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GH3 Best Video Settings
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  • Guys, had you got problems with flickering? I tried to shot interior with only light from the vindow and I couldn´t get a shot without terrible flick.No matter wich mov flavor, SS etc... with manual lenses, everything manual, no idinamic, nothing auto...I can´t believe it. Seems like darker and uniforma parts of the scene start flickering ,like it doesnt can take light and sadows from the interior...totally lost..

  • I found the answer, but is a little bit frustating. It is a matter of light coming to the sensor, I deal with the flickering pushing up the iso,at 1600 iso flickering desapears, that increase noise but flicker or banding desapear. Was new fir me, because gh2 never saw this, and seems is something i need to get use. The monitor or lcd doesnt show ( getting use to it) me a good way to nail the exposure. Another dificult situation is when in super contrasty situation I need to preserve the lights then in darker zones flickering or banding come alive again. I need more test, with proper lighting interviews etc.. Exposure seems a lot harder than gh2, what do you think? The last shot I made was against a balcony, preserving the highlight exterior made a total mess of flicker interior. Only at 1600 iso at noise cost fix the problem,.That makes an unusable camera for me, at least for weddings and events. Is happening to you? I have time to send back the camera..

  • @fran

    That flicker thing seems to be not normal. Are you using movie mode or automatic PASM modes. 24P or 50/60P. is there electrical lights in scene. I think your camera may be broken. Can you go to store to compare to other GH3?

  • @wgtwo good question.. I worked with natural until a few days ago, but now i reconsidered the vivid profile (-3, -3, -1, 0)

  • I've worked with both Standard and Neutral ... prefer "standard" and have played with the settings some ... though who hasn't?

    I white balance with an Expodisc Neutral ... seems to work great, though I'm craving a OneShot card ... but an accurate starting WB seems the only start ... you can't "bend" the files too much from that. If I want an altered tone, I will play with K and the grid settings ...

    Yea, too low a contrast and you get more a bit more shadow and highlight range (though not THAT much) at the cost of what seems to be bunching tones in the upper mids ... right where middle & highlighted skin "live".

    Too low a saturation and the colors aren't quite ... right ... somehow on pushing in post.

    Too low contrast and too low saturation combined seems to really help the sensor "bunch" skin-type tones, but ... it does it more with skintones than other colors. So I am thinking it's something the processor does if it thinks it's got "skin" by color & tonal value.

    I don't take contrast below -3 anymore nor sat below -2. I try to lift contrast in the mids/upper mids slightly in post, and for skintones, yellow hue a bit away from green, and magenta a bit away from blue. Or I can get the mostly blue-ish/magenta plasticene look that occasionally tilts a bit yellow green.

    Neil

  • I wish Shian had stuck with working with the GH3 a little more so we could have a ColorGhear for it. I found his GH2 Green Kill ColorGhear perfect for correcting the GH2's green cast.

  • @vesku, nothing electrical, nothing automatic, no light involved. Tomorow I will check with a gh3 of a friend of mine, I'tell you, but it is not normall at all....

  • I think I found a way to setup white balance. Before wb set +2 contrast and +5 saturation and then, if I conclude correctly, the camera shows better the direction of color and the way it catch rgb. It is much easier to set the wb and the extra adjustment in, yellow, magenda... Then, you shoot as flat as you feel, everything -5 or whatever.

  • @starios ,

    that's interesting idea, can you post test results? As anyone else done these type of tests? I'm a relatively new gh3 shooter, was primarily shooting 16mm for the past 10 years, apologies for my ignorance but is this common practice to adjust settings for WB, then re-adjust for shooting? I can see where boosting saturation when taking the initial WB reading could potentially have a significant effect.

  • @larrysanders I don't know if it's common practice, I just tested it and it works for me. I can't think of a way to shoot an example for wb. One shot right wb and one wrong??? :) but maybe it could be a way to set wb in any camera, at least now I can get rid of the extremes (especially red at night) with more balance in one by one color intensity.

  • I also noticed something but I may be wrong. In "perfect" wb, shooting all in -5 image has contrast, probably because there is no color on top to flatten everything.

  • @starios, I was thinking take first image with WB calibrated with your +2 contrast and +5 saturation, then adjusted to -5's to take the shot, vs. an image where WB was calibrated with camera already set to -5's. I'll run my own tests, but I guess I was assuming based on your previous post that you had already done side-by-side comparisons.

    I have been shooting at all -5's, with the exception of keeping saturation at -2. But I also personally like keeping NR down - I prefer a little noise to emulate film grain, though I recognize that might not suit everyone's taste. I have certainly noticed a major reduction in moire, which was initially the most disappointing factor in my film-to-gh3-digital transition, by keeping sharpness dialed all the way down it is much less of an issue.

  • @starios

    Are you using external calibrated monitor or are you trusting of GH3 screen when shooting. In my tests I trust more on camera auto white balance than GH3 screens. Those OLEDs can show anything weird. When I go home and watch clips with good monitors I am usually happy with WB.

    Is it almost same thing to set OLED color to max to see color errors?

    One annoying thing with GH3 is that you cannot program picture control to any of "hundreds of" Fn-buttons!!

  • I've found with my GH3 that the color of the video on the camera screen is perhaps just a bit warm, but not that much from what I'll see in Premiere-Pro. But I do use that screen to check primarily the "vertical" axis on the adjustment screen's "G-M" setting. Try to get the "A-B" set in manual WB mode to reasonable, then using the vertical "G-M" to balance between green/magenta ... my GH3 doesn't seem to pay attention to the "G-M" when setting a wb, and that's where I can get the nastiest hues to try to recover from.

