GH2 in PAL land

F

Francesco Dal Bosco

Active member
I've seen a lot of great GH2 footage on the net so I'm thinking to replace my 60D (too much aliasing and moire).
I can't understand the lacking of 25p in this camera but I'm planning to use 24p and (when I really need it) simply change the frame rate to 25p in post.
I'm really interested to hear some thoughts from Pal lands GH2 users about shooting 24p.
Thank you.
 
I use 24p in PAL land because I don't have a choice. But to be honest, it is a hassle. You have the choice of speeding up the footage by just map each frame to 25, or convert to 25 by adding frames. The first one is quiet a task if you record external sound (which you have to since the internal sound amp is not worth a lot). You then have to time remap the sound. Because the film runs a bit faster now. With the second solution I couldn't find any tool to make the extra image added smoothly. So every second the image jumps a bit.

So no fun over all. Whenever I can, I use my 5D still even though the GH2 is sharper. For a studio shooting I now plan on pluging a Ki-Pro and record to 1080i50 ProRes. But that is no solution for documentary type shooting.
 
Neveraholiday said:
I use 24p in PAL land because I don't have a choice. But to be honest, it is a hassle. You have the choice of speeding up the footage by just map each frame to 25, or convert to 25 by adding frames. The first one is quiet a task if you record external sound (which you have to since the internal sound amp is not worth a lot). You then have to time remap the sound. Because the film runs a bit faster now. With the second solution I couldn't find any tool to make the extra image added smoothly. So every second the image jumps a bit.

So no fun over all. Whenever I can, I use my 5D still even though the GH2 is sharper. For a studio shooting I now plan on pluging a Ki-Pro and record to 1080i50 ProRes. But that is no solution for documentary type shooting.
Click to expand...

Back in the olden days there was a lot of problems with getting PAL stuff converted to NTSC. But in these modern times, I have no idea why people are really worried about this. Put 24 fps material on a Bluray, connect HDMI cable from Bluray to Display... job done... the player/display 'figure it out'...

24 fps has been 'broadcast' in PAL land, by being run at 4% faster. I don't know why this is an issue, other than, yeah, sure, someone 'should' have made 25p an option...
 
Neveraholiday said:
... The first one is quiet a task if you record external sound (which you have to since the internal sound amp is not worth a lot). You then have to time remap the sound. Because the film runs a bit faster now.
Click to expand...

If you realy need 25p (because the Bluray-Way together with a state-of-the-art TV works for PAL too and gives the best result), just do all your editing in 24p and do the conversion to 25p as the last step. As said before the cinema way is PAL-speedup, i.e audio time stretching which can be done with a two-liner in avisynth:
---------------- 8< -------------------
AssumeSampleRate(50050)
ResampleAudio(48000)
---------------- 8< -------------------
This will slightly change the pitch, but there are more sophisticated ways to stretch audio available.
 
Im in PAL land and I am going to add a GH2 here. If what Im shooting is specifically for broadcast - then it wont be used. My GH2 will only be a B-Cam, as I really want something small and light that shoots well. And forgetting all other aspects, and only looking at size and weights its producing the best images. Im not sure of the actual numbers but it feels a lot lighter than my 5DMKII does and is much smaller.
 
For anyone delivering for broadcast in a pal country, 24fps is not an option. That's quite a lot of us.
 
Thank you very much everybody. I'm not planning to deliver my footage for broadcast, I would like to use this cam for my personal projects (and I think I can accept the 4% speed difference of both video and audio after the 24 to 25 conversion if I need to have 25p finished material).
The main thing I'm worried for are the possible issues related to camera motion (strobing/jerking when panning and so on). I have not yet understand if the use of 24p instead of 25p can make these problems worse.
 
The main issue you may have is with flickering from lights. you may have to work around by choosing a irregular shutterspeed.
 
Noel Evans said:
Im in PAL land and I am going to add a GH2 here. If what Im shooting is specifically for broadcast - then it wont be used. My GH2 will only be a B-Cam, as I really want something small and light that shoots well. And forgetting all other aspects, and only looking at size and weights its producing the best images. Im not sure of the actual numbers but it feels a lot lighter than my 5DMKII does and is much smaller.
Click to expand...

Since I don't worry about 'broadcast', certain things have not been of interest to me. But I was under the impression that DVB could 'carry' 24 or 25 fps content, at least for such things as 1080i/p.

Perhaps it's the 'need' to support SD PAL that requires 50i media... or media that translated easily enough into 50i.
 
No 25p / 50i is VITAL for anything other than cinema film in Europe. The fact that the GH2 doesn't offer both of these (even though the GH1 did) means that it is of very little use in Europe and could probably be scrapped altogether as the NTSC models won't have the silly EU recording limits and will offer 24p as standard (oh, and be cheaper!)
 
well i have found the 24P jitter is not caused by my GH2 camera in my case anyway,playback of 24P clips direct to tv via hdmi show none of the jerky movement i get after edit,why is this so,24P clips on their own simply rendered to any format show jitter,the other frame rates dont show jitter after render,i dont get this.
 
flinty said:
well i have found the 24P jitter is not caused by my GH2 camera in my case anyway,playback of 24P clips direct to tv via hdmi show none of the jerky movement i get after edit,why is this so,24P clips on their own simply rendered to any format show jitter,the other frame rates dont show jitter after render,i dont get this.
Click to expand...

In cases like this, it is good to have example clips. From a recent, now canceled thread, it was not clear if the artifact that was 'objectionable' was due to specificially '24 fps', or looking at 'action' at 24 fps, with a shutter speed not consistent with expected 'blurring' of motion to minimize any 'strobing' effect.

This effect has been known since the earliest of times, and there are tables which give various shutter speeds, for given apparent motion on screen, to minimize such effects.

Also, in looking at various issues with playback, computers are notoriously bad at maintaining a regular frame rate, and depending on the processor, applicaiton used, etc. will drop frames willynilly, and inconsistently from one playback to another.

Even playing on 'big screen', dedicated devices may not yield smooth results, because there one has the refresh rate of the screen, the ambient light, which affects the persistence of vision effect that 'movies' are based, and then if the screen is interpolating 'motion' because someone likes wyrd effects...


When one sits in a theater all this typically is calibrated, or should be..., so as to maximize the visual effect of still images flipping at 24 fps to give the viewer the sensation of motion.

To stress a point, my experience is that the codec, and the options used, severely impact the playability of the media, and even seemingly small 'tweeks' will yield crappy results...
 
Energy80s said:
No 25p / 50i is VITAL for anything other than cinema film in Europe. The fact that the GH2 doesn't offer both of these (even though the GH1 did) means that it is of very little use in Europe and could probably be scrapped altogether as the NTSC models won't have the silly EU recording limits and will offer 24p as standard (oh, and be cheaper!)
Click to expand...

I didn't realize the recording limit was due to a EU regulation... for some set of things I sometimes I wished I live in Europe... but when people pop one of these up (and in my day job its EIRP on 802.11 antenna power... ), I have to wonder what these people were thinking of... and why... In the case of RF transmissions, on a good day, I could think of reasons why... but limiting recording time... what whackness induced that regulation...

One also wonders why this sort thing can't become a new Revolution, where filmmakers of Europe Unite, you have only your recording limits to lose...
 
BTW- why was the 24P thread cancelled??

it was one of the more interesting threads, with mature and informative replies..
hell, i wanted to write me down some very important stuff from there... what will i do now??
start another thread like this??
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top