[losty]

Hi everyone,

I have a Pentax K-5 since a couple of years now and I really like the image quality I get - especially with some Lightroom Post-Processing of the RAW-Files, the K-5 does an awesome job!

I'm trying to get some nice videos done now as well. Unfortunately the quality of the video seems to be much worse than what I'm used to from still images. Althought shot in 1080p25 the sharpness of most shots seems more suitable for 720p, but not 1080p. Only some perfectly lit scenes have somewhat nice colors and the Dynamic Range seems to be only fraction of what the camera is capable of in still image mode.

Now I wonder if it is possible to post-process the videos somehow to enhance their look as I do it with Lightroom for still images. Pure RAW does not look very fancy as well - it's the post-processing that matters. The video output of the K-5 is in Motion-JPEG / MJPEG AVIs, which is more suitable for editing than for directly viewing it as well. At least this is what I get from Googling around, but I cannot see if this is (just) because MJPEG stores every frame as a JPEG and is not depending on previous frames. This will obviously make random seeks more efficent and cutting more easy, but do I also have advantages for color processing? Sure - JPEG is no RAW, but is the still some color hidden which I might be able to restore with the proper post-processing workflow?

I've already tried a bit with iPhoto and the test version of Premiere Pro, but couldn't see tremendous improvements. Well I'm certainly no expert there...

Any hints on special settings on the camera to improve video quality (with post-processing)?

What is the post-processing workflow you use? Especially in terms of enhancing the quality (contrast, colors, sharpness, ...)?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Losty

[grispie]

ot 1080p.

well, it depends on how much you know already.
I 'm taught the following rules:
1. make sure to flatten out the shots (in camera: sharpness, contrast, saturation down...). this will improve the grading options.
2. In premiere: go to color correction panel and make sure that the blue, red & green channels are on the same level in the waveform.
doing this, & even not looking at the images, will put all shots on the same "realistic" colors line.
3. after this you can start enhancing the shots:
i mainly use (in this order):
- fast color correction (where i increase the DR with the levels and adjust saturation as per my liking)
- to give it a filmic look, use "three way channel correction" where you set the midtones a bit to blue and dark tones to red/orange" or just play around as per your liking...
- lastly use contrast/brightness to correct some more and maybe "tint" to get it where you want it.

this is just my way though, there are a lot of ways & a lot of trial & error is involved.
But teachers hammered on number 1 & 2 to be crucial to get the "floating" out of the workprocess (e.g. to put all shots in the same league)
there are multiple things you can find on the net & youtube on this topic.

Ofcourse, the choice of shots and when to cut in the shots is another art...
hope it helps...
chr

[Giklab]

I wonder if, on the K-5, kicking up sharpness in the camera would not be a bad idea. I'm not an expert though.

[Steve.Ledger]

It's always a bad idea to use in camera sharpness on video. The processing required to do this results in a much degraded video result. Unusable in most cases.
Due to the line skipping method by which the camera grabs 1080 video from the sensor, sharpening causes the already present aliasing (and any moire) to be accentuated beyond the point of no return.

[PiDicus Rex]

Steve and Grispie are pretty spot on - reduced sharpness, low contrast, reduced saturation, give you more range in colour grading/colour correction later.

Mjpeg -> Yes, it is a lower workload for the CPU and GPU in editing. You can edit HD mjpeg on a Pentium4, you need an i5 to edit h.264 with smooth playback in timeline scrubbing.

Each individual Mjpeg frame should look similar to what your camera shoots if you were able to set HD frame size when taking Stills.
(I have no idea what the frame sizes available in the K5 are)

On my K-01, if I need to match a Canon shooters footage, I can get a close match to their Normal look using Natural, with some tweaking of the contrast and highlights.
Pentax's Muted setting matches Cinestyle very closely.
Staying with Muted, it's my opinion that reducing the contrast two notches and raising the highlights two notches gives an very wide dynamic range to play with.

Regardless of Mjpeg or h264, if you light a scene so that no area is over or underexposed, you will get less breakdown of the CoDec as you adjust the footage in post production.

