Render times applying LUT's and sharpening...to correct for gopro protune

S

squidman

Member
Need some help as a newb..sort of!

Moved from Vegas to Premiere a few years ago, but having trouble despite recent workstation build with render times/preview times. At the moment gopro studio just crashes (the importer crashes) so resorted to premiere to convert gopro protune .mov files. After mucho to and fro with Gopro tech support, have the firstlight LUT's (.look, .cube files), however, although a quick batch encode to say DNxHD or Cineform with media encoder works a treat (really fast!), as soon as I apply a LUT, or an unsharpen mask (all to approximate the gopro studio look), I get around 1-2 frames a second in Premiere. What's worse, currently rendering a bunch of gopro protune clips converted to cineform, and in premiere with the lumetri protune lut applied and one unsharpen mask, the 23 minute total of four clips is going to take over 3 hours to render!

I'm using 2 scratch disks both with ssd caching, and have a dual xeon workstation (albeit slower e5-2665 ES sandy chips running around 2.4 ghz), still...wow that is really friggin! slow. Looking at my 32 threads, not surprisingly, very low utilization....32gb ram and whatever it is lots and lots and lots of hdd's as well as a raid 5 array for backup...

Other: I have an older 770 gtx 4 gb for graphics (just the one), and OS and main software are on 2 SSD's, completely separate from scratch disks. All on Asus z9pe-d8 WS. Yes have latest drivers pretty much, ditto BIOS (to the extent I can with ES chips), and Maya, Max, Nuke etc run fine no problem (3D animation student).

Frankly, wondering if I have to finally learn Resolve (the gopro software just crashes on opening, and no batch export), or maybe get stuck into nuke although that seems a bit overkill for correcting home gopro vids!

Any help from you pros out there much appreciated! I don't actually use premiere or AE all that often, but can't see that I've completely messed up optimization! Iff I had the dough, a separate ssd just for AE/Premiere scratch would be nice.
 

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It's my understanding that Protune is a camera setting that allows a more 'professional' basic look for the camera footage, so that it can be more easily graded in post to match other cameras. Meaning, Protune is not a look you would want to end up with, or emulate, in post. It's what you start with in order to match other cameras.

So, I'm at a bit of a loss on what exactly you're trying to do here.
 
I shoot my gopros in protune as it has a higher bitrate, and from what I can tell (on my amateur monitors, although I do calibrate them) much better looking image (AFTER you apply grades, sharpening etc. !) As Gopro Studio software doesn't batch export (and in any case is not working at all for me at the moment), I'm trying to find a workflow to apply the Protune LUT (Gopro told me where they got it from, not theirs originally) without horrendous render times. After this post, I chucked converted gopro .mov clips which had been converted via media encoder to Cineform .mov (huge file sizes) straight into speedgrade, instead of using the premiere linkage, and finally had real-time playback. However, a 24 minute project (4 clips) still took 1.5 hrs to render back to cineform within speedgrade..so still too long. Speedgrade doesn't allow batch exports of clips either. So still at a loss. This was on a dual xeon workstation with all 32 threads working, but at very low utilization (albeit ram usage shot up to 22 GB on a 32 GB machine).

To answer your question in anther way...protune is a 'flat' image without sharpening, contrast etc applied (but which retains more of shadows and highlights) and needs to be graded (and sharpened, denoised etc). So just like any other 'flatter' setting i.e. sony s-log arri etc...it also runs on my old hd2's at around 45? mbps as opposed to 30, so retains more information. Hope that clarifies things (or clear as mud?)..:)

I see the confusion: the flat mode the gopro shoots in is called ' pro-tune mode', and there is a corresponding LUT, as well as sharpening, contrast, noise removal applied in the gopro software which they call 'pro-tune look' or something....I'm just trying to emulate that look as well be able to apply it to all my clips in batch-mode (because I'm lazy) rather than laboriously grade my clips individually. And in some kind of time-efficent manner..as graded protune clips look MUCH better than clips with all the above applied in camera..
 
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The protune settings in camera are a 'flat' look which you need to grade...i.e. increase sharpening, saturation, tweak colors etc. So you're not applying it twice, rather once. Straight from camera the protune setting looks terrible. Rather like canon log or blackmagic raw files.....google flat looks or camera raw or s-log etc. The idea is to retain more details in shadows and highlights, increase dynamic range when shooting...then apply a look in post. You could apply any kind of look in post, either manually or using a look up table (LUT), the latter simply simply applying an algorithm which changes color values. The protune 'LUT' is just gopro/cineform's renaming of a popular commercial LUT. You could just as easily apply a kodak film approximation LUT or similar...
 
So the LUT applied after the fact is simply 'correcting' the flat footage recorded in camera? Sort of an 'undo' for the ProTune look you recorded?

If that's the goal, why shoot flat to begin with?
 
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