GH2 Can I use stills to gauge the quality of a GH2 24P movie?

G

guyburns

Active member
I want to get an idea of how well my GH2 functions in varying light conditions. Instead of taking videos, will taking stills with an exposure time of 1/40 - 1/100 at various aperture/ISO settings give me a reasonable indication of how a video will turn out using the same settings? I'm talking about in terms of colour, contrast, sharpness, and the amount of speckling you get in low-light (what's that called?).

It would be a lot easier and quicker to take 30-40 hand-held stills than the same number of videos.
 
Stills will give you a general idea of how video might look under various location conditions as long as you keep in mind that stills will be sharper and probably more detailed than the video. This is because still images use the whole sensor array of pixels while video will be downsampled some.

But you can get a fair idea of what it will look like by shooting stills.

That "speckling" you mention is digital "noise" and will show up worse in underexposed areas.
 
would that also be true if you took stills while in video mode?

cos on my nikon v1 can also take stills in video mode, and i quite like the aspect ratio but its a teeny 1920x1080 which for stills kinda sucks.
 
brucker said:
would that also be true if you took stills while in video mode?

cos on my nikon v1 can also take stills in video mode, and i quite like the aspect ratio but its a teeny 1920x1080 which for stills kinda sucks.
Click to expand...

It would seem taking stills while in video mode could be very much like a "screen grab".

At 1920x1080 like you describe. I'd rather evaluate and judge from a full resolution still.

I'm able to do the visualization. I've been practicing visualization since I first picked up SLR cameras in the early 1960's and marveled at how much looking through the prism finder could be like sitting in a darkened movie theatre.
 
Film DP's used to do the same thing.
There was a lab on La Brea here in Hollywood (RGB Labs) that would take all of the different Kodak and Fuji motion picture stocks and roll them onto 35 slr loads for the DP's to put in their Nikons. They would then shoot the roll at 1/50 of a second prior to shooting the same motion picture stock to check out exposure, contrast, latitude, etc. Don't see why it wouldn't work in the digital world, as well.
 
I would never use stills to gauge the video of the GH2. Stills are always gonna be sharper and clear vs video. I've seen stills from the kit lens vs video and the stills always looked way better. You have to use video to really get a guage what you're seeing. Also, depending on where you're shooting and when, video will show you if there's going to be any problems in the scene/location. You won't see fluorescent light flicker in stills. Just record 10 seconds of video and you'll be fine.
 
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