Got my GH1, first impressions

commanderspike

commanderspike

Carbonite Member
I'll try not to repeat other discussions too much here, but thought I'd give you my penny's worth...

Lens: was worried that the build quality and zoom ring would be poor (zoom is sticky on the G1 14-45), but the GH1 14-140mm is a fantastic piece of kit. They've changed the zoom so it's much smoother and has more torque, you can actually do some incredibly smooth zoom actions with it. Oh and the lens locks into place on the camera much more solidly than the G1 kit lens, which by the way I am getting the occasional lens fixing error popping up with after 6 months of use.

Low light: the video preview live view is quite noisy but most of that disappears while recording. A slower shutter (mine goes down to 1/30), at 24p F4 at ISO 1600 is very bright with very little fine grain, but the grain tends to be in a fixed pattern across the sensor, you can almost see the read-out of the digital info, with the noise slightly more the further down the sensor things get.

Japanese menus: I don't worry about this now, although there are a few options which do not have an icon and only text, which I will need to figure out from the English manual I downloaded.

Movie mode on the dial: you don't have to be in this mode to shoot a movie but I puts the camera in video live view mode, with the continuous iris operating.

AVCHD playback: playing ad hoc the unprocessed files on my Macbook is currently a challenge. Playback in editing software not a problem, playback in a media player is hell. Even the latest nightly build of VLC player does not work properly. Any recommendations?
 
Sweet Commander. Thanks for the input. Are you happy with the purchase? I'm in the air for either a 5D or GH. Haven't made the final decision yet.
 
PS3 Playback is flawless. I high recommend it for this purpose. Copy MTS files to thumbdrive and rock and roll.


I.

Illya Friedman
Hot Rod Cameras
 
I really could do with a way to preview files quickly on my laptop before importing them into Final Cut Pro. VLC Player usual handles anything... not this time!

Some other observations:

- Low light performance seems much better in full HD 1080 24p mode than in 60i 720p, maybe due to frame rate / shutter speed
- AVCHD is a highly compressed format. Just 90MB per minute for Full HD at 17mps.
- Auto focus in video mode seems dispassionately slow at long end of zoom or in anything other than bright outdoor light.
- Seems they've changed the white balance to be more 'Canon' like under indoor lighting, it mimics warm tones rather than attempting to be as close to white as possible. The G1 auto-WB actually did a better job than the GH1 under my lighting here, not sure if I have strange lights or if this is a problem with the GH1. Was able to get it spot on with the custom preset but not under auto.
 
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Yeah VLC can't hang with AVCHD.

I like that the GH1 allows you the ability to manually dial in your WB with actual Kelvin temperature numbers, rather than just using the little icons of sun and lightbulb..etc.

I.

Illya Friedman
Hot Rod Cameras
 
I really could do with a way to preview files quickly on my laptop before importing them into Final Cut Pro. VLC Player usual handles anything... not this time!
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Have you seen the Voltaic HD workflow threads? If you look on the Voltaic HD page, there are also a couple of sister apps for previewing and importing in an iPhoto kind of style. Could be good.
 
iMovie is good for previewing AVCHD on the memory card, but does not playback full screen, the window is quite small and the memory card often too slow for uninterrupted playback. I will see if a faster 150x card improves matters.
 
commanderspike said:
...the memory card often too slow for uninterrupted playback. I will see if a faster 150x card improves matters.
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This is a question, not a statement:

That doesn't seem right...as far as I know, the read speed is usually faster on these cards than the write speed, so if it was fast enough to have the video written to it, it seems like it should be fast enough to have video read off of it...but maybe I'm missing something? Maybe it's because the computer is trying to read multiple things off the card? Any idea?
 
commanderspike said:
I really could do with a way to preview files quickly on my laptop before importing them into Final Cut Pro. VLC Player usual handles anything... not this time!

Some other observations:

- Low light performance seems much better in full HD 1080 24p mode than in 60i 720p, maybe due to frame rate / shutter speed
- AVCHD is a highly compressed format. Just 90MB per minute for Full HD at 17mps.
- Auto focus in video mode seems dispassionately slow at long end of zoom or in anything other than bright outdoor light.
- Seems they've changed the white balance to be more 'Canon' like under indoor lighting, it mimics warm tones rather than attempting to be as close to white as possible. The G1 auto-WB actually did a better job than the GH1 under my lighting here, not sure if I have strange lights or if this is a problem with the GH1. Was able to get it spot on with the custom preset but not under auto.
Click to expand...


