Uwe Lansing
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Are you sure? Today the amateurs want good lowlight capabilities too. And with fstop of 4.0 iso gonna rise a lot. I´m afraid that they will be disappointed by this cam...
Panasonic unveiled G1-HD...
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Are you sure? Today the amateurs want good lowlight capabilities too. And with fstop of 4.0 iso gonna rise a lot. I´m afraid that they will be disappointed by this cam...
Park Edwards
Veteran
lack of manual controls? what camera on the market has the ability to adjust ISO??? it has control over shutter and aperture. for a narrative filmmaker and doc work, this is gonna be a tight cam to work with. and i'm willing to bet a dollar you can either trick the iso or something can be adjusted just like the d90 and mkII. and think about it. that lens f4 is almost equivalent to all the cameras out there now with their small sensors and adapters put on the front. and that is just one of many lens that will most likely hit the market. so you can bet they'll have faster lens with AF. but what do i care, i never use AF for anything unless i'm taking a picture.
Uwe Lansing
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You´ll win - no doubt about it. But why the heck they didn´t install manual control over iso? Then one do not need all the tricks. And an ordinary consumer don´t like all these complex tricks...
Park Edwards
Veteran
not sure, i really think it's probably more trouble than we all think to control iso in movie mode. but, truth be told, much much rather have control over shutter than iso. it's be wonderful to have both, but if you gotta drop one, let it be the iso.
but you said ordinary consumer. the ordinary consumer probably doesn't even know what iso and shutter are.
but you said ordinary consumer. the ordinary consumer probably doesn't even know what iso and shutter are.
Uwe Lansing
Veteran
Haha... maybe, but almost all have two eyes and will notice a lot of noisy footage in lowlight situations and don´t know why that happens. Anyway, lets wait + see.
Here is an interesting article which announces two new glasses with fstop 1.7 + 2.8 before the end of this year.
http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/21656/panasonic-lumix-gh1-review/
Eddy Robinson
Well-known member
An external converter like Streamclip will do fine. If you want to do the 30->29.97 conversion in the NLE, it's best do do all the conversion before you start editing. Use some software that can do batch processing like adobe audition and shrink or pitch up the clips by 0.1% - such a small pitch change won't change the quality of the audio noticeably.
One of Pro Tools' selling points is that it handles this by manipulating the sample rate of the DSP hardware, but the reason that matters is that for film you're generally planning to output both for TV and theater - so you record audio at 30fps because it's relatively easy to resolve that to both 29.97 and 24.
Happily, all this will cease to matter in the next few years as TV goes digital. Frame rates like 59.94 and 23.976 are just there for backwards compatibility.
Eddy Robinson
Well-known member
My impression (which is partly a guess) is that you can have it adjust automatically or lock it to a specific value, but not adjust it during shooting (eg like the gain on the DVX or HVX. Is this really so bad? After all, manual exposure adjustments in the middle of a shot don't look that great either. I'd rather lock it and be able to adjust aperture.
Well, on a camera this size having an AC pulling focus might not be all that practical. If this feature works as well as suggested by Panasonic, it would be very useful for dolly shots and walking handheld where keeping the keeping focus can be tricky; it won't be quite so critical if your talent doesn't hit his/her mark correctly. That would be a big time saver right there.
I estimate that in the real world less than 20% of focus pulls are creative choices, and the other 80% are technical necessities to just keep the picture sharp. A traveling shot as above is an obvious example, or consider a closeup wher the actor maybe leans in for emphasis and you want to make sure the focus stays on the eyes rather than the ears.
On thing I don't see on the GH1 that would be useful is a focus range. Suppose I'm looking down the neck of a guitar and want to focus on the left hand, then the right hand. The ideal situation is a great AC fulling focus while looking at a big monitor but that's not always an option. Creative manual focusing over short distances might be difficult on this camera...perhaps that's why Panasonic opted to go with a slower kit lens, - offering shallow enough DoF to provide some bokeh but not enough that the autofocus gets twitchy?
