Auto focus!
 

To me, one of the biggest appeals of the GH1 doing video is its ability to silently and (hopefully) effectively autofocus, especially tracking a moving subject. Neither the Nikon nor the Canon can do that, and in a documentary or run and gun situation, as previous posters have said, that beautiful 2.8 DOF is going to be a bear to work with. Shoot, even on an indie film with planned blocking it's not all that easy! Your footage is not worth much if half of it is out of focus. That said, I really DO wish that the GH1 had faster lenses, considering the crop factor. Now if only Canon or Nikon could autofocus and do 24P....

I'm really surprised I got away with it for so long before someone said anything actually. :) Again, I only said it to discredit the notion that size doesn't matter, and that feature films shoot 35mm and not 16mm for a purpose. It seemed like the best comparison between the GH1 and 5D2.

For those arguing that it will be easier to focus with the GH1 over the 5D2... yeah, you're right. I've been shooting a 50mm f1.4 as my main lens, wide open. Yup, DOF is razor thin, and I've been making a lot of mistakes... but practice helps a lot and I'm much better a month in than when I started. If I actually marked the lens for camera movements and had a focus puller, it would be fine. Of course, if you are shooting live and solo, you better have some mad focusing skills, or yes, you are better off with a camera that autofocuses.

GH1 manual controls
 

I was waiting for the 5D MKII but the lack of manual controls is not acceptable for me.

Does anybody know if the GH1 requires button poking and menus to access the manual exposure controls?

And will it be real manual contol or just Apeature and Shutter priority?

I did get to play with the GH1 at PMA but nobody in the Panasonic booth had a clue on how any of the manual functions worked for Video.

The manual focus was very good and the viewfinder was bright.

Does anybody know if the motion jpeg will directly import into PP CS3?

Thanks in advance.

The way I understand it, the GH1 uses an EVF which aids in manual focusing, another reason the G1 has become popular with manual/old lens fans. So I imagine the GH1 to be fairly workable in this respect, without the need for auto.

Adrian

Every single film above plus 99.99% of everything else was shot at 24fps. Yes, I've twixtored 5DMkII footage to 24fps but it's very slow and just okay results.

That matters way, way, way more than the shallow DOF advantage (or disadvantage depending on your focus puller). As pointed out, the GH1 is only a stop or so away from 35mm motion picture DOF and has 24fps native. Huge advantage for digital cinema.

You are right the Canon's lens choices are way ahead but adaptors for the GH1 take care of that for longer - it's really only wide lenses where the 5D has far more options.

We still don't know the codec issue but we do know control is way ahead for GH1, so I'm thinking the d-cinema battle leans towards the GH1 so far.

Call it haste, but I'm out of the GH1 interest. Goin for the 5DMkII. As someone had predicted, "you can wait for other cameras to come out, but the look of the 5DMkII will get under your skin." - and it has.

So far for the GH1, here's what it came down to. I'm seeing bad noise from the GH1, intermittent banding, not as much latitude, no pulldown flags on the 60i, 2x crop factor, slow lenses in the 4/3rds line, and overall, I'm not seeing the magic in the images. I'm sure people will make this camera dazzle, but I have gotten addicted to the 5DMkII look. I'll deal with the lack of manual controls and 30p frame rate. I have a lot of ways to get around both. Plus I like the thought of easier workflow with the .mov files out of the 5D - I can easily mount the CF card, pull out some select clips in QuickTime Player Pro, and save it out. The full frame sensor rocks beyond belief. And on top of it, I can easily rent lenses for it, and it's truly a pro still photography camera. I opted out of the f4 kit lens and went for the cheaper EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens, so I have something for simple auto-focus photography. All my other lenses are Nikon.

Thought I'd share my mindset for anyone deliberating. Now I unsubscribe from GH1 threads.

-steev

What I find interesting is that you make this announcement on the very day that the GH1 becomes available in Japan. In the next week or two, there will be many more sample clips available to allow a more fair assessment. So this is ridiculously hasty. You haven't given the GH1 a fair chance. You've only been able to see a small number of poorly shot clips trashed by compression for Web streaming. That's hardly representative of what the camera can and cannot do.

Where? The clips so far have seemed pretty clean to me, especially the ones posted in the last 48 hours. I can easily make the 5D Mk II noisy as well. Of course, it would take more effort, but that's beside the point. With enough light, the GH1, just like the D90, offers a sufficiently clean image. Recent tests have shown that the image remains reasonably noise-free up to ISO 800. If you're serious about videography/cinematography, you'd be employing real lighting in nearly all shooting situations anyway, except for maybe run-and-gun. Don't think just because a camera can handle low-light better, that it's an excuse not to use a proper lighting plan.

