pietz

H.264 supports 10Bit as well and yet we dont see it around. Just because its compatible with the Codec doesnt mean companies will actually use it. just saying.

And some people seem to forget about the fact that H.265 is not much more efficient than H.264. But for this sentence to be true, you need to understand what efficiency means. its not only the final filesize, but also the computing power it takes to encode and decode the video.

H.265 simply opens many doors of compressing files much more for the cost of much higher computing power. A camera like the NX1 wont have "that" computing power to take the real advantage of H.265. i personally would guess their 80mbit/s H.265 video to be around the same as the GH4's 100mbit/s H.264. You also need to understand that H.264 isnt all the same, even when using the same encoder. You can choose between different presets that differ in encoding speed and file size results. Cameras need at least the speed of doing the conversion in realtime, so when you put a faster processor in a new camera you can make the encoding of the video look better by using a slower preset. An H.264 camera from 8 years ago will be deliver a lot less quality at the same bitrate as a camera from today. people seem to forget this and just hype H.265.

It will be pretty awesome but big computers are just getting the power it takes to edit H.265. for cameras it will take another year to actually benefit from it.

let me get this straight.

this camera costs $900 and has a 11-34mm f1.7-2.8 lens on it and a m43 sensor. so why the f is the 12-35mm f2.8 so expensive?!

The LX100 seems to have a better lens and yet its less expensive than the 12-35mm alone?!?

i always called this lens completely overpriced, but now Panasonic is just making fun of themselves! rediculous.

i can relate. i love the 14-140mm II on run and gun shoots and it has been a great performer on my G6. the 6MP resolution is not a negative point in my book. i still think that 95% of the people shoot 4k and master in full hd, so 6MP is plenty. with the GH4 the OIS feels worse, although not as bad as your tiger sample clip. kinda strange, lets hope for an update.

ive never liked the 12-35mm. its not versatile enough for run & gun and not fast enough for commercial shoots. above all its rediculously overpriced, i dont understand why so many videographers fancy this lens. however if the OIS is better with the 12-35mm, it jumps up the latter a little bit.

i would be really pissed if it were true. not because i dont want oly users to shoot in 4k, but panasonic said themselve that a 120fps upgrade on the gh4 is unlikely/impossible because a firmware update can only do so much. so if oly finds a way to add something like this to an 18months old camera, it would piss me off.

well on the other side, this might poke panasonic that they have to work some more on awesome firmware updates. hmm. the last one made my reocrdings less stable...

You don't get it do you. At all.

The video is supposed to have a raw, ramshackle, Manchester band / New Order feel to it. Why do you think they left the cars in the background towards the end and have the crew come out?

 

Of course they could have made it slicker like every other fucking music video... that is not the point...

then you didnt understand a word i was saying. at all.

this kind of work is supposed to look like it comes straight out of camera. thats the entire fucking concept of this shooting style. a look that says: we dont know anything about cameras or post production but we had this great idea for a video where we dont need this knowledge anyway.

to achieve this effect, you shoot it clean so you have direct controls of the hickups and shakes in post. thats just how you shoot these kinds of videos if you have the budget. a budget that they clearly had.

but if you shoot it with flaws, like they did, you either take it as it is OR you try to fix a couple of heavy mess ups in post. but if you do the second and the stabilization looks crappy and warped, the entire concept of this shooting style is thrown out of the window. because now it doesnt look straight out of camera anymore but like a messed up video that even post production stabilization couldnt fix. and thats definitely not what they wanted or they could have also shown the cuts throughout the video.

oh come on. virals that look like they were shot on an iphone have been around for the past years, but were almost always shot with a more expensive camera, with a look applied to it. having a video-ish look is a choice by the dop, which i respect for this kind of video but crappy stabilized footage that warps just isnt.

the dodgy stabilization comes from the rolling shutter. the software algorithm tries to hold on to different parts of the image. if some of these parts are "stretched" to a incorrect position because of RS, the algorithm has a hard time adjusting to that. you have all these cameras at hand andrew :) next time youre out with a bmcc and a gh4 take some really shaky footage with both and stabilize them in post. the bmcc will hold up much better.

