Some colour corrected talking heads footage

[EdMcLeodJones]

A quick test of some mucking around footage from the weekend to get a feel for how dialog/talking heads sort of shots might look.

http://vimeo.com/5217367

A lot of it was fairly underexposed, so had to bring it back quite a bit in After Effects, probably more than looks good, but was interested to see how far the footage could be pushed. See the attachment '01 - Uncorrected' for the worst case - the skin texture in the face is getting a bit banded, whereas '03 - Uncorrected 2' had a bit more to work with.

Shot using the 25mm f2.8 Zuiko 'pancake' lens:
http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/dslr_digital_slr_zuiko_digital_25mm_1_2_8_pancake_ 18942.htm
http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/olympus_25_2p8_o20/

[Isaac_Brody]

Looks good. I wouldn't call that underexposed either. You preserved the highlights without losing details in the shadows.

[drk3p]

Great stuff, looks like a drama you would see on tv

[reaktor]

That lens is awesome, how much did you pay for it? How do you like it? What kind of crop factor does it have on the GH1, 2x?

[John Caballero]

Very well done. The lighting looks good. This cam is not going to need much extra to light a scene well. Good luck with your invention, the Feijito. You can shoot your own commercial for it with the GH1!

[EdMcLeodJones]

Cheers, thanks for the kind comments.

The lens was £150 off ebay, I think it's around £200 new. It has the standard 2x crop factor, so it's got the nice 50mm field of view - I got it as I wanted a relatively fast (2.8) 50mm equivalent prime, and luckily enough this one happens to be a tiny form factor as well, so it makes for a very small and light rig.

It's a shame it needs an adapter, but apparently Panasonic is releasing a pancake 20mm sometime later this year for the micro 4/3 mount, so that'll be good. And presumably we'll be able to use the little Olympus EP-1 lenses as well.

The lens is nice, certainly has a nice look to it. The only thing I don't like is the focus ring which has no real feel to it when you move it (no set range, just keeps rotating forever)

Autofocus does work with it, but not during video, which is fine as it's really noisy when focusing. But handy to frame up a shot in advance.

There's some photos from that day up on my Flickr page if you want to see what the stills are like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edmcleodjones/