What is needed?

[Jacques Mersereau]

Hey List,

I recently watched the revenge of the great camera shoot out and was very impressed with the GH2.

I am wondering if buying a GH2 (or GH3) might be an inexpensive way use my 35mm lens while
I save up for a RED.

I have a couple of decent Canon EF lens (16-35mm and 100-40mm).

Can I use this glass with the GH2 or is an adapter available? if so what?

HDMI out - is it clean or what 'hobbles' does that have?

What hack is everyone going for these days?

Thanks, I realize these questions are probably all answered someplace,
but I have not been able to find them after looking over the board for an hour.

J

[Don Litten]

There are a lot of opinions on this. Here's mine.

The GH2 is a very good way to wait until you get the Red and an excellent B camera after.

Some Canon lenses work and some vignette. Going to ET mode eliminates the vignetting so really all lenses are useful. You do lose some quality in ET because you use less sensor space,

Lots of adapters are available. You need one with the built in vanes and your aperture in the lens should be wide open before you turn the camera off. That way the manual aperture in the adapter has a clear shot.

HDMI is not clean. There is a lot of information on the net about that and that's one thing most are hoping will be fixed on the GH3.

There are a ton of hacks (settings) which one you use depends on what you're doing, what cards you are using and what your temperament is.
That's like asking what the best rifle for Deer hunting is. It's a guaranteed way to start an argument.

[Jacques Mersereau]

Is the GH3 due out this month?

[Jacques Mersereau]

Which hack are you using Don? And why?

TIA,

J

[Kevin McRoberts]

There are EF to m43 adapters available now; one example:
Live Canon EF to Micro 4/3 adaptor

They tend to be expensive and a bit cumbersome because they require their own power source to control the lens' aperture. Another option is to by a similar range lens that works without the adapter, for instance the Panasonic 12-35/2.8 - remember that you're going to have a ~x2 crop factor, making your lovely 16-35 have an equivalent FOV of 32-70. Not terrible, but you might want more on the wide end than any reasonably affordable EOS lens will provide.

HDMI out has some problems... if I recall correctly, it's simple 4:2:0 8-bit, and stuck at 1080i60/50. Someone more familiar may be able to shed more insight there... but I believe external recording doesn't gain anything over hacked internal recording.

There are probably as many favorite hacks as there are GH2 hack users. Current favorites (AFAIK) include FlowMotion V2.02 (my favorite), Orion v4 (I think that's what was used in the ROGCS), Cluster V6, and a mess of others that I can't keep track of. Vitaliy Kiselev's "personal-view" website is the best source of information due to its proximity to the testers themselves, and simultaneously the worst due to complete disorganization. Make sure to have fast SD cards (ie SanDisk Extreme 64GB 95mb/s) for best reliability with the beefiest hacks. FlowMotion works on cheap Transcend cards.

Buy extra Panasonic brand batteries. Using hacks sucks battery life quicker for some reason, and hacking with a cheap ChiCom battery is an invitation to destroying your camera.

Any more questions, don't be afraid to ask. Happy to pass on what I can.

[Chip Thome]

Jacques.... no one knows for sure when the GH3 will be available. The best any of us are doing is making wild assed guesses at it. But it has not been officially announced yet so I would say, no, it will not be available this month.

The rumors pages have not leaked much about a GH3 yet, so none of us knows much of what assets and abilities it will possess yet. So far the GH3 appears to be a pretty well guarded secret at Panny.

[Don Litten]

Originally Posted by Jacques Mersereau

Which hack are you using Don? And why?

TIA,

J

Depends on what I'm doing Jacques/

Sanity 5 Good quality and bulletproof
Flow Motion 2.2 Good in 720, doesn't lock up around water and grades well
Sedna AQ1 The highest detail in good light (Temperamental)
CM Night The best low light setting (Temperamental )

[Willard Hill]

Jacques,

I used the Canon XL-1s, and XL-H1 for long range wildlife for years, and of course since Canon dropped the sensor size that made this possible, I tried the Canon T3i with its' 3x crop mode and now the GH2. All of my lenses are Canon and at first I tried one of the adapters with built in aperture and it vignetted on all of my lenses except at long telephoto and with the 2x extended telephoto mode kicked in,--for it to work otherwise, one had to shoot wide-open or nearly so.

