GH2 Have a feeling the 5D Mark III's video quality won't come close to the hacked GH2s

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dtjohns1

Well-known member
I used to be against the GH2 but after picking it up and working through the kinks of the hack and learning to deal with its nuances (green shift, noisy blacks, sky banding) along with testing and seeing the results from the new v4 orion patch I think this camera's IQ will be hard to beat. The sad thing is I know I will still probably buy a Mark III just because of the "new toy" factor even tho the GH2's image will be drastically ahead of it. Even when the D800 was announced and the video was released I was saying to myself "with rolling shutter aside the image i'm seeing is something the hacked GH2 would probably make better"
 
Probably. But the GH2 doesn't have the same easy to use video files, tried and true for factor, name recognition, intuitive and useful button and menu placement or superior stills ability. Depends what you'd like to pay for.
 
I am waiting in excitement, but as for now I am somewhat unsure if the current price tag can justify whatever the new video capabilities are for video users. I'm afraid we are gonna hear a little bit too much about features like clean HDMI out.
 
GH2's files are fine for me to handle. Honestly I don't get the whole bone people have to pick with AVCHD. It has real small file sizes which I can archive, and log and transfer is a breeze with FCP
 
If one is worried about the still image quality, get a Olympus E-PL1 for a few hundred for that purpose. Same lenses and adapters and field of view, but the image quality for 4k images is superior to current Panasonic cameras. I have a sample 4k jpeg that came straight out of E-PL1 and would require only very little tweaking for a print job:

http://www.fourseasonshd.com/epl1minoltaiso2.png

I am no expert in print jobs, but I think Canon or Nikon still images would need to be very good to beat silky smooth shadows and color gradients from E-PL1.
 
That's so subjective and I've owned several canon cameras and in my opinion, the video files are a PITA to deal with... the form factor is a tank and no where near as ergonomically efficient and lightweight, and I hate their menus for video.. but the name recognition is really what people are paying for. I have countless people po-po my camera for it's "looks".. but not when I have it up on a monitor, or when I'm rolling for hours, or when their camera is sitting cooling off for overheating. The 5D looks interesting and I might pick one up for stills and low-light nighttime stuff, but It wouldn't be a replacement by any stretch... just another tool in the arsenal.
 
I love my GH2's - but really - who can't Panasonic make a camera with a servo lens in the
HVX form factor that has GH2 quality???
 
For the people who say the GH2's files are hard to deal with are you on a Mac? It's a shame because I can drop my footage straight into a Premier or Vegas timeline and go straight to work.
 
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Don't turn this into a Mac vs PC thing... I'm on a Mac and AVCHD is fine. If you're going to bounce around among DSLR's for "the best image," just get a Scarlet and be set for much longer.

dtjohns1 said:
For the people who say the GH2's files are hard to deal with are you on a Mac? It's a shame because I can drop my footage straight into a Premier or Vegas timeline and go straight to work.
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I don't believe that was his intent. I actually never thought about it until you mentioned it.

But that Scarlet comment is out of place.
 
Andor said:
If you're going to bounce around among DSLR's for "the best image," just get a Scarlet and be set for much longer.
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If you're going to bounce around among DSLR's, Scarlets, and C300's for "the best image," just get an Alexa and be set for much longer!
 
@Andor let me hold 20k and I will gladly get a scarlet-x. until then dslrs will suit me just fine. Nah but my comment wasn't a mac vs. pc thing. I just heard from some people who recently bought a sony 5n that they cannot view or edit avchd files on their macs so I was thinking it was a mac problem seeing that pcs handle avchd pretty much natively.
 
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Jester2138 said:
If you're going to bounce around among DSLR's, Scarlets, and C300's for "the best image," just get an Alexa and be set for much longer!
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Naw, 8k is out, so anyone who is waiting should just hold out for those 8k cameras...need to be sure after all! :beer:
 
Gary Huff said:
Naw, 8k is out, so anyone who is waiting should just hold out for those 8k cameras...need to be sure after all! :beer:
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8k? Feh. Wasn't it Bill Gates who said that 640k should be enough for anybody? I'm holding out until that happens, THEN I'll be sure!

But seriously, all joking aside (and returning to the topic of this thread), I very much think that the 5DmIII will be a force to be reckoned with. I mean, in general the 5D has many advantages over the GH2, and I'm not just talking about name recognition (more native lenses with IS, larger sensor/FOV, better low light, more accurate color, no weird "shifting" or banding, etc). But, as we all know, the resolution kind of sucks. All of these Canon HDSLRs don't actually resolve 1080p of data in movie mode, throwing away somewhere around 90% of the sensor data (mostly because the Digic4 chip is not fast enough to downsample in real time time). Even if you push the H.264 codec's bitrate with Magic Lantern, the camera simply doesn't resolve enough detail to make a clearer image, and doesn't get anywhere near an unhacked GH2 (forget about a hacked one).

However, if the Digic5 chip really delivers the kind of speed they are promising it will, and the sensor speed can keep up (which is entirely possible based on the R&D Canon went through for the 1Dx), its very possible that the new camera will be able to properly downsample the 22megapixel image in real time, giving a crisp and clear 1080p image to the encoder.
Now, will the H.264 encoder eat some of that detail? Sure. But bitrate hacks like Magic Lantern could get it back up to speed, perhaps pushing past the quality of our beloved GH2 if not simply matching it.

Again, we won't know for certain until it is out and we've tinkered with it. But I really think Canon is going to come out with their fists swinging this time. I mean, the images spotted in the wild imply it offers a headphone jack. Audio monitoring built into a DSLR, anyone? They clearly appear to have designed this to be more friendly to video shooters, so I'm very excited to see what happens.
 
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