My first paid gig with GH1 - 1080p available

Martti Ekstrand

Martti Ekstrand

New member
Commercial shot on Panasonic GH1 for swedish band Larz-Kristerz. Uploaded in 1080 so the full HD Quicktime h.264 file is available for Vimeo members. Broadcast in PAL SD resolution.

I used Canon FD lenses - 28mm f/2.0, 35mm f/2.0, 50mm f/1.4 and 100mm f/2.8. Cokin ND8 x2 on the outdoor daytime scene.

Band has a incredibly tight schedule so this was a run'n'gun job over two days with a two man team whenever they happened to have a break between other assignments. Reshot the night time part alone, lit with two battery powered LED lights.

Direct link: http://vimeo.com/6997918

 
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Looks great at full rez! Nice colours and love the titles - fit really well with the overall look and definitely set a tone.
 
LOL, how cool is that lead singer. Great work. This camera take excellent footage.

-Nate
 
Dude that's freaking awesome! Arg...and it's crisper than my GH1 footage, how do you do that! I love the Dusty Springfield song! Are these guys on itunes (I would just love to hear that cover)
 
Kerplunk said:
Looks great at full rez! Nice colours and love the titles - fit really well with the overall look and definitely set a tone.
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Wish I could take credit for the design of the logos but that's all Jonas Kjellberg at Zion Graphics in Stockholm who did those for the cover.

Kellar42 said:
I love the Dusty Springfield song! Are these guys on itunes (I would just love to hear that cover)
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Dunno, I'm old-school - I still buy CDs. (My brother is worse though, he still buys vinyl)
 
Is this a joke band or a band that does parodies? The Elvis knockoff costumes are hilarious. The graphics are funny too they look like the 80's.
Shot well too.
 
They play in a local swedish genre called 'dansband' which is a sort of homegrown version of country for party and dance evenings based heavily on doing covers that people recognize. To stick out in the crowd they decided for fun to style themselves like the bands in the genre looked back in the 70s as opposed to most of their current competitors who dress rather conservatively. The album is currently #1 on the swedish chart a week after the release.
 
Hell yeah! Dansband as it's best!

I think I recognize them from Dansbandskampen!

Looks like it's gonna be broadcasted on TV? Did you shoot 25p?
 
Looks great. Did you change the Film Mode settings depending on daytime vs night shots? The shot at 0:19 ("You Don't Have to Say You Love Me") has super clean blacks. Just wondering if you did anything special in-camera to tweak that or not. What was your ISO range for the different shots?
 
Oedipax said:
Looks great. Did you change the Film Mode settings depending on daytime vs night shots? The shot at 0:19 ("You Don't Have to Say You Love Me") has super clean blacks. Just wondering if you did anything special in-camera to tweak that or not. What was your ISO range for the different shots?
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Smooth mode, contrast -2, sharpness +1, saturation 0, noise reduction -2.

Now I'm not going to pretend the clips looked as you see them right out of the camera. I've done - as I always do regardless of source - some massaging with colour correction and post processing in After Effects to create a final and unified look.

Blacks come out pretty clean from GH1 regardless of ISO and then super clean blacks were done with a combo of applying Remove Grain and clipping off the last 1-2% with Levels in After Effects depending on exposure. To handle that due to the 4:2:0 chroma subsampling the red channel is basically half resolution and shows pixelation on hard edges I stuck a Adjustment Layer on top of all, set it to blend mode 'Color' and applied a 1.5 pixel Channel Blur on red - this blurs the red chroma without affecting luma sharpness much. Then on top of that I had a final Adjustment Layer with Film Grain emulating Kodak Vision 250D but I backed of it's Intensity to 0.75, Saturation to 0.5 and Application Shadow 0.1 which knocks off any small codec edging/blocks plus give a nicer ... umm ... film look.

Then on a clip by clip basis I adjusted contrast, colour balance and saturation by using Curves, Color Balance and Hue/Saturation and extra fixes as needed. For example the close-up with the accordeon needed some animated masking to bring out the shadow side of his face since the sun came out of a thin cloud between that one and the other takes - I just didn't have time to get a reflector in place to help the exposure there. Shown in pictures attached and as you can see I also cocked up white balance badly in the entire sequence due to the rush nature of the shoot so had to warm up the takes considerably.

Only special thing I did at the "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" section is I applied Trapcode Starglow with very short Streak Length, 4 pixels to have some extra zing on the highlights.

Note that I've done all the CC looking on a broadcast monitor. Computer monitors are way too linear and can often fool you to push contrast to high for looking good on television sets plus lift to much detail and colour in the deep blacks. Panasonic has done a pretty good job of adapting the GH1 video for TV viewing IMNSHO.

SignalPix said:
Nice work, Martti. Which Micro 4/3's adapter do you use?
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I have the ciecio7 FD adapter, excellent little bit of gear.
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