Panasonic GH1 consideration

[kippard]

I'm preparing to shoot my second zero-budget feature. (I shot the first on a Z1U.) I want a more filmic look. I was considering an HV20 with 35mm lens adapter. I'm now considering the Panasonic GH1. Please give your opinions about these options. What will I need to do it on the GH1 (lens hood/matte box, cards, mics etc.)? The lowest budget. Appreciate any tips. Thank you!

[zoobie]

Seems you could have a lot more fun hiring actors and making sets and green screens than buying another goofy camera just to get an effect...but its your $.
While many are just using Magic Bullet, it appears that getting a desired film effect from video is more of an artform using a blend of fps, 35mm adapters, and software tweaks.
There's a whole forum on 35mm adapters and DIY tips and tricks for regular video cams worth reading...especially the stickys...along with their pitfalls here.

[kippard]

I don't have the Z1U any longer, and I am not happy with the look of what I shot on it anyway. GH1 accessories, tips, advice, etc. are appreciated. Thanks for the forum link. Anyone aware of good GH1 deals?

[edDV]

My advice is find a user report by someone who used this camera (or a Canon 5D MkII) for a similar project and understand the pro/con and extra expense items to budget. Editing will be a pita so pay more attention to lighting and exposure on the set.

[kippard]

Thanks, edDV. I'm looking for such a report - want to learn what I can from the mistakes and experience of others. I will take care shooting, but can't I convert to cineform or other intermediate with the GH1 AVCHD? A "pita?"

[aedipuss]

the gh1 looks like an overpriced toy and there isn't any good glass for it.

[kippard]

No good glass? Is this so? I thought the whole idea was getting 35mm DOF. What budget solutions do you like, aedipuss?

[aedipuss]

define your goals. are you interested in exhibiting your product? festivals? for commercial sale? check their requirements carefully. a 3 ccd is more mainstream. a dslr would require you to record audio separately to achieve acceptable quality , are you prepared for that? nikon and canon have good glass if you are enamored with dslr, but to me they may be ok for a 10 second fill shot, but i wouldn't expect to live through trying to make a feature with one.

have you looked into the red "scarlet" line? due out soon. maybe some used red ones may start showing up also.

i use hv30s in cine mode to turn off the artificial oversaturation/contrast and shoot 30p, but if i could afford to upgrade the new jvc 35mbps xdcam-ex GY-HM100U's look good. bigger budget i'd probably go red.

[edDV]

The Canon 5D MkII has a small cinema following and good lenses. Yes you could use Cineform to make editing more practical.

[kippard]

...a dslr would require you to record audio separately to achieve acceptable quality...

Could you elaborate on this? I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately, my principal goal is to spend few dollars. DSLR seems the cheapest way to get the closest to what I need.

[kippard]

The Canon 5D MkII has a small cinema following and good lenses.

Any community pages you like? Is the GH1 lens just awful? Thank you!

[zoobie]

last I looked, a major feature of the SLR was interchangable lenses
most HD DSLR's record audio in stereo



ROTFLMAO

[kippard]

So the point here is the lenses for Panasonic are not the best? I'm sure they will do. As far as audio goes, if I use my Shure A96F transformer and Sennheiser, I'm in business. No? Use one channel of the audio...no?

[aedipuss]

hehe - it's your cash. if if set shots with no change of distance is all you are going to be recording the gh1 should work fine. <strike>what it doesn't have is the ability to change focus on the fly like a vid cam does. you must depress the shutter button half way to refocus.</strike>

edit - sorry bad info - unlike the canon and nikon dslr's the gh1 can refocus without user intervention.

[Des]

From a photographic viewpoint the lenses of the Panasonic are not bad. They use a 4/3rds imaging system and share the lens mount with Leica and Olympus (Leica and Panasonic co-produce a lot of photo product together now).
If the Pnasonic lenses are not up to snuff the Olympus ones will be and the Leica ones certainly will be.

Another advantage to this lens mounting system is that it is ready made for adapters to other systems mounts. Ie, you can use Nikon, Canon, Minolta, etc. lenses on it, but you give up features (like autofocus and auto exposure). Primarily the adapters are for manual focus 35mm systems but I have seen some for the Maxxum and EOS mounts on Ebay. The 4/3rds system is a 2x magnification system in terms of 35mm point of view. So for a 28mm wideangle lens the camera will see the equivlent point of view of a 56mm lens for a 35mm film system. Grat on the tele end but crummy for the wide angles.

Whether or not any of this serves your needs I don't know, but it is a system with a lot of versatility in a general purpose way.

--dES

[kippard]

Thanks. I guess I'm more concerned about the audio at this point - will my approach work well enough? The lens will be good enough [for the needed low-dough solution], and the focus, I'll manage.

