Stephen Mick
Totally Usable
Many of the GH1 fans here may have seen my Costa Rica video from a few weeks back. When I put that original cut together, every now and then I would come across a clip that showed what looked like "aperture flicker" or "exposure flicker." Thankfully the flicker wasn't present on key shots, and I was able to cut around it.
After doing some initial research, and consulting with a few others, I chalked up the bad clips to "operator error," thinking either some automatic function had been left on or the variable-ND filter was causing some shifting.
But in the process of putting another recent edit together, I realized the issue that I thought was unique to my setup was, in fact, an issue with the camera itself. After doing some testing, I decided to share it with the GH1 community.
Check out this link…
http://www.proofcreative.com/roxy/gh1_issue.mov
This clip was recorded at 720/60p and changed to 24p in Cinema Tools. Although you can see "refocusing" going on here, the camera itself is in Creative Movie Mode, full manual operation. Whether the focus was set to manual (as most shots were) or partial auto (as this shot was), the results were the same.
You can clearly see the image shifting in exposure from one frame to the next, primarily when the lens is moving up and down with the motion of the boat. At the time, I didn't see this in the viewfinder, but I often shoot focused more on what's going on with my "free" eye than my "shooting" eye.
There are a good many shots like this where the blue sky seems to shift in exposure. All of them were on bright sunny days, where there was a good bit of blue in both the sky and the water.
Again, when I first saw this, I figured there was something I did wrong, some setting I mistakenly used that created this problem. But I shared the footage with another local GH1 shooter, and we tried to recreate the issue with his camera. At first we couldn't seem to get the same effect. Then, when filming a test shot of a woman in a blue shirt, it happened again. The blue tones flickered in exposure, as if the amount or intensity of the color were somehow confusing the camera's brain.
We changed the GH1 from 720/60p to 1080/24p and the issue persisted. We switched shooting "film" modes, and made an interesting discovery: when shooting in some modes, the issue wasn't present, while in others, including even the monochrome/B&W modes, it was easy to see. If I remember correctly, "Standard" mode was clean, but "Smooth" and "Dynamic" showed the shift.
We wondered if maybe this was an issue between the lens and camera, so we removed the kit lens and tried a Nikon 50mm lens on an adapter. No flicker. We tried all the same settings and could not recreate the flicker with the non-kit lens.
So, to sum things up, when using some "film modes" with the GH1 and kit lens, you might experience some "exposure shifting" in the blue tones. Hopefully Panasonic will fix this as part of a firmware update in the future.
I'd be curious to know if any others have seen behavior like this, as now I have seen it on two completely different GH1 cameras.
After doing some initial research, and consulting with a few others, I chalked up the bad clips to "operator error," thinking either some automatic function had been left on or the variable-ND filter was causing some shifting.
But in the process of putting another recent edit together, I realized the issue that I thought was unique to my setup was, in fact, an issue with the camera itself. After doing some testing, I decided to share it with the GH1 community.
Check out this link…
http://www.proofcreative.com/roxy/gh1_issue.mov
This clip was recorded at 720/60p and changed to 24p in Cinema Tools. Although you can see "refocusing" going on here, the camera itself is in Creative Movie Mode, full manual operation. Whether the focus was set to manual (as most shots were) or partial auto (as this shot was), the results were the same.
You can clearly see the image shifting in exposure from one frame to the next, primarily when the lens is moving up and down with the motion of the boat. At the time, I didn't see this in the viewfinder, but I often shoot focused more on what's going on with my "free" eye than my "shooting" eye.
There are a good many shots like this where the blue sky seems to shift in exposure. All of them were on bright sunny days, where there was a good bit of blue in both the sky and the water.
Again, when I first saw this, I figured there was something I did wrong, some setting I mistakenly used that created this problem. But I shared the footage with another local GH1 shooter, and we tried to recreate the issue with his camera. At first we couldn't seem to get the same effect. Then, when filming a test shot of a woman in a blue shirt, it happened again. The blue tones flickered in exposure, as if the amount or intensity of the color were somehow confusing the camera's brain.
We changed the GH1 from 720/60p to 1080/24p and the issue persisted. We switched shooting "film" modes, and made an interesting discovery: when shooting in some modes, the issue wasn't present, while in others, including even the monochrome/B&W modes, it was easy to see. If I remember correctly, "Standard" mode was clean, but "Smooth" and "Dynamic" showed the shift.
We wondered if maybe this was an issue between the lens and camera, so we removed the kit lens and tried a Nikon 50mm lens on an adapter. No flicker. We tried all the same settings and could not recreate the flicker with the non-kit lens.
So, to sum things up, when using some "film modes" with the GH1 and kit lens, you might experience some "exposure shifting" in the blue tones. Hopefully Panasonic will fix this as part of a firmware update in the future.
I'd be curious to know if any others have seen behavior like this, as now I have seen it on two completely different GH1 cameras.
