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So I played with the GH4 this afternoon at Jessops, Oxford Street, London. Although I spent around an hour with the camera, I was not allowed to record any footage to my SD card as the Panasonic rep said that the unit was a pre-production model without the release firmware. Being a nice chap, he did allow me to test many of the video functions and looked closely at the 2 Cinelike profiles the camera has, Cinelike D and Cinelike V. I've never held a GH series camera in my hand before, so I was very suprised by the light weight of it. I'm used to the weight of my 5D MKIII with lump of L glass, so it was lovely to hold a camera that felt so nice in my hand. The OLED screen was very sharp and clear and worked perfectly to pull focus. The EVF was bright and full of detail. The eye piece was ultra comfortable. Focus peaking worked an absolute treat. A quick word about the autofocusing, its very impressive and I noticed no 'hunting'. I think it will be pefect for shooting with the 96fps function when you want to track something that is moving at speed. The Cinelike profiles look interesting and I believe no footage we've seen so far has used these profiles to capture footage. Cinelike D is pretty much like a Technicolour style flat profile which is probably going to be the most used one on the GH4. Cinelike V seems to crush all the shadows into black and I found it hard to see what purpose this profile would serve. The DR of the GH4 looks really good. Even though we were inside near the back of the store, when shooting out towards the windows, plenty of detail was retained outside. I know on my 5D, lots of it would have been blown out, almost white! Unfortunately, I was not able to look for moire or aliasing as we could not connect the GH4 to a monitor and it was too hard to notice it on the OLED or EVF as they are too small. In all, its a great camera and I can't wait to see more footage from it in the coming weeks. I did get the Panasonic rep to watch my showreel and while winking at him said I've love to shoot something for them :) If you have any Q's please feel free to ask. Finally, some photos of the Cinelike profiles, this is the best I could do :( '> '> '> '> Adrian

On paper,.. for a gh4 in non 4k mode you'll need a 25mm at f1.4 (approx) to match the depth of field / field of view equivalent to what you're seeing on your 50mm at f2.8 on full frame. in gh4 in 4k mode you'll need a approximately an18mm f0.95 to get an equivalent of what you're used to seeing from a 50mm f2.8 on full frame. And thus, the m4/3 system becomes less and less appealing from the viewpoint of someone used to the full frame look. the 'equivalent' we all use as comparisons is also a very loose term very few people consider properly. for example, a fast wide lens on a small sensor will never resolve the same in/out of focus information in the same way as a longer lens on a bigger sensor, despite showing the same field of view and ratio between focused subject and maximum defocused subject. The dof will be a lot less forced on the bigger sensor, and to me I find this a more attractive aesthetic. This aesthetic tends to be cherished more by still photographers, hence the natural progression from 35mm film was to move to medium format or bigger. It's harder to demonstrate the intricate differences, but it becomes even more apparent when you look at large format photography and their use of a 250mm lens for a 'normal' focal length and you see just how much control of in and out of focus subjects the photographer has at their fingertips. and that '3D pop' you get. The rolloff is completely different.

To calculate DOF I use this: http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html It's extremely useful :) I am in a similar boat. I have MFT camera at the moment but would like to get a Canon 6d (compared to the 5d3 it has less noise at high ISOs and is smaller). MFT is very good, but that lack of DOF is always at the back of my mind.

The design condition for an anamorphic lens is always at the infinity focus state (afocal rule). So if a lens is stated at 1.5x it means this is true only for an object focused at infinity. Objects focused at close range will exhibit lower stretch, perhaps as low as 70% of the rated stretch at say 0.5m. This is the reason behind the mumps phenomenon in projected films.

You want the shallow DOF look so stick with full frame and get a 5d3 and experiment with MLRAW. Getting shallow DOF from M43 requires expensive and exotic fast glass and even then it's debatable if it actually convincingly achieves the 'full frame look'. I doubt the GH4 will have significantly better DR than the GH3 - Panasonic claim 1/3 stop better DR for RAW and this may translate into nothing for video. Stills quality from a 5d2 is better than from a GH3 (speaking from owning both) so that's another reason for you not to jump. I've moved my video capture like this 5D2 - GH3 - BMPCC. I actually hate shallow DOF cinema style and so the BMPCC suits me perfectly. Once you have used 10bit 4.2.2 in post you will never want to deal with 8bit 4.2.0 again if you can help it. For stills I still use the Canon system although I may get a Sony A7R and eos adapter as Canon don't seem in any hurry to update the 5d3 to competitive levels of DR or MP......

I confirmed just in the last week my suspicion that 5DtoRGB improved even All-Intra footage and this was visible with a simple A-B between the two clips lined up on top of each other, in both Premiere and After Effects, without any special tricks to highlight the differences (being slightly zoomed in did help, however). Boundaries where the edges of very colorful objects meet darker parts of the image were smoother in the transcoded Prores. In the instance of two brightly colored objects that overlap or otherwise share an edge this smoothness was even more apparent. I also noticed areas with chroma noise being overall a little smoother (though that was only really apparent under magnification) Not all footage will show off the improvement of course. You need to look at the kinds footage or subject scenarios that hits color under-sampling where it lives. Then decide how much "better" is worth the investment to actually do work with the better methodology. Premiere and After Effects show a slight difference in their handling of the AVCHD footage. My guess is because you engage Premiere's precision as a render setting, meaning any interactive color correction is only semi WYSIWYG, unlike After Effects which has a color managed viewport. Premiere does no chroma filtering of AVCHD to the viewer. It might when you crank up the rendering precision and be somewhat closer to After Effects quality. After Effects does seem to do some form of chroma filtering to AVCHD footage when dropped into a 32bit project file. It just doesn't do as good a job as 5DtoRGB. Unlike Premiere, however, now I figure I can manually filter the chroma on the AVCD in After Effects and be as good as the 5DtoRGB filtering and skip the transcode if I'm finishing in After Effects, which is generally the case.

