@yak very interesting and doesn't look GH3. How did you exactly make the grade, if I may ask?

@yak I thought this is what your 'skins v3 cube' LUT attempted to do.

I still think that "something off" is that the engineers decided "we" would want a particular look to skin, and built into the processor routines a section that "reads" skin tone and makes a smallish "correction" to the data therein ... lowering contrast and changing color slightly. As it seems to be ONLY skin on which the blame thing does this.

I'm used to Nikon's engineers boosting red saturation because they KNOW we like red. Nothing in-cam that can "cure" this, but a profile say with a passport-checker filed in Lightroom or making your own pre-set to both slightly desaturate and darken reds with a very slight red-tint change towards magenta restores reds to a usable status. They've done it for years, though the wife's D600 finally has less of this than our others, up through my D3.

So ... @flablo ... best wishes on trying out the "vivid" settings, and I trust you'll post what you find. Most of my shooting is under "controlled" situations so if you do find something interesting it won't be a problem to apply it.

@maddog15 totally agree. I'm happy about the camera, I've used it in lots of jobs and will use for even more. Cost, ex tele, battery life, and other factors, are totally saving my day. I too have become able to tell a video shot with the GH3 :) I'm going to try to explore the Vivid mode is search of hope. Guess the only way is sacrifice some dynamic range in favor of contrast. If you look the first short GENESIS made on the GH3, it only works when there is more contrast and apparently less DR. I'm curious about the GH4 essentially for this aspect, rather than the 4K capabilities. This guy https://vimeo.com/kidzrevil makes videos which I were surprised discovering were made with the GH3. But his post workflow is pretty intense! Worth having a look anyway.

@yak +1, was thinking the exact same thing right now. Some day ago I made some interviews, made on the fly with little time and preparation. Basically we used ambient lighting + 1 LED panel and round white/silver diffuser to control light for what was possible. We mainly bounced the LED on white walls and used the round panel to add some fill to faces. It wasn't optimal but looked decent. I used mainly a Nikon 20mm 2.8 with a SpeedBooster. When I edited the footage I got really depressed: there was really nothing I could apparently do (in little time within Premiere) to get rid of the extreme flatness and plastic look of the skin tones. There was no LUT or Filmconvert to fix this. The images didn't came out so bad in the end, but they were so dull...

The one thing I learned: with the GH3 use a visible fill light. If you don't have a fill light available, keep the shadows and don't just bounce the key light, otherwise you will get the flattest unusable image possible.

@liammatador Of course your eyes have to be the final judge but I'd start with the Natural profile. (Natural is a slightly less contrasty than standard so you're less likely to loose details in your blacks.) That said - set to Natural with all sub settings at "0" you should get a decent "video" look, color and contrast with no post production.

Ditto @rNeil about White Balance setting.

@liammatador ... for out-of-cam give to someone not too savvy/critical ...

Camera settings before shooting:"Natural" or "Standard", "mov" and pick your frame-rate but avoid the ALL-I modes, contrast -2 or -3 depending on the scene, saturation -1, noise -3 unless you're shooting above ISO 1600 then noise maybe -2 (don't like their de-noising), sharpen -1.

Get a good WB in-cam of course ... I've found with mine that using an Expo-disc (neutral) and then setting the grid for two points "amber" gets better (slightly warmer) image if people are involved.

Other than having an expodisc, a gray card works well. You can sort of get to WB "manually" by looking at your screen if you're used to what that ends up looking like on your monitor or tv screen in play-back.

Keep your exposure good checking to make sure you don't really go off either side of the histogram.

And hey if they're not too savvy, any color/contrast problems you can note is because every video player uses its own particular color-interpretation scheme and of course there's no way you can correct for that. It's not only true, it works! :)

Neil

Just a quick one...does anyone have any suggestions for best settings to use if you don't want to do much post production. Normally I do a little bit of colour correcting but I'm no genius. I'm thinking about a specific client here who isn't video savvy anyway so it'll be best for me if I get the best possible image straight from the camera. Any ideas?

@Donzo ... loved it, both the song and the video too. Thanks for posting!

I have been working with GH3 for my movie.. the camera is great, here the music video I shoot on Gh3, I did alot of green screen shoot.. the setting was Mov 50mb/s and -4

@maddog15 Thanks. I shot using Standard with contrast, sharpness and saturation all just a couple notches south of the factory setting. I left noise at 0 since I still haven't got a denoiser, though I'm considering Red Giant since it's less expensive than many others. The first couple shots were made with the GM1. I stopped shooting with it because I couldn't hold the longer lens steady at all. I added a smidgen of blur in post to those couple shots because I had sharpness set too high in the camera, and to match the rest of the shots, though there's still a touch too much sharpening going on in those for my taste.