Panasonic Removable Lens Four Thirds HD AVCHD Camera

John Caballero said:
Watching that video and having the D90 and hating its video quality I can say it looks great. If that is the "jello" it produces then "hurrah!" It looks promising.
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That is why I'm so excited about any new cameras that push things in this new video DSLR market. While this Panasonic one may not be perfect, it still provides more motivation for Nikon and Canon to give us better quality and controls at an affordable price on their next cameras.
 
FINALLY someone smart like Panasonic had to be the one to come out with a 1080 DSLR with a swivel screen!! woohoo!! :)
 
Wish this was on the way before the end of this month. THat'd be nice to have going out of town.

Looks like miniscule wobble as well. Big uh oh for the competitors, especially considering you can use whatever glass you want.
 
Yes, the crop factor is 2x so you lose a lot.
But what the micro 4/3 specification and this camera specifically allows, is the use of lenses that have shorter flange distances; i.e. Canon FD lenses, Minolta MD, etc. that cannot be used on Canon/Nikon/Sony digital bodies because of their longer flange to focal plane distances.
Whether its worth it to use these old lenses on the G1 is something we'll find out through trial and review.
 
This will probably replace my D90 if it comes in at a great street price. I only wish someone would report on some street dates, etc.

The DSLR Movie mode is progressing rapidly. I certainly didn't expect Panasonic to drop anything nice and only time will tell how good the raw footage looks. But one step closer with manual controls and the rest of it!

Pretty soon we'll have a real SCARLET, only it won't be from RED it looks like.

Edit: By the way, as it stands Canon and Panasonic are positioned to do the most damage with an HPX170/HVX200 or XHA1 (references relative to manufacturer brand) and their native still lens mounts. Someone else in the thread mentioned a 4/3" HPX170... I have to agree. If the Wobble/Skew isn't atrocious then offering a camera body that takes advantage of the existing 4/3 mount as an interchangeable system could really be something awesome. I'd suggest it record to something better than AVCHD... AVC-Intra + P2 perhaps? But then again that doesn't sound like an accurate fit.
 
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Kholi said:
Pretty soon we'll have a real SCARLET, only it won't be from RED it looks like.

Edit: By the way, as it stands Canon and Panasonic are positioned to do the most damage with an HPX170/HVX200 or XHA1 (references relative to manufacturer brand) and their native still lens mounts. Someone else in the thread mentioned a 4/3" HPX170... I have to agree. If the Wobble/Skew isn't atrocious then offering a camera body that takes advantage of the existing 4/3 mount as an interchangeable system could really be something awesome. I'd suggest it record to something better than AVCHD... AVC-Intra + P2 perhaps? But then again that doesn't sound like an accurate fit.
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Yes, this is what I'm talking about. :beer:

Either a 4/3 HPX170 or HMC150 and an APS-C XH-A1 style camera would be what we need. The video DSLR's are nice, but I think we all really want something in a video/film camera body style. Unfortunately for Canon fans like myself, I don't see them beating Panasonic to the punch on this one since Canon has always sort of lurked in the shadows and waited to see what Panasonic, Sony, and JVC do before they make a move. They might be second though.

I agree about the codec as well. I figure, why not allow the camera to have both a higher end codec/recording medium like P2 as well as an option to also record in AVC-HD on SDHC cards? AVC-Intra would be awesome of course, but I don't see that being put into this price range just yet. Although, with the HPX300 having it at around $10K, maybe I'm being pessimistic about an HPX170-style camera having it.
 
The thing that I've come to realize is that it won't cannablize their professional line-up. Canon doesn't have one to protect and Panasonic's is so high up there, something like this wouldn't really touch it.

It would probably lack the proper manual/automatic controls for a streamlined environment, catering mostly to the same crowd that Scarlet would have: the niche indie/no-budget do-it-yourself filmmaker.

Of course, that means they couldn't really produce en masse like they wanted.

There's a big chance for an outside company to take advantage of this tech as well.
 
