 looks the best about 1/2 to 3/4 of a stop underexposed.
 
1. shoot C4K - better for later cropping (more pixels!)
2. 24fps (done in C4K)
3. shutter angle: 180 +/- a little

non GH4:

4. lighting
5. framing
6. add grain layer
7. vignetting
8. good musical score
9. perfect audio (no exceptions!)

0. start with a GREAT STORY
 
filmguy123 said:
Sans Vlog, what settings will help the GH4 produce a more filmic look? CineD with -5 sharpness?

Should other settings such as NR, saturation, be brought down?

What essential post processes do you do? It seems FilmConvert could be a VERY handy tool in making GH images look more filmic.

How important is the added resolution that comes from shooting in 4K, even if delivering in 1080, to achieving higher end and filmic looking images?

What else can squeeze every once of a film look out of Micro43rds?
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Lighting, lighting and lighting. Seriously this is the key to the film look and a high production value. Invest in a good kit of lights that will last you 10+ years. Cameras come and go all the time. If you nail lighting and composition the camera no longer matters as much. Even the dynamic range limitations can be worked around with good lighting. Dynamic range like low light is one of those things shooters need if they plan on being lazy when it comes to lighting and don't want to mess with lights or carefully planning the scene to reduce dynamic range issues.

Just to point out I'm not talking about the wedding shooters here but film makers.

4k all the way. Single sensor cameras use a bayer filter which reduces resolution in the way it builds the images we see. One way Hollywood gets around this is to shoot 4k or 5k and down convert to 2k and 2.5k to help increase the quality of a 2k delivery. This helps reduce sensor based artifacts and create a more naturally looking image with finer detail vs just shooting 2k. There are many other benefits to down scaling 4k to 2k but the short answer is yes it is much better than just shooting HD or 2k.

Record externally if you can. Hollywood uses raw or ProRes at the very minimum for a good reason. You will find a lot of videos and articles online about how an external recorder doesn't look any different than recording internally. These tests are fundamentally flawed because almost always involve shooting a static still life scene with little to no movement. These are about the easiest things on the planet for a camera to record and does not stress the internal encoder at all. A format like ProRes is about consistency. We use it because no matter how simple or complex a scene gets the quality will be the same. The noise pattern/grain, fine details, high contrast edges, areas of flat color and subtle gradients will always look the same. An internal format like that on the GH4 can change how some of those factors look from shot to shot. IPB encoders work based on motion prediction. They try to determine how many bits to use for each frame based on how much changes in each frame. If there are little to no changes it can save a lot of the bits for the overall look of the frames. If there is a lot of random motion (leaves blowing in the wind, water surf, explosions, blowing dust clouds, flight action sequences, sports) then the encoder has to use a lot of the bits to keep that motion looking good and it takes away from the overall look. In many cases the 100mbps just doesn't have enough bits to use and you get macro blocking. The 4:2:2 and 10bit helps as well, especially for grading.

Speaking of grading, that is a big component to the film look. Film/log/raw on its own is kind of ugly and bland. You can buy film look plugins and grading luts but those are just presets and not something you create for the mood of the project you are creating. Why use one grade preset over another? Just because you like it doesn't mean everybody else will like it. We don't create art for ourselves for for others to experience. Understanding good grading concepts will help you understand why you use certain looks for certain moods. Nothing wrong with using grading presets/plugins/luts but you should become aware of what the meaning is behind of of the looks.
 
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This is in no way a knock on the OP but not learning everything one can about what stoneinapond just posted is like doing a heart transplant and only connecting two of the four valves. If one wants to be a film maker I just don't think they can honestly say they don't care about lighting or grading or any other part of the equation. You really need to get intimately familiar with all of them or at least build a crew that is and that has the same amount of passion.

I always hear people say that stuff is too technical but look at how much stuff Shane Hurlbut knows about the technical side of color and lighting. He is where he is for a good reason. He has talent but he also took the time to understand the crap out of the technical stuff. Film making is fine art but its a technical fine art. If one just wants to be a director and just focus on the creative aspect thats fine but then why is that person concerned about cameras and resolution? Let the people on your crew like Shane or a DIT worry about all this other stuff.
 
Well, I think some people are being a bit patronizing. He didn't ask how can I make my film look like a movie. He asked how to get the best film look out of the GH4, and there are things one can do, which some people have listed, and which are specific to this camera and its settings, to get the most film like image as a base to start from.
 
I asked about the GH4 because this isn't a post about craft, it's specifically a technical question. Posts about craft would go in the lighting or cinematography forums. I've been shooting for 15 years and I care a great deal about that, just not in this discussion :)
 
Understood but when somebody asks about a more filmic look those are the answers I give. The term filmic is very subjective. Its like asking what notes to play on a new trumpet to make good music.