Going from 420 to 422 is only going to (possibly) improve the horizontal chroma. If the tool is improving quality better than an NLE, ideally you'd go to 444 (both horizontal and vertical). One way to test to see what's going on is to bring in both clips (transcoded and original) to the NLE and place on the timeline/sequence, one above the other. Then set the top track blend mode to Subtract. Add a gamma filter/effect to the top clip and crank it up until you can start to see differences. Another test is to bring the clips in and just A/B (track toggle) the two clips. If you can't see any difference visually, not worth it to transcode (even if you see a difference with the Subtract+gamma test). Pascal's two clips differ in a major gamma/contrast shift.

I had the same dilemma as you... but I quickly got over it. I've had a 5D MKIII since it was launched and back then, the quality of the H.264 was decent enough. Since ML gave us RAW, I've been shooting nothing but RAW ever since. ML RAW is amazing and I never thought I'd own a camera that could shoot such beautiful footage as it does... Unfortunately, it is still only a hack and even though it is getting more and more stable, you cannot trust it on a paid job. It will crash on you or it will stop recording due to a bug and it will happen during an important take or during a moment which once missed will be gone forever. This was unfortunate enough to happen to me a month ago and it was not a plesant experience. It actually made me look like quite a fool and potentially has lost me more work with that client. I Pre-Ordered the GH4 without too much thought. It will without doubt shoot some of the best 1080p we've seen from a stills/video camera. Most of the sample videos being uploaded by testers are not so good, likely to be because they are photographers with no real interest in the GH4's video capabilities. A few good videos are starting to surface though. I really would like to see something shot with the Cinelike profiles. I'd obviously love to stay with Canon as I've invested a lot of money on some fine EF glass and the thought of having to start from scratch with MFT is a little daunting, but exciting. It would be great if Metabones hurried up with their EF to MFT adaptor, but there is no sign of it still. I will most likely replace my EF glass with the nice SLR Magic Cine lenses. Maybe Canon will suprise us at NAB, but doubtful. P.S - Anyone in London should get to Jessops on Oxford Street tommorow. They will have a fully working GH4 there between 10am and 4pm. I'll be heading down there with a fast SD card... fingers crossed!

the guy you're filming is a madman. i had sweaty palms watching it. i'd love the guts to do that.

overlay a fine 4k grain. gives vimeo something to bite into and it sees the grain as detail that needs to stay.

Personally I can't live with the small sensors for stills, I even bought some medium and large format film cameras recently because DOF always works better on larger sensors. 25mm f0.95 will give you very shallow but bad DOF, with just some part of the eyes in focus, large format gives you better blur in the background and better sharpness "rolloff" at the same equivalent aperture.

Funny story, I actually went from hybrid to full frame recently. I sold my GH2 to get a 5D mkII and am using the RAW hack for video. I'm glad I did. crop sensors just were not my thing. Maybe, in some world, using both can bring good results? I understand we're not all millionairs, but having a 5D with full frame glass is far from a bad investment for photography and you can use your fullframe glass on your cropsensor camera. GH4...let's just wait a bit. The footage i have seen so far is far from anything groundbreaking. I still prefer the RAW look of full frame 5D than BMCC, even though it in theory has more dynamic range. But hey... OPINIONS

Since I don't always want to fire up my videos in an editing program when I do some quick viewings of the shots, here's how to use VLC for viewing footage in different aspect ratios. On VLC in Windows it is easy: - go to Preferences -> All -> Video and you'll find a field where you can enter custom aspect ratios, separated by commas. Keep in mind that VLC only wants whole numbers without decimals, so to get 2.66:1 and 3.55:1 ratios, you would type in: 266:1,355:100 On VLC in Mac OS X: - There isn't unfortunately not anywhere to input this in the application interface, and I just spent some time figuring this out and I'm sharing the howto for you guys, since I couldn't find this information anywhere else on the net! 1) Locate the VLC preferences file: ~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc/vlcrc Note: ~ equals your home folder for your user, e.g. /Users/myusername. The preferences file is created the first time you run VLC, like Caleb mentions further down in this forum thread. You might want to make a copy of this file before you edit it, just in case... 2) Look for the line that says (lines marked with a # character in front are comments that are ignored by VLC): # Custom aspect ratios list (string) #custom-aspect-ratios= After that, just add a line that says: custom-aspect-ratios=266:100,300:100,355:100 Then you will get the custom aspect ratios 266:100, 300:100 and 355:100 (2.66:1, 3:1, 3.55:1) to choose from in the VLC interface (Video -> Aspect ratio in the menu). Again, keep in mind that VLC won't accept decimals like 2.35:1 for custom aspect ratios. They must be entered like 235:100.