How do you know that it's not an artifact of the compression for the Web? If it is, then you could find similar examples from 5D footage as well, if you look for it. The 5D has aliasing and moire issues, which haven't been seen in GH1 footage so far.

Again, how can you tell, definitively, just from the few sample clips that you've seen? And how much latitude do you really need anyway? In other words, in how many situations will the possibly greater latitude of the 5D really matter, anyway? It can't have to do just with the "look" of the image. Reversal film has plenty of fans, and it has poor latitude.

Really? That seems odd, given that the 1080p footage is supposed to be 24p in a 60i wrapper. There must be a way to extract the 24p out of the 60i. Even if what you said was true, how is that worse than having to deal with 30p?

This is not necessarily a detriment. In fact, I have just come to see it as a benefit. How so? Consider this: It allows you to have faster telephoto lenses. Good luck finding an affordable 300mm lens faster than f3.5. With the 2x crop factor, you can use an easily obtainable 135mm f2.8 lens for a 270mm-equivalent field of view. What about the normal and wide end, you say? Use the Nikkor 24mm or 28mm f2.0 for the normal field of view. Get the Tamron SP 17-50mm f2.8 for a fast zoom that covers the 34mm to 100mm range. You can also get a 35mm f1.8 or f2.0 for a short telephoto.

See above. With the 5D Mk II, I bet that you'll be using mostly manual lenses (and manual focus) anyway, so who cares about the Panasonic kit lens and the Canon L lenses? AF/AE lenses offer little to no advantage when shooting video with the 5D.

Nobody who really knows what he/she's doing with the camera has posted a serious demo yet. Nobody has done what Laforet did with the 5D. Anybody can easily make crappy 5D footage. For now, you've simply gotten used to the 5D "look." How can you be so sure that you wouldn't become "addicted" to the GH1's "look"? How do you know that you wouldn't be saying the same thing about the GH1 if the first footage that you saw from it happened to be competently shot by someone like Laforet?

I own a 5D Mk II. I was anticipating holding onto it for months until the Scarlet finally ships, but I will soon be ditching it for a GH1 because, among other things, I got fed up with the hoops that I would have to jump through in order to make the 5D do what I want it to do. My philosophy is that in general, image quality is the top priority, so normally I would be sympathetic to your views about the 5D, but there's a line to be drawn somewhere. The more effort that you put into making a tool work for you, the less useful the tool is. Useful tools are supposed to get out of your way in order to let you create as freely as possible.

This doesn't make sense to me. You should be able to just drop the QuickTime files from the 5D directly onto the FCP (or whatever) timeline. No intermediate steps required. But if you like to make the extra effort, then AVCHD is not much different in its workflow. By the way, you can't just save sub-clips from an H.264 stream. Since it's an interframe-compressed format, you have to recompress.

Why? How is it that much better than APS-C or Four-Thirds? There is such a thing as too little DOF. The effective image area of a full-frame sensor is almost exactly the same as VistaVision. So it's a lot larger than Super-35. Having too little DOF makes focusing more difficult.

By quantity alone, there are many more options for the GH1.

So why are you forgetting about the GH1 so hastily, again?

So, a RED ONE camera with a sensor closer to the APS size and not far from 4/3 doesn't rock?!?

Another example where the shallow DOF craze is more important than a good a good story. Cinematography and film making is not only about depth of field.

I'm back! To begin with, I have since reconsidered and may end up buying a GH1 as well. My 5DMkII will be here tomorrow. I'll admit, "Writing off" the GH1 was necessary at the time for me to commit to buying the 5DMkII. It's been analyzed a lot that decision making, while as technical as we may want it to be, often becomes purely emotional. And the emotional response to the GH1 footage so far has been - eh, hmm, well, I don't know, well, oh wow, that looks awesome, but then a bunch of it looks pretty boring. By contrast, footage from the 5DMkII has consistently captivated and interested me from the very start.

So on with the technical...

1) Barry's clip had a bunch of macro block noise on footage that appeared to be pretty well lit. http://www.holyzoo.com/content/dslr/...decBlowup1.jpg It's reminding me of early HDV all over again. Whereas I haven't seen the 5DMkII fall apart like that. In this noisier clip I have, the codec looks more organic and bottom line - cleaner: http://www.holyzoo.com/content/dslr/5DMkII_Codec.jpg

2) This GH1 clip shows some strange banding on it in the beginning of the clip:

http://www.holyzoo.com/content/dslr/GH1_Sample14.mp4

Sure it's web compressed, but that's not what's causing this.

