GH4 Leica DG Nocticron 42.5mm f/1.2 @ F1.8 1/8000 sec C4K of Memorial Day bike race

[joe1946]

Last year with 25mm F0.95 Nokton @ F2.8 in UHD :

 

[joe1946]

Using Video Frames for Stills
It wasn’t that many years ago that 8 Megapixels was a decent sized image capture. Many an ad campaign, magazine cover and fine art image was made with 8MP or even less. Now with 4K video cameras we have what is essentially an 8 Megapixel camera shooting stills at a machine-gun like 24 images per second. I have taken many of these frames and made very nice 13X19″ prints from them and I would not hesitate to put one in a book or on a gallery wall. But there’s a gotchaand it has to do with frame rates and shutter speeds .
Video or film shot at 24 FPS, the industry standard for cinema. It is normally shot with a shutter speed of 1/48 second, or what the film industry calls a 180 degree shutter. In other words the shutter speed is double the frame rate.

That 1/48th second shutter speed is what gives movies their familiar motion cadence. Things that move have a small amount of blur and this makes the action look “natural”. Now, there are decade-long debates about this, but for the moment accept it as the norm. And if you don’t believe me, try shooting some video with a shutter speed of 1/500 sec and see what it looks like.Yikes.


What this 1/48 second shutter speed means is that when you try and extract a still frame there may be some blur when anything in the frame is in motion, or even from camera shake. Now, if you’re using a tripod or a stabilized lens hand-held, then camera shake is not likely to be a problem – unless a long lens is in use. But if someone is turning their head, or otherwise in motion, you simply won’t be able to extract a clean still. Sometimes you’ll get lucky. You do have 24 stills every second to choose from, but maybe not.


The answer is to shoot 4K 24 FPS video with a high shutter speed, and forget that you’re shooting video. You’re shooting high frame rate stills. So at an event with rapid action, go ahead and set the shutter to 1/500 sec, or even higher. With the video clip on a 4K timeline find the frame(s) you want and just do a “Capture Frame”. Then load it into Lightroom, Photoshop of whatever is your favourite. You’ll have the equivalent of a 8 Megapixel JPG to work with. If you have set the camera to a low contrast, low sharpening setting you’ll likely be able to do some reasonable amount of post processing without the image degrading.

https://luminous-landscape.com/gh4-video-primer/

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Also if I had the latest GH4 firmware I would have shot it at F1.2 and 1/16000 sec shutter for even more shallow DOF but I shot it at F1.8 and 1/8000 sec shutter speed.



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