    Neil

  • @Vesku I use gh3 screen, I know it's not the best way but my point is that when you set saturation at +5 everything is of course fake but even in gh3 screen every change in wb is visible for balancing the different color areas. To tell you the truth, I have a cheap 1080 LG monitor calibrated by a friend with his equipment and I don't see much difference from camera screen to monitor in color, the big difference is in exposure, gh3 is always brighter sometimes more than 1 stop

  • I find that my footage looks remarkably underexposed when I look at it in MPC-HC, but is fine once I chuck it into Premiere.

  • I at once went out shooting and I looked GH3 OLED and scenery which I was shooting. I tried to set WB with GH3 screen to match what I see with my eyes. I shooted also auto WB shots in same situations. Almost always camera auto WB was best when I saw results.

    I have tried many times to set manual WB indoors too but not succeeded very well. I just dont trust GH3 displays. It may be that eye sees camera display and scenery differently in shooting situations because almost always when I mess with WB results becomes worse. Or maybe it is too difficult to me.

    I am almost always underexposing 1/3 or 2/3 step with natural -5 contrast.

  • I don't want to depend on any auto stuff cause when I work on a wedding in premiere I try to have the least possible adjustment layers with basic cc. The other option is everything in auto but I am afraid to take the risk for those 90 minutes projects. From my tests, the big problem is in greens generally because red is always inside green, day and night, and wbalancing by this new way helps alot. @Vescu I am also 1-2 steps underexposed, but playing with filmconvert I choose to be at 0 or + and then grading, Chris74 affected me positively with his work!

  • @starios

    Did you ment 1-2 whole esposure steps underexp (not 2 clicks). Is there then too little light for sensor to make good result?

    I never use iAuto for video. Too contrasty and shutter may be whatever and too much sharpening.

  • Im reading and learning from this topic since long time. Im not advanced enough to notice same same little differences as people here (yet) All this was shot Standard -2-2-2-2 (looks like gh2 but I did not want to go to far) I used different lenses and aperture settings and Fader ND. Based on my knowledge I did have treble to match Skin tone. Is this acceptable for you?

  • I normally use a hand-held meter to set exposure (Sekonic L-358). Used in incident-mode, with the dome DOWN and pointed to the major light source, as I don't want any "averaging" effect. I want to know where I'm putting the highlights. That's what I measure for ... simple quantity falling on subject from the 'main' source.

    I then manually set WB for most things through an Expo-Disc (neutral), and then probably go into the WB settings to "adjust" that just a bit just a point or two "down" to the magenta side, and "left" to the amber side another point or two.

    I'd note, I also always have the histogram showing on the GH3's screen, and proper setting by the meter nearly always gives the 'yellow' histogram scale showing the camera also thinks the exposure is correct ... but I'm still more comfortable setting this by hand measurement.

    I'm currently working at -3-3-1-4 (contrast, sharpness, saturation, noise reduction). Bringing this into P-Pro (CC) I don't see any exposure problems or changes from the view on the camera's OLED. Naturally, when shooting at a minus-contrast setting, in many situations the highlights aren't quite highlight enough ... as I would expect.

    So ... sometimes it simply needs a gamma lift, but often just a bit of gain adjust. I rarely, rarely need touch the "offset" or base exposure control in Speedgrade at all, and when I do ... it will be to adjust typically only one channel for more color-mod than base exposure change.

    I'll work the grade first for tonality ... then bring input saturation up until the colors start to ... become just a little "richer"? ... then grade for color ... not normally needing more than say, using a bit of highlight-warming/shadow-cooling to give a bit of feel, occasionally choosing a small bit of color-balance adjusting to the overall, then up the output saturation until it feels ... right.

    It's different than I typically have worked stills, as there ... still shooting fairly "flat", I'll over-saturate a bit to correct WB and hues & etc, THEN back off sat a bit to do my tonality work after coloring.

    But this process seems to get me where I want to end up quicker with video from my GH3 or the D600, and there's not typically a lot of change I'll do. Typically the footage comes in very close to neutral/barely warm, and just needs massaging to get "feel" from it.

    And ... this is the best process I've been able to get so that skin "works" for my little projects. Still I REALLY wish Adobe put proper "graticules" on their vectorscopes, especially in Speedgrade. I can mask a bit down to skin, then check the vectorscope for where that bit lies on the scale, and I'm pretty good at guessing the "skin-line" territory, but I DON'T like guessing! (The "graticules" are the boxes and lines for color/hue standards.)

    Neil

  • @konjow First off, nice shoot. As far as skin tones go I think you're lighting saves you. At times you can almost see some of that flat pinkish thing the GH3 does but having such a dramatic light provides much more tonal range. Good job. It's in the subtle differences within dynamic range that the GH3 seems to struggle.

  • Thank you @maddog15. I used 2 fresnels and led160 with jell and different ND/apertures - the same manual 3400 WB, I had to do CC to match skin especially because skin its only colour there. So after all I reed here I was wander what you think. Thanks again as Im not confident in this area yet. BTW that was shot in my living room 4.5x4m as a first use/test fresnels when I got them-love them want more:)

  • Yep. I think I'm also done with the -5 rule. Turned out ok but she sure is pink.

    Screen Shot 2013-12-23 at 6.46.16 PM.jpg
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  • @maddog15

    Pretty hard color correction. I think upper one looks better though a little flat.