Are you guys still waiting on GH1 keeping your eye on the 7D?

I would be willing to bet good money that the 7d will overthrow the GH1 in every category but those you mentioned and autofocus.

For most filmmaking the GH1's bitrate and codec just doesn't hold up. Of course thats only an opinion.
 
Fluke said:
Oh, for fu-...

If I had waited one month... Not only that but the re-sale on the GH1 has dropped significantly as the price has dropped here in Australia. That and there's not going to be anyone that wants to buy a GH1 if it's essentially just the (much cheaper) G1 with HD video that is (probably) going to be trumped by a competitor.

And I could have stayed with what I know, too: Canon. Bah.

Goddammit.
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too bad. well you didnt know.

anyways about NOBODY but squid thought canon would come through.

Im only lucky cause the GH1 was so slow on delivery!
 
sunburst said:
too bad. well you didnt know.
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Sigh. Yeah, there was no way I could have known. And I'd already put off buying a new camera for a while to see how the field played out... But apparently I didn't wait quite long enough.

I think I'm just going to wait to see the price of the 7D in Australia, the quality of the images, and some hands on film making opinions and then weigh up whether the loss I will incur selling the GH1 would be worth it. I'm thinking probably not...

I suppose, after all I still have in my hands a piece of equipment that was taking the video world by storm very, very recently. It's not as if the GH1 has gotten any worse. It's just a pain knowing that I could have stuck with Canon, as they have done me well in the past.

I just hate being superseded. *Grumble*
 
ryansheffer said:
I would be willing to bet good money that the 7d will overthrow the GH1 in every category but those you mentioned and autofocus.

For most filmmaking the GH1's bitrate and codec just doesn't hold up. Of course thats only an opinion.
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At some point you have to have something that's nice to shoot on. Have you shot on a 5D and a GH1? There's no compare. Using the 5D after using the Gh1 is like pushing your car down the street instead of driving it. Sure you'll get to the same place eventually, but doing one is a whole lot harder on your arms and takes a whole lot longer.

The lack of an EVF (not necessarily a bad thing, mirror box is better for photographers) an articulating LCD screen, it's large size, etc, make the 5D a total pain to use and the 7D seems very similar in this regard.

The GH1 really behaves more like a video camera when you're using it and for that I love it.

As long as you can get a great image out of it there's no reason to say it won't hold up and we've been getting great images with it...a whole lot better than the few bits of 7D footage floating around out there.
 
ryansheffer said:
http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosd/samples/eos7d/
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OMG, not even the pro photographer Canon has hired to promote this camera understands to use ND filters to keep shutter speeds down to avoid strobe jerky motion.

It's from a pre-production unit so shouldn't draw too hard conclusions from samples but the paris wheel 1080 Quicktime clip that Gizmodo posted on Vimeo got some pretty coarse aliasing crawling at hard edges and lines plus looks rather softish, a very odd combo. Could be bad re-encoding. Would be interesting to see the camera original clips. And the bug clip on top of the aliasing has several occasions of frame jumps / freezes at light changes that has also been shown in some 5D footage.
 
Yeah that Gizmodo thing is fail. That footage..well...blows. I'm arguing merits of video DSLRs all up and down that thread to skeptical photographers, using the GH1 as an example of when it's done right.
 
I own both a GH1 and a 5d. I wanted to love the GH1 so much that I would sell my 5d. The truth is the I just didn't think the footage held up. The usable dynamic range and the codec are sooo much worse on the GH1. At the end of the day I'm more willing to do workarounds than I am to get a lesser image.

My opinion of course.

Also - for what its worth I just helped produce a web series for the show vampire diaries coming out on the CW. We heavily tested my 5d and GH1 side by side. The DP wouldn't go near the GH1.
 
Do you have your scene settings adjusted on the GH1? Are you shooting contrast -2?

I've found the dynamic range on the 5D to be problematic because it clips everything out with it's high contrast.


Marrti, that video sort of exemplifies how the vDSLR marketing is going:

Panasonic hires Philip Bloom for GH1 promo and puts out a video that looks great, but was shot on $10,000 primes mostly and has little movement in it to hide potential codec problems.

Nikon puts out a video for D300s that is more photos than video.

Canon puts out a video where the operator didn't know the first thing about filming anything.
 
ryansheffer said:
Watch line of sight on the canon japan site.
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I see a lot of rolling shutter, choppy footage, ghosting, and a blocky codec. Seriously. Wow. Not very impressed at all....does the guy who shot this not understand the way shutter speed effects video or the way an NLE handles footage when the framerate changes in a timeline (or is hacked low thanks to slow shutter?)
 