On this one, I'd have to spend far too much time gathering clips and doing side by side comparison to pedestrian stuff I've seen with the 5DMkII. Bottom line is think about the first time you saw night time footage shot on the 5DMkII - for me it was mindblowing. The night time footage I've seen so far from the GH1 doesn't look any more impressive than the state of the art camcorders on the market. It's "good", but I'm not seeing it look "revolutionary".

Well, let's be honest, it definitely is a bummer they didn't include flags. So you have to use Compressor and hope that it finds the pattern (it may not). Or you JES deinterlacer - and that has proven to be pretty cumbersome for me. It crashes and sometimes can't find the pattern either. Although I have just discovered that HF S100 footage might just work fine without removing the frames, when just throwing it into a 24fps timeline. I tried this with Barry's GH1 clip and it didn't work right at all - it was horribly juttery. Anyway, it's pretty messy not having a quick way to remove pulldown like it was with the DVX100 24pa. I agree having 24p SOMEWHERE in there is better than being stuck with 30p on the 5DMkII. That's why I may end up buying the GH1 anyway once it's easily available.

Well I'm really not impressed with no fast wide angle lenses in existence for 4/3rds. Where is a fast lens in the 35mm equivalent 10-35mm focal length? I love wides, and I want them fast. With the 5DmKII I've got a 20mm f1.8 and have access to a ton of fast wides from 16-35mm f2.8 and a bunch of 2.8 fisheyes. On the GH1? Well you know what the cropping does. In the end though - the lack of fast lenses isn't what has bothered me most about the GH1 so far. So put this complaint low on the list. I could deal with the lens options for the GH1. Would have to hope that their 7-14mm f4 doesn't cost $1400. Because there's not a whole lot more out there in the wide lens options for it.

I agree that when you are being exacting with a production, you need as much control as possible. The 5DMkII is full of frustration in that regard. However, I thought about what I'm personally wanting to do with it, and my approach will be much more experimental and philosophically geared towards letting go of the obsession with control. To that end, I like how with the 5D, I started to care less about shutter speed and ISO, and more about dialing in an aperture on my Nikon lenses, adjusting exposure with a dial, locking it and go.

Well, what I do know is I can open up a .mov file off a CF card from the 5D in QuickTime Player, make a selection and save that as a new file with hardly any effort. I know I can't do anything of the sort with AVCHD.

Well, I was thinking also that I didn't *need* all that DOF. But I reconsidered what I was wanting to do artistically, and I came to the conclusion that I want as shallow as I can get *as an option*. And at whatever focal length I want - from wide to telephoto. I know I can do that with full frame.

With that said, I do agree that shallow DOF isn't everything, and often dof chosen is way too shallow. For example, I still prefer to see events and sports with a great DOF (most things in focus). I also agree that the GH1 sensor size has plenty of shallow DOF - read my prior posts on that.

Well Fei, you got me! I'm not. I've resumed my interest in the GH1, even though I have the 5DMkII hitting my hands tomorrow. It's only money right! Looks like we'll have to wait awhile though.

-steev

A lot of people deciding to use this professionally despite the limitations, and I'd say they aren't just wooing their friends in the living room.

Shot entirely on 5DMkII - The Other Side - Ghost Whisperer - CBS.com

5DMkII used on select shots - YouTube - Hoobastank - So Close, So Far

And a ton of professional wedding videos (they make money). The list is getting mighty long now.

I'm surprised by the ambition taken with this camera. Collectively, people are saying "we're going to use this no matter what."

It'll be interesting to see if the GH1 makes it as far in usage. I think it probably will.

-steev

GH1 and Jello effect when panning fast.
 

From what I have read, GH1 has a problem with jello effect when panning fast. I tried this with my 5D2 and can't seem to see any jello effect. Plus night shot with 5D2 is really good. I wonder if the smaller 4/3 sensor will do well in low light. So far we have seen footage of GH1 night shot at low resolution. Wonder how it would look on a FullHD tv.

Actually the skew is much better in the GH-1 as compared to the D90 and 5Dll.

Edit: Check out this video. First part is handheld (shakey)...but looking at this tells me if a decent DOP got his hands on this cam like Vincent L. then there would be lots of beautiful pictures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t7xHgOHxl8&fmt=22

You cannot mention d90 and 5dmii in the same sentence here. The d90 is much worse I believe... About the GH1 I've heard very conflicting information about this, I guess we'll just have to wait a little bit longer before we know anything at all about that one.

