GH4 Anamorphic Mode Monitoring

[PeterKirk]

Hey All- I know this has been covered in bits & pieces throughout this forum already, but wanted to present the following topic in a clear manner:

What's your monitoring workflow for shooting in anamorphic mode on the GH4?

It seems that unless you have a shogun, monitoring can be tricky because HDMI is disabled in 8 bit and internal recording is disabled in 10 bit  Seems one is stuck with the viewfinder, but who knows... Maybe someone has figured out a clever workaround  

 

 

[Andy Zou]

I shoot 16:9 4k.
 

Gh4 anamorphic 4:3 cannot be transmitted over HDMI while recording, meaning you can only record the 4:3 internally.  The h264 4:2:0 100mbps may be a dealbreaker for some.

But, it outputs the 16:9 4k over hdmi while recording just fine.  So with a monitor that has desqueeze built in, you can just crop off the sides and get usable external recordings of anamorphic footage.

Not sure what sort of workaround you would have around desqueezing besides using a monitor or a desqueeze diopter, which I don't think they'd even build as a loupe for the GH4.  

[eris]

I haven't used GH4 "anamorphic" mode yet although I'd like to since I have a couple great 2x anamorphics.  I use a very general solution that combines a Bolex 16/32 1.5x on several different taking lenses.  Combine that with a good variable diopter and you have a anamorphic solution that's capable of very close to Hawk ($40k) quality levels.    Monitoring this only requires feeding the HDMI output to an external monitor of your choice.  It has to be able to desqueeze 1.5x.  I'm using both the SmallHD AC7 and a Sidefinder 502.  SmallHD support is excellent and their firmware upgrades come fairly often.    This is not a "cheap" solution, but it is very flexible, not limited to the GH4 and IMHO is the best bang for the buck unless you want to rent Hawk or Panavision lenses and get a PL adapter for your GH4.  At that point I'd be wondering why you don't just rent a Red or Arri setup along with it.