I have done all that can be done with the settings of the GH1.

With that said, the out of box image that comes with the GH1 (once the contrast, saturation settings have been made) is much nicer (color wise) than the 5d, however I spent a solid 3 weeks tweaking my settings using picture style editor with the 5d. The final result is amazing compared to where the camera started - especially in terms of dynamic range.
 
ryansheffer said:
I own both a GH1 and a 5d. I wanted to love the GH1 so much that I would sell my 5d. The truth is the I just didn't think the footage held up. The usable dynamic range and the codec are sooo much worse on the GH1. At the end of the day I'm more willing to do workarounds than I am to get a lesser image.
.
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well ive been on the fence. I never preordered a gh1 till recently.

I do a lot of post work, so codec is very important. Im leaning hard toward
the 7d now. although ill miss the 43 form factor and auto focus.
 
I'm not saying the 7D can't put out a decent image, I'm sure it can, I'm just saying why the hell did they hire a guy that can't shoot video for crap?

I do a fair amount of post work on my stuff and yeah I've seen the codec break down when you hit it too hard with filters, etc. I see where you're coming from on that. It doesn't bother me so much though because I'm used to already dealing with HVX footage which you don't want to smack around too hard in post due to grain.

What's your workflow? I put my stuff into ProRes LT and I've noticed once it's actually in a decent codec in post (10 bit, etc) it seems to handle things a lot better. Are you editing natively because I bet that would suck for doing image work in post.
 
Ben_B said:
I
What's your workflow? .
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well my workflow varies.

but production wise, quite a bit of green screen. I know the 5d has good reports
on this , so the 7d should be at least as good.

I know too, the mud problem seems to effect the green channel badly.
{ what ive read here }. so im thinking the gh1 is NOT a good candidate
for screen work. { sure, the odd shot should be ok }
 
For what its worth I am an editor and visual effects artist that edits in final cut. The defacto standard is Prores. I haven't upgraded to 7 yet due to not being in between projects, but I have been working in Prores HQ using Neoscene to convert and then using cinema tools to conform to 29.97 so that the footage will work with my Matrox box.

It kinda blows my mind that you claim to be a post guy and you can't see the problems with the GH1 codec-wise when compared to Canon's H.264. There really is no comparison. I just finished a project that was a two camera shoot, one GH1, one 5d. I literally won't be using most of the GH1 footage because it doesn't hold a finger to the 5d footage.

The real test always comes in post. The 5d image stands up to grading, the GH1 does not. I'm sick of working with such limited formats. Color correcting GH1 footage reminds me of HDV. And your claim of blockiness in the codec is something I have never seen. Three weeks ago myself and a very successful DP did side by side tests with the 5d and GH1, trying to "break the codec" by doing things like running around in front of the camera holding a bright red shirt in the air while shooting at an F11-13. The 5d held up suprisingly well. The GH1 looked horrible. Red blocks everywhere. All I can say is that these are my experiences.
 
I was referring to how crummy the 7D footage looked, at least what's up right now, especially in the canon videos, not 5D footage.

I shoot 720p almost exclusively, this might be where we're having our disconnect? The 720p on the GH1 holds up a lot better than the 1080p does.

I do a fair amount of color correction on my footage and so far I've been happy with it, reducing contrast, (slightly reducing) saturation, noise reduction, and increasing sharpness a step in camera seems to really allow you a lot more flexibility and let you push things a lot harder before it breaks. I tend to shoot for as low-contrast as I can get and that way when you increase it in post and tweak other things you have a lot of leeway.

The stuff looks pretty darn good to me.

I dunno. Let me know what you think of this: http://www.vimeo.com/6340277 It's pretty heavily graded throughout believe it or not (but with a montage there's not that much consistency shot to shot, wasn't going for a specific look.)
 
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I'd say the shot near the end of the theatre that racks in from bokeh is an example of how the codec can have some problems, especially when grading, but part of the reason was that that was 720p and zoomed in quite a bit to do image stabilization in post. I was running and gunning. For most narrative work I'm going to have a tripod or some other stabilizer.
 
I would have thought that if someone launched a video-only camera with no viewfinder and a fixed LCD on the back of it at a high price, it would be regarded as a bit of a joke surely? The fact that it also takes photos isn't the key thing here. I guess if there's live output from the hdmi it could tip the scales a bit, but otherwise, it would be rather restricting in use?
 
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