@liammatador Hey, regret nothing. The GH3 is a fine piece of equipment. I still really like mine. Not just throwing a bone to the GH3 either. I'm sure we (or I) sound like a nit-picky hair splitter regarding the GH3's weaknesses. I still have my GH2 but I do use my GH3 80% of the time. 1080p at 60fps for slow mo can't be beat. The "issues" for me with the GH3 have been skin tones and bit rate. For All-I you really need to be shooting at 100Mbs or greater to get a noticeably superior quality. While I was very excited about shooting 72Mbs All-I, I've found it to be pretty much useless now. (Remember that 50Mbs IPB Interframe is the visual equivalent of 100Mbs All-I.) That said, If I were on a dessert island and could only take one... GH3 wins out over GH2 for an essay of reasons.

The perfect world for me would be the GH3 camera as is... with the 158Mbs bit rate of my hacked GH2. Hello GH4? We'll see, but I'm in no hurry.

Since You've Asked: Technically: Well done. Definitely a time consuming edit. Skin tones work great especially for this stylized kind of execution. Again, nicely done.

@liammatador ...

Yea, the more you get right in in-cam set-up the easier EVERYTHING is down the line. True in stills but I've found it even more so in video. The more "depth" to a file & the more dynamic range you have make it a bit easier to recover from initial ... mistakes? ... but a "recovered" footage from a cam with higher bit-rate & dr is often out-shone by a "lesser" cam that was spot-on for initial setup and handled wisely in post. So better initial setup is realistically never something you completely recover from. With any cam no matter how expensive.

The GH3 has an issue (as I've seen it) with the engineers trying to out-think the users as to what "our Ideal" would be in skin-tones, and used the facial/tonal recognition ability of the processor to bake-in certain parameter to "help" skin along: lower contrast, lower sharpness, and over-saturated and lighter magenta (blue/red mix) coupled with a bit of de-sat in yellow/orange areas. Going for soft "pink" skin, I think. Which is where the "pink plasticine" look comes from, as far as I can tell.

I ran this by a Panasonic rep who's done a lot of work with the GH3 and the user-base, MUCH experience in working the files himself ... and as I suggested the above reason for the look of the files, he ... um ... well ... um ... carefully chose not to demur ... um ... yea, he understood my point, you know ... and um ... well ... um ... maybe the design engineers don't always make the right choices, do they? ... Um.

When I pushed a bit more about whether he'd actually discussed this with "Home" ... I got a rather distressed initial look ... and um ... um ... well ... um ... at which point I said I had to take his reaction as a rather powerful affirmative on my conclusions. He looked away for a bit, and noted that while he couldn't really say anything more on this ("You've been ordered not to?" actually got a brief nod) ... he wasn't certainly wasn't going to say I was in any way inaccurate or missing something in my statements either.

Right.

But ... all in all, a GH3 is a very fine tool. Initial WB on-set with skin should include an adjustment on the grid of the menu-driven WB set-up for a bit to the orange side of things, in my humble opinion. I neutralize with an Expodisc, after setting exposure by hand metering, then go in and take the manual adjustment on the grid a couple points towards orangey.

Then in grading I "lift" the upper mids a bit while taking the straight-mid down ... both fine adjustments, just to get a bit more contrast in that Zone VI area that most "diffuse" fully-lit skin "inhabits". There's a couple of the LUT's available here that attack it slightly differently but end up about the same, one of which I've used some.

And cam will have it's joys. A rather high-end grader I know of has a massive distaste for Canon glass and finds that to be a rather larger limitation on a multi-cam shoot than dealing with a hacked GH2 mixed in with a couple different Red's. For his tastes and experience, of course.

And to my utter joy, the GH4 the better footage that's been out there and available for individual download/grading does NOT show any sign of pink plastic skin ... it's real honest-to-gosh people with pores & color and ... everything odd that real skin has. Yippee!

Oi vey was this too long ...

@SuperSet I'd say it's safe to say don't hold your breath. And honestly with the GH4 in 2 months (reliable stock firmware shooting at 100Mbs IPB and 200Mbs All-I) who cares? Not me. The GH2 hack days were fun but looks like it's run it's course. And It's been months with no news since VK closed the section about it. Driftwood had been recently working on, and was supposed to release, the updated to Moon T8..... for the GH2. Enough said i guess.

Sorry to the group for posting off topic.

That's what I figured, fellas and it makes sense. Did we finally come to the conclusion that Sat -5 is a no go?

I'm still a bit minus on things ... -3 contrast, -1 sat, -4 sharp & -5 noise as I really don't want their noise routines messing the footage ... on "standard" w/ hand-metered exposure, custom WB with a notch or two of orangey-grid adjustment after the Expodisc.

@maddog I don't know why but I find inner camera sharpening better than in most editing software. -2 is what I dial in with 43 lenses... On FF manual lenses 0 is perfect for me.

Yak- From what I gather from your posts: Natural or Standard 0,0,0 or -2, and I presume -5 ? Natural for high contrast light, Standard for flat? Ideal ISO 640. The LUT you made is for all -5, not the settings you mention on this page?

@royfel Yes, 0,-2,0,-5 (m43 glass) 0,0,0,-5 (Legacy) and the LUT I created if for shooting at -5, the last LUT I posted is garbage it came out very bad, still don't understand why, the other 2 are good.

@royfel & @flablo: Yes natural for high contrat scenes (Natural looks a bit like standard -3,-2 but flatter in the shadows while not touching the lighter mid tones too much) and standard for flatter scenes.

If I understand you, iso 640 make less noise than iso 200 ??? and Yak, if it's possible for you, you can put your good LUT again, to be sure that we get the good LUT.

Huh, can someone confirm this noise thing? I've heard the same about the 5Dmk3; lower noise at 320, 640 and 1250 ISO.

I am uploading a noise test in some minutes, as I see, EVERY step up in iso brings more noise, the think is in every whole stop, 400 800 1600 I notice big change, so, if I understand correctly the lighter settings with less noise is just before 400 800 1600, for me, best settings are in iso 320 and 640, in iso 200 unfortunately the DR curve changes cutting some highlights

@yak nop, it can't, it is only about noise, but best iso for DR is a very interesting next test! It sounds reasonable 640 to give the best DR. Another thing a bit off topic, I had to shoot something with a 5d and my gh3, my conclusion, double sensor, double iso! 6400 in 5d is like 1600 in gh3, in noise I mean