djrockadoo

I haven't posted here, but I have to say this post bothered me a little bit so I had chime in. I'm a colorist for a living in between directing and editing, I grade Alexa footage constantly and I have to work with everything from that to RED, to DSLR stuff all the time. As much as I love my GH2 and GH3, I had a pretty good suspicion there was no way this comparison would remotely hold up. I let it go, but the latest post seems to be pushing the argument farther. 

I've included an example here from the downloaded gh4 footage and the publicly available Alexa footage to illustrate my point, which is, theres a million factors that go into a comparison like this. Glass, codecs, bit rates, resolution, color space, dynamic range and more, but for the purpose of this illustration, I'm just talking about dynamic range, codec, and color space.

There is no comparing what an Alexa is putting out in S-log, vs the modes this GH4 footage was shot in. As shown in the example, the first cut of the guy on the bongos is S-log. There isn't a single pixel in that image that is clipping one way or the other. This means in a perfect world I have full control over what i want to make black and what I want white. The Panasonic isn't giving me nearly as much. Whether thats simply the color profile thats on, the codec squeezing it, the quality of the glass, or simply the cameras dynamic range ability, there is simply no way to take a GH4's image to the places you can take an Alexas.

The example videos point that out. For the Alexa, it starts as S-log, than kinda normalized start no detail lost yet, then a nice little crushed punchy look, then an extreme s-curve look, than a completely ludicrous version. Of course no one is grading at ludicrous speed that often, but the illustration is that even at that level, the image is tight as can be and nearly noise free. pretty incredible

A real test of how strong an image holds up is fixing a broken one, rather than slightly grading a nicely exposed one. Luckily there were a few good examples to use in the supplied link and in those you can see where the GH4 cannot hold a candle to the Alexa. In the spire shots where I tried to neutralized all the haze, the image gets noisy as heck. Even the sky has pretty noticeable banding if you look close or put up on a waveform monitor.  In the shot of that tilts down from the buildings to the people, it grades well, but theres still noise littered all over the blacks. Those same images shot with the Alexa would have had more head room for fixing.

Now Im not a hater, I actually love the GH4 is putting out on a well exposure image, like the car. i was actually able to recover clipped detail in the hood before I even began grading, pretty nice for an 8 bit codec! If i could get a truly log like starting point from the camera I'd love to see how far it can be pushed. And given how "bad" the tilt down shot was originally, i was very happy how far i could push it to something usable. 

Anyway, I love what panasonic is doing, and it looks like they have another winner, but lets not get crazy here people! :)

I haven't posted here, but I have to say this post bothered me a little bit so I had chime in. I'm a colorist for a living in between directing and editing, I grade Alexa footage constantly and I have to work with everything from that to RED, to DSLR stuff all the time. As much as I love my GH2 and GH3, I had a pretty good suspicion there was no way this comparison would remotely hold up. I let it go, but the latest post seems to be pushing the argument farther. 

I've included an example here from the downloaded gh4 footage and the publicly available Alexa footage to illustrate my point, which is, theres a million factors that go into a comparison like this. Glass, codecs, bit rates, resolution, color space, dynamic range and more, but for the purpose of this illustration, I'm just talking about dynamic range, codec, and color space.

There is no comparing what an Alexa is putting out in S-log, vs the modes this GH4 footage was shot in. As shown in the example, the first cut of the guy on the bongos is S-log. There isn't a single pixel in that image that is clipping one way or the other. This means in a perfect world I have full control over what i want to make black and what I want white. The Panasonic isn't giving me nearly as much. Whether thats simply the color profile thats on, the codec squeezing it, the quality of the glass, or simply the cameras dynamic range ability, there is simply no way to take a GH4's image to the places you can take an Alexas.

The example videos point that out. For the Alexa, it starts as S-log, than kinda normalized start no detail lost yet, then a nice little crushed punchy look, then an extreme s-curve look, than a completely ludicrous version. Of course no one is grading at ludicrous speed that often, but the illustration is that even at that level, the image is tight as can be and nearly noise free. pretty incredible

A real test of how strong an image holds up is fixing a broken one, rather than slightly grading a nicely exposed one. Luckily there were a few good examples to use in the supplied link and in those you can see where the GH4 cannot hold a candle to the Alexa. In the spire shots where I tried to neutralized all the haze, the image gets noisy as heck. Even the sky has pretty noticeable banding if you look close or put up on a waveform monitor.  In the shot of that tilts down from the buildings to the people, it grades well, but theres still noise littered all over the blacks. Those same images shot with the Alexa would have had more head room for fixing.

Now Im not a hater, I actually love the GH4 is putting out on a well exposure image, like the car. i was actually able to recover clipped detail in the hood before I even began grading, pretty nice for an 8 bit codec! If i could get a truly log like starting point from the camera I'd love to see how far it can be pushed. And given how "bad" the tilt down shot was originally, i was very happy how far i could push it to something usable. 

Anyway, I love what panasonic is doing, and it looks like they have another winner, but lets not get crazy here people! :)