jonpais

rubenlatre

While I agree that there have probably been a few too many tests with rocks and ducks (particularly since landscape and nature aren't my thing), there have been enough videos to convince me that getting good skin tones with the GH4 will only be limited by my ability, not the camera's. I can't recall each and every one of them, but this recently posted

okay, it's not nonsense then. whatever makes you happy. Then Daniel Peters has done an excellent job at hiding all the flaws of the camera (except the lack of IBIS!). BTW, WHICH camera are you buying, Olly? The Bolex, with its flawless tonality?

@OzNimbus This is pure awesomeness! Thanks so much. Sigma lenses, generic focal reducer... Hopefully the camera will be available in Southeast Asia in the next month.

I hated this movie so much, I had to walk out on it (Dark Knight, that is). I'd never spend money on anything with Terminator in the title.

I thought I'd found someone to handle the sound for me (a young college student who works at a coffee shop nearby) until he bailed out on me the other week. So boom microphones are great if you have a crew, not so great if you don't. Perhaps it's time I shop around for a lav myself. I'll probably be looking for a uni-directional mic, since I always record in noisy environments. On the bright side, even though he'd never handled a boom before, the results came out quite good, except for the occasional dead cat in the upper right corner of the picture. :)

Thanks for Clearing that up :)

Thanks for sharing those with us, Axel. The Flemish painters rule! To be honest, the first time I saw 4K TV was only a few weeks ago, and even though the picture was dazzling - I suppose they were clips from Sony's vast library - I had no desire to rush out and buy one. It was not at all the same as when I would upgrade my DVD collection with Blu-ray discs. The law of diminishing returns? Like many, if not most users, I will probably shoot in 4K and downscale the image for a more pristine 1080p. Does there always have to be war between Black Magic and Panasonic users?

It's only been out a few weeks. Give it time. :) As a matter of fact, I believe this '>test' shows that the GH4 is no less capable in the right hands. Chaos of detail? My god! In fact, it is the unbelievable attention to detail in Breughel's canvas that fascinates me, as well as that of so many other painters of the Northern Renaissance, like the geniuses Hubert and Jan van Eyck. /edit/And I would argue that even the threads visible in the fabric of the garments add to my emotional response to the painting. The eye can roam for days over something like the Ghent Altarpiece, admiring the superhuman effort that went into it, and not for one moment does that detail detract from one's appreciation of this timeless masterpiece of art. And at no time, as I stood transfixed before this sublime work, did I think to myself, 'if only it had less detail'. /edit2/I think it goes back to what what Andrew was saying, talking about Kendy Ty's videos: something to the effect that he was hiding the camera's faults. (sorry, I couldn't find the citation!). And with the GH4, you have the option of choosing just how much detail you want to reveal.

@dafreaking Since when is $600 a budget mic? Or is Budget the name of a production company? This is a bit dated, but you can learn a lot about lavs here: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/lavs_brockett.html Actually, after reading the article I was more confused than before and decided to stick with my shotgun!

This skin tone conversation is complete nonsense. There has been lots of footage of people shot with the GH4, and skin tones are beautiful. But it's great to hear the GH4 being mentioned in the same breath as cameras costing $30,000 and up! @Tim Naylor Did it come as a huge surprise that the Arri had better colors than the Red and the F55?

Exactly. The footage should be on a different drive from the boot drive for maximum performance. In FCP, if you go to System Preferences, then to the 'Playback' tab, you can choose to set rendering to begin after 60 seconds or even longer. If, on the other hand, rendering takes place in the default setting (in other words, far too often), you can always go to 'File' and select 'Delete Event Render Files' every so often to clear up space on your drive. If you are looking for a 'read only' (i.e. just for editing video) drive, two Thunderbolt SSDs stand out from the rest: the Buffalo DriveStation Mini and the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2. The 512GB Buffalo scored 717 MB/s read and 647 MB/s write speeds according to the BM Disk Speed Test. The LaCie LBD 1TB has read speeds of 1,375 MB/s (but in first gen Thunderbolt, speeds will be around 800 MB/s). The former costs $650, the latter, $1,300. For 'long-term' storage, the soon-to-be released LaCie 5big with Thunderbolt 2 and the OWC Thunderbay IV Thunderbolt are remarkable. The 5big starts at 10TB and promises transfer rates of up to 1,050 MB/s. No word on cost yet, but the current LaCie 5big 10TB with first gen Thunderbolt runs around $1,200 $1,000. Finally, there is Other World Computing's Thunderbay IV, which can achieve transfer rates of around 800 MB/s and retails for $870 with disks included. Both can be configured RAID 5, making them ideal for both editing and long-term storage, whereas the first two, because of cost and limited capacity, are obviously exclusively for editing. Buying cheaper, slower, low-capacity drives just doesn't make any sense to me, and in fact, will end up costing more in the long run. How fast is fast enough? For the compressed 4K files from the GH4, transfer rates of ~400 MB/s are probably adequate. I won't have the camera in my hot little hands for at least a month to do any testing. /edit/ Obviously (or maybe not!), there are many other factors than sheer speed involved in choosing an appropriate backup. I'm not a power user processing 100s of terabytes a week and running my drives 24/7; nor am I a working professional whose livelihood depends on having umpteen backups stored both on- and -off site; and I often do backups as often as several times a week anyhow; but having gone through the mill with inadequate computers, I don't want to end up throwing money out the window on slow, low-capacity drives, either. In any case, a top-of the line storage solution like the OWC costs no more than a premium Panasonic lens, and should provide years of reliable service.