There are arguments for and against for 'Conforming' your footage from the in camera Codec to something like ProRes, personally I don't because every time you process the footage you loose some data, due to the types of transform functions used, and because the NLE I use will 'Edit Anything'...
( I'm using v6.01 at the moment - EDIUS Pro 7 | Grass Valley, A Belden Brand )

Colour Grading, beyond the basics of making sure the colours conform to the correct technical standard for your delivery platform - say REC709 for Broadcast - once you've met the standards, the grade becomes a subjective matter - whether the colours as shot match the mood of the scene. You can add warm tones for romantic pieces, blues for cold clinical action, etc etc.

There's some pretty good examples of what footage will look like 'as shot', and as the grading procedure occurs here - www.kinefinity.com/support/downloads/shots/?lang=en

On Grispies point 2 above - all decent NLE programs will have a waveform display available.
It's worth getting to know how they work, and what they mean - and knowing that they represent something completely different to the Histogram display on your camera.

When shooting, I always have the histogram on, and I aim to have the curve displayed being largest in the middle of the graph, not bunched to either end.
That way I know most of my scene is well within the dynamic range that the camera can capture.

[TomGarn]

About K-7 and K-5:
The K-5II is not needed for manual focus-pullers. Nothing is better than on K-5 (just the K-5II AF at darkness is faster)
The K-5 has less noise compared to the K-7 ... and the full HD of course.
The K-5 has around 80 and the K-7 around 45 mbps
The K-5 has not such a terrible moire as the K-7 !

About mjpeg:
On CS4 you may have NO mjpeg-codec - even if Quicktime is on board. (Can be bought from Morgan or MainConcept)
On CS6 you have the mjpeg-codec with it, yes ...

About Focus Problems:
Filming with a camera like K-5 you will need a viewfinder like the Delamax by GGS (minimum price and weight)
The only bad problem is your breath sometimes clouds the front glass with - + 3 diopters. (Those 3 diopters
where still not enough for me so I had my optician fit a lense that has ~ 2 diopt. more and add it to the tub e (us)

Read more at: https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/75-video-pentax-hdslrs/266806-want-start-...#ixzz38LNCC336

[kadajawi]

I wonder if, on the K-5, kicking up sharpness in the camera would not be a bad idea. I'm not an expert though.

Sharpness to 0. It artificially increases the amount of detail in the scene that the encoder has to compress. The more detail, the more likely you are going to hit the bitrate limit, at which point the camera will start to throw away stuff. --> Blocking and other artifacts.

Add it back in post.

I have the problem that when I record the video it looks fine in camera and on the histogram, but on the computer screen it waaay overexposed. Hopefully I can recover what is in the highlights. And I struggle to keep the exposure constant enough... it varies from video to video.

For the color temperature I tend to use the sunny day preset. I find that it usually looks good and gives me some consistency.

[PiDicus Rex]

Sharpness to 0. It artificially increases the amount of detail in the scene that the encoder has to compress. The more detail, the more likely you are going to hit the bitrate limit, at which point the camera will start to throw away stuff. --> Blocking and other artifacts. Add it back in post.

+1 for that technique - definitely better to do the sharpness in the colour grading / colour correcting.

I have the problem that when I record the video it looks fine in camera and on the histogram, but on the computer screen it waaay overexposed.

Da, seen same - I'm not 100% sure about what's going on, but you can pull a lot of detail out of what you think is overexposed, and if you put Pentax video next to Canon video shot at the same settings, the Pentax stuff always looks brighter.
The best description I can use, is that it almost looks like Pentax is recording data outside of the 0-255 IRE levels in to the .mov files.
I see the same out of a mates K30, where both of our cameras show lovely smooth waveform well beyond 120%, but where would see fairly hard roll-off to 100% of the same data on a 7D.
I do my colour correction using the video waveform monitor window in Edius - keyframed so it comes out like having a CCU operator riding the Iris 'live', bringing everything back to 'safe' level first, then adjusting within that to get results I like.

Take a look at the Car Crash Make-up video I put on Vimeo, specifically the section in the train, at 3min 56sec, when the original shot was on the timeline, everything outside the train window was flat white overexposed in the preview window, a little time with the Colour Balance and then the Three-Way Colour Correction tool pulled all that exterior stuff down to where it was useable - much like the 'Highlights' adjustment in Lightroom.


Before too long I want to hook up the K-01's analog output to my Canopus ADVC100 and feed in to Adobe On Location and the live waveform monitor in that, just to see what effects on the waveform there is when changing the picture profile settings.