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Finding Face Exposure on GH2
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  • shianshian

    Since the actual "Zone System" Tutorial is a far from being completed, I figured I'd try to at least shed some light on the subject. ColorGHear Film School subscribers already know about the "target range" and "skin tone range" for the GH2.

    But for the rest of you I created this thread (Complete with Tutorial video) to explain the 5 stop "Target Range", and how I use it. (when you hear me say 4 stops, I'm talking the difference in stops)

    http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/3773/expose-in-the-zone

  • GabelGabel

    Amazing findings @shian.

    And Smooth underexposing 2/3s of a stop is correct. When I got my L308DC I noticed that the metering in camera compared to the meter was off and by setting EV to -0.6 it was correct (meaning 2/3s of a stop underexposed). But a great find, otherwise I would have underexposed my material by 2/3s, going by the in camera metering, not waveform.

  • davidp158davidp158

    I am a totally new to shooting video, and proper exposure has been a bit of an obstacle for me. Is there a book or on-line reference that explains this in details that a neophyte can grasp. BTW, Shian's colorghear.com tutorials are very informative, but I lack some of the requisite knowledge to comprehend some of the details. Any advice on learning this part of the craft would be appreciated.

  • GabelGabel

    What is it you don't understand in them? If you start there, I think it's easier to give you some help.

  • qwerty123qwerty123

    @shian You write: "There is some really weird stuff going on in the highlights of Cinema and Vibrant, where skin tone turns green. The screen caps below show this." And you show some stills to substantiate this with cinema. I've noticed this too... but I notice that this goes away if you manually white balance off of a grey card--relying neither on the Kelvin scale nor the in-built daylight, tungsten, etc. white balance presets.

    Can you confirm this? How did you white balance for those stills?

  • shianshian

    Initially by setting the WB to 3200. I also tried sampling the gray card, BUT manual WB added noise to image, so I went back to 3200, and so I don't think I have any recorded shots with the manual WB on this test, I'll have to look. (to my knowledge I'm the only one reporting a noise problem when doing manual WB, so it might be time to test it on other cams to see if its just my specific camera that has this issue.)

    (not totally unrelated; the detail on the skin is falling apart in addition to the green tinge, making it a less attractive option)

  • qwerty123qwerty123

    Gotcha, thanks for the honest response. Yeah, as long as you get the skin tones where they should be cinema (and other modes) you'll be golden though. Interesting about the noise on manual white balance... hmmm.... I wonder if what it does is reset the iso-bug? So that maybe after a manual white balance, one should take precautions to avoid the iso bug? Just a conjecture.

    (Also, I'm kind of partial to cinema's color rendition (I know it's lacking in some other areas). But someone a while back claimed that cinema really just is standard with a contrast curve applied to it. I don't know if that's right. When I did a quick n dirty face exposure test, the skintones looked different in both.)

  • vladnikvladnik

    @shian i play a little bit with a frames u post ... "Target Range" is best way to get "film like" results ... thanks for tutorial ....

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  • shianshian

    @vladnik Yikes, dude. Go easy with the grain and the sharpening... that's crazy

  • GabelGabel

    @vladnik: Wow, that's A LOT of sharpening. I've actually stopped adding sharpening on the GH2, with my Lomos it's more than sharp enough already.

  • vladnikvladnik

    @shian i know (i never use sharpnes in color corection) , i just pushed sharpening to find is there any noise ...and i didn't add any grain ... but i like the colors u can get when u expose in "target range" ...very robust

  • shianshian

    @Gabel Yeah, people keep wanting to sharpen digital footage, and I'm like, "it's pretty sharp already." To look more like film, you might want to diffuse it a tiny bit.

  • punditpundit

    The GH2 is a bunch sharper than any Canon DSLR and if the shot is already in focus then all that adding sharpening will do is generally make things look worse. When Magic Bullet Looks first appeared there was plethora of 'overcooked' looking video clips appearing all over the web (ala CSI Miami etc). Must have been a preset that became fashionable I guess. Within about a month I was saying "Enough already!"

  • GabelGabel

    @vladnik: Ah, had you told us that, well then it makes more sense.

    @shian: Yeah, I usually put a slight "Unsharp Mask" on, but stopped using it with the GH2. I do agree too, diffusion is usually nice with it too.

  • phanatikphanatik

    For some reason with the hack, I am not able to change color temp in WB. Any body know how I can resolve this?

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