Well I’m not 100% sure about color tints in the Frewell ND filters. Maybe they are fine.
I did a ton of tests with these settings today in Iceland. There was a lot of noise everywhere in the darks and the midtones, just as you described. I did not recall seeing this much noise when I was testing in Auto. Makes me wonder if they apply some noise reduction internally when set to auto???
Still, the p-log footage retains a lot of detail in the blacks, so as long as I’m going to have to remove noise anyway, I’ll expose darker to preserve clouds in the sky.
When I get home I’m going to make my own profile for Neat Video to remove the noise, unless someone already has posted a good one. If you use Final cut, there is a Neat Video plug-in for Final Cut (and just about every IDE). It is miraculous. If you don’t have it already, I highly recommend it... although it’s super processor intensive - best to edit down your footage first to save hours of render time. Generally you want remove the noise with Neat before you mess with exposure, color correct or color grade. An external GPU helps speed things up.
My workflow will probably be to first import into Final Cut. (I prefer Final Cuts awesome media manegemnt system over Premiere or Resolve). In final cut, I’ll cull out the crap footage, then run whats left through Neat Video and do any stabilization that’s required. I’ll render that out to ProRes 422 HQ.
Next I’ll bring all the ProRes renders into Resolve to do color correction. You kind of have to convert from log to rec 709 before you color correct. Resolve doesn’t really handle log footage that well (qualifiers struggle, etc). I bet Final Cut color correction would benefit from a conversion to Rec 709 too (but I don’t really know). I know the latest Final Cut has some powerful new color correction tools built in, but I’m accustomed to Resolve, so I’ll stick with that.
Anyway, once I’m done with the color correction (and any grading) in Resolve, I’ll render once again to ProRes 422HQ, and bring all that footage back into FinalCut.
At that point I’ll have noise free, stabilized, and color correct/graded footage back in FinalCut. (I’ll probably take a moment to delete the intermediary renders I generated along the way to free up some drive space. I’ll only keep my nice new stable, clean color corrected renders, plus the original h.264 footage I started with).
Exceptions along the way:
- If I need to, I’ll use the stabilizer in Premiere Pro which is great. The Anafi seems plenty stable so this probably won’t be nessisary.
- I’m not very experienced with editing in the timeline in Resolve, but if its a simple edit with no titles, transitions, or effects, then I won’t bother to round trip back to Final Cut.
