@xenocide - you're on the right track, but here's the rub. You are looking at a recorded image...It's easy to see when those clip. In live view on the LCD you will not be able to tell that it's clipped. It'll look fine. And so will the shadows.

It remains to be seen just how accurate the in-camera meter will be while operating in log mode. I'm a little stunned at the silence in that regard from those who have the update already. This leads me to believe that nobody is certain because nobody has done a comprehensive bracket test to see where middle gray, black, and clip white fall. AND if changing the ISO causes any of these benchmark points to "move" up and/or down accordingly. Not saying they will, but I won't be surprised if they do. IF it is accurate in finding middle gray, then at least you'll be in the ballpark with exposure. But just exposing for middle gray is not going to insure that you fit your scene into the camera's DR.

I love this, because I love seeing people who like to call themselves "cinematographers" struggle when all of a sudden what-you-see-is-what-you-get no longer applies. Might just force people to learn their craft... they'll certainly make better images. And better images makes me happy.

Okay from a potential buyer point of view there are some considerations.

12 stops instead of 10 makes me excited. Next time I'm in the jungle I might be able to capture the full dynamic range and not have to choose between crushed blacks or clipped highlights. And I might even try to capture magic hour sunset shots with decent shadow detail. HDR video in camera. Nice!

But just buying the vlog makes some of the cameras internal measurement options unreliable. If you guess the wrong clipping point in the histogram you'll drop from 12 stops to 11 or 10 and the advantage is gone. If you set zebras to 80% and increase exposure until the zebra's appear in significant areas and dial exposure a bit back should give me the full 12 stop range. In post I have to see whatever I can recover from the shadows but they might still be very noisy and stop 11 and 12 in the shadows might not look very nice.

I don't want an external monitor, because it takes too much setup time. It gains very little advantage and is pretty expensive. I am very happy with viewfinder and lcd and get the results I like from them. Nice, fast and compact makes me more productive in the field.

So I won't buy the upgrade right now and first wait for impressive high dynamic range shots I haven't seen before from the GH4 and then I might consider the "upgrade".

@konjow Some are assuming Panasonic neglected to tweak exposure tools because of something Barry Green said about a completely different camera (DVX200). I would like to think they'd take the time to enable correct exposure monitoring with zebras and/or histogram given the many months of development that went into the paid feature release. Monitors with LUT support are nice luxuries to have, but I doubt they'll be a requirement to operate this camera in V-Log profile.

Perhaps Jordan from TCSTV can enlighten us as I'm pretty sure he was exposing in camera when he shot the last few episodes in log.

@shian thanks for the reply and I think I follow what you're saying. I definitely want to get my hands on it to see exactly what's going on. Hopefully they actually get it out by mid-September like they say.

Yay!

@shian

Downloaded the ProRes clips Driftwood released. Would you consider these underexposed?

They're all underexposed to a degree. But with the 10bit ProRes coming out of the shogun, there's so much damn detail, it doesn't really matter, except on the clip with the guy sitting in the sand... that's atrocious. And even then it power windows up beautifully. Better than R3D footage.

I wasn't sold on the Shogun before, but holy shit... this footage is a dream to work with.

Great grade @bleach551!!!

Wonder if the assassin can pull the same image?! Super impressed. Love the detail!

On another note is the cash back from 20th September a world wide thing? Or France only? If it's France only maybe it's a way of saying sorry for having a 30min restriction?

@alcomposer,

I'm not really sure about the cash back for V-log , I think that might be a sales promotion in France only. I also hope that these samples from Nick @Driftwood, from the atomos shogun, will be of the same quality in the Ninja assassin.

@alcomposer,

Driftwood's samples are UHD 3840x2160, DCI is 4096x2160. All you have to do is open up a 1080p project in your NLE and import the UHD footage. OOPs I read you comment wrong, I thought you said conversion. Duh

@bleach551 Great job! Just out of curiosity, which conversion LUT are you using?

The latitude in this footage is simply amazing /Bleach....your grade is beautiful!...the GH4 /vlog/ shogun combo is going to turn things on its head!!:)...

@PierreB,

Thanks so much.