Closing Time - my first GH1 clip

[Martti Ekstrand]

Hi,

here's my first edited clip - some low light street photography, shoot in just over an hour the first night I got the cam. Nothing fancy, just showing how easy it is to run'n'gun this little puppy.

 

[Isaac_Brody]

I saw that, some really good stuff there. This camera is amazingly clean in lowlight. Looks great.

 

[DvxHerb]

I like a lot of your shots and I want to love this camera, but.....

I'm seeing a tremendous amount of compression and banding. At the beginning sky is terrible, :38 is pretty bad, 3:32 is horrible.

Not a slight against you. It is totally the camera's 17mbps limit.

 

[John Caballero]

It looks pretty good. 17mbps has nothing to do with anything. That was as fallacy to sell the more expensive cameras. This cam is gonna make a lot of great footage. While some complain others go shoot and improve. Keep enjoying your camera Martii. Thanks for the post.

 

[DvxHerb]

John, Isaac, anyone...

Is there a problem on my end? Could you look at the times I listed on the footage. Is that level of macroblocking normal?

I rather pay $1500 for the GH1 than spend twice that on the 5D MKII.

 

[Isaac_Brody]

Well I wasn't looking for macroblocking I was just watching the clip. I think part of it is compression to post on vimeo but I can't be sure. I think you're probably better off not buying right now and just waiting for something else to come along. If you're bothered by this clip then this camera is probably not going to fit your needs.

 

[Martti Ekstrand]

Could you look at the times I listed on the footage. Is that level of macroblocking normal?

To begin with, are you looking at the vimeo stream or the QuickTime file?

Bear in mind that first I rendered the colour corrected verision with titles from After Effects to QuickTime uncompressed Animation codec, getting a 9.55 GB file and from that made a reasonably sized h.264 153 MB file that I uploaded. From that file vimeo in their turn converted to a file compressed for streaming. I have no info on the quality of that but they raise gamma a bit which shows their macroblocking even more. To venture a guess I'd say what vimeo shows has roughly 1/100th of the data of my original master. Which is what they must do unless they'd spend crazy money keeping the site running.

To illustrate clearly what happens I took the same frame from each step and in Photoshop added a big gamma lift with a Curves adjustment layer. You see them below:
1. uncompressed 2. h.264 3. vimeo & 4. the uncompressed without gamma lift, ie: original frame.
Apologizes for size of the pictures but it's the only way to show what's really going on. I didn't just want to crop out a section of the sky.
(Also I'm a bit hesitant to show these altered screenshots 'cause I bet they are gonna get pulled out of this context and used as proof that GH1 sucks)

And the original frame would look even better if I had not converted the original AVCHD files to Apple Intermediate Codec but something like ProRes or Cineform instead. But my laziness and need for speed took over, this was just a quick fun little gig after all. I did the colour correction and titles in about 2 hours as compared to my day gig where I can spend 2-3 days on a 30 second commercial doing the equivalent of a Vogue cover image retouch before the clients are happy. I also just slapped a basic noise reduction right over it without adjusting any individual clips.

Finally the sky you see is not a clear one but slightly overcast at 00.15 in the night. Any video camera I've previously used or gotten footage from, be it pro, pro-sumer or consumer would have rendered it near pitch black. Had I shot all this footage, nearly an hour of it, with a 35mm film camera, the raw stock, processing and telecine would have cost more than the GH1.

Hope this helps keeping things in perspective.

 

[DvxHerb]

Wow. I really appreciate the time you took to post these. Thanks.

I was looking at the downloaded version. I know vimeo's compression mangles things.

The uncompressed picture, obviously, looks much better. It is amazing the amount of blocking the H.264 introduces.

Again I want to emphasize that I really want to like this camera. Not trying to be a hater.

 

[Isaac_Brody]

That puts things into pretty good perspective. There's only so far you can push low light night footage. I'm guessing this was kit lens? With a faster lens I'm sure you could get an even better result to start with for color correction.

The original looks really clean and as I suspected it's generational compression.

 

[Boz]

According to Martti's vimeo posting the clip was shot with Canon FD 35mm f/2.0 lens.

Overall this looks real good, but I just can't get past the look of clips shot at 50/60P. They look 'unreal' for lack of a better word. Too clean and smooth. I guess I'm just too big of a fan of 24P to let it go. Nice clip though, good work.

 

[Martti Ekstrand]

Thanks all for your kind words. It's really fun to shot stuff like this without the pressure of burning money and I got really good info out of this board so just trying to give back a little.

I guess the 5DmkII would have given a brighter image with less noise so if really low light capabilities is a must then you should go for it. That said I didn't expect GH1 to do this well. For instance seeing the two talking girls I thought 'there's no way I get anything here' and got really surprised when I looked in the viewfinder, still at 800 ISO. There was one dirty streetlight with a old bulb 5 meters behind me and 6 meters up and and the lit doorway behind them - that was all and yet it exposed. I switched to 1600, f/2.0 and rolled. Sure it's underexposed but I love how it looks.

Now speaking of frame rates... Boz, that must be your mind playing tricks on you - I intentionally dropped every second frame without frameblending from the 50p stream when converting so it's all 25p @ 1/50. I know I certainly can't see the difference between that and 24p @ 1/48.

Or perhaps what you are missing is the slightly uneven cadence and frames broken over fields in 24 to 29.97 transfer. I know a couple of american Flame artists who got distracted by that when starting to work here in Stockholm with PAL material saying 'it doesn't look like film'. However after a year or so of mostly working in PAL they started to hate that faint stutter and prefer straight clean 25p. Not to mention the lack of interlace problems when chroma keying.

Anyway here's proof of the 180 degree shutter working as it should - I've overlaid two adjacent frames with Lighten mode in Photoshop. Notice the gap between the lights on the building. This is an amazingly close to how 24 fps film looks in a cinema or on a flat bed. Though it misses some photo-chemical grain.

 

[AdrianF]

Anyway here's proof of the 180 degree shutter working as it should - I've overlaid two adjacent frames with Lighten mode in Photoshop. Notice the gap between the lights on the building. This is an amazingly close to how 24 fps film looks in a cinema or on a flat bed. Though it misses some photo-chemical grain.

I thought that this particular shot, at least on the computer screen, was a dead ringer for something shot on film. Nice looking "video".
Thanks for posting this and some of your other findings as you've got to grips working with the camera.

 

[Ken7]

John, Isaac, anyone...

Is there a problem on my end? Could you look at the times I listed on the footage. Is that level of macroblocking normal?

I rather pay $1500 for the GH1 than spend twice that on the 5D MKII.

Didn't see any macroblocking and 3:32 looked just fine. Perhaps a computer issue on your part?

 

[Ken7]

According to Martti's vimeo posting the clip was shot with Canon FD 35mm f/2.0 lens.

Overall this looks real good, but I just can't get past the look of clips shot at 50/60P. They look 'unreal' for lack of a better word. Too clean and smooth. I guess I'm just too big of a fan of 24P to let it go. Nice clip though, good work.

It's funny how differently these modes impact us. To me it's the 1080p that looks too 'unreal' and it's the 720p looks perfectly natural. But I've been shooting video for years using HDV, DV and 60i AVCHD. So for me this is the look I'm accustomed to. I've never felt that 24p in these cams 'really' duplicates the look of film.

But that's me.

 

[yabyum]

Love the colors in this video. I'm convinced that the FD lens far make for wayyy better colors on the GH1 than the kit lens. Everything looks so vibrant and nice, I don't get that with the kit. Then again, maybe it's just me being a noob at color correcting.