GH2 Anyone else looking to upgrade their GH2 for the Blackmagic Camera?

brunerww said:
There is an amazing grade of one of John Brawley's frames from the MagicCam over on the 100 page(!) BlackMagic Cinema Camera thread. Pixel peepers should go over there and check it out.

I absolutely love my GH2, but its comparatively poor DR and 8 bit colorspace are a problem for me, hack or no hack.

I am on the waiting list for the BMD at Mac Business Systems. They're local, so I can drive up when the camera gets here. For those who want to pre-order, they will put your name on the list without taking a credit card number.

I still have one Canon EF lens left over from T2i days, and my Nikon glass can be easily adapted to EF (I sold my adapter with the T2i, but they're not very expensive).

I will keep the GH2 for stills and as a B-cam, if I can afford to, and buy Leica R glass from here on out, adapting it to the GH2 with the DMW-MA3R and to the MagicCam with a Kipon Leica R to EOS adapter with focus confirm.

There is some good Leica R glass out there for about the same price as a decent micro 4/3 lens - like the Leica Vario Elmar-R 28-70 f3.5- 4.5.

Thanks, BlackMagic!
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It's not an amazing grade but it dutifully shows up the codec artifacts in the sky. Yuck!
Say hi to Sonny Trohan for me :)
 
wgzn said:
but why does it have to be so God awful UGLY? the thing looks like a clock radio : (
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Aesthetics is personal. As a designer, I find the BMC minimalist aesthetic very functional and beautiful. Much as I like the look of the RED, I find its machine-age steampunk chic a bit über-industrial looking. If I could get my flip Mino HD to do 4K RAW that would be ideal. Think of this as a pro Mino HD ;)
 
I need to be able to use Minolta MD lenses for this to work for me. The Nikon and Canon FD lenses just aren't as good as many believe. Minolta MD lenses are better than Canon L glass. I hope BMD could hear this.
 
Zephyrnoid said:
It's not an amazing grade but it dutifully shows up the codec artifacts in the sky. Yuck!
Say hi to Sonny Trohan for me :)
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You do realize the source was a highly compressed 8 bit jpeg, right? This is nowhere near what to expect from the quality of the camera.
 
DPStewart said:
Heck - the way things are moving, the iPhone 8 will probably shoot 4K video with "Vintage Lens Emulation" software inside and cost $299...

In 15 years you KNOW my joke will have long since come true.....

Sometimes it is almost scary.
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And it won't make one single person a better filmmaker. It will just cause more people to think they can point the magic box at stuff and have a movie come out.
 
Consider this: nothing has changed. The intra Gh2 is the same exact camera it was yesterday: a plastic explosive that compares favorably with the material from cinema cameras (hard to distinguish when handled by a good colorist). It meets certain 'standards of image quality', that no other affordable camera had come close to. A few motions of the pen will benefit the film one-thousand times more than a little finer image (character over camera). Just something to consider.
 
Let's not compare this to the GH2 either. I mean, the GH2 is a $700 beast. Why would you want to trade up even if you get the BMD?? People have been crying for "3k for $3k" and now you have something very close and I still see some complaints. You know, there's a bum in Santa Monica who found $1,000,000 in a dumpster and wasn't happy because it wasn't $2,000,000 - hypothetically speaking :)
 
Thomas Smet said:
You do realize the source was a highly compressed 8 bit jpeg, right? This is nowhere near what to expect from the quality of the camera.
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He made a similar post in another thread. Although the gist of your reply was pointed out to him, unless he doesn't read answers to his own posts, he's trolling.
 
strancali said:
Let's not compare this to the GH2 either. I mean, the GH2 is a $700 beast. Why would you want to trade up even if you get the BMD?? People have been crying for "3k for $3k" and now you have something very close and I still see some complaints. You know, there's a bum in Santa Monica who found $1,000,000 in a dumpster and wasn't happy because it wasn't $2,000,000 - hypothetically speaking :)
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I think I know that guy.
 
I'd be more inclined towards a D800 than the BMDCam, mostly in value of versatility.

That said, the only things I'm upgrading for the next year or two are lens and support equipment. Camerawise, I'm fine.
 
Sage said:
Consider this: nothing has changed. The intra Gh2 is the same exact camera it was yesterday: a plastic explosive that compares favorably with the material from cinema cameras (hard to distinguish when handled by a good colorist). It meets certain 'standards of image quality', that no other affordable camera had come close to. A few motions of the pen will benefit the film one-thousand times more than a little finer image (character over camera). Just something to consider.
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Oh, I agree completely. If you can't make a good movie with a GH2, the Blackmagic Camera won't help either. And I never meant to imply that I dislike the GH2. I love mine! Especially considering the price, the quality it can put out with the Intra hack is astounding.

The GH2 isn't perfect, though. My complaints are mostly all about usability, not image quality. ISO bug, playback issues with some hacks, flimsy mini-HDMI connector for monitoring, etc. These are the things that I want to upgrade from, and the Blackmagic seems to fit the bill. On top of that, there's no more 8-bit 4:2:0 footage! No more macroblocking or banding in the sky! No more in-camera sharpening! No more aliasing! It's more than 3x the cost of a GH2, but, for me, it's worth the cost. If only somebody would figure out how to match up m4/3 lenses with it!!!
 
How will it compare to the GH2 in low light capabilities? Once it hits the streets, we'll see how it fares - just as the GH2 has the ISO bug, banding and so forth, it's pretty much a given that the BMC will have its share of issues - sure, they'll fix it in the next iteration, but there will also be a GH3 (hopefully) fixing some of the GH2 issues.

Personally, I'll wait until the BMC has been well and tried by many people out there in the field, instead of getting orgasms over specs and theoretical cameras. The GH2 is here, it's real, we know it's limitations and, crucially workarounds. If you need to shoot something in the near future, and the GH2 was good enough, I don't see how this NAB changes anything.

In short: I'll wait and see. And yeah, you may not be interested in the low-light capability, but for my project it's absolutely critical.
 
OldCorpse said:
How will it compare to the GH2 in low light capabilities? Once it hits the streets, we'll see how it fares - just as the GH2 has the ISO bug, banding and so forth, it's pretty much a given that the BMC will have its share of issues - sure, they'll fix it in the next iteration, but there will also be a GH3 (hopefully) fixing some of the GH2 issues.
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Indeed. Every camera has its glitches and idiosyncrasies, and the BMCC will be no exception.

However, unlike the Lumix G series cameras, Blackmagic is focusing exclusively on the needs of the filmmaker. Panasonic has so far intended the Lumix cameras for consumers only. That's why I'm not really expecting them to fix much with the next GH3. Sure, they'll add features (probably 1080p60), but I don't think they'll ever add stuff like timecode, waveforms or vectorscopes, balanced audio inputs, and certainly not RAW 12-bit recording or 4:2:2. They'll keep them in the AVCHD family because it's easy for consumers, and that's what consumers want. We're the minority here. We're the one hacking our cameras to deliver intra-frame codecs and better motion cadence. Most consumers don't care, and they shouldn't.

That's what I find so appealing about the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. It's made by people who understand the world of low-budget filmmakers. That makes all the difference in the world.
 
The concept of this camera is extremely appealing, but the smaller sensor is not. I was actually hoping for a S35 sized camera to offer similar recording capabilities.
 
Aki_Hartikainen said:
The concept of this camera is extremely appealing, but the smaller sensor is not. I was actually hoping for a S35 sized camera to offer similar recording capabilities.
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Why? When in the past has S16 ever been a problem? From what I've seen thus far, the sensor size is a complete non-issue.
 
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