Search the Community

It's the eleventh hour for the GH2, but it will still be a few months before I have its replacement in my hands so I am still trying to get the best possible performance out of it. And I'd still like to hang onto it as a B-cam, but not until I work some issues out. I did a full-range ISO test of my GH2 with the Flowmotion 2.02 settings, starting at 12800 and working my way down to 160. I did this after reading a little more about the GH2 ISO bug. Initially, I had read that if you wanted to use ISOs 320, 640 or 1250, you had to switch the camera on and first go to [i]any[/i] higher ISO, and then back to one of these three to minimize noise. Then I did some more reading on Personal-View and apparently what you want to do is go to the next ISO increment up, and then back down to the desired setting (so if you want ISO 320, go to ISO 400, then back to 320; if you want 640, go to 800, then back to 640). This seemed to result in a MUCH cleaner image than my initial tests with the first image. The footage is pretty usable up to ISO 1250, at least with the Flowmotion hack. What really surprised me was this: [img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_13/gallery_18451_13_3510.jpg[/img] ISO 160 Flowmotion 2.02 Noise enhanced for visibility 500% crop [img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_13/gallery_18451_13_74801.jpg[/img] ISO 320 Flowmotion 2.02 Noise enhanced for visibility 500% crop This tells me that working around the ISO bug as I have talked about above, ISO 320 is actually much [i]cleaner[/i] than 160. In fact, it's the cleanest ISO (at least with this hack on my camera). Thoughts?

The official EOSHD sticky topic for GH4 users.

Y'all know what Darias Khondji and Dean Cundey, Kovaks, Carpenter, Storaro, Toland, Conrad Hall, Harris Savides and pretty much anyone you can think of and dozens you can't, guys who shoot great looking stuff on purpose, not by accident, not because they got lucky but by design and through their own effort and expertise, either for the selfish benefit of the image itself or in service to the story, you know what they did so that they could do that stuff when it count, when they were getting paid to do what they did, when dozens if not hundreds of people were depending on them, waiting on them, when possibly millions of dollars were on the line or potentially rendered forfeit, you know what they were doing so that they could do what they did?   They were shooting tests.   Every camera.  Every lens.  Thoroughly.  They didn't waste other people's times learning what they could and couldn't do under a variety of common or unique circumstances on-the-clock.  They're smart enough to realize the occasional "happy accident" of a flare or focus pull or color combination or Golden Triangle configuration that just happend to occur at just the right time such that a most amazingly emotional chord is struck when the image is viewed by most humans is great but discovering that that last take, the one where the set/car/character/town is destroyed by fire, the giant monster is blown up, the command shuttle breaks apart the rented helicopter is finally, perfectly aligned with the setting sun to create a perfect silhouette through rippling heat refraction in some exotic locale on their last day of access or visa or the last raw nerve of some local potentate or executive producer isn't wasted because they didn't know WTF they were doing and just hoping for the best.     They weren't satisfied knowing the stuff they were using was expensive, or from a well known pedigree, or supposedly crafted by Santa Claus's most talented, clever elves, or promised in some way to never fuck up, under any circumstance, with any other combination of previous, contemporary or future widgets made by Satan Claus or the Easter Bunny or Baby Jesus.  They had to know.  So they could do it.  On purpose.  On demand.  Repeatedly.    They shot tests.   What they likely didn't do, for all sorts of reasons, is share these tests with the world, in a public venue, so that others at, below or above their stature and experience could comment on, learn from, share, ridicule or improve upon.  (this last bit was my maybe cryptic way of saying we should be lucky we're in a community where ideas and techniques are shared openly and not hoarded.  I'm not saying "stop posting tests" and non-narrative videos)   edit: TLDR version -- y'all stop marginalizing folks posting test videos because that's how you familiarize yourself with your gear enough to be useful to yourself and anyone else.  It's what the  name brand pros do so snarky comments about yet-another-boring-test-video are really just ignorant.

Just did some lens tests with the GH3 vs GH2 w/ Flow Motion v2.02 hack.  Information below:   GH2 vs GH3 Night Lens Test Panasonic GH2 w/ Flow Motion v2.02 Hack, Vivid -2,-2,-2,-2 Panasonic GH3, Vivid -3,-5,-4,-5 Lenses used: Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm F1.4 Canon FD 50mm F1.2L Canon FD 85mm F1.2L Canon EF 100mm Macro F2.8 Perspective is different even though I used them on the same tripod.  GH2 is 1.86x sensor crop, GH3 is 2x sensor crop.   In very dark situations the GH3 is noticeably brighter, about 2/3 of a stop.  I tried to compensate by making the GH2 1 stop ISO brighter.  But by doing so makes the GH2 have more noise and have "milky" blacks.  Color correction is very difficult with the GH2 even with the hack.  The GH3 does much better in this regard, although detail might be a little lower.   http://youtu.be/KM_6ZKCFuPs   http://youtu.be/6pwNZxfa1uM   http://youtu.be/_UK0Ck7jQbM