GH1 has drop frame issue?

M

manov

Member
I watched this great GH1 video and the guy ( bob lorrimer) said that he had drop-frame issue and the returned both of his GH1 (the 1st and the 2nd -replacement unit). And now he switched to EOS 7D.

http://www.vimeo.com/6142441

So anybody else has drop-frame issue? Dude......, earlier I was pretty sure to get GH1....:undecided
 
Bob Lorrimer's films are great. He lives in England and had a PAL version of the GH1. In a post on Vimeo, he told me the problems he had with the GH1 were particular to the PAL version and have been solved by the firmware upgrade.
In my experience, I've had no dropped frames. It seems more likely a problem with a slow SD card and not the camera itself.
 
I have had the PAL version since mid June and haven't seen a single frame drop except the time I tried to run the camera until the battery died, where in the last minute of the file some odd things happened like frame drops and colour shifts. But that was really pushing it way outside a normal situation - the screen was flashing madly with info that the battery was about to expire that I purposely ignored :)
 
Martti Ekstrand said:
I have had the PAL version since mid June and haven't seen a single frame drop except the time I tried to run the camera until the battery died, where in the last minute of the file some odd things happened like frame drops and colour shifts.
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Was the footage interesting enough to be usable in some way? I'm curious about what it looks like. :)
 
In frame are my two nephews one and three meters away being annoyed at having to stand still while I mess around with the focus. (Had to buy them each a big ice cream cone afterwards) Errors were just a few faint colour shifts pretty similar to the blue-shift issue reported elsewhere and a couple of dropped i-frames making half a second freeze frames. Not bad enough damage to look cool or interesting in any way. I was actually impressed at the time that the camera prior to shutting down did close and save the AVCHD file properly so it could be played back and opened on the computer - wouldn't have been surprised if the file had been corrupt. Everything up to the last 50 seconds was perfectly usable.
 
Mine (PAL) does drop frames under certain circumstances in 17mbps mode and also the GH1 of a friend of mine. Lots of german users have been reporting the same issue on a german m4/3 forum. Firmware will not solve it but you can control it to a certain degree.

By the way, it's not a problem to leave the camera running until the battery dies. It will safely shut down like every other camcorder I know (even my Canon GL-1 from 1999 did it). The battery will always retain a certain amount of power so shutting down is possible it's nothing special at all.
 
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I've also had the dropped frames on a couple of occasions, with a PAL model. I've posted about this before, I'm sure it is connected to card performance, as on both occasions I had either a more than 80% full card or had not clearly formatted the card. The image freezes for about 10-12 frames or half a second.
 
AdrianF said:
II'm sure it is connected to card performance, as on both occasions I had either a more than 80% full card or had not clearly formatted the card. The image freezes for about 10-12 frames or half a second.
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Hehe, I'm sure it's not because I made extensive tests and my card was always properly formatted before testing. Also the same card is used in Pana's very own HMC which records at a higher data rate and it never dropped a frame.
 
I had a PM from one "Russ" on this and his last message was as follows: -

this was happening in intelligent auto, and manual modes, with OIS on and off, predominantly shooting on tripod 720p and fhd. I could replicate every time, all you had to do was shoot outside in the garden with trees in background, zoomed out on a tripod, ad then walk in front of camera, it dropped frames in abundance, not jello, not mud, just dropping frames so the footage skipped - badly.
I have a uk pal version, it went away to panasonic for two and a half months, they admitted that they could replicate the fault, I eventually received a new camera yesterday, I switched it on, tested it, and I had exactly the same fault.
I have spoken to panasonic again, and they have asked me to update with the new uk firmware update for the body - 1.2 - this appears to have fixed the fault - I believe every pal version of the camera must have this issue, but because people are shooting hand held, usually close up - they are not seeing it.
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Some may recall that I had this happen when using an auto mode and the shutter speed dropped low so as to change the frame rate. Moral - don't use auto.
 
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