[blackest]

Ok I am totally inexperienced in this so do not expect expertise in this post.

Shooting log or flat footage enables more dynamic range of a scene to be captured and a LUT can be applied to convert to a standard rec709 profile and hopefully beautiful footage.

Thats not so hard if you have raw footage to begin with, but we certainly don't with Pentax Video Even with Raw with a high dynamic range scene Lightroom or adobe camera raw applies a curve before you get to adjust the raw file. This can be seen that you can reduce exposure and get good highlight detail and increase exposure and get good shadow detail but you can't get both since adobes curve is already in play. whats needed is a camera profile - that curve to allow you to recover the shadow and highlight detail. 3D lut creator can actually make this camera profile in recent versions but its not exactly cheap and the demo version will not let you save such a profile.

With Video we pretty much hit the same issues as with processing raw v jpeg. The jpeg file has curves applied before you start and adding another curve results in distortion.

Unfortunately we don't get raw video footage from the k1 which makes color grading hard to do well, however Pentax did throw us a bone they included a flat profile. This should be enough that we can grade this footage.

I do some video with the iPhone and filmic pro this enables a flat profile and log profile on the iPhone and they provide 2 luts to convert to rec709.
with the k1 we can get a flat footage but I am unaware of an existing LUT to convert that to rec709.

I think there may be a way to film color targets (xrite color checker) and create a LUT to convert the flat footage.

This page may help

How to Create Your Own Custom LUTs in Under 5 minutes ? Matchstix Studios

If we can create a suitable custom lut it should be useful for anyone shooting with the flat profile in the K1.

Anyone interested? I apologise for the confused nature of this post, it reflects my level of understanding.

better link for the video in the previous link

Vimeo

---

Last edited by blackest; 04-07-2019 at 05:02 AM.

[PiDicus Rex]

Ah, Grasshopper, much there is to learn,....

Firstly, Log is a crutch, 'real' cameras output Linear Raw
(That's a rabbit hole we don't want to go down for a while, not until shooting on Arri Alexa, AJA Cion, or Sony F55 / F65.)

If you have a search through some of the older posts in this section, there's discussions on how to adjust the profile settings to maximise the quality of the video recorded, but the basics are using the 'Muted' profile, with the sharpening turned down one or two points, and the High/Low Key setting adjusted to match your scene - whether you need to preserve highlights details or expand shadow detail.

One of the good things about Pentax for Video, is the way the vision is not clipped in dynamic range during the encoding to h.264.
(h.264 is a crappy CoDec for content creation, fantastic for delivery and streaming, but crap for anything that's going to be edited and graded)

When displayed in a waveform monitor in Edius or Resolve, vision from a Pentax will always appear to to have spikes of picture information below and well above the 0 to 100% range - from about -15% to +125% - One of the first best steps in grading Pentax footage, is to pull back the highlights and shadows to match the 0-100% range, where by details that were showing as blown highlights or blacked out shadow, will suddenly have a lot more picture information displayed, especially when compared to what was shown on the LCD while recording.

Muted Profile, plus this correction back to safe levels, will pretty much give you Log footage, without needing a LUT to do it.