Dear Forum,

Advise needed. I have been shooting 4K footage and bringing it into CC Premiere Pro. I have read a lot about using the D-Log style so I have good flat footage for post production which I now have a ton ready to edit. The thing is I can't find any info on the ideal sequence setting, and camera choice within Adobe Premiere. It defaults to Red Cinema, and there is an array of other cameras listed but none for the Zenmuse X3 or X5. I also have some LUT's purchased of sites showing Inspire 1 footage but again these sites don't list what the basic setup for editing is. I have played with a few but see that as soon as I make a selection it changes the look quite dramatically, and with a LUT applied, it changes even more.

What setup are you using?

Does DJi have a camera profile setup that can be imported to Adobe Premiere?

Thanks

Dominic

It's relatively simple, depends a lot how you shot and what settings you used. For X3 I found that you need to reduce sharpness to -1 or -2 and bump saturation to +3 when shooting D-log, else saturating in post brings horrible color noise and ugly sharpness. Also white balance setting will influence grading decisions quite a bit - I usually use AWB but if I have a color chart on me then it's better to lock the setting manually. Trick I use to get color balance to sit in the right spot is cranking up saturation in Lumetri and insert a master color wheel (Fast Color Corrector) plug-in before Lumetri, then move the wheel around until colors in Vectroscope are more centered, but also watch that picture colors is actually very natural looking. Remember that with saturation cranked all the way up it's much easier to judge weather colors are messed up or not. Usually the changes you'll need to apply using the color wheel are very small but very critical and beneficial to make the remaining adjustments actually contribute to the quality of the image. This step is in a way "calibrating" your footage to properly "attach" itself to Lumetri controls and react properly to adjustments mainly because getting white balance right in the field is never 100% accurate weather in auto or manual modes.Once you're satisfied with color balance (meaning colors look as natural and vivid as possible) you can now pull saturation slider in Lumetri back to where you actually need it to be and grade from there.
I like Lumetri quite a lot for grading. Usually need to recover lots of highlights and shadows (using respective sliders) to flatten the image still (even though it's D-Log footage) to usable state and then make small adjustments to Blacks, Whites, Exposure and Contrast settings. Then chose a desired temperature setting and make micro-changes to Tint control if there's a noticeable tint to the image. After this it's a matter of making creative choices by using the rest of Lumetri controls and also coming back to ones you already adjusted.
One thing worth mentioning about X3 footage is it almost always needs serious noise reduction (NeatVideo as a bonus reduces X3's "flickering" effect like magic using temporal filter, but that's a whole nother discussion) and always applied first in plug-in chain. Another effect worth using is grain for aesthetic reasons, to blend the visible noise reduction effect in certain areas and for de-blocking qualities of grain - always applied last in plug-in chain.

Here are before and after frames (also another frame with denoising and grain applied) and a quick glimpse at adjustment setting used to make this grade.
Grade "Before"
Grade "After"
Grade - de-noised + grain applied
Color wheel setting
Lumetri settings
Scopes
P.S. - Looks like you want to download the images from Dropbox to see them in original quality - the ones displayed by following the links are previews.