drokeby

The other thing that these aspect ratios offer that I haven't heard much talk about is that you have a completely different set of reframing options for 1080p. I often produce video for portrait orientation, and the 1:1 gives the option of copping to 1080p in either orientation, with plenty of reframing room on top.

Clearly the current 96fps is not really 1080p, but we also know that at 96 fps, it is having to skip over pixels to get the image. In ex-tele 1:1 pixel readout, the reading of the sensor would be much more efficient (no skipping / waiting to skip pixels, and no filtering of the result on the fly either). Many of the industrial image sensors use variable windowing allowing you to freely grab any smaller portion of the sensor at higher frame rates. Perhaps read back access to the GH4 sensor is more constrained than that and Panasonic is doing something funky to access the sensor for 96 fps... some sort of special access that only works at very specific rates and resolutions. If so, this may be why we cannot engage ex-tele crop mode in 96 fps currently. But certainly the rate that pixels must be read off the sensor for 4K at 30fps is higher than the rate that 1080p read off at 96 fps in crop mode.

This is slightly off-topic, but in addition to wondering why Panasonic has not implemented a cinemascope aspect ratio along with 1:1, 3:2 and 4:3, I find myself wondering why there is no ex-tele option for 96 fps. I am not sure how they actually sample the sensor to do 96 fps, but they do seem to be doing something funky that results in lower image quality, like strong filtering to hide line-skipping. If they did a one-to-one readout as in ex-tele, for 96 fps, we might get a much cleaner and crisper 3 x slomo, and some extra lens flexibility at the same time. Since they are reading over 8 million pixels 30 times a second in 4K, reading 1/4 of that 96 times a second should be well within the capacity of the processor and sensor. Indeed, 120 fps would be an equivalent pixel rate. Wouldn't that be nice!

It would be a nice addition for Panasonic to implement a Cinemascope aspect ratio right in camera using as much of the width of the sensor as possible. It is nice to have 2880 vertical resolution for anamorphic but the horizontal resolution suffers. (Not to deny the value of the special look of anamorphic lenses) The sensor is 4608 pixels wide. 4608 / 2.35 is just over 1960. 4608 x 1960 is a few more pixels than 3840 x 2160 (9,031,680 versus 8,294,400) and just a bit larger than 4096x2160 (8,847,360 total pixels). One would assume that they could do 4608 x 1960 at 24 fps at least. I would love to have that frame width! Or they could do 4512 x 1920 (8,663,040) or stick to their current pixel count at 4414 × 1878 (8,289,492) for 30 fps. David