I've been playing with the GH4 today in RAW stills burst mode. My workflow needs some refinement to get the motion blur looking more regular, but I actually quite like the filmic staccato of 12fps. The image quality is insanely nice though:
Note: Plus members can download the original Prores LT file on Vimeo. I REALLY RECOMMEND DOING THIS - motion looks much worse when streamed.
Vimeo blurb below:
First test of using GH4 in RAW stills burst mode to make video.
RAW stills converted to ProRes 444HQ and slowed to 50% in 24p FCPX timeline. Graded in FCPX and some grain applied. Also used REVisionEffects' RSMB to add motion blur as most of this was shot with a very high shutter speed. This has caused some unpleasant motion artefacts here and there. The final shot in the video (of blowing leaves and cars) used a 180 degree shutter in-camera (1/25s) and looks better I think. I will try using that setting for my next attempt. Rolling shutter looks quite severe. The GH4 buffer can only do about 40 frames in raw burst mode, so you can't really get longer than a 3 second clip. My card is a Sandisk 95MB/s U1 - I don't know if a faster card would do better.
I actually really like the 12fps look, particularly when used with film grain and the really bold colours you can get from raw. I like the excessive motion blur. I think if you avoid severe camera movement so as not to draw attention to the rolling shutter and low frame rate, it can look very filmic. Obviously this can't be used for everything but with some refinement I think I will be using it a fair bit. If you like the 12fps look (12fps is right on the border of human perception of individual frames - I think this makes it rather interesting) and can live with the short burst times, there are a lot of good reasons to try this out. Yet another great thing about the awesome GH4.
Check our blog for further testing of this mode: lintelfilms.co.uk/blog/
Note: I tried using 'optical flow' (FCPX's version of Twixtor) to create 'real' 24fps, but it was a mess, with lots of the usual warping around movement (even though I used a very fast shutter speed).
Music by Chris Zabriskie.
Pros are wondering what the benefit of 4K is to them in terms of overall image quality, when mastered and delivered for 2K / 1080p. A lot of work is still shot in 1080p and cameras like the Canon C300 are the workhorses of the moment.
In the case of the GH4 it may appear from the specs that it's just an 8bit 4:2:0 camera internally.
Actually the theory is 8bit 4:2:0 4K material from this camera can be taken through a workflow in post that converts it to 10bit 4:4:4 1080p - with all the smoother tonality, better colour and workflow advantages that format brings. This is a big leap for 1080p based on the much more expensive C300 which only does 8bit 4:2:2.
I asked Go Pro's David Newman (Sr. Dir. Software) whether this theory was correct...
