So I tracked down the download that Mr. Bloom was again so kind to share, especially considering it stars some of his family members. I very much appreciate when others have access to new cameras and are not only willing but able to share some of the material they shoot.
This is almost more of a denoising test than a color grade test, as many noted previously the clip that Philip shared was shot in somewhat low light due to a combination of the camera’s available ISO and the practical lighting in the scene resulting in it being a little noisy; but I actually found there to be quite a lot of latitude in the source files.
Half way through I show a before and after denoise frame for each of the RGB channels.
That being said, I tried to keep this somewhat simple as if I were working on client work and didn’t have a lot of time or budget to really get the grade right. I did feel however that there was a lot of saturation in the source, I think with the various LUT’s I used for looks the colors come through but I really desaturated the source Cinema DNG settings and further desaturated underneath the look LUT(s). I pulled back the highlights as well where I felt they were blooming too much and surprisingly there was a lot of information in there so I didn’t really feel like the highlights were getting muddy.
Of course all of this is subjective and it all depends on what the mood one is going for is, as well as what the piece calls for. This is simply a test to see who well under-exposed footage from the Digital Bolex stands up and what some pretty quick denoising can do to rein it in a little. Given more time, direction and focus I’m sure much better results can be had than what I did in this little example.