Uwe Lansing
Veteran
If so, it would be great...
Excellent post. Pulling focus will be a necessity and what that means is that the cam will have to be fully kitted out to make that happen as well as having focus pullers and the cost of this cam just went up considerably.
I seriously doubt the auto focus of this cam will be the autofucus that will eliminate the need of a focus puller because only a human can decide what you want or don't want in focus.
Any four thirds or micro four thirds lens should have af on this body, like the olympus i mentioned, which is why i mentioned it. Not that i've ever used af for movies or ever will, but for the record. If they don't mention manual iso control it's a fact that it doesn't exist? Sorry but you lost of there. /m
i'm still not sure what you guys mean. there are plenty of glass for the four thirds or micro four thirds format. sure they don't have the "video optimized" af that's smooth and quiet, but it's still af. other than that i agree with the previous poster that only humans can decide what's supposed to be in focus, which is why af rarely works for narrative stuff anyway. i've worked on three features, two of them we used cameras that had af, and we never used it once.
/matt
i'm not sure what you mean by creative choices. *especially* on dolly and handheld shots it's often very hard to determine what's supposed to be in focus. "just" keeping the picture sharp works on auto for static shots with the subject in the middle, rarely otherwise. auto focus is nice, but the lack of good manual focus is a much bigger concern with low end cameras and their less than great manual focusing rings. i prefer great manual control with a fast and snappy auto mode for when you're lost or need a starting point fast.
/matt
Agreed. Auto focus just doesn't look good full stop anyway. Even on the cameras that are good at it it still hunts and shimmers on occasion sometimes totally randomly as to when. Especially if there is movement out of focus in the shot like a candle or something.
No camera smoothly keeps a subject in focus all the way (automatically) when its moving in or away from the camera, or likewise when the camera is tracking forward or back. It happens in intervals, choosing points.In the better cameras there are many intervals but it still would look twitchy. If AF is not acceptable for TV then its definately not acceptable for film. Push auto in manual mode can be handy for sure.
But on a steadicam, when you just cant touch the camera at all auto can be just the thing.
Park Edwards
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i'm by no means a pro here, but auto is for most amateurs. why do you think professional drivers still use manual.
Eddy Robinson
Well-known member
Perhaps I didn't make it clear (this goes for mico too) that my comments are based on Panasonics claims - still to e verified and quantified - for the AF tracking ability on the GH1. Automatic tracking is explicitly limited to still photos, but selection of the AF point in the frame (prior to shooting) seems universally available.
My point is that to some extent the camera lets you decide what is meant to be in focus before the shot, rather than forming its own opinion. To the degree that this is functional in movie mode, it could make the autofocus quite useful - particularly in combination with the user-definable guidelines (scroll up a bit from the link below).
I'm looking at this section of the website: http://panasonic.net/avc/lumix/systemcamera/gms/gh1/liveview.html#no06
Eddy Robinson
Well-known member
Not in formula 1, though :huh:
I get (and agree with) the point you're making, but I've been startled by the recent advances on this an other cameras with technologies like face recognition and AF tracking - these are only offered in still photography mode on the GH1, but their availability on moving pictures is surely only a matter of time and (ever-improving) processing power.
Don't get me wrong - my interest in this camera stems from the the combination of image quality, price, and good manual control. It's just that Panasonic has so far done pretty well in making their automatic features useful rather than gimmicky. 'DVX Film look', anyone?
Park Edwards
Veteran
i hope this could be the new dvx
John Caballero
Veteran
Auto focus is a great option. The original DVX 100 did not have it but later versions did. I've used it countless times in my HVX 200 and it has worked very well. The more options you get the better. Then it is up to the operator to use them or not.
Not at all. The D90 is simply an introduction to the future. It is ok for home movies and not much else. Codec, compression, "jello"... Forget about it.
Not at all. The D90 is simply an introduction to the future. It is ok for home movies and not much else. Codec, compression, "jello"... Forget about it.
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