GH1 Action Short / Field Test

[Jack Daniel Stanley]

Ok. For cereal this time:
(and not bad for the stock lens eh?)

CINEFORM PNG
http://files.me.com/jdanstan/hls2g5
CINEFORM JPEG

PRORES PNG
http://files.me.com/jdanstan/bnl3r9
PRORES JPEG

 

[Kholi]

Cineform wins. Just look at the edges of her face, forehead and the upper cheek. The edges of the little boys hands, etc.

Might be negligible but with the GH-1 footage I think every lil' bit counts.

 

[Jack Daniel Stanley]

Look at the yellows in the out of focus leaves and the gold in the backlit highlight on her face and the general goldeness vs. redness of the baby in the cineform too. More there / more pleasing than ProRes, imho.

Again this is not ProRes bashing - it's a great Pro codec, I just stated my preference, a mild one at that, and was asked to show examples. I have a slight .. SLIGHT preference for neoscene.

ALSO NOTE: This is shooting through a fence. So if you're wondering what any faint floaties are it's likely the fence.

 

[jenningsp]

i was messing around with codecs in FCP last year when i was doing some extreme colour grading. like turning a scene red to look like a dark room...

Everything fell apart. Prores went blocky. dvcproHD was better but still went blocky. The only thing that held up was photojpeg and uncompressed. Photojpeg rules! and it's free!

 

[pailes]

...and the general goldeness vs. redness of the baby in the cineform too.

Sorry but I cannot believe that those two codecs would result in such a huge color difference. There must be something else going on because such color variation can only be explained by different color space conversion algorithms or different color profiles. I never used Cineform before, but I can certainly transcode to uncompressed images and the colors between ProRes and uncompressed do match exactly.

I transcoded the same AVCHD clip from my HMC150 twice: ProRes (HQ) and a lossless animation codec. The results are almost identical but with the animation codec the file is 5 times bigger than the ProRes clip. Colors are identical.

Just look at the attached pictures.

ProRes:

Uncompressed:

 

[Mike@AF]

Those don't look the same to me. The ProRes looks like it has more contrast. Look at the shadows in her face. The uncompressed image looks smoother. The color looks different too. More neutral and natural in the uncompressed. It's ever so slight and if I couldn't see them side by side I never would notice.

 

[Kholi]

Those don't look the same to me. The ProRes looks like it has more contrast. Look at the shadows in her face. The uncompressed image looks smoother. The color looks different too. More neutral and natural in the uncompressed. It's ever so slight and if I couldn't see them side by side I never would notice.

Yup. The color's differences are probably a direct effect of the contrast shift. This is one thing I've always been annoyed with as far as Apple and Post goes: it's like it refuses to give you accurate contrast in your image.

 

[Mike@AF]

If you want to test whether there is generational loss with a codec, just recompress the clip with that codec 10 times. You'll see the difference. My method for testing this has been to put a few clips in a FCP timeline set up as ProRes or even uncompressed. Export as a Quicktime movie using that sequences settings. Do it again 9 times with whatever you export, rearranging the clips as you go so you can be sure it's actually recompressing. Want even more noticeable results? Change the codec. Go from ProRes to Uncompressed to Cineform to ProRes to Uncompressed, or however you want.

No lossless codec or uncompressed codec is truly lossless.

The same applies to lossless audio codecs whether it's Apple Lossless, FLAC, or anything else. Do the same with those and you'll hear a difference compared to the original.

 

[Martti Ekstrand]

Apple touts ProRes as being robust for multi-generation work. Have you experienced generational losses with it yourself?

I've helped out troubleshooting a project where clips had bounced back and forth between FCP, Motion, Color and After Effects using ProRes and edge crawl had become a nuisance. Redoing the steps after capture with QT Animation codec (hopeless name for a codec...) yielded zero added edge crawl.

See page 10 of their white paper: http://images.apple.com/finalcutstudio/resources/white_papers/L342568A_ProRes_WP.pdf

Based on the above experience I wrote off that info as another example of the Jobs Reality Distortion Field™ pushing things just a little bit too far. Don't get me wrong, I only use Macs, both professionally and privately.

Everything fell apart. Prores went blocky. dvcproHD was better but still went blocky. The only thing that held up was photojpeg and uncompressed. Photojpeg rules! and it's free!

Yup, PhotoJPEG at 75% is fantastic, very little degradation and small file sizes. I typically capture material as Pjpeg75%, edit and then in every subsequent step I use QT Animation up to delivery where better skilled people than me transcode for transmission format. If image quality is really critical I go back and recapture with Blackmagic uncompressed.
One can use ProRes for capture instead in the above workflow but the file sizes swell. This avoid open up FCP to hack a settings file for realtime SD support which Apple only allow Pjpeg to have at quarter size of NTSC/PAL for 'offline' use.

Here's some PNG's
ProRes (Extremely noisy pic)

NeoScene

:evil: KEEEEEEDING

Hahahahaha! But seriously Shirley, look at that picture. If I didn't have a GH1 myself and somebody showed my a moving HD clip looking like that and said it comes from a $1500 consumer device I'd think somebody was pulling my leg. Or yanking my tail. Or both.

Cineform wins. Just look at the edges of her face, forehead and the upper cheek. The edges of the little boys hands, etc.

Might be negligible but with the GH-1 footage I think every lil' bit counts.

