Panasonic Removable Lens Four Thirds HD AVCHD Camera

Okay, so I've viewed some footage on an HDTV, a 67" DLP. A big difference from the 17" LCD I'd seen it on before.

The good: when it's good, it's really good.

The bad: when it's bad, it's kind of bad.

The verdict: I think someone who has more than five minutes to play with it should be posting footage.

I got a couple of shots that look pretty good, but nothing with the "wow" factor of the demo footage. However, I did some shots at ISO 100 that I was none too pleased with, there was some sort of odd chroma pattern in that footage. There were some shots where the skin textures seemed kind of smoothed out too much.

What can we learn from this? Someone who knows what they're doing can make it sing, and someone who doesn't know what they're doing can make some mediocre footage. Anyone trying to base their decision off any web footage is completely selling it and themselves short, you have to see good footage.

I've seen good footage, and it's good. But I didn't take good footage... ;)

I do know that someone with some major skillz is getting their hands on one next week, so I don't doubt that it'll soon be shown off about as good as it gets.

In the meantime, I'm gonna go retract my "hpx3000"-level comments...

Oh, and there's jello, but about EX1-level. It's there if you go looking for it, or if you are shooting handheld, with the image stabilizer off. It's a rolling shutter, no doubt. But it's not bad at all; obviously it's more noticeable at full telephoto, etc., but if you're comfortable with EX1 skew, you shouldn't have a problem with the GH1. Again, that was in 1080/24p; I don't know how the skew performance is in 720/60 but I would presume it's noticeably better.
 
that would be from the new m43 sensor cropping... utilizing the full image circle of the lens.

if it was compared to a full frame sensor, its 2x crop.
 
Well, no real way to tell, it was a totally uncontrolled environment. Plus the camera has settable ISO factors, so 100 to (I think) 1600... DVX is 640 to 1280... so... I think I only ran it as high as 400, so not a fair comparison. We'd have to see some 800-ISO stuff to know for sure.

The lower-ISO stuff is the stuff that had the chroma patterning problem, the higher-ISO stuff looked better. That is completely the opposite of what I was expecting.
 
Barry, maybe you can post some footage. Let us be the judge of your first GH1 work no matter the circumstances in which it was shot! This camera is suppose to offer all kinds of scene modes and settings for color, exposure, etc., etc. I guess somebody really has to go into all the menus and choices and most likely figure out the best settings. Like you do in your in-depth reviews and books with the other cameras. Thank you for letting us know your findings.
 
Barry, from what you've seen, in comparison to the D90, although it produces a sharper and higher resolution image, how would you say they compare in terms of dynamic range and highlights?

The D90 does wonders to blowouts, but is it maybe just a question of a different curve recorded in camera that can somewhat be reproduced in post? Or even with a slight bit of tweaking?
 
Okay, well, what I saw in the demo footage was startlingly good 720p with what looked like excellent dynamic range. All shot on a beach and on a boat, bright skies, lush textures, excellent skintones, etc. I don't know how that would compare to a D90 shot in similar circumstances. You'd have to try them side by side.
 
Okay, a clip is posted, in as near as I can tell, proper AVCHD format. It's a .zip of the PRIVATE directory. So this is a lousily-shot 1080/24p clip by someone who doesn't have a clue how to use the camera. And yes, it's going to have interlace lines because of the 24p-over-60i issue; I'm presenting this as raw straight from the camera as-is.

Right-click and save-as, of course...

http://www.dvxuser.com/barry/PRIVATE.zip
 
I'm sure you're right Barry, but I've shot extensively on the HV20 and hardly ever remember seeing it there, whereas I can't run my D90 for five seconds indoors without having to fiddle with locking the exposure to make it go away. Is it because I'm able to reliably dial in 1/48 on the HV20?
 
Barry_Green said:
Okay, a clip is posted, in as near as I can tell, proper AVCHD format. It's a .zip of the PRIVATE directory. So this is a lousily-shot 1080/24p clip by someone who doesn't have a clue how to use the camera. And yes, it's going to have interlace lines because of the 24p-over-60i issue; I'm presenting this as raw straight from the camera as-is.

Right-click and save-as, of course...

http://www.dvxuser.com/barry/PRIVATE.zip
Click to expand...

Darn, don't know how ot play that.
 
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