In low light, I don't think there is any contest, the Canon looks to be a real benchmark here and it's never been one of the strong points four thirds. The GH1 does look like it will do pretty well in this department though, especially when compared to other camcorders.

On the Jello, it's still a case of waiting for real tests. Interestingly, I heard about a new helmet cam today, ContourHD Helmet Camera Features
It's designed for fast action, but still appears to suffer from some rolling shutter problems. Cool little helmet cam though.

Adrian

I know how that is. Everyone does that. Like I said in another post, I've had a lot of debates with myself, some of which has involved "writing off the 5D Mk II" in order to justify giving into the temptation of committing to the GH1. By that I mean that I've stressed to myself the very disadvantages of my beloved new camera that I told myself to ignore in order to convince myself to buy it in the first place.

To each his own. But again, the problem is that nobody has yet done for the GH1 what Laforet did for the 5D. There's a LOT of 5D footage that is "boring" and uninspiring to me. And I had to talk myself into accepting the very "digital" quality of its look that I hadn't seen in D90 footage.

How do you know that if Laforet had used the GH1 instead of the 5D, the GH1 wouldn't look similar? Again, all of the night footage on the GH1 so far has been poorly shot. We're talking poor lighting, framing, and locations. Some guy was impressed with low-light footage of a Sony AVCHD camcorder compared to the GH1. You know the clip that I mean. He was impressed with something that I thought looked terrible. So it's all very subjective.

Actually, to me, lack of control isn't what has bothered me most about the 5D. It's the fact that I have no idea what settings the camera is actually using in video mode. The information that it gives you when using the half-shutter-press is only an approximation for still mode, not what the camera is using for video. I recently did a camera test in extreme low light. We're talking ten tealight candles only. The camera reported a shutter speed of 1/5s, which is impossible for video. Exposure compensation wasn't working in this extremely lighting situation. I think that's when the first big crack in my love for the 5D appeared.

Why would you need to do that? Why not just drop the footage in an NLE and save a step?

True, but also consider than in order to get a DOF closer to regular 35mm film, you have to stop-down the lens, which comes with its own pros and cons. I personally like the fact that I have to open up the aperture in order to get shallower DOF on the GH1, because more light gets collected, improving performance. Also, a wide-open lens will always have the "best" bokeh.

My problem with this argument is that there is an ambiguity about what you are using as a reference point. Are you accustomed to shooting with full-frame cameras? The whole concept of "35mm equivalent" focal lengths is using full-frame as the reference, despite relatively few people shooting full-frame in the vast majority of scenarios. The size of a 35mm film frame is roughly equivalent to APS-C. So with 35mm film movie cameras and still cameras, there has ALWAYS been a "crop factor." A 20mm lens on a film SLR is not the same as 20mm on a full-frame DSLR. So there is little substance to the phrase "whatever focal length I want," because you haven't specified what your frame of reference is.

I can get the jello easily on my 5D. In fact, if I merely stuck a 135mm lens on it and started to pan steadily, the jello already appears. The rolling shutter on the 5D is a very good one, but not as good as high-end prosumer camcorders like the EX1. People who have extensively tested the GH1 so far have reported that the rolling shutter is EX1/RED-level. So that's amazing.

Yep it sucks, but on the other hand, I have an appreciation for where it steers in me in my thinking right now - choose my aperture on any Nikon lens, let the camera auto expose, adjust it brighter or darker with the wheel, lock it and record.

If I wanted more control? I may buy the GH1 when it's available, go throw together my Redrock Micro on my HVX, rent a Red One, or later this year or eventually S35 Scarlet may be in my hands on a daily basis. The 5DMkII is for a different purpose for me.


Let's say I liked merely one part of one clip out of 10GB of footage. I can easily browse through them all in the finder in Mac OS X, then open it in QuickTime Player, then just save that part out and trash the rest.


Yes, and the big pro here is getting some seriously shallow dof.


My frame of reference is 35mm adapter work - my own and RedRock Micro, as well as still photography (back in the day). The crop factor - yes, there's always been a crop factor, but I've gotten really used to my 20mm being wide, not normal, as it would be on the GH1. And to get that, I'd have to grab a 10mm lens, and I have not seen one single fast lens that wide (f1.8-2.8). Additionally my beloved 105mm micro nikkor is pretty useless to me on a GH1. It was already at the far end of as telephoto as I was wanting.