There's no 60i 720p. It's 720/60P. What do you mean lowlight performance? Noise and grain or that it's faster in 1080 than 720. I didn't notice that but that's interesting. Wonder why that may be.
 
Kholi said:
There's no 60i 720p. It's 720/60P. What do you mean lowlight performance? Noise and grain or that it's faster in 1080 than 720. I didn't notice that but that's interesting. Wonder why that may be.
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That may happen in the auto modes. Shutter can be automatically lowered to 1/24 in 24p mode while it can only be lowered to 1/60 in 60p mode (at least that's how my HV30 works when in Av or auto mode). This gives the 24p mode a better lowlight ability.
We now know, thanks to the testing done by the lucky ones that have the GH1 already, that 60p can be used with shutters lower than 1/60 in the manual modes (increasing lowlight capability), but results in image containing 30 fps or less.
 
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The shutter speed only goes as far as 30 in 1080 24p mode on my GH1, and then upwards in increments of 10. I find that strange as you'd think it'd go to 24.

I've shot a lot of extreme low light footage at both full HD and 720p 60p in Taipei over the last day or so, will attempt to make sense of it in more detail and upload some videos here.

Obviously one of the good things about this camera is that although ISO 1600 is too grainy and ISO 800 at F4 is a little too dark for extreme low light shooting, you can simply pop on faster glass to solve this issue... at a cost!
 
latest VLC on my macbook works fine!

very interested to find out if there will be differences in the PAL versions!!!

Still looking for a c-mount adapter....and waiting for mine to appear in a shop nearby.
 
A few other observations...

- Main shutter button rather than video button can be used to start / stop video recording and a half-press actions the very quick stills mode AF during recording. Useful when the continuous video AF struggles.

- Have 3 or 4 different types of lights in my flat, will try to find out what the name is for the type of lighting that confuses the hell out of my GH1's auto WB but not my G1's.

- The G1 kit lens (14-45mm) is useless with the GH1. No AF, no stills AF override during recording, no continuous iris and the zoom ring is about as smooth as sand paper. Not tried the 14-200mm yet but that will be on eBay shortly as the 140mm is more than long enough for my liking.

Will try the latest VLC player later, I've tried the 1.0.0 RC and current 0.9.
 
Martti Ekstrand said:
Thanks for this bit of info, I'll love to tell my auditor that that PS3 I'm now gonna buy on my company is for viewing footage :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
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My buddy does a lot of work for a high speed camera company. He wrote of 2 rifles and 3x dozen coconuts last year. All were legitimate business expenses.

The PS3 uses cell processors and is a very capable Linux box, you should have no problem writing it off.

I.

Illya Friedman
Hot Rod Cameras
 
commanderspike said:
- The G1 kit lens (14-45mm) is useless with the GH1. No AF, no stills AF override during recording, no continuous iris and the zoom ring is about as smooth as sand paper.
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About 2.5 weeks ago I did a camera test where we used the 14-45 pretty extensively. You are correct, no AF during recording- but you still can use AF to push to focus (AFC) in some situations. You're right about the zoom ring...

On the plus side, this is a super lightweight low-profile lens. If you had to steal a shot somewhere, this lens might be the best choice for not attracting attention.

I.

Illya Friedman
Hot Rod Cameras
 
Glad my NDA has elapsed, and I can finally talk about some details from a job from early May.

commanderspike said:
... grain tends to be in a fixed pattern across the sensor, you can almost see the read-out of the digital info, with the noise slightly more the further down the sensor things get.
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I just wanted to echo this. There's definitely some FPN depending on the shooting situation ISO above 500 brings it on a lot stronger than lower ISO settings.

I also noticed that ISO settings 500 and beyond tend to be underrated as far as the actual speed goes. I really think that 640 is 1200, 800/1000 are both about 2000 and 1600 is actually is 3200. Personally, I think these high ISOs should probably not be used if you are planning on going out to a big screen. However, if it's a home movie or for the web- have fun.

The "painters palette" setting is a trip. Unusable for anything not home-movie styled, but an unreal level viewing into darkness without obviously slowing down shutter or frame rate.


I.

Illya Friedman
Hot Rod Cameras
 
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