Filmic is really up to the stuff we listed more than anything else a camera will ever do. Besides what settings you use is really up to you. Panasonic didn't provide multiple settings to have a good look and a bad look in the camera. They provided the settings because each person has a different definition of what filmic actually means. To some that mushy over used DOF rack focus Canon look is filmic and yet I don't see any Hollywood movies that look like that. Well at least the movies that actually make money. Film has many different film stocks and it is hard to call any one look more filmic than others.

So we were not trying to patronize at all but providing insight into what actually goes into a film look.

Honestly if we are just talking about camera settings here I would say V-log -5, -5 external recording at 4k and down convert in post to 2k and save as ProRes4444 XQ master files to use for editing/grading/FX work. Next alternative would be the exact settings Paul Leeming provided for Cine-D. Thats about all you will get out of just the camera itself. I wouldn't exactly call either an instant filmic look however. I use 10bit V-log because I treat it like raw and can manually grade it in many different directions as desired. To me thats more of a film like editing experience than any other baked in profile on the GH4. I have shot on RED and to me using V-log gets me much closer to the workflow, quality and what I can push in post than anything else the camera can do. Thats not to say it doesn't have its limitations. Just that I prefer the advantages it gives me for that type of work.

My point is a person can make an amazing film that people enjoy with the standard profile at all 0 settings. I'm not sure any single person here can really answer how to make the camera itself more filmic without knowing what the OP's taste is in terms of a film look.
 
filmguy123 said:
I asked about the GH4 because this isn't a post about craft, it's specifically a technical question. Posts about craft would go in the lighting or cinematography forums. I've been shooting for 15 years and I care a great deal about that, just not in this discussion :)
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This is just my own opinion so please take it as such.

sharpness -5. Why? Because thats how sensors work. Cameras don't have a Gaussian blur filter built in just to make an image softer. The softer image is actually what the camera captures and adding sharpness adds fake contrast to the edges to make the video look sharper. To me one of the most obvious signs of digital video is electronic edge sharpening and a huge giveaway that something isn't film. This is also what affects a lot of green screen work because the sharpening adds extra edge artifacts and halos along the screen edges which will show up in a key forcing people to choke the matte. Having clean soft and smooth edges is much easier and natural looking to key.

Noise Reduction -5. Why? Because cameras have to perform noise reduction on every frame up to 30 times per second. Thats a lot of processing. Software like NeatVideo is really good and still far from perfect and yet can't even do HD on a beefy quad core computer with a monster GPU at realtime speeds. No camera can ever have that level of processing so noise reduction in camera is typically at best mediocre. Raw cameras handle noise reduction in post so my view is so should we. I know some argue against this because it takes long and we are doing NR on already heavily compressed material but I still feel it adds huge advantages. It is not perfect but using NeatVideo offers much more accurate and clean looking noise reduction. A lot of what separates good vs bad sensors is how well the camera can do noise reduction. The GH4 cleans up extremely well if you shoot NR at -5 and use Neatvideo in post. Sure it takes forever but visually it helps a lot. That NR in post is a much better process than the NR in camera if you use anything higher than -5. I also record externally for this reason. ProRes422 HQ while far from uncompressed is much cleaner to perform post NR on.
 
Thomas, this is really helpful. Regarding bypassing any in camera NR, does this NR in post become necessary on most all shots or just more taxing low light or stressed dynamic range shots?

Do you have any concerns about the better noise reduction that the GH5 employs to be so much better in lowlight, or is that different? Should we expect to see lowlight performance similar to GH4 if we set the GH5 NR to -5?

Why does leeming luts recommend NR only at -3 (for non native M43 lenses, that is)?

And lastly, does turning down contrast and saturation get you closer to the GH4 raw image, or does it start to artificially reduce contrast and color? Wondering why if anything higher than -5 is "Fake" for sharpening and NR, why this wouldnt be the case with contrast and saturation?
 
Paul - was everything in your 2015 reel shot on GH4? :45 with the guy in suit stood out to me as a shot with a look that I don't think the GH4 could achieve, but would be thrilled to hear that was GH4! It's not just the lighting, its the smoothness of the skin and the way the image renders. I dunno.
 
filmguy123, good eyes ;) That clip is shot on the original Red One. The power of RAW.... :D

Regarding -3 Sharpness for non-native lenses, that's the setting which I found gave the most sharpness before artifacts started creeping in. Below -3 the image got softer (aside from using native lenses, where the camera sets internal sharpening higher to correct lens deficiencies). Above -3 I started to notice artifacts like ringing and false detail creeping in. -3 gave me a lens sharp image where I felt the lens's natural sharpness was correctly rendered.

Cheers,

Paul :)
 
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