[aedipuss]

audio solution should work. the camera has a stereo minijack in but mono should be ok, if not adapters are available. the panasonic lenses just don't have the same light gathering abilities as good nikon/canon/leicas do. they will have the desired small dof though

[edDV]

I haven't had time to check that cam but most digital camera audio is poor. The cheap ones are heavy compressed mono to keep SD files small. The DSLR's may be better but it will be compressed. Compare that to DV uncompressed 16bit/48KHz stereo @ 1536 Kb/s.

Make sure it has external mic jacks and manual audio level control (not AGC). Most real movies redub the voices and add sound effects later. This process is called ADR (auto dialog replacement). Rarely is original audio used except as a guide.

[kippard]

2.5 mm stereo mini jack, but I haven't found the remaining audio specs after a bit of searching... Thanks,

[1handclapping]

There's a lot of misinformation about this camera on this thread.

First off, this is a quote from a review by digitalcamerainfo.com:

"We were pleasantly surprised with the GH1's autofocus system as well. You don't have to push the shutter button halfway to engage it, and the camera doesn't make any loud noises when it attempts to focus—both of which were problems on the Canon T1i and Nikon D5000. The GH1's autofocus wasn't quite as good as a regular camcorder's, but it was pretty darn close."

The review goes on to conclude:

"Judging it solely on its video capability, the Panasonic GH1 ($1499.95 MSRP) is a strong camera. It is the first video-capable DSLR that truly offers the gamut of manual controls that we expect to see from such a device. This isn't all that surprising coming from Panasonic, which usually offers an extensive amount of manual controls on its consumer camcorders."

The autofocus and stabilization capabilities of the GH1 are built into its *LENSES* are are designed to give it video recording capabilities that are somewhat competitive with its prosumer camcorders -- that's one of the things that's really new about this camera.

While we're on the subject of lenses, the GH1's Lumix kit lens covers 28-280mm (35mm equivalent, actual lens is14-140mm). That's a pretty decent range, and in terms of quality, the Lumix lenses typically have a lot of the feel of the Leica lenses on most of Panasonic's prosumer cameras. Various video experiments I've seen posted on Vimeo look pretty damn good. But the big deal with this camera is that because they scrapped the mirror and optical viewfinder, the camera's lenses are interchangeable, and the mounting ring to sensor distance is short enough that with adapter rings a variety of lenses including Leica, Nikon, Canon, etc. can be used with the camera. Of course, they'll lack stabilization and you'll have to pull focus and zoom, but that's the way primes are typically used anyway. Actually, the biggest difference between this camera and a typical camcorder, is the lack of any power zoom capability. So some of the camera's flexibility certainly comes at a price.

In terms of the sound, the camera has has a decent but limited recording system with built-in microphones that work fairly well in certain situations. It also has a stereo external mic input jack, but unfortunately the recording system uses an AGC (automatic gain control) system that *CANNOT BE DISABLED*. So, unless Panasonic fixes this problem with a firmware upgrade (which has been suggested), for high quality sound (and if you're making a film there is there any other other kind of sound?), you're going to have use a separate recorder. Something like Samson's ZOOM H4 ($240) or H4N ($300) should do the trick and enable mono or stereo with your external mic's. Since modern camcorders and digital audio recorders both have crystal controlled timing you should have no trouble mating your audio with video as long as you preface each shot with a clapper.

Finally, this camera does real 1080P at 24fps like film, and the shutter and compression (AVCHD @60fps) technologies used are designed to work well with that speed. Nevertheless, the camera doesn't handle fast pans well at that speed and format, so you might want to shoot anything like that with a rented camera or use the GH1's 720P mode and conform the formats in post. By the way, the AVCHD compression runs at 24Mbits/sec and records to low cost SD cards just like Panny's HMC150 HD prosumer camcorder that sells for $3500.

Basically, my take on this camera is that it's a poor indie filmaker's RED -- I wish I could believe that anything from RED will ever cost less that $10K by the time you have a complete system.

This package, a GH1 + a ZOOM H4N costs $1800, and you get a pretty decent SLR for this publicity stills in the bargain...

That's the best deal for the functionality provided that I'm aware of -- for the indie filmaker, this camera is anything but an expensive toy.

Hope this is helpful to you.

[1handclapping]

Just found this likeminded response to this review http://gizmodo.com/5304887/panasonic-lumix-dmc+gh1-review-a-1500-misfit

This review is missing the point of the GH1; which is a VASTLY superior video-capable dSLR to anything on the market. To come close to the video capability you really need to get a 5D MarkII which can't shoot in PAL, 24P, 50p, or 60p, and has much worse rolling shutter and aliasing issues.

Besides that, the lens has an infinite-stop aperture, which is like those expensive PL lenses; this gives the added benefit that during video you don't see the aperture knocking back and forth. Beyond that it has silent continuous AF with subject tracking. The lens itself is $800-900.