Kholi said:
The thing that I've come to realize is that it won't cannablize their professional line-up. Canon doesn't have one to protect and Panasonic's is so high up there, something like this wouldn't really touch it.

It would probably lack the proper manual/automatic controls for a streamlined environment, catering mostly to the same crowd that Scarlet would have: the niche indie/no-budget do-it-yourself filmmaker.

Of course, that means they couldn't really produce en masse like they wanted.

There's a big chance for an outside company to take advantage of this tech as well.
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Very good points. I shoot manually all the time anyways, so I say bring it on.

One thing too is that even if a potential buyer, whether they're a filmmaker or not, doesn't care about the DoF control that these sensors and lenses allow they can't really ignore the low light improvement over the standard 1/3 3CCD or 3CMOS cameras that comes with having a single larger sensor and the ISO boosts versus regular old gain.

I do want 35mm DoF without the hassle of an adapter, but the excellent low light capability is almost as, and in some cases, is more important to me. I'll take the DoF though. No arguments there.

As for a non-video camera company taking advantage of this, I say why not Nikon? They have no video camera divisions to protect, consumer, prosumer, or high-end professional.
 
From the newly posted video, it seems there's a rolling shutter (the one from PMA). 17mb/Sec is a very limiting (and obvioulsy market protecting) move by Panasonic. I still think that the still company with the biggest potential to breaktrough is either Nikon, since they don't have to protect anything, or a non conventional maker like Koreans Samsung or LG, or different less considered but very good brands like Sigma (a foveon DSLR with movie capabilities sounds exciting), Pentax, or even Olympus (if this doesn't seriously damage their relationship with Panasonic.)

The biggest contender, of course, and I am obviously still leaning for it, is the Red Scarlet. Just take a look at this photo. The portrayed system, according to our own DVXUSER founder Jarred Land, is self contained:
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=27080&page=34

I wouldn't mind continuing with my HVX+Brevis flip+ Rails for one more year untill this baby comes out- if it takes that long- unless, of course, a similar value for money offering comes from the competition. As it is, excluding a firmware updated 5dMark II, everything is still way bellow in spec to the Scarlet. For a 10k/12k investment, I'd ratter go this route.
 
I think AVC-Intra was a mistake. If they had done the same bandwidth with AVCHD 4:2:2 (100 Mb/s, which can be recorded to a $100 Compact Flash) they would have had a much better image. The interframe stuff allows for a lot more info in most shots. The reason the Canon shows so good, IMHO, is that the 40-45Mb/s AVHCD 4:2:0 records enough info to let the ability of the lens and sensor to show their stuff.

Class 6 can handle 45Mb/s. Unless Panasonic ups the storage bandwidth or makes the HDMI port output uncompressed 4:2:2 video (or both), this camera will probably not match the 25Mb/s HMC 150 or HF S10/100.
 
DavidNJ said:
I think AVC-Intra was a mistake. If they had done the same bandwidth with AVCHD 4:2:2 (100 Mb/s, which can be recorded to a $100 Compact Flash) they would have had a much better image. The interframe stuff allows for a lot more info in most shots. The reason the Canon shows so good, IMHO, is that the 40-45Mb/s AVHCD 4:2:0 records enough info to let the ability of the lens and sensor to show their stuff.

Class 6 can handle 45Mb/s. Unless Panasonic ups the storage bandwidth or makes the HDMI port output uncompressed 4:2:2 video (or both), this camera will probably not match the 25Mb/s HMC 150 or HF S10/100.
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Mind your B's and b's.

MB = 8 Mb
 
DavidNJ said:
I think AVC-Intra was a mistake. If they had done the same bandwidth with AVCHD 4:2:2 (100 Mb/s, which can be recorded to a $100 Compact Flash) they would have had a much better image. The interframe stuff allows for a lot more info in most shots. The reason the Canon shows so good, IMHO, is that the 40-45Mb/s AVHCD 4:2:0 records enough info to let the ability of the lens and sensor to show their stuff.