So, yeah, if you think differently about focal lengths and don't care about fast wides, and invest in some 4/3rds lenses, the GH1 can be pretty awesome.

Bottom line for me - I see the GH1 as a killer tool. The footage I've seen this week has been impressive and changed my mind on a few points. However, my observation on compression artifacts seems to be correct. And with that, I think I may be done with the dichotomous "this or that" part of the debate.

I may end up owning both. Or wait until my employer pays for the Scarlet S35.

-steev

Fei Meng...it absolutely looks that way. For starters check out this clip of a train. Halfway through you will see a traini zipping by very fast....take notice of the skew. It's so minimal that I'm shocked to say the least. Don't get me wrong...it's definitely present...but if that were the D90 or 5Dll...the lean would look a lot more.

YouTube - LUMIX GH1 ?????

And if you want to see some great shots....check out Phil Bloom's stuff on Vimeo here. Thia was shot using the slow(er) stock lens.

Panasonic Lumix GH1. First footage on Vimeo

Imagine Panasonic decided to put this in their camcorders.

Dof
 

Now I'm a bit confuse with DOF in FF and Cropped Sensor:

I did two test with a 5D MKII

ImageShack - Image Hosting :: 5dmkii200mmf28.jpg

and with a Cropped Sensor 400D

ImageShack - Image Hosting :: 400d200mmf28.jpg

Maybe I'm wrong but I'm not getting the same DOF in booths Test. The Focus is in 20mm

Thanks

I think you posted this in the wrong section of the forum.

But to answer your question, I don't think DOF has anything to do with what size sensor you use. As long as your lens aperture is set the same, the same DOF effect will happen no matter what size sensor it is. Just that the field of view of a larger sensor is more than that of a smaller sensor. Imagine the 400D image is cropped from part of the 5DmkII image. That's what it is essentially.

Just my thoughts.

I agree. This discussion is about 5DMkII vs GH1.

This is false. Sensor size has a strong relation to depth of field. Why do you think a 1/3" sensor and a FF sensor vary in depth of field so much?

To bring this back on topic, I had started earlier on in this thread about comparing the dof on GH1's smaller sensor size vs the 5DMkII's larger sensor size beginning here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/1035594-post5.html

It's been hashed out already. All things being equal, the depth of field will be shallower on the 5DMkII with the larger sensor. And that can be good or bad depending on your goal.

p.s.

You're right that the DOF is not the same. However, you have an error in your test. You'd want to compare equivalent focal length lenses compensated for the crop factor. The field of view of a 200mm lens on the 5DMkII would be around 122mm on the 400D, since the 400D's sensor is .6111 the size of the 5DMkII sensor size.

My math:
22mm sensor width on 400D divided by 36mm 5DMkII sensor size width = .6111
200mm lens x.6111 = 122mm

No, indeed Alex is right (and I never thought of that before Alex mentionned it), you will always get the same DOF as long as your absolute aperture is the same. Picture the physic behind that, shallow DOF emerge from light coming from different direction. Only aperture has an influence on that, not sensor size.
In the industry when you have bigger sensor, you tend to have bigger aperture (easier to build it that way beause of optic manufacturing limitations), but in fact only aperture matters for DOF control.

On a technical level, looks like I'm wrong.

Depth of Field and the Small-Sensor Digital Cameras - photo.net

Digital Camera Sensor Sizes: How it Influences Your Photography

Meanwhile, it's been far easier to think in terms of sensor sizes relating to dof. My 1/3" and 1/2" sensor size cameras have a deeper dof than my 35mm sensor size cameras.

Have fun figuring it all out!

The way I see it, you can use a normal 35mm lens to create an image on the sensor, but it would mean the focal length of the lens in relation to the sensor would be say for a 20mm FL will be probably 4 times that (just a random figure plugged out of the air) for the sensor. Just like a 20mm FL lenses will be approximately 32mm on a cropped 1.6x sensor.

That 80mm FL on the 1/3" sensor might not be practical for normal shooting.

For instance on my 350D and using a 50mm lens, we are talking about 80mm equivalent. I had to move back more than 2m just to get the subject in frame. Imagine how far you will have to move away from the subject in order to frame subject on a 1/3" sensor.

I hazard to say the design of the lens on a 1/3" sensor would be different as compared to a DSLR to take into account of the smaller sensor.

Anyway I could be way wrong but it make sense to me.

Yeah, that's why if you crop an FF image you'll get deeper focus... Oh, wait a minute?!

It's the focal length and aparture. Nothing else. But a 50mm focal length is extreme tele on smaller sensors. (cropped full frame and zoomed in)