@rwriter. These clips are kinda long, and I want to make sure you get un-recompressed files straight out of the camera. Anything else in a small downloadable package would be degraded, and affect your results. Maybe I'll export a very short ProRes444 of the untouched V-log later today. Deadlines :/

@joepereira don't base your green eval on my footage. Green is my fave color so I always enhance it. And much of the other footage I've seen has been translated poorly, and skews green.

@joonas_t thanks for that V Log to C Log LUT. It looks a bit red/magenta, but I dialed it back to about 50% and its perfect!

@aaronchicago agreed! I colored a feature earlier this year that shot on alexa, and the look is so similar its hard to believe. Let us know how you like the ninja star. I am thinking of doing the same thing!

@Xenocide38 I took a close look at the macro blocking and I think it's color noise from the sensor. So to fix it use photoshop, camera raw filter and color noise slider. No generic Lut can fix that, without major color shifts.

@aaronchicago The lut that I provided is not probably not working correctly because I'm not at all sure now what it the starting gamut and witch end gamut to use for the lut, but good that is any use for you.

^^^ give that man a cigar. It doesn't eliminate but it does manage it as you push the image.

Maybe Panasonic is trying to say something about V-Log L and 10bit 422 external recording by bringing the prices down of the GH4 & YAGH to $1798.

Has anyone tested different formats(avchd, mp4)?

@joonas_t, check my post above: http://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/206448#Comment_206448 I added one of driftwood's beta frames.

V-Gamut is a gamut. It specifies primary chromaticities, the gamut being all colors that you can create with a combination of those primaries. I linearize the color values and then use a matrix to transform from one gamut to another. I don't work in V-Gamut. I work in ACES or ACEScc, and then transform from that into Rec.709. Or you can use a 3D LUT to do everything in one step, like Panasonic's V-Log-to-709 LUT.

I added Caveport's image above. The color balance was way off and had to be corrected.

@balazer

Nice.

One question: is V-Log-to-709 LUT the way to go to edit in Premiere Pro?

My observation of the V-Log-to-709 LUT is that the gamut mapping is accurate. The optoelectronic transfer decoding and encoding are OK too, I guess, but the LUT renders images with unnaturally low contrast. If you boost the contrast before the LUT, I guess the results could be acceptable. But the LUT was only ever intended as a quick way to preview footage. Using display LUTs and working directly on camera log footage is not ideal. You can't accurately perform basic color correction like exposure compensation and color balancing. If you get the white balance and the exposure set perfectly in the camera, you can get good results with a display LUT. But if you can get the white balance and the exposure set perfectly in the camera, why do you need camera log at all? You might as well shoot in Standard photo style.

The big benefits of a scene referred camera color space are that you get more exposure latitude, and you can perform basic color correction accurately in post. That's why I like ACES and ACEScc: it breaks down the process into constituent transformations. You transform from the camera color space to a linear or log working space. In the linear or log working space, you can apply exposure compensation and color balancing accurately. In a linear color space, you can perform photo-realistic compositing. In a log working space, you can use all of the familiar color manipulation tools.

Then you transform from the working space to the display color space for previewing and rendering. I use ACES and ACEScc in Sony Vegas Pro. It uses OpenColorIO as its color space conversion engine, just like Nuke and Fusion and some others. OpenColorIO's configuration can be extended to support new input and output color spaces, which made it easy for me to add a Panasonic V-Log color space. Davinci Resolve has ACES and ACES log workflows too, and I believe the newest version has a V-Log IDT. But Resolve's ACES workflows are only half baked. Most standard color correction tools won't work well in the linear ACES space, and the ACES log mode lacks common output transforms like Rec.709 or 2.2 or 2.4 gamma. The ACES RRT+709 ODT is about your only choice in Resolve's ACES log mode, and I really don't like the look of the ACES RRT. It desaturates upper midtones and highlights and shifts skin tones towards green. But maybe it would be worth someone's time to experiment with ACES and ACES log in Resolve. Resolve does support loading of custom LUTs, but creating technical LUTs (and I mean the LUTs for transforming between well-defined color spaces), is, well, rather technical.

It's not like throwing a bunch of color manipulation into a LUT file to give some kind of prescribed look. You need to understand color space specifications and you need to be very particular about how video levels are encoded by whatever recorded the video and how they're decoded by the software. Sony screwed up parts of their OpenColorIO configuration, and even the official ACES configuration has several color spaces that are wrong. Did anyone read this far? I think I'm just rambling now. :)

It would be nice if someone who really knows these things could explain the difference of gamut, color space and color model and all the other terms used here. Well maybe not all, but anyway...