It strikes me as curious that those who complain the most about noise are the very ones who take great pains to introduce grain into their videos with Gorilla Grain or Film Convert, which to my eyes, is virtually indistinguishable from noise. I almost added, 'when viewed on Vimeo', but since this is the platform most of us are using to distribute our videos (well, ok, I'm guilty of using YouTube!), whether the original files looked better or not is almost irrelevant. If that is the case, it might be better to make two versions: one for yourself, and one (without added grain) for distribution. By no means do I outright object to grain, but it shouldn't be used indiscriminately - it ought to serve some expressive purpose. Another thought that occurred to me is that some may be editing on laptops, not realizing how the grain actually appears on a larger monitor (that is, distracting).

@Bioskop.Inc JG Harding may have some valid points (I really enjoyed watching his videos over at Vimeo), but calling Panasonic's GH4 half-baked - preposterous!

It sounds to me as though you are the one who is extremely biased. As long as subjectivity shouldn't be confused with objectivity, as you say, then let's stick to facts. First of all, the BMPCC is NOT four times less expensive - what kind of math are you using? In fact, with all the gear you'll need, some people would argue that the BMPCC is far more expensive than the GH4. And according to the tests and videos I've watched from the two cameras, the difference in dynamic range is not HUGE. Then, there is no such thing as one camera being MILES better than another - for one thing, no camera is ideal for every situation. Actually, I'm tired of BM users attacking the Panasonic cameras - it gets old very quickly. I've even read one BM user who had the audacity to claim that all the buttons and menu choices get in the way of shooting! haha

@RamblinR First of all, you do really nice work! I've uploaded bunches of video from iMovie and never saw issues like the ones you're experiencing (I was uploading to YouTube, but I think that's irrelevant here). Then again, I would seldom upload directly from within iMovie - you'll have much more control if you first convert your video using software like MPEG Streamclip, which is completely free and awesome. Secondly, you should absolutely, definitely and without a doubt switch over to FCPX or another professional NLE. /edit/ Because the behavior is restricted to dark grey and shadow areas, it almost resembles banding from lifting the shadows. But if it isn't appearing while you're editing, it's beyond me why it would show up after sending it to QuickTime. It also occurred to me that it could be the bit rate is too low, but the rest of the image looks great, so I'm doubting that's it, either! The frustrating issue I had with uploading to YouTube via QuickTime was the gamma shift: colors were pale, and there weren't any true blacks. That's when I began using the free X264 Encoder. I've written about X264 here.

In fact, no single enclosure is satisfactory: a secure backup strategy is going to involve at least two or three backups, with one or more of them away from the computer. This is particularly true if you are concerned about theft or vandalism. Fault tolerant RAID in and of itself is not a backup. Here are some excellent resources for those wanting to learn more about storage, backup strategies, Thunderbolt and RAID: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum-32.html http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html - this is a must read http://www.larryjordan.biz/hard-drive-basics-a-collection/ "The speed of our computer is far, far less important than the speed and the size of our storage. And if I were to invest money, investing money in high speed storage is a far better investment than in getting the absolute fastest processor because any processor right now is sufficient for doing even 4K video." - Larry Jordan

Very happy for you, jnorman34.

