[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/49944730[/vimeo]
This week I was loaned a GH3 body for a short time at Photokna by Panasonic. This test footage was shot in 1080/25p ALL-I mode at 72Mbit, with two slow mo-sequences of Pocahontas and the juggler shot in AVCHD 1080/50p at 50Mbit.
I also had a go at grading the GH3 footage with Peter Patten of Apple.
Read moreTest footage from the pre-release Panasonic GH3 at Photokina
As I recently found with my FS100 Macs really seem to hurt your AVCHD footage from Sony cameras and the Panasonic GH2… But especially the Sony FS100.
It is no wonder these cameras often get a bad reputation for limited dynamic range, crushed shadows and blown highlights – when you are only seeing the middle part of the full 8bit range of luma.
This Rec.709 portion of a 601 space (16-235 instead of the full 0-255 the FS100 shoots in) is incorrectly remapped to 0-255 by Quicktime. Therefore apps that use Quicktime at their core like Premiere, trip up. This makes a huge difference to the image. When fixed, you recover over 10% of your dynamic range, highlight and shadow detail, along with a much smoother roll off to whites and blacks.
I’ve had my suspicions for a while now about AVCHD footage having a different exposure on my Mac to on the camera. When I edit my GH2 and FS100 stuff natively in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 or the new CS6, or preview AVCHD MTS files in VLC Player (Quicktime X still does not support AVCHD) blacks are crushed and the image is darker overall with far less shadow detail than on the camera’s LCD.
Read moreHow Mac OSX still *screws* your GH2 / FS100 / NEX footage – A must read!!
Above snap taken with SLRMagic E-mount 28mm with SLRMagic macro extension tube on Sony NEX. Click here to buy the lens on eBay. Full review soon!
Premiere Pro CS5 aside, support for AVCHD has been poor to date on PCs and Macs. Are you tired of having to wait for media to transcode in Final Cut Pro? Can’t edit HX9v 1080/60p in Final Cut Pro X? Having trouble previewing AVCHD clips in Quicktime Player on a Mac? No thumbnail of AVCHD clips in the Finder?
Finally a solution is at hand.
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/26611738[/vimeo]
The GH2 is already a lot of bang for the buck. This hack has made it a bonafide plastic explosive!
In the latest hack released today Vitaliy has enabled high bitrate AVCHD in 1080/24p cinema mode for the first time. These represent the first image quality improvements for the hacked GH2. What does it look like? Watch the video above to find out.
Above: EOSHD’s hacked GH2 with Zacuto EVF Flip and Iscorama!!
Codecs are currently the biggest weakness of DSLR video but that is about to change, and no – not with an external record but inside the camera.
The hacker Vitaliy Kiselev says he has had ‘a break-through’ – raising the AVCHD bitrate of the hacked GH2 to an average of 42Mbit – almost double the original Panasonic specification and higher than the top AVCHD PS setting of 28Mbit. And unlike the GH1’s encoder, the GH2 has B-frames making it more efficient, so for the same bitrate it delivers more image quality than other DSLRs in the 40Mbit ballpark like the Canon 5D Mark II.
Vitaliy says on his forum that the video looks ‘like a photo’ in terms of quality. The next PTools release containing the patch is due out soon.
Read moreVitaliy hacks ‘photographic’ looking 42Mbit 1080/24p AVCHD out of GH2
[vimeo]16963752[/vimeo]
I’ve recently moved from Final Cut Pro because I want the speed boost of 64bit. Those with a NVidia CUDA enabled card will also get real-time FX editing with no timeline rendering.
Read morePremiere CS5 – Editing GH1 AVCHD direct from card and Twixtor
UPDATE – will Sony keep the box form factor? They have done it before with the Sony HDC-P1.
Sony have announced a $7k AVCHD camera with 24p and 35mm sensor. Aimed squarely at the AF100 and Red Scarlet, the boxy looking prototype gives little a way right now but I’m gathering more info as the story unfolds.