AF100 with GH2 best match?

S

Sttratos

Veteran
I would like to use the AF100 and GH2 together and I have been looking around for matching settings. I of course came across Ipowell and Barry's great threads on the matter. But both took very different approaches. I know it's all in the eyes of the beholder, but which is the most preferred among people who shoot with both cameras?

I guess it may come down to if you like the GH2 or the AF100 images better? Barry tried to make the GH2 look like the AF100 and Ipowell the other way around. But technically speaking which one will produce the highest quality set of images?

If I understood it right, by Barry choosing the Cinema mode instead of Smooth in the GH2 he was trying to get the GH2 to handle the highlights more like the AF100 does, while Ipowell was trying to get the AF100 to handle the mids and shadows more like the GH2?
If so, is it really a good idea to make the GH2 match the AF100 highlights when the worst thing about the AF100 is exactly how it handles the highlights?


I also don't understand when Ipowell says that by choosing a pedestal of -9 it helps in the highlight handling, that it gives more highlight headroom and a raised pedestal will cause the highlights to clip worse. How so? I thought pedestal affected only the blacks and not the highlights?

And Barry says it throws way info, I guess he means it crushes blacks too much and you lose info on the shadows?

In short, what I don’t understand is that Ipowell seems to be saying that -9 allows you to use the full dynamic range of the AF100, while Barry seems to be saying that -9 actually diminishes the dynamic range. Just trying to understand it better.

The other question I have is about setting the detail as high as -2 with the AF100. Didn't Panasonic say -5 is zero? Wont the edge enhancement be too obvious, specially when projected if you use -2?

With both settings, Barry's and Ipowell's you set the cameras to equal ISO and F-Stops and the exposures will match?

What about white balance? Is the 5.6K preset in the AF100 accurate for real daylight shooting, meaning outdoors? What about the GH2?

I know these area lots of questions, but I thank all in advance for helping me sorting this out and understanding it.
 
Why not take a couple of hours out of your weekend, try out each style, tweak to taste, and choose the method that works best for your situation.
 
Sttratos said:
I also don't understand when LPowell says that by choosing a pedestal of -9 it helps in the highlight handling, that it gives more highlight headroom and a raised pedestal will cause the highlights to clip worse. How so? I thought pedestal affected only the blacks and not the highlights?

And Barry says it throws way info, I guess he means it crushes blacks too much and you lose info on the shadows?

In short, what I don’t understand is that LPowell seems to be saying that -9 allows you to use the full dynamic range of the AF100, while Barry seems to be saying that -9 actually diminishes the dynamic range. Just trying to understand it better.

The other question I have is about setting the detail as high as -2 with the AF100. Didn't Panasonic say -5 is zero? Wont the edge enhancement be too obvious, specially when projected if you use -2?

With both settings, Barry's and LPowell's you set the cameras to equal ISO and F-Stops and the exposures will match?

What about white balance? Is the 5.6K preset in the AF100 accurate for real daylight shooting, meaning outdoors? What about the GH2?
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Here's a link to the thread the OP is referring to:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...he-GH2&p=1986178192&viewfull=1#post1986178192

The MASTER PED setting on the AF100 affects not only the black level; it sets the position of the entire dynamic range of the camera. Much as the name implies, you can visualize it literally as a pedestal whose height determines where the AF100's limited DR cuts off both the darkest shades at the bottom, and the brightest shades at the top.

Setting the pedestal to -9 positions the camera's DR to cut off more of the grungy dark end of the scale (to match the GH2) and provides a bit more headroom at the cramped bright end. While Barry is correct in pointing out that this discards some of the darkest shadow detail, I found this setting best matches the GH2's Smooth gamma curve. It also crushed the AF100's shadow noise enough to allow me to set DETAIL CORING to -7, which preserves the sensor's native sharpness across its entire dynamic range.

As you gathered, my goal with this Scene File was to match the AF100 to the GH2's best image quality. That's the criteria I used in setting the AF100's DETAIL LEVEL to -2, which to my eyes most resembles the GH2 in its Smooth Film Mode.

The net result of these Scene File settings is that you can indeed set the GH2 to the same exposure values as the AF100 and obtain comparable results, so long as you take care not to overexpose the AF100. The major limitation of this Scene File is that I was not able to reproduce the GH2's graceful handling of blown highlights on the AF100. To do so would require a gentler gamma curve than the AF100 provides.

With respect to White Balance, I matched the AF100's 5.6K preset to the GH2's Sunlight preset. In my own shooting, I use these presets in all natural lighting situations, as I prefer to preserve the ambient light quality rather than attempt to normalize its color temperature. Since I didn't alter the AF100's chroma settings, this Scene File should work with manual White Balance as well. The GH2, however, required chroma adjustments to remove its greenish cast, and those settings may need to be tweaked to produce comparable results at other color temperatures.
 
