This is getting bad

[John Pale]

Video does not look terrible. Certainly should be grade-able to look decent.

Your program monitor is set to 1/4 resolution. Are you judging by that image?

[Duke Sweden]

That’s actually as corrected as I can get it without the skin tone falling apart. If I didn’t empty my recycle bin I’ll take screen captures of the three clips I shot.

Yep, I white balanced, that’s another problem. Too yellow, not correct at all. Yes, I import through the browser. I let the clip set the sequence, then scale down to 1080p if I want, otherwise I leave it at 4k.

[Duke Sweden]

Like I said, that’s as good as I can get it before the skin tone goes all to hell. Program monitor is 1/4 but still frame is full resolution.

[Duke Sweden]

OK, here are the 4 clips straight out of camera. Cinelike D, -5 everything (-2 and default 0 not much better), manually white balanced with gray card, notice the yellow cast.

Properly exposed (Notice the gray cast. Normally proper exposed looks good, with a bright spot on my forehead)

Overexposed by 3 stops (No bright spot on my head, almost close to perfectly exposed)

Underexposed by 2 stops (Looks very similar to the properly exposed clip. Again, very gray)

This one I shot in my dining room just to see if manual white balance is off or what. Shot this before and wb was perfect. Here, once again, there’s a yellow cast.

Up until 3 days ago my clips would look very good and a little flat. Now there’s this, and that weird waveform ha ha ha’ing at me. These outside shots were all outside in 5 p.m. sunshine. Not the best of conditions, but I’ve shot in this light before and gotten much better results.

[Tero Ahlfors]

GH4 isn’t some magical piece of kit that automatically works in every situation. Personally I wouldn’t record any cinelike/log-ish footage if the camera isn’t recording to at least a 10 bit format.

That said. Are you possibly using some sort of LUT as a starting point? It might be clipping out information before you can get to it. Have you tried the footage in Resolve? It has better secondaries so doing selective correction might be easier on that. It also has it’s own color management where you can change color spaces and gammas without using a possibly destructive LUT.

[Duke Sweden]

No, those examples are straight out of the camera. Also, the problem here is that without changing anything, suddenly I’m getting extremely crappy footage, shooting in the same light I’ve always shot in. I was just saying to myself a week ago that I finally got a basic formula to get the look I’m after, and then suddenly I’m getting this. That’s the problem. I mean, seriously, look how underexposed the overexposed still frame is! That was overexposed by 3 notches on the meter with the sun shining directly behind the camera.

[Tero Ahlfors]

How are you measuring your exposure? That “properly exposed” picture looks really dark considering you’re supposed to be in the sunlight and there are probably unrecoverable shadows in that. Try changing the profile from cinelike to a more neutral one and check if that change shows up in the camera’s histogram. Dealing with exposure is different for log footage.

[Duke Sweden]

That’s what I’m saying. And the overexposed shot is close to properly exposed. Here’s an example of what’s happening. On the right is similar to what I used to get. Flat (Cinelike D -5) with proper color. On the left is what I’ve been getting these past 3 days using the same settings.

[Tero Ahlfors]

You should probably go check out a GH4 users forum and ask them. There’s one in Four Thirds users https://fourthirds-user.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=91

[Duke Sweden]

I belong to all of them. Except for the Facebook one. I keep getting banned for my righteous political views 😉