Class 6 can handle 45Mb/s. Unless Panasonic ups the storage bandwidth or makes the HDMI port output uncompressed 4:2:2 video (or both), this camera will probably not match the 25Mb/s HMC 150 or HF S10/100.
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While 100Mb/s is stretching it for SDHC or Compact Flash, IMO, 50Mb/s sounds possible. I don't see anything (excluding, of course, the implementation on the camera of the avc Intra chip) preventing the AVCINtra50 10bit codec to be encoded on an SDHC card.

EDIT- Also, Encoding AVCHD 100Mb/s (if such a thing exists) and AVCINTRA100 would be exactly the same. Its the same 100 Mb/s encoding speed. The only thing that would need to be changed is the encoding chip on the camera.
 
SPZ said:
While 100Mb/s is stretching it for SDHC or Compact Flash, IMO, 50Mb/s sounds possible. I don't see anything (excluding, of course, the implementation on the camera of the avc Intra chip) preventing the AVCINtra50 10bit codec to be encoded on an SDHC card.
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I'll buy that for a dollar.
 
SPZ said:
17mb/Sec is a very limiting
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H.264 is a very flexible codec, in fact its not even necessarily fixed bitrate. It can be variable bitrate. I think many people are still hung up on the days when the format was DV and the encoding was "fixed compression" and the bitrate determined quality.

This is not the case anymore. The quality of an H.264 stream is dependant on several factors, including bitrate, but also including the complexity of the encoding being done, the horsepower of the CPU doing the encoding and the time available to he CPU to do that encoding.

The 5D drops much of the sensor information and barely encodes the video and so it needs a massive bitrate to get by--- because it doesn't apparently have the horsepower to encode the video in real time at higher quality, it makes up for it with bitrate.

Its quite possible that the GH1 will encode video at a higher quality than the 5D, even though the bitrate is much lower. Two reasons: Superior input: The GH1, by all accounts, reads the full width of the frame-- a 4k image, and reduces that down to the 1920x1080 video frame. The 5D just drops all that info. So, better input quality. Secondly, the GH1 has a dual core CPU, and probably one of those cores is a dedicated H.264 encoder. I believe the 5D just had video added on late in development as a response to nikon-- its probably encoding in software, and thus relying all on bitrate. Finally, the GH1 has %33 longer time between each frame to do the encoding. That goes directly to the quality bottom line.

It remains to be seen what the GH1 video looks like, but we can't draw many conclusions at all from the 17Mbps bitrate. This isnt' tape.

Frankly, this camera delivers what the scarlet promised-- a 4k camera with interchangeable lenses great for shooting HD. Course, not in raw mode, etc, but its a whole lot cheaper....and it will be shipping in months.
 
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SPZ said:
While 100Mb/s is stretching it for SDHC or Compact Flash, IMO, 50Mb/s sounds possible. I don't see anything (excluding, of course, the implementation on the camera of the avc Intra chip) preventing the AVCINtra50 10bit codec to be encoded on an SDHC card.
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Do you guys realize what you're asking? Not even a class 6 card could support AVCIntra @ 50mbps. Class 6 is supposed to support a sustained speed of 6 megabytes per second, or 48 megabits. So even under the absolute perfect conditions at all times, 50mbps still wouldn't be possible. And if it were, it would be on the absolute edge. There would be no margin of error, no room for redundancy, no safety net whatsoever.

Class 6 is the current highest class of performance out there, which guarantees the minimum-write-speed. SDHC cards would have to progress to at least Class 8 before you'd have a remotely rational base for trying to encode a 50mbps data stream on one.

And yes, you'll read all sorts of tests and manufacturer claims about 150x and 300x and whatever, and none of that means anything; the Class rating is a guaranteed minimum write rate. If it can't write at Class 6 speed, it won't be given a Class 6 rating, and Class 6 guarantees 48mbps.
 
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