well they should have used a camera with global shutter because that video just gave me eye cancer. terribly stabilzed shots, blurred frames, warping effect, video-ish looks...

dont get me wrong i love their videos because they are lots of fun to watch, but the video quality is absolutely nothing to be proud of.

wouldnt there only be an advantage of using log over cinelike-d, if it improved dynamic range? i would question that a simple firmware update would have the power to do so...

sorry i have to take back what i said, or at least be a little more specific. today i filmed a talk at my university and really only used the Video Mic Go as a back up and easier syncing. At higher gains the clicky buzz noize is definately there.

so stay in the negative gain area and you should be fine, everything around zero to +6dB is annoying as sh*t.

im using a rode video mic go in manual movie mode and i have absolutely no problem with audio. everything sounds superb. the base noise is at somehwhere around -54dB with the video mic go and with the internal mic its at about -50dB.

i contacted panasonic and was told that its not possible to reinstall the 1.0 firmware from the US as a firmware update to get around the recording cap.

so if anybody has an idea or solution for recording longer than 29min59sec, i would highly appreciate it.

I had the same experience yesterday, I got 4 files around 7 minutes and one around 2 minutes, more or less 30 minutes total. Happened each and every time I tried. Personally I don't mind the limit for 'normal' usage as I never record more than a couple of minutes ...but it sucks big time that it does the same with variable frame rates. In effect it renders that feature useless. If you record with two frames per second you get stuck with 3600 frames or two minutes 24seconds of footage ...which doesn't come close to 29 minutes 59 seconds of footage.

youre right. i cant count :D it was the fifth file that was 2min long. so yep, 30min recording cap.

has anybody had experience with US firmwares? maybe they dont come with a recording cap.

Not until there's a hack to to disable the EU limit. I am assuming you're from the EU!

i am, but i remember quite a few people saying that there is no recording limit in europe with the gh4. wasnt it also andrew who said this?

i tested it today with C4K in a MOV file: after around 6.30-7min the file reached the 4GB mark and created a new file on its own. however this only worked three times. the fourth file recorded only a couple of minutes before it stopped. now i assume this might be because im not using a UHS3 card (although im using a 600x transcend one), i'll try out a few more things on the weekend.

I'll try that, thanks

i just got my gh4 yesterday and one of the first things i noticed is that mine comes with a 30min recording cap. didnt quite a few people agree that there is no recording cap on the GH4? switching prom PAL to Cinema didnt fix the problem. is there a workaround with an american firmware version or something?

Sony's A6000 is so much better than GH4 as a stills camera.

I'm pretty sure that it is very close in video as well and all that for less than half the price!

Sony is gonna say good bye and get past everybody else pretty soon...

well i think its absolutely great what sony comes up with on paper. no other company brings out cameras with such amazing specs in the smallest possible bodies. i often like to compare Sony with RED. not that their cameras are comparable in any way, but both companies seem to have the exact same goal of pushing the limits of whats possible with todays cameras and always being the first of introducing new standards and features. 

on the other hand theres Panasonic, who would never come out with a camera that isnt rock solid in its performance. FF 4K camera that overheats after 30min of recording? it would never see the light of day if Panasonic built it.

its really up to you what you choose, but id always go with a rock solid camera. just like i would always choose an Alexa over an Epic.

i think its a spit in the face by panasonic to announce a camera with these features a couple of months after the GH4 was announced. Yes, its a different system, with a fixed lens and smaller sensor, but if they were able to build 5-axis IBIS, ND-filters and 120fps 1080p in a smaller body, why couldnt they do the same in the larger, twice as expensive GH4 that doesnt even come with a lens. it even has the same processor so 120fps should have easily been possible.

