GH4 Atomos Ninja 2

[David Del Real]

Anybody using an Atomos Ninja 2 with their GH4? I have a couple of them and was thinking of using them even though they only record 1080p. 10 bit ProResHQ should look pretty good - especially for V-Log. Anybody with experience/tips with this setup?

 

[Thomas Smet]

Anybody using an Atomos Ninja 2 with their GH4? I have a couple of them and was thinking of using them even though they only record 1080p. 10 bit ProResHQ should look pretty good - especially for V-Log. Anybody with experience/tips with this setup?

Absolutely! I use the Ninja Blade which is also HD. Great recorders and you are absolutely correct that having HD 4:2:2 10bit directly from the camera is a stunning way to shoot video. It may not be 4k but it is exceptionally good looking HD which the vast majority of 4k shooters deliver as anyway. By recording directly to HD you end up with much smaller files than 4k ProRes with most of the color benefits. For shooting V-log is is 1000000x better to use the Ninja to get external 10bit color in HD vs internal h264 8bit 4k. The file sizes are not that much larger either 24p HD ProRes HQ is 176mbps. internal 4k is 100mbps so less than double the size which isn't bad for what you gain in terms of color.

Just a couple very minor things to think about on the GH4.

1. 10bit loses the ability to manual white balance. Massive pain I the rump but you can set your presets in 8bit mode or with the record unplugged and then switch back to 10bit. You can also dial in a color temp if you use controlled lighting and know what the color temp is.

2. Auto focus gets very clunky with 10bit. Not an issue if you manual focus.

3. The HDMI does have some lag with 24p. It isn't a show stopper but it can be jarring at times for some people.

4.The HDMI down conversion uses a nearest neighbor method of scaling. This results in some insanely sharp details but can also yield some aliasing in fine detail. Down converting in a computer tends to use a certain level of filtering. So what can happen is if you have a fence post in the distance that is exactly one pixel wide it could flicker as the nearest neighbor scaling does a crude method of tossing out the pixel. the GH4 tends to never have details that fine with the optical low pass filtering and lens optics but fine details can alias a bit. I find adapted lenses like Rokinon work better since they blur the edges of single pixel details even more. This is more of a pixel peeping nit picking kind of thing so I wouldn't worry too much about it. In FCPX I find adding a blur to the HD material of 0.2 to equal the overall look of GH4 4k material downscaled to HD in FCPX.

5. Be sure to keep the GH4 in 4k/UHD mode and just set the HDMI to down convert to 1080p. This over samples the output. By shooting HD on the GH4 you use the inferior binning method of down converting the sensor to HD which can have mushy details, moire and aliasing. Visually it is much better to set to 4k and let the HDMI port down convert to 1080p.

 

[David Del Real]

Brilliant! Thanks for your encouragement and words of wisdom Thomas. Yeah, I shoot 4K but most of my delivery is still 1080p so I thought it would make sense to use the Ninjas. I'll check my settings on the GH4, probably test shoot today. Have a couple projects coming up that might benefit from this workflow. Thanks again.

 

[estarkey7]

I use one, and it works well. I bought the Ninja 2 so I could use false color with V-Log. But the 1080p footage looks so nice in 10-bit, I started recording 1080 internal more than 4K internal.