dsavage

I felt like Matt (the company guy) was pretty knowledgeable about everything and didn't try to sugar-coat the camera's flaws too much.  He basically conceded to full-frame on low light sensitivity, and wasn't afraid to bring up the issues with shooting on EF-mount glass.

The B&H rep definitely threw out some hard balls, which I wasn't expecting.  I seriously did not expect to hear anything about the audio grounding issue. Funny that the workaround is to buy Panasonic's shotgun mic.

But even with all of this in mind, I still wasn't happy with the way they skirted around the issue of dynamic range.  Eduardo said "10 stops", and Matt said "I would tell people 11", but nobody really delivered any official numbers.  I mean, this dude can talk about subtle differences in codecs all day long, but won't give us an official line on usable dynamic range?  

Would this process also be possible with Cineform Studio Pro?

Some of these shots look fantastic, but some look a little overkill.  Like the LUT is crushing the bottom end of the curve and bringing out too much red/orange saturation.   

Lowlight test has hit the web: 

Looks like the 5D Mark III is still the lowlight king, but I'm impressed with how well the GH4 footage holds up to being denoised.  Curious to know if this was Neat Video or something else.

After looking at it again,  Notice the skin tones on the GH4 Cinelike-V.   They look like a really nice quick way to get some superb color out of the GH4 if you don't have time to grade.       

Cinelike-V looks like it should be called "Canon Mode"!  It's got a real similar saturation and warmness to what I'm used to seeing from a 5D.  It's not my favorite look, but it's nice that we'll have the option.  Especially on things that need a quick turnaround.

I've been waiting for you to get your hands on this camera!  Can't wait to see some video.

One thing I'm interested to see is how the flat / gradeable the footage can get.  I've seen quite a few clips from the GH4 now, and they all have  a very Canon-like saturation and warmth to them.  While that's not necessarily a bad thing, I do like to have options in post.  

Is it possible to get an image out of this camera that doesn't look so baked-in with the picture profile?

Wow.  Panasonic keeps surprising me with how seriously they're taking this camera.  

Care to speculate on what an external recorder/monitor might cost for this?

That's exactly where GoPro should step in. Hope they are working on something. CineForm due an update too.

Ever since GoPro bought Cineform, it seems like development completely stopped.  They haven't even made a blog post in nearly a year, and even then it was just to hype the new GoPro.

I used to think Cineform was the one codec to rule them all.  You could encode it with a PC or a Mac.  It was better compression than ProRes.  The encoding tools were easy to use and packed to the gills with cool features (pulldown removal, etc).  I even bought into the whole Active Metadata thing, which I still think is brilliant.

Selling the company to GoPro was the worst thing Cineform could have done.  Would have been much better to simply license the codec and build GoPro a custom interface.  Imagine all of the great in-camera implementations we might be seeing today if they went the licensing route!    Cineform could be the de-facto standard in capture codecs, and they'd be making millions off of camera manufacturers.  Too bad we'll probably never see this happen with GoPro keeping it all for themselves.

Straight from the card into Premiere and Film Convert. No need for anything in between, no LUT.

This!  Everybody seems to (rightly) put image quality first, but there is so much to be said about workflow.  I've spent countless hours transcoding from camera codecs to a workable intermediate.  

When I get done shooting, I'm ready to EDIT!!!  Having to wait for footage to transcode is no fun.  Can't wait to ditch the overly-compressed camera codecs altogether.

Very impressive combo.  As a current GH2 user, this is starting to look like the right upgrade path.

I do have to say the warp-stabilized footage immediately jumped out at me though.  I still don't think warp stabilizer is a good replacement for lens stabilization.  That being said, if this is the only drawback, I'll take it. 

Just give me dynamic range and better low-light performance.  Those have been my biggest hangups on my GH2.  I haven't found myself yearning for 4K or any of the storage and processing issues it brings with it.  

Since we're making out wishlists, it would be awesome to have less compression introduced in-camera.  Maybe the option to record to DNxHD or ProRes?  If Blackmagic can tell customers that they have to buy a faster SD card, then why can't Panasonic?

Good to see all of the GH4 teasers today.  Sounds like you know the right people.

A post about 4K and 120fps that you tagged "GH4".  This alone has me plenty excited.