I was going off topic in this thread GH4 4K Panasonic video camera, User reviews and opinions... So I'll continue here.

@jopereira

Here is my GH4 to BMD LUT, remember it's not an exact color match because I don't think the GH4 can go there with a 8bit recording.

Here is a sample of the LUT correcting a GH4 frame to "match" BMCC.

Forgot to say, adding saturation to your LUT also gives me pleasant results. Will test with other shots and see the results in my home cinema projector, where thinks look different (and where I'm used to see final results).

@yak You made it clear you’re looking for BMCC look :) . Sorry, my bad.

Have you tried Natural photo style (contrast -5, perhaps with a small s-curve in shadows/highlights to get dynamic range comparable with Cinelike-D)? Many run away from Cinelike-D because Natural seems to produce better (= more accurate) colors.

In either case, from what I observed yesterday, your LUT doesn't seem to produce big changes in overall dynamic values of the scene (only in in-between values), which is a good thing. Noam Kroll's LUT increases highlights a lot and decreases shadow too much to keep values in there limits, and clipping may occur if scene is exposed properly in first place. Nice job of you.

A question to this forum: applying this LUT in Magic Bullet Looks makes a big difference from applying it in PremierPro Lumetri - MB Looks makes magenta blotches similar to what V-Log does in the same circumstances. Any idea why?

@yak I'm not a professional in video/film market, I'm simply an amateur. So take my word as is. After a few more tests, I think your LUT makes skin less alive/cooler than I want/I think is 'real'. Other colors also shift a lot not to be recognized as the real deal. I don't know if BMCC workflow corrects this, but I think we must have a copy as close as possible to what reality is, then the grading/creative process takes place.

Here is a scene with original Cinelike-D 0,-5,-5-5,0, your LUT with S-curve and some saturation, and the one I did based on some of you comments (particularly, shifted and desaturated the yellow and orange towards red + some blue to shadows). I also attach my configuration and a LUT for it.

After a year of messing I have settled on natural with all 0's except maybe -3 on NR.. Not the most cinematic but the most please to my eye out of camera with no need for grading

I wonder where comes the sky banding and little rough video image in GH4? Is it scaler, codec, sharpening, image adjustments, etc. When rendering a JPG photo to video even at low bitrate there is no such banding. I think the GH4 and all Panasonic cameras fools somehow with colors. Maybe GH4 reads sensor in video with limited color palette? I think that Canon/Nikon may have smoother color palette than Panasonic. The GH2 colors are quite visible limited compared to photos. GH3 is better and GH4 again smoother but not perfect.

@caveport

Banding comes from 8 bit 4:2:0 sampling in the camera.

Yes banding comes from camera but in generally 8bit 4:2:0 codec can make banding free result especially with 100 Mbs. When I watch TV programs with very low bitrate there is less banding in skies than in GH4 100 Mbs 4k files. 4:2:0 is not limiting color steps, it just reduces color resolution. If I render a photo slideshow in 8bit 4:2:0 video there is no banding.

Has the Panasonic codec less "colors" than others? Or is there differences in color channels? I have heard that Panasonic cameras records green colors better than others but has difficulties in skin tones (reds) and skies.

Here is an example of GH4 iso200 video with lots of skies (not mine). There is something like noise all the time in sky but it cant be noise at iso200 and bright sky. Why the sky is not clean?

@Vesku

Why the sky is not clean?

Answer= The GH4 is a noisy little camera.... No matter what you do you will see noise when shooting video on the GH4 even at ISO 200. If the noise at 200 ISO bothers you, well you might as well sell the camera because trust me the noise will be there no matter what you do. I am ok with the noise at ISO 200 and with Neat Video it cleans up pretty nicely but if you are not willing to use Neat Video you may want to consider another camera.

It is sad though that even at 200 ISO the image is noisy ;-(

I think that the CineD stock settings with a good LUT is the best picture profile overall for noise, dynamic range, skin tones etc etc. I really like VLOG for skin tones but the magenta issue is just to much and the image in general is way to noisy. I bring this up because the profiles also make a difference in regards to noise.

@Azo

I think you have to test it yourself. I just figured this new idea. Now when I am obsessing about banding I found a very well working de-band filter in my Potplayer. It makes skies very clean when playing GH4 files. I tried gaussian blur and normal blur but those were not helping.

Potplayer is a video player like VLC or Windows Media Player. I dont know if it is for Mac but it works very well in my AMD 6 core PC. The de-band filter makes my nature videos super clean and still sharp. Like having GH5 already :) I think there is de-banding filter in other players or editors too.

What he calls banding isn't the same kind of banding that's caused by using too few bits in each color channel. It's just that the interpolated LUT is only an approximation of the smooth curves used to generate it. It's something like this.

I don't see anyone using 17x17x17 LUTs these days. That's tiny. 33x33x33 is usually enough for a "look" LUT, if the look is not too extreme. For color space conversion, you can run into problems even with that many points, e.g. if you are doing gamut mapping. It really depends what transformation you are trying to encode in the LUT. A linear transformation, for example, can be accurately represented in a 2x2x2 LUT.