The Office Party.

[marcdalessio]

I've been lurking on the forums for a couple of months and just tried my hand at filming an 'office party'.

Hand-held, 20mm f/1.7, auto focus (unfortunately), and way too much red wine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqeXxe3an_U

[asteele10]

looks so good. is that cause of your settings or the lens? What settings did you use. great for such low light..

[marcdalessio]

looks so good. is that cause of your settings or the lens? What settings did you use. great for such low light..

Thanks. My big mistake was using the 23 area autofocus mode, next time face recognition, 1-area, or manual.

It seems to me that the lens was grabbing the lights in the corners of the shots.

I have a great respect for wedding videographers after trying this, the dexterity required to manual focus an evening like this is really impressive.

Settings I remember (I was filming after way too much wine, this was a totally unplanned shoot) were FHD, smooth, ISO 800, f1.7, I think I varied the ss down to 30. Used Neoscene for pulldown, standard editing with no color correction or anything.

[tired]

I'm confused - I thought the 20mm was a fixed focus lens?

from B&H website - The Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 Aspheric G-Series Lens Pancake Lens is a large-diameter wide-angle f/1.7 20mm (40mm in 35mm camera equivalent) fixed focus lens.

Can you manually focus?

The footage is exceptional, the only thing that's stopping me from buying the 20mm is the fixed focus but whatever it is - it looks great!

[marcdalessio]

I'm new to photography in general, but I think they mean fixed-focal length lens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_lens as opposed to a zoom (like the kit lens).

You can manually focus the pancake lens, and the 3 autofocus settings work.

[justFRED]

Cool. Oh, for a little bit of extra light.

I have a couple of LED lights intended for bicycle helmets - they're great at about 4 feet for lighting people up just enough in situations like this. I have a wax paper diffuser attached to the light with a rubber band. I think the lights cost about $5 each.