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I had a go a little while ago with both Barry and powell settings. I did it in a hurry and never went back to it. But I remember that to my surprise, Barry's AF100 settings matched powell's GH2 setting better than powell's AF100 did. Cinema produced much too dark shadows and so did powell's AF100 setting with the -9 master pedestal. But Barry's -5 master pedestal looked the closest to the GH2 with Smooth (powell's setting). I don't know why this was, but the GH2 was ISO 160 and AF100 ISO 200 I just just don't remember the f-stops, but I used the same lens.

By the way, how do you do chroma adjustments to remove the greenish cast in the GH2? I didn't know you could tweak that. Is it what the A-3 and M-2 mean in your settings? I was never sure what that was as I couldn't find it in the menus.
 
Adamsenoj said:
By the way, how do you do chroma adjustments to remove the greenish cast in the GH2? I didn't know you could tweak that. Is it what the A-3 and M-2 mean in your settings? I was never sure what that was as I couldn't find it in the menus.
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Yes, the A-3 and M-2 settings are part of the White Balance adjustment on the GH2. On the White Balance screen, press the down-arrow button to access the adjustment grid. There's a separate chroma grid for each White Balance setting and it's an important part of matching the color balance of the AF100 and GH2.
 
lpowell said:
Yes, the A-3 and M-2 settings are part of the White Balance adjustment on the GH2. On the White Balance screen, press the down-arrow button to access the adjustment grid. There's a separate chroma grid for each White Balance setting and it's an important part of matching the color balance of the AF100 and GH2.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. Never new that. So to replicate your A-3 and M-2 settings, you just move the yellow square to the 3rd little square towards the A (leftwards) and to the second little square towards the M (downwards)?

By the way, I see no A- . I only see A, G+, M- and B.
 
By the way, on the subject of coring, my experience is that setting coring to -7 does indeed produce a lot of noise in the blacks. Really a lot. I also read that Panasonic techies advise to keep coring two points above the detail value (this is a direct quote). So if using a detail of -2, coring should be at zero according to them.
Regardless, -7 coring is ugly in the shadows. I would only use this under bright sun light with no shadows.
 
-7 coring is what i use. Don't like when camera smoothes everything out with false detail. A program for noise reduction does a better job with noise then coring i think.
 
Adamsenoj said:
By the way, on the subject of coring, my experience is that setting coring to -7 does indeed produce a lot of noise in the blacks. Really a lot. I also read that Panasonic techies advise to keep coring two points above the detail value (this is a direct quote). So if using a detail of -2, coring should be at zero according to them.
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My intent was to find the AF100 settings that best emulate the look of the GH2. On that camera, I set Sharpness, Contrast, and Noise Reduction to -2, but it's still quite sharp. After examining magnified low-light footage from the GH2, I'm convinced that it uses a lowered pedestal to crush the worst traces of its shadow noise. Setting the AF100's Pedestal to -9 allowed me to set Detail to -2 and Coring to -7 without producing too much shadow noise. I'd rather have the sensor preprocessor clean up the blacks anyway, since the 8-bit AVCHD codec makes over-saturated, quantized chatter out of the darkest shadow details no matter how you adjust the camera.

In practice, the best way I've found to capture shadow details is to use fill lights to lift them up into gray. Even when outdoors in daylight, you can use portable LED's and reflectors to reduce the contrast to a range that the AF100 can handle. One of the benefits to me of using the GH2 to calibrate the AF100 is that I can make use of its waveform monitor and numerical readouts much like a light meter, and then duplicate its exposure settings on the GH2. That has given me more consistent results than I've been able to obtain on either camera alone.
 
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OK. I did my own tests with Ipowell and Barry's settings. I could not get them to match at all using WB presets, even with Ipowell settings. I had to manual WB both to get it close. With presets they look very different. But even with manual WB the shadows with the GH2 are still green while the AF100 is not.
But neither cinema or smooth crushes the blacks as much as setting the master pedestal in the AF100 to -9. This is too much. When the GH2 is still seeing details in the shadows with both cinema and smooth, the AF100 with -9 pedestal sees only black. It also makes blacks look nasty somehow. Like the shadows are dirty. So Barry -5 looks closer to my eyes than Ipowell's -9. -9 is too much.
But for some reason I have to compensate exposure with the GH2 in cinema mode to match Barry's AF100 settings. With Barry's at ISO 200 in the AF100 I had to bump the GH2 to ISO 320 to look the same. So doesn't look to be a good match. But GH2 smooth exposure matches Barry's AF100. To my eyes it looks like the closest match was to use Barry's AF100 settings with the GH2 in smooth mode. Ipowell's AF100 settings cruhes blacks much more than the GH2. GH2 cimena mode needs an ISO bump to look closer but colors look too different. Did I do something wrong?
 
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