Olympus Flat Profile LUT on E-M1 mkII video compared

Olympus released the new LUT for their flat profile.  You can get the file for both the E-M5 mkII and E-M1 mkII from Olympus here.  They certainly didn’t make that link obvious.

I’ve put together a quick video comparison of the E-M1 mkII flat profile. I show 4 clips side by side.
1. Flat profile
2. Flat profile with Olympus LUT applied
3. Natural Profile with Contrast, Saturation, and Sharpness all -2 in-camera.
4. Natural Profile as is.

Make sure to check it out full screen at 1080P quality.  It definitely makes it easier to see.

Light is a Paul Buff Digibee 800 with a large wescott umbrella to camera left. Settings are 1/48th, F/2.8, ISO 200. C4k 24fps. Nothing crazy or scientific, just wanted to see the difference side by side.

I definitely see the highlights retained better in both flat clips.  Even after the LUT is applied, that clip still shows detail in the brightest areas the two natural profiles don’t seem to show as well.  Aside from that I need to experiment some more and get a better feel if this will become my starting point or if I will keep using my own adjustments directly from flat.  What are your thoughts?  See any interesting differences?

 

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3 responses on "Olympus Flat Profile LUT on E-M1 mkII video compared"

  1. Thank you to put time to share your experience on this topic, I have hard time to find valuable people to talk about Olympus video color grading. I’m using Adobe Premiere for editing so I tried to load the look-up table since Premiere seems to support .cube files. However, it failed without too much surprise! I then installed the free version of Davinci Resolve to try the LUT and the automatic Color Match tools with my newly acquire Xrite ColorChecker Passport Video. I compared the effect of the Olympus LUT and the automatic calibration only for a short time, but I don’t see that the LUT really helps much. The changes seem mostly limited to luminance (I did not see much difference in color in my test footage). I will probably not use it, since I don’t see yet a big advantage (neither for the automatic calibration tools) and I’m not ready to change my editing tools for that.
    I’m curios which conclusion you will draw to achieve the best color rendition. Here’s mine, feel free to comment I’m working hard to improve my footage result.
    1) I don’t use the automatic white balance anymore because the camera never stops adjusting the color for any small change in image composition (i.e. lightning). This can’t be fix in post without a huge effort. Furthermore, the camera really struggles to set an appropriate value the minute you are not in daylight condition.
    2) I’m only shooting flat profile now, I found colors too much saturated in other profiles and that shows when you have skin tone in the image. This is particularly true in high scene dynamic (gradatation set to Auto) where I see fluorescent green or pink cast. I’m not a pro for grading and I was not able to fix some of my forage it in post. I see the same problem as reported by DPreview in the EM10 MKIII review (still jpg). There is also the video of Mathieu Gasquet on G9 vs EM1 MK II.
    3) Since I have Xrite ColorChecker Passport Video (a month or so) I use the grey card to set my custom white balance. This seems to improve color reproduction tremendously. This help me so far in mixed light condition when shooting at high ISO where you are left with the smallest grading latitude (i.e. no color dynamic range at high ISO to start with)

  2. Hey Toni,

    I just stumbled upon the fact that there is a LUT for the EM 1 II flat profile – however, when I use it in Premiere Pro on footage shot with the setting “picture profile” set to “on”, I get a strange looking result – almost like the result is even flatter. Have you experienced any of this?

    Best regards,
    Lukas

    • So apparently the LUTs are designed for Davinci resolve according to Olympus. I use that on my windows machine and final cut pro on my mac. I haven’t noticed anything weird on those two…but I have not tried it on Premiere yet. I have premiere, though an older version. I am assuming maybe there is something that isn’t being read correctly? I would think LUTs are made in a generic fashion and not for a specific software. Then again, I am not very deep in the video world. Maybe another one of us can chime in that knows more.

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