Barry_Green
Moderator
I don't. It's what has to be done. You have to learn the product to get the best from it.
The edge enhancement does seem stronger on this unit than on prior units. Maybe it's the nature of having so much shallower DOF, that the edge enhancement stands out more. I originally told Philip Bloom to go with -2 on detail, based on my prior experience, but with some testing that night I found that I preferred -4 and advised him such. Which says to me, that yes, you do have to tame the detail circuit to get better performance from the camera.
Which, incidentally, is exactly the kind of thing you learn when you spend a day in the studio with charts and lights, profiling the camera to learn what it does, and how you like it. That's what every cinematographer does, with every new camera (or, well, they should). That's what everyone does when Kodak introduces a new film stock -- or, at least, they rely on someone qualified to do it. Look up the film tests in American Cinematographer -- whenever a new stock comes out they shoot the living hell out of it, in every imaginable combination, at every possible level of over and underexposure, to find out how it responds. That's what you have to do with digital cameras too.
The way I heard it, they had about five hours total. The panasonic factory shipped the camera to Amsterdam for the IBC show. They had a layover in Frankfurt. Panasonic Germany found out about it, and asked these guys to shoot during that layover before the camera went forward to Amsterdam.
This was not some pre-planned, layed-out, "let's get the very best footage in the universe" thing. This was working under the schedule of the engineers who were trying to get the very first barely-functional prototype out of the factory, and then handing it over to the guys who shot it, who took it exactly as it was because they had no time or opportunity to properly profile the camera.
I know everyone's disappointed with how the launch has been handled, and we all wish that they had conducted it more like how Sony has -- commissioning professionally-shot film-style stuff, right from the get-go. That's not how this launch has happened. But it also is no reflection on what the ultimate quality this unit will be capable of. I think Panasonic has learned a few lessons about this, or at least I hope they have, and that they never allow any footage out again unless it's absolutely representative of the best their camera can do, because that's the standard that internet viewers are going to hold it to.
It's not all that long ago that the first footage in the world from the DVX100 was from the show floor at the WEVA convention, where I shot some trains circling a track. That's how the DVX was launched. People's expectations have changed dramatically since then, probably because of "Reverie". Panasonic hasn't managed this properly, in my opinion. But there will be good-quality footage coming soon.
