GH1 Color Shifting Issue

AH HA! I noticed this shooting plants and an old hotel up in the Hudson Valley. Medium shot of leaves, the blue/green midtones were hopping between color values. I have everything set to manual, using Vivid color.... And come to think of it, my Nikon lenses haven't given me this guff
 
Hey Ben! What you have there is gradient banding. It's an old problem when using 8 bit RGB. Watch the GFX on many commercials in high def and you'll see the same junk. For the most part, our eyes are way better than our displays and it becomes very prevalent (like in your BandW photo) when you crush the dynamic range with contrast. The best way to nuke this fractillian order is with a hint of noise. It will disrupt the uniformity of the banding just enough to soften the issue
 
That's interesting cause I've been shooting most of this at contrast -2...hmmm.

This aggravated by 4:2:0?

Definetly noticed it when trying to do some HDR stuff.
 
That's 8 bit colour space showing it's limitations. Same thing happens in After Effects / Photoshop on generated gradients with a discreet colour change if working in 8 bit mode. You can apply Smart Blur and/or grain it to break the banding.
 
Martti Ekstrand said:
That's 8 bit colour space showing it's limitations. Same thing happens in After Effects / Photoshop on generated gradients with a discreet colour change if working in 8 bit mode. You can apply Smart Blur and/or grain it to break the banding.
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Good to know. Working in 10-bit in post (important for lots of color correction stuff) but obviously that doesn't change what's already been recorded. I'll try some of those tricks if it blows a critical shot....also I think I may have some color shift for you guys, stand-by.
 
I did the post on my commercial in After Effects with 16 bit mode, helps when pushing colours around to have way more discreet steps :)
However I always render out to 8 bit myself in the end as that's how it is broadcast - better to see and deal with the limited colour space before it's on the air and banding has snuck in at some unexpected cut.
Come to think of it - these colour shifts could be that only Standard mode stays within the 8 bit colour table of the AVCHD format and therefore it does some flipping between two values when a colour hue falls between the cracks. Haven't seen the shifts myself but I haven't done much skies yet. Oh wait, I did see some shifting once when I was pushing the battery to it's limit - ie some minutes before it packed in and camera stopped recording and shutdown.
 
When I saw it in my footage, the WB was set to 5600K, so I would say yes it does.
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Same here on the clip I posted.

@ Ben, the banding does occur on other lenses apart from the kit lens, but as others have pointed out, it can be rectified in post. It's certainly not unique to the GH1, but can be a pain when it does occur.
 
Barry_Green said:
i say any of these types of vidoes forward them along to panasonic.

http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-e...t/Contact-Us.2
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Agreed. Since I haven't heard back from anyone yet regarding submitting the bugs, do as Car3o said and start sending in complaints. This is a bug and it should be fixed.
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Seeing as we haven't heard anything in response - just wanted to urge all the GH1 owners to drop Panasonic a line about this issue if you haven't already.
Hopefully if enough members make them aware of this problem they will respond in some way.
 
I am totally shooting standard from now on!

I found my footage looked weaker (IMO) in smooth mode...more barf from the codec everywhere.
 
Ben_B said:
I am totally shooting standard from now on!

I found my footage looked weaker (IMO) in smooth mode...more barf from the codec everywhere.
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I prefer shooting in the most neutral way and creating a certain look afterwards in post. If you decide to create a certain look right in the camera you will have a hard time getting it to look differently in post.

So filming in standard mode is definitely not a bad thing, it really depends on what your workflow is.
 
Yeah that's why I was shooting standard but then I moved to smooth cause it looked pretty nice but now I'm going back to standard.
 
Great work guys. I best Panny's consumer camera division is not use to getting such detailed and professional scrutiny of their camera bugs from working pros. Hopefully they respond soon. Guessing jane soccer mom would have never caught this bug, but DVXuser pros did.

Another reason why if you work in the industry you need to be on this site.
 
jason.adams said:
I bet Panny's consumer camera division is not use to getting such detailed and professional scrutiny of their camera bugs from working pros.
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I guess not - honestly I'm a bit shocked that there has been no reponse from Panasonic on this at all.

At this point I don't think there will be - this may simply wind up being one of those issues they let go and then quietly fix in the next generation of camera.

I hope that's not the case - but the deafening silence isn't increasing my faith at all.
 
Agreed. There's a work-around, but when that work-around is not using 6 of the 8 or so camera "film modes," that's not acceptable.
 
Luis Caffesse said:
I guess not - honestly I'm a bit shocked that there has been no reponse from Panasonic on this at all.
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Okay, but let's put it in perspective -- how many responses do JVC, Sony, Canon, or any of the other companies give? They don't communicate to the end customer at all. Just one day a firmware update pops up.

I expect that this will be the same situation, one day it will get fixed.

I hope that's not the case - but the deafening silence isn't increasing my faith at all.
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Deafening silence is the standard for all these companies. Canon never speaks to the end user in either consumer or professional products (except for the unbelievably rare recent announcement about the addition of a forthcoming firmware update for 5DMkII/24p). JVC never talks to the end customer about addressing any issues or fixing anything, in either consumer or pro. Sony never speaks to the end consumer about fixing any issue, either consumer or pro. And Panasonic Consumer never speaks to the end consumer about fixing any issue, either consumer or pro. And then one day a firmware update pops up on their site.

We've been spoiled by Panasonic Broadcast communicating back to us, and by Red communicating back to us. But they're the only ones who do. For everyone else, "deafening silence" is the normal modus operandi.

Doesn't mean it won't get fixed; frankly I'd be shocked if it doesn't. This is exactly the kind of thing a firmware update is designed to address.
 
Barry_Green said:
Okay, but let's put it in perspective -- how many responses do JVC, Sony, Canon, or any of the other companies give? They don't communicate to the end customer at all. Just one day a firmware update pops up.
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Fair enough.

Though I didn't mean to imply that Panasonic was acting any differently than any other company - and were it any other company I would have said the same thing.
Yes, we have gotten spoiled by Panasonic Broadcast and by Red - because it's the way things probably 'should' be done in regards to communication (at least in instances of 'bugs' of this nature).

A 'bug' that affects the core function of a product is something that any company would be better off dealing with sooner rather than later. And the longer the lag between the discovery of an issue and a reaction from a company, the more faith in that product gets lost by the end users.

That's all I was saying - nothing groundbreaking.
You're right, though - noncommunication is pretty much the norm across the board.
 
Right, point being -- who knows if Panasonic is even aware of it yet? They may have just heard about it today, for all we know. I would love to have a dedicated consumer presence here, like we have with Jan for broadcast, someone that we could rely on to relay the information to the factory. I don't know who that might be. Maybe I'll have to go to PMA or something and meet someone and drag 'em over here, because ... well, we've got Jan, we've got Rick Haywood from NZ, we've got Rob Myers from Australia, we have at least three territories of Panasonic Broadcast that monitor our forum and who we have easy access to. But in consumer, nada so far.

If we had a rep here, we'd at least know we were heard, and I'm sure that'd make a big difference... but then again, that representative would probably be prohibited from talking about forthcoming fixes or unreleased products, so -- the net effect might not be any change at all...
 
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