Anna Possberg

I was hoping for a 4K Pocket in m43 and got very disappointed last night. As a wildlife filmmaker I belong to the niche of the niche and I am aware that there is hardly a market for us. Still I wait for a 4K m43 that fits the pocket of an indie wildlife filmmaker. The budgets for wildlife docs are shrinking yet the costs to produce them are rising. So, although the Pocket had its downsizes it allowed me to shoot high-quality stuff until broadcasters expect nothing less than to deliver 4K mastering. The much hailed Super 35 sensor is great for a lot of situations but for shooting wildlife in 4K is painful. Grant showed yesterday a sleek picture of a cameraman shooting penguins with an Ursa implying that it is also a wildlife cam. The reality is totally different as in most cases I have to keep a serious distance to my wild subject. Meaning I need all the tele I can get (and depth of field as animals like to move unpredictably). Which is fine with a m43 sensor with its crop factor. And with all the rigging the Pocket is still a camera I can carry for hours off the beaten tracks. And I can still use my arsenal of m43 lenses. The tele lenses for a Super 35 sensor are very heavy and very expensive. And mostly primes - unusable for documentaries like I do. (Yes, Canon has a fine zoom lens 50-1000 mm at only 70 000 USD). So for now I will wait for more footage from the GH5 - maybe it is my next camera....

Peaking and Low Light with GH4 Hi Andrew, first of all, thank you so much for your great reviews which guide me through my filming workflow. Your GH2 ebook was really supportive last year when filming in Iceland. Recently I have read your review about the GH4 (along with that of Bloom). Last week I was filming wildlife (brown bears) with my BMPC but I also had the GH4 with me for testing from Panasonic. I know you have also an ebook already for the GH4 but at this moment I have the camera only for testing the capabilities of filming wildlife in 4K. The footage I have taken with it is not bad (I am reserved in a final statement until I edit the footage) but I have some issues which I would love to discuss with you as an expert: - you mentioned that: "There are some situations when the codec is really being pushed where you can see macro blocking and compression and such a situation includes very low contrast dimly lit shots at high ISOs. Here fine texture has a more scratchy and softer feel to it so you need to be careful in how you handle the footage in post and how you set the picture profiles in-camera to avoid the ‘electronic feel’." I have footage in low light where the darks look like a colored pixel soup - I suppose because of the internal noise reduction (which I left unfortunately to zero). My settings were Cinelike D with saturation and contrast to -5, darks +2 and lights -2. How could I mitigate this blotchy look in post? The material is already soften due to this internal NR. The Neat Video filter makes it all worse. What was your feeling about the peaking? For me it was a nightmare to focus a 4K resolution on the tiny display. The magnifying doesn't work while recording plus I cannot touch the screen while filming a moving bear (also with a super tele). I tried this AFC and AFS with tracking focus- works quite well in sunlight conditions and if the subject is slowly moving but...I wouldn't rely on that. So I left with the peaking but I have the feeling it is not so perfect and tends to focus slightly in front of the object (the bear had blue peaking spots but the camera focused more on the grass before him) Thanks for taking your time to help me out with the footage shot at high ISO.