When to apply LUT

[Pete Burger]

AFAIK with 5D2RGB you can apply the LUT while transcoding. Haven’t tried it since I don’t use the LUT (I grade every piece of footage individually in AE with curves, hue/saturation and levels or with Red Giants Colorista.)
Using the LUT while editing (at least with Premiere Pro which I use) is very processor heavy and for my taste, it slows down the editing process too much. But that may be just a problem with my computer.

When using the LUT you could try to apply it before (or while transcoding) so you can edit the pre-graded footage or – what works for me – I edit the ungraded footage and do all the grading afterwards in a second step. But that’s for sure a matter of taste.

What I’d try to avoid by any means is to show ungraded Technicolor Cinestyle footage to my clients. So if they want to see work-in-progress parts, the LUT (plus LUT Buddy or equivalent) is a cool and easy to use gadget to give a hint, what the final footage might look like…

Just my two cents.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Michael Locke]

David,

Keep in mind different programs like different “flavors” of LUTs. I learned…

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/202/893322#893322

[David Bitterman]

Thanks for the help and info. I’ve ben able to use the cinestyle 3d .mga lut just fine, besides having to move off the current frame for it to kick in. I have however noticed that my performance is horrible when I have the lut buddy running. I’m only on a 2.3 core 2 duo as is, but a clip that will play once buffered is suddenly horribly stuttery after applying the lut, even after rendering effects in the timeline. I’m going to have to do a little more experimentation it seems. It started to seem that I would want to apply the lut in the color correction stage, but if it kills my performance that much I may have to either bake it in or just manually color grade the clip form the raw cinestyle footage.