GH2 shoots the moon at 12,480mm but misses the eclipse

M

mpgxsvcd

Veteran
This was supposed to be a video showing the eclipse of a full moon. However, the clouds rolled in before I could get a shot of the eclipse. Instead I got some of the best footage I have ever seen of the moon.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIHSHtnv9is
It was shot with the GH2 with lenses ranging from 40mm to 12,480mm in 35mm equivalent terms. I used the GH2's near lossless 2.6x and 3.9x extra teleconversion feature in combination with a 400mm Canon FD lens and two 2x teleconverters to achieve the super tight shots at the end of the video.
I did some sharpening and color grading in post processing to get each shot to look similar. However, I left all of the really close up segments untouched in order to show how good the GH2's footage is straight out of the camera. Unfortunately, youtube's compression is nowhere near what the original file looks like so I also uploaded it to Vimeo. You can download the original file there.




http://vimeo.com/18046194
The Canon 400mm lens cost me about $30 on eBay so it has numerous flaws in it. In the 12,480mm shots you can see a large spec of dust because the aperture I was using was probably something like F32.0-F40.0. However, the shots still retain fairly good detail.
 
I would love to see an original mts file of the tighter shots. In my experience (shooting the moon during the day) the teleconversion introduces a lot more noise, even at 160 iso.

Great shots regardless!
 
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Nice indeed. I wanted to do that but my GH2 arrives today.... I missed out on some cool stock footage for sure.... cheers for showing this.


What did you use as far as the teleconverters and lens setup.... did you shoot any timelapse?
 
The Canon 400mm FD lens I used is shown in the video below. I used two $5 2x converters I bought off of ebay as well. I also shot some of the wider shots with my new 14-140mm. I wanted to try the 45-200mm as well but the clouds moved in before I could shoot with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cZ-w1qWdJY

All of the scenes in the video were actual videos. Nothing was sourced from a still. I took still pictures as well and I will post those once I have a chance to process them.

If any of you all have a nice 800mm F5.6 or longer lens then I bet you could get some incredible shots with the GH2s ETC mode. This camera is absolutely in a class by itself.
 
Looks cool. That crop feature is pretty awesome. I was setting up my 7D to shoot a timelapse of it, but there were clouds all over. I mostly just wanted to set an angle and lens wide enough to capture a good chunk of it but still keep detail. I shot a few test shots over the course of a few hours to figure out where the moon was going to be, but by the time the eclipse got around to happening, the clouds were so thick they covered up everything. That's my second failed timelapse, after trying to shoot the Perseids meteor shower and getting nothing. Maybe next time.
 
Ah, thanks. These shots look great. Way better than what I got.

I thought you had mixed some digital zoom in there with ETC. I tried 2x and 4x digital zoom + ETC at 1080p on my 100-300mm and it didn't seem to be anywhere in focus. The moon was massive though. I should have ditched the digital zoom and tried 720p I guess. I also torture tested the GH2 keeping it shooting outside for 2.5 hours with the LCD on at -20C with only one battery.
 
ProjX v2.0 said:
Ah, thanks. These shots look great. Way better than what I got.

I thought you had mixed some digital zoom in there with ETC. I tried 2x and 4x digital zoom + ETC at 1080p on my 100-300mm and it didn't seem to be anywhere in focus. The moon was massive though. I should have ditched the digital zoom and tried 720p I guess. I also torture tested the GH2 keeping it shooting outside for 2.5 hours with the LCD on at -20C with only one battery.
Click to expand...

The 2x TC's I used are not much better than a digital zoom. They are not very good ones. However, they did the job when I really wanted to zoom in. Your best bet if you want high zoom and still retain resolution is to get an 800mm or greater lens/telescope and use the 1080p TC mode. That will get you out to atleast 4160mm with mimimal loss of quality.
 
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