Speak of the devil! TweakTown just posted their review of the Buffalo DriveStation Mini Thunderbolt 512GB External SSD. In RAID 0, we see write speeds of 647 MB/s and read speeds of 717 MB/s. In RAID 1, the Buffalo reaches read speeds of 651 MB/s and write speeds of 320 MB/s - results very similar to the 2013 iMac 1TB Fusion Drive. This is some of the best performance we've seen from a first generation Thunderbolt external drive. MSRP is $650 and supposedly there are ample quantities in stock. I don't think I've ever worked on a project longer than 100GB, so this would be an ideal solution for me - it strikes a nice balance between size, speed and cost. Just to clarify - this is solely for editing 1080p or compressed 4K clips, not for long-term storage. /edit/ While this drive costs a little more than Brellivid's 840 (which can't be installed in the MBP anyway), it offers the same capacity and much higher read/write speeds. It can also be daisy-chained.

Although it is commendable that you care more about getting the technical aspects of shooting out of the way before committing to expensive gear, I'm thinking you'd be better off reconsidering... The RX10, while a fine camera, costs $1,300. The GH4 is a far superior camera in every regard, and costs just $400 more. You could pick up a cheap adaptor and start working with some inexpensive used Nikon AIS lenses right away. Or some reasonably priced MFT Sigma ART lenses.

@nevrozel When you hit 'share', then 'master file', click on the 'settings' tab. There, you will have a choice of some 13 different codecs, including some five ProRes flavors. You can simply choose to send it to QuickTime with H.264 if you like.

I work with external audio all the time and wouldn't consider purchasing another camera without a hotshoe and microphone and headphone jacks. In-camera microphones suck. For example, I might be interviewing young musicians in the park. I have an assistant handling a Rode VideoMic Pro on a boompole attached to a digital audio recorder. I still monitor the sound in camera with a set of earphones, even though that won't be the sound heard in the finished project. And I have a Rode Stereo VideoMic Pro mounted on camera, allowing me to capture some of the performances. If you go to YouTube or Vimeo and watch some travel videos with no ambient sound, only some background music, and compare them to ones where ambient sounds are used creatively, you'll recognize the difference immediately.

Incidentally, my very favorite Panasonic lens is the 35-100mm f/2.8, though don't take that to mean I'm recommending it as an all-purpose optic for travel photography - far from it. I love the color and bokeh and it is crisp as hell even with in-camera sharpening turned down to -5. But it is all but impossible to hold steady on the GM1. As a matter of fact, it's impossible to get a jitter-free image handheld even with the GH3, which is why I use a shoulder rig. But a shoulder rig defeats the whole purpose of owning a miniature camera like the GM1. The kit lens on the GM1 is remarkable, but there is no way to conveniently manually focus, and auto-focus sucks big time in video. I suppose you could always use the touch screen in manual to select your point of focus, the only viable alternative. So there you are. I think the 12-35mm f/2.8 is a remarkable lens that might fit the bill. You can watch many videos on Vimeo and YouTube, including a test shot in a monastery with the GH4 that proves the 12-35 is a force to contend with.

I just did a short test of the Seagate Backup Plus Fast with FCPX on the iMac. First of all, read and write speeds as measured by the AJA Systems Test and Black Magic Disk Speed Test were both around 200 MB/s, results which by the way compare favorably with some popular 5-bay desktop storage systems costing several times more and weighing in at 15 pounds! Of course, those systems have many more niceties... Importing and transcoding 9GB of MOV files to ProRes 422 took seven minutes - which isn't going to win any speed records. I applied the 'aged film' look from special effects to one of the clips, but got tired of waiting for it to finish rendering, so I don't have any results to share with you. Now I can appreciate the work of those intrepid guys over at AnandTech, et al. The upshot is, unless you have the patience of Job, if you plan to spend a lot of time editing and color correcting, it pays to invest in storage with read/write speeds in the ballpark of 500MB/s. /edit/Just for the record, you don't have to wait for rendering to finish when working with FCPX, and in fact, I prefer to initiate rendering manually. And there are at least half a dozen tricks to get faster performance including reducing resolution in the viewer, and so on. And just doing simple edits is instantaneous.

Once you've shot your award-winning video, you've got to, hmmm, edit it, right? Here are some sites worth visiting: For color grading tutorials and stuff, you might check out David Vickers' superb DaVinci Resolve training videos, iseehue (for grading breakdowns) and Toolbox, an outstanding resource, to name just a few. For highly opinionated advice on setting up a Mac and storage advice, you should have a look at Lloyd Chambers' Macintosh Performance Guide. Storagereview.com and TweakTown have reviews of, well, storage! The best FCPX tutorials I've seen are found at lynda.com, while Larry Jordan has free training over at YouTube. He also publishes a newsletter and has created a series of free filmmaking videos with Norman Hollyn called 2 Reel Guys. For inspiration, check out Ruben Latre's atmospheric work at Vimeo or listen to lots of music. Or you could check out this