GH2 How does the GH2 perform under color grading?

R

rc444

Well-known member
Hi Everyone,

I own a GH2 but haven't had time to experiment with how it performs under colour grading.

-- How does the GH2 tolerate basic FCP timeline grading?
-- And how does it tolerate FCP Color?

If anyone's had any good/bad experience with color grading the GH2, it would be interesting to hear your views...

Many thanks,
rc444
 
I have only had positive experiences with the GH2 material. I open the mts files in Sony Vegas Pro 11 without conversion, and if the shots are well exposed in the first place, quite a lot of grading and coloring will be tolerated. Have fun!
 
I've found you can't push it too far. It's not long before it falls apart.
There's loads of threads on here about this subject so have a search and you should get some more detailed answers!
 
I find if you use cine convertor in premiere or aftereffects, you can convert it to log, then grade from there, it seems to hold up better.
 
Hacked or stock?

I shot a short recently with 'Moon T5' and it held up very well in the grade. I did everything right inside FCPX with the stock tools as I didn't have time for elaborate workflows. I coloured the crap out of it, day to night shots and all sorts. No problems.

Stock at 24mbps it's a little fragile to be honest. If shooting stock I try to bake the look I want in camera. It really helps to have a quality external monitor. The screen on the GH2 is only really useful for focus. The EVF is relatively good. I have my phone if I can't take a monitor, an SD card reader and an OTG cable. It has an 1280x720 5.5 inch AMOLED screen which makes for a great reference on set. Watching the rushes on the way home is a potential time saver too.

If I know I'm shooting footage I want to colour later, I run one of the very high bit rate intra hacks.
 
The higher bit-rate patches definitely help when grading. ( FlowMotion ver 2.02 stays permanently on my GH2 )

Also being an 8-bit format, it's important to get a proper color balance when shooting as significant color-correction in post will limit how much your footage can be graded.
 
I too have used flowmotion quite a bit and it's a workhorse. Grades very well. My favorite patch is still Driftwood's Sedna A. Is anyone else still using this patch? How would you compare it to the new moon patches?
 
I find the GH2 grades just as well as most other 8 bit video formats which covers a lot of the cameras out there. Even XDCAM 50mbit which is a broadcast spec allowed by all HD stations is an 8 bit format. Even the SONY F3 shoots an 8bit format using the XDCAM 35mbit flavor.

It is what it is and unless you want to move up to a serious camera for serious money then 8 bit is what you have to deal with. Just shoot your color as close as possible so it doesn't need to be pushed as much during grading. I know the thought was to shoot flat but that's just not as good with an 8 bit format. You want to get the color as close as possible in camera so the 256 values per channel are baked in as close as possible. Than during grading you should hopefully only have to decimate those channels by pushing them a little bit. This still leaves you with as many different values in the 256 value range per channel.

If you shoot flat at 256 colors per channel and have to push each of those channels very hard you could end up with half the value in each channel and that's when 8 bit formats fall apart.

The reason why higher bitrate hacks can help is that sometimes compression artifacts take place on the color channels the naked eye wouldn't normally see. When you push those color however they start to show up and become more obvious. The less compression the better the color channels will look even if they are pushed hard. You will still be interpolating color values and get banding but you will see less noise and other color compression artifacts.
 
+1! I shoot full color, even vivid, these days, and it just takes a little desaturation, adjustment of color temperature/hue and gentle application of curves to get fine results most of the time...
 
I do the same thing as troelskirk with great results when I am looking for a vivid color look. I find that a much better result can be obtained by desaturating footage shot using higher saturation settings on the GH2 rather than shooting flat and then trying to raise the saturation levels in post. I have also used the Expressive mode for highly saturated colors and then desaturated for great looking footage.
 
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