I recently started trying to shoot video on my Nikon Z8. Because I shoot RAW for still photos, I thought I would try shooting N-Log footage as an equivalent. I quickly discovered the world of color grading, and it’s quite a step up in complexity from processing RAW photos.
I started by trying to get a DaVinci Resolve flatpak to work. It’s a little tricky with my Sway/Guix setup because I’m not running XWayland and I read DaVinci Resolve is a little finicky about the linux distro you use. I was able to get it to start up with Claude’s help, but it was crashing when I imported video in one of the libraries for processing video. Long story short, I gave up on that and tried kdenlive.
Kdenlive was stable and worked well out of the box for me. However, I struggled getting the color I wanted right even though I was able to download and apply the Nikon LUT. I think Kdenlive might have been more focused on color grading normal videos rather than ones on a log scale. To get the contrast I wanted I felt like I had to use a custom curve, and replicating that on every cut I had started to add a lot of time to something I wasn’t really interested in doing. Maybe it would get easier with time but I guess it sort of took the fun out of it for me. Along the same lines, sometimes processing photos gets tiring, but not to the point where I shoot with JPEG. I think if cameras got to the point where you could have a 10 or 12-bit pre-processed JPEG XL photo coming out of the camera, I might still shoot RAW.
Ultimately, in the environment I was shooting video in, I don’t think I need another N levels of dynamic range, and I don’t want to spend an hour on color if I’m making essentially home videos. It’s already noticeably nicer than cell phone footage or any home video setup I had when I was a kid. It was great to have a video off the camera that was ready to upload, of course after I got my AI agent to put together a ffmpeg command line to make it smaller/internet-ready.