Yes, as lovely as it is the clips coming out of GH1 are on the fragile side and should be handled with care if aiming for a big screen.

As for colour matching when I was comparing methods to transcode AVCHD to something editable I noted that while ProRes, Animation, Apple Intermediate Codec and Pjpeg are very close to each other Cineform mostly closely matched the AVCHD image. And when checking the results with histogram the Cineform file looked smooth as baby butter. For matters of convenience I opted for AIC anyway for the Closing Time gig as I'm fairly certain it will never go beyond vimeo. If it does I can fairly quickly redo it in Cineform anyway as then I would spend a whole lot more time on colour correcting it.

No lossless codec or uncompressed codec is truly lossless.

True but just for kicks I've once re-rendered a QT Animation file one hundred times and not a pixel was different. I'm not the only one who comes to this conclusion. Check out Marco Solario's codec page - it's a pity he hasn't added newer codecs in a long while. http://www.onerivermedia.com/codecs/ Check the 4:4:4 tab.

This is one thing I've always been annoyed with as far as Apple and Post goes: it's like it refuses to give you accurate contrast in your image.

That's why I like old codecs like Animation and PhotoJPEG, they don't have support and metatags for 'colour management', ie; some software designer who thinks he can pre-cognitively outsmart my system and workflow setup without letting me in on it.

 

[Kholi]

That's why I like old codecs like Animation and PhotoJPEG, they don't have support and metatags for 'colour management', ie; some software designer who thinks he can pre-cognitively outsmart my system and workflow setup without letting me in on it.

I was told this same thing by a longtime FCP guru, to render EVERYTHING out in Animation if you can. He also hates, with a passion, that P2 footage has to go through ProRes to get to FCP. For those reasons he almost quit FCP in general because it's a forceplay to an image that's not at it's best.

Barry's right about FCP, man... it's old hat in general. There are so many other options for AVC-HD and especially AVC-INTRA, working natively so you've no worry about what this codec or that compression scheme is doing.

Sigh, alas, it's also very hard to get away from FCP. =(

 

[cowpunk52]

Those don't look the same to me. The ProRes looks like it has more contrast. Look at the shadows in her face. The uncompressed image looks smoother. The color looks different too. More neutral and natural in the uncompressed. It's ever so slight and if I couldn't see them side by side I never would notice.

Have to disagree with you there. Took both stills, opened them in photoshop, then put them in separate layers on top of each other. Turning the top layer on and off results in no visible difference between the two images. And the histograms only show the minutest differences. For all practical purposes, they are perceptually identical.

 

[Mike@AF]

True but just for kicks I've once re-rendered a QT Animation file one hundred times and not a pixel was different. I'm not the only one who comes to this conclusion. Check out Marco Solario's codec page - it's a pity he hasn't added newer codecs in a long while. http://www.onerivermedia.com/codecs/ Check the 4:4:4 tab.

I will admit I haven't worked that much with Quicktime Animation codec. I'll have to try it out. If it's such a great codec why isn't there a lot of talk about using it more? Does it work real time in FCP? Does it work with Color? Any reason why you would want to use it, aside from file size? I'm not concerned about file size. Hard drives are cheap these days.

 

[Mike@AF]

Have to disagree with you there. Took both stills, opened them in photoshop, then put them in separate layers on top of each other. Turning the top layer on and off results in no visible difference between the two images. And the histograms only show the minutest differences. For all practical purposes, they are perceptually identical.

Look closely at those histograms. There are differences. They are slight, but there are differences.

EDIT: And like a side, if I couldn't look at them side by side I wouldn't have noticed, but I do see a difference and from Kholi's response it sounds like I'm not the only one.

 

[androoow]

i take it all images on this page have been converted to jpg then uploaded... shouldn't you be putting the original still image files through photoshop to reach conclusions?? wouldn't compressing the files into jpg's do away with any important tech information?

 

[Jack Daniel Stanley]

I gave links to the png's right out of QT above my jpegs.
Because that's how I role.

 

[Jack Daniel Stanley]

Here's how I got my images:
MTS -> Cineform or ProRes via NeoScene -> pct via QT -> jpeg via preview (but JPEG and Png are posted)
Maybe NeoScene doesn't reconstruct the chroma as well with ProRes?

 

[Ian-T]

Yes, the histograms are definitely different. Prores shows that it is an ever-so-slight more contrasty (or really more in the lower end).

 

[squig]

Yup. The color's differences are probably a direct effect of the contrast shift. This is one thing I've always been annoyed with as far as Apple and Post goes: it's like it refuses to give you accurate contrast in your image.

Didn't apple address this in the latest quicktime update?

the cineform looks better but you can't import it into color

FCS3 isn't far away

 

[Mike@AF]

No. But hopefully that fix will be part of QuickTime X.

 

[Ken7]

Guys, I've got a question that's really bugging me! I've seen many clips shot at 1080p on this cam that seem to show motion very smoothly. I just received my GH1 today and I just don't get that same fluid motion at 1080p..at least when displayed on my Pioneer Kuro plasma. I do get the expected fluid motion at 720p though.

Is there some setting I'm overlooking? I can't see how since the frame rate is 24p and should not be as smooth as some of these clips I've seen. Other than that the camera is superb!

Just as an example of one of those fluid 1080p clips:

http://vimeo.com/5243537