IBIS and NDs would have made a huge difference. Screw you Panasonic.

hard to believe that the default video of the mark 3 was once considered good :D if i recall correctly that wasnt all that long ago...

awesome, thanks andrew!

regarding Premiere: i just love it. not having to render anything in after effects because i can just drop the ae project in the premiere timeline is just a killer feature. i tried fcpx for a while, but i couldnt get used to it. and i think i never will as it seems to be for people who edit something from the left to the right. i on the other hand drop the footage in different places and fill the gaps that are left. with this workflow using fcpx feels like i have to workaround everything i do. i just cant wrap my mind around why i cant just import a second video layer and move the footage freely. i dont want to connect this clip to any other clip. its so weird to me...

I was just editing in Premiere and found this quite annoying. Ever clip I imported into my timeline I had to go in and change each to 50%. In Premiere CC settings there's an option that says "Default scale to frame size" which I thought would auto adjust my clips to fill the sequence size, but it didn't. Is there anyway, by default to get Premiere to scale the clip size to the set sequence size?

Preferences -> General -> Default Scale to Frame Size. Tick this option and youre good to go.

however there is one thing that you need to know: when this box is ticked and you take a 4k clip and drag it into a 1080p timeline, the clip will be zoomed out to fit the frame as you want BUT this is now referred to as 100% scale size. that is not a problem just something to work with. if you now want to zoom in native resolution of one of your clips you have to change the scale to 200%.

well i think its fair to say that because its a guide about the camera, that the post process isnt absolutely needed. that in mind i kinda miss that chapter as well. your nifty curves trick is good, but that cant be the only mention. in my opinion.

-i would have loved a few links to free LUTs or more tricks like the curve presets.

-how to work with 0-255 in premiere and if theres a way to set ip up so it always includes all luma values. because by default it chops them of.

-some words on the GH444 tool and if there is still problems with gamma shift in MOV files.

stuff like that.

Andrew,

 

Great guide! Lots of good information and things for me to test out on my GH4.

There's a section however that mentions a chapter on post-production, which I did not find in the book. 

 

"...by using the RGB Curves effect in Adobe Premiere. For more on this see Chapter 7 on Post Production." 

 

Is this a chapter that will be updated or added later?

same here. really missed the post part.

Do you have an Opinion on the cheaper Panasonic Primes? Namely the 14mm 2.5 and the 20mm 1.7? I have the 14mm and can't decide if I should keep it or sell it because it doesn't suit 4k well.

why doesnt it? i dont understand why some people think they have to invent new lenses to go with 4k. its nothing but a 8MP moving image. any m43 lens should handle it just fine. but i personally like 20mm on m43. its a good focal length to have with you if you dont want more than one prime. the fact that its one stop faster makes it easily win the race. isnt the AF like worlds better as well?

I'm sorry but these reviewers suck!

 

1. The moment you see the Panny rep you know the camera is going to be free of shortcomings and flawless in every aspect.

2. The best use they can come up with for slo.mo are family videos.

3. They omit the imminent launch of the Shogun and "the brick" is presented as the only option to record 422 4K externally.

i dont even know what youre talking about dude...

Anyway Andrew, lovely review, thank you very much.

• Codec does not prioritise very dark areas of the image resulting in some macro-blocking in very dimly lit situations

   

   

 concerning this topic: do you think raising the pedestal and pushing it down in post slightly fixes the problem?

may we use this thread for live discussion of what they are saying on BHP Live?

EDIT: wow, i like this panasonic dude. honest guy.

EDIT2: Answer to why the GH4 doesnt have IBIS:

it was built for professional video production. having the sensor move around inside the body without a heat sink, wouldnt be a reliable choice for filming longer periods.

EDIT3: Answer to the audio problem with external microphones:

Panasonic engineers are looking into it. it might come because of the 3,5mm audio pin. the issue doesnt appear with the shotgun mic made by panasonic. others have to be tested.

EDIT4: Best detail and dynamic range at ISO200

EDIT5: Higher DR in 4k compared to 1080p with at least 11 stops