The next move was to get a Red-Rock Micro adapter. This is expensive, and less than ideal, but it does work. The biggest problems are that there is no indicator light to tell if the power is on on the adapter or not and it is easy to forget to turn it off. It uses a dedicated 9V battery and life is short, with also no gauge to tell you when it is getting low so it can suddenly quit at a crucial moment and it takes awhile to change it. You actually have to remove a screw and a sliding cover. Another downside is that it takes it a bit to power up and if you get in a hurry you can press the aperture control buttons and nothing happens. When it is up, the aperture moves in 1/3 stop increments and it takes awhile to change. If you power the adapter down to save power it retains that setting, and you can turn the camera on and resume shooting if light levels have not changed, but if you turn the adapter back on or change lenses it defaults to wide open.

No documentation is included with the unit, but there is a modest amount of information on the website. It states that the IS will not work, which is true, and that certain lenses such as the 300mm F2.8 will not work along with the tel-extenders. I may be mistaken, but I don't think any lens is supposed to auto focus with this adapter., so it sound like you can't manual focus certain lenses or lenses with the extenders attached, but I can manual focus the 300mm f2.8 IS and use both the 1.4 and 2x extenders--just no IS and no auto-focus. This would be a pain for serious still work, but it is basically what we were used to with the XL cameras and the adapters except that we could use IS.

The bottom line is that it does work and I have used it extensively for long range wildlife recording with the 500mm F4 and the 100-400mm this summer. It is only a little more difficult to use than the EF adapter for the XL cameras (because of battery life and the way the aperture control works) and this camera is much easier to focus.

So far I haven't tried any of the hacks. Based on my limited experience, I think it gives a more detailed picture than the T3i and regardless of how it would fare in objective tests against the XL-H1 and nanoFlash, I have used that combination very little since I got the GH-2. Another major consideration is that it is not nearly as unwieldy as the XL cameras with the big telephotos and is very easy to carry for long distances into the backcountry with the 500mm attached. Although it doesn't have as much 35mm equivalent focal length as the XL cameras, it is still enough to do some serious long range work--especially with the 1.4x converter attached.

[Bill Bruner]

Jacques - if by "clean" HDMI out, you mean "monitorable" with all of the graphics removed, the answer is yes, straight out of the box..

If by clean HDMI out, you mean "recordable", the answer is also yes, but not straight out of the box.

There is a free software fix that will give you results like these from an external recorder:

GH2 HDMI output recorded with Atomos NINJA on Vimeo

On the GH3 release date - latest rumor is that Panasonic will announce it at Photokina in Berlin next month. But, if the GH2's initial rollout is any guide, it won't show up in North America until Christmas, and it won't be widely available until spring of next year.

Cheers,

Bill
Hybrid Camera Revolution

[Jacques Mersereau]

I want to thank everyone who has provided your experienced information.
You guys are the ones who continue to make dvinfo rock -
really, it is all about the people sharing their knowledge.

Sigh - I am just not thrilled at owning yet another camera that forces a lens crop.
For the project I am working on and hoping to shoot,
I am going to insist on whatever I purchase, or rent, to be full frame, unless I can
secure a cheap warehouse with tons of room to back up the camera.

I love the idea of Nikon's that allows cropping/zooming in software,
but if I want to shoot with an 16mm, I want it to be 16mm, not 32 dang it.

Though I love the look some are getting from the GH1 and GH2,
the idea of cumbersome and costly adapter is also painful .

Honestly, I would rather spend a couple of grand more and get the Nikon D800.
I am still hoping someone might be able to hack the 5DMK3 and get the HDMI out clean
as I am invested in Canon glass and they don't work on Nikon (argh!).

I guess the good news is, I can afford to wait until I have my script ready, actors in place, locations secured and financing set up. All that might well take another 8-16 months.

Again, many thanks for everyone's time. Much appreciated!!!

Jacques