To say that camcorder prices are coming down is somewhat silly, you don't have interchangeable lenses, and you have a tiny sensor size. To come close to the GH1 in the camcorder market you need to spend vastly more to get the same performance as the GH1; which is the point of the camera.

[aedipuss]

i edited the no re-focus bad info. sorry i got it from an early review and didn't check it thoroughly.

i've seem some dslr commercial stuff and find it to be more of a gimmick, "hey look what i've done with a $1000 still cam" thing. usually what they don't mention is that they also used 10 $25,000 lenses to get the shots and the dslr ended up looking like this.

[1handclapping]

Frankly, it shouldn't take anything but the Lumix kit lens for the GH1 to outperform an HD standard prosumer camcorder in terms of image quality, given the sensor size... For example, the HM150, Panasonic's $3500 prosumer HD camcorder has three 1/3" (diagonal length) sensors each of which has an area of about 22 sq mm. By comparison, the GH1's single 4/3" sensor has an area of 225 sq mm which is nearly 3.5X greater area in aggregate. That translates into better light gathering power and improved imaging by the lens.

Add the ability to use relatively low cost (not $25,000 but $300 to $1500) high quality 35mm SLR lenses from companies like Canon, Nikon and Leica, and I find it hard to see your argument, edipus -- what are you comparing the GH1 to?

The vaporware RED 1080P Scarlet?, the HMC150?

Frankly, I'm mystified by your response...

[poisondeathray]

You can check the reviews and discussions on dvxuser.com: basically 1080 is not usable, and judging from the samples I would agree

a few other reviews with downloadable samples
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DMCGH1/DMCGH1VIDEO.HTM
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonicdmcgh1/page19.asp

The imaging and sensor are only part of the equation. I've examined the footage, and it's not your typical AVCHD, in that it has no b-frames. HMC150 and even consumer level AVCHD camcorders have better coding efficiency for the same bitrate. Shooting techniques/image sensor size aside, this would help to explain the lower quality people are complaining about these cameras, as this appears to be a hardware limitation.

That's a decent price for what you are getting, I just wouldn't expect great video quality

[1handclapping]

The original question was posted by an indie filmaker -- the vast majority of shots in anything but an action film
are relatively static. That's what makes the GH1 a good deal for filmakers... under these conditions, the GH1's 1080P
is anything but unuseable. I recommend you look at the GH1 thread on the DVXuser site -- many of the posters are
indie film DP's with lots of experience with prosumer camcorders like the HMC150.

The GH1 is not a general purpose replacement for a camcorder, but it opens up some videographic territory we haven't
had access to before at a fair price.

[aedipuss]

as the cmos sensor size gets bigger the rolling shutter problem also increases. i'm just not a fan. i'd have to side with the major networks that don't allow any single sensor video.

for a 90 degree pan panasonic recommends taking up to 180 seconds to complete it. a full 3 minutes to lessen the effects of the cmos sensor, and even at that amount of time it doesn't completely eliminate the problem.

[aedipuss]

The vaporware RED 1080P Scarlet?

that's a wee bit harsh isn't it? the doubters said the same thing about the red one...... hang in there if you are drooling over the scarlet's specs. it will make it to market.

not my cup of tea, but it may cause some folk's orgasms.

[pippas]

Since modern camcorders and digital audio recorders both have crystal controlled timing you should have no trouble mating your audio with video as long as you preface each shot with a clapper

You might need to do a bit more than that - at least at first.
'Commercial' crystals are only accurate to about 20 or 30 ppm, so syncing up longer shots can be a bit of a pain, unless you've already done your 'calibration' by using something like this procedure

[1handclapping]

aedipus, in the high-tech business we generally say that it's vaporware until it ships. So far, I haven't seen any reviews of a Scarlet, only RED's airbrush pictures, so to me it's still vaporware.

RED has a terrific PR and "advance sales" department -- as a former businessperson, my hats off to them for creating such a phenomenal brand.

But their products have yet to demonstrate value pricing, and I suspect that their 2/3 format camera will continue this trend. Until they actually release
the product it's impossible to know for sure.

Yes, pippas, you're right. For long shots the clocks can be sufficiently out of sync to cause problems, but as you so admirably describe, it's a problem
that is fairly easy to address. BTW, my experience is that the better the recording gear, the less the problem, as the better manufacturers design and test their gear to meet more stringent standards.

One last point on the dual system audio matter is that, while the timing error
between two devices once measured will be fairly constant, this may not be
true if the conditions of use change significantly. In particular, temperature changes can affect crystal frequencies quite significantly and because the crystal devices or reference frequencies used in different devices may be quite different they may not change in such a way as to maintain a consistent timing error with the environmental change.

[edDV]

Whadda you want to do make a movie or test pilot camera technology? Your writers and actors will walk.

Why does every newbee want to reinvent movie technology?