An adventure into the Panasonic GX85/80 begins - and a look at the Leica Nocticron for Micro Four Thirds

[DPC]

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how far I could open up the image...

For me, the original is a bit too flat.  I had to really pull it around to get this. 

 

 

[Kamil Sarnowski]

It is flat all right. Not the easiest sample to grade cause the sky quickly blows out. But I like a lot that colors doesn't fall apart easily so it seems reletive values are set up well .

[jase]

@Kamil Sarnowski: if i compare my skin right now with your shots, your first one is most accurate, it keeps a good balance between color and saturation.

This is my quick grade. It might be a tad on the darkside, but sun was already quite low, shining on me from the side angle.

[Kamil Sarnowski]

Jase: Thanks but I'm not yet convinced that it has hit a spot:) Building a good skin from flat without a proper lut is challenging. In your sample the most problematic issue to solve was to avoid greyness in darker parts of skin midtones (ex. deltoids in shadow). When the image is 8 bit flat and desaturated, increasing saturation makes an artificial "plastic" look (due to a math of most saturation tools). Usualy it can be avoided by adding previously extracted color layer (in davinci: ilumination at 0, in ps: add color over neutral grey layer). But it work only to some extend. Adding the same amount of sat to hi,mid,low also could mess an image up. Personaly I would experiment and not dial down the saturation in the camera. Lowering contrast values are great but lower saturation in 8bit could be inferior setup. But it shoud be a testing subject and not academic blablapotesis.

Have you got any portrait sample?

 

 

[DPC]

And from a pragmatic point of view, just how long do you want to spend in post? I try to find settings that get me as near as possible to my final result without compromising shadow and highlight detail. These aren't raw files. I work the way I would with JPEG stills. The biggest mistake I made on early jobs with a GH4 was filming too flat and not being able to acceptably restore contrast in skin tones. 

[fuzzynormal]

6 hours ago, DPC said:

filming too flat and not being able to acceptably restore contrast in skin tones. 

I like shooting 8-bit as close as I can to "done."  Bake a nice clean image right into the camera as you like it.

[markr041]

Comparing at ISO 6400 the GH4 and the GX85 in 4K (UHD) - same Lumix 25mm f1.7 lens, at f1.7, 1/60th shutter, AWB, ISO 6400, NR -2, histogram used to equalize exposure by manipulating the light source. No re-compression was applied to the files, so they are exactly what the cameras produced. You can see the greater crop factor for the GH4. GH4 is first.

 

[sanveer]

2 hours ago, markr041 said:

Comparing at ISO 6400 the GH4 and the GX85 in 4K (UHD) - same Lumix 25mm f1.7 lens, at f1.7, 1/60th shutter, AWB, ISO 6400, NR -2, histogram used to equalize exposure by manipulating the light source. No re-compression was applied to the files, so they are exactly what the cameras produced. You can see the greater crop factor for the GH4. GH4 is first.

 

I saw this video a few hours ago. I did not notice as great a difference as I was expecting (ala G7). But, the Crop factor on the GH4 is way too much. 

[Mattias Burling]

Thanks for that Mark. Seeing that the crop isn't so massive and the 20% discount I found made me order it.

Will see how it preforms next to the a6300.

(If any fellow swedes are interested the 20% is for the 20mm f1.7 kit at cyberphoto.se)

[Buckster]

same sensor as G7 I thought ?

[sanveer]

1 hour ago, Buckster said:

same sensor as G7 I thought ?

What sensor does duty in the GX85 is a Dirty Little Secret, NOBODY in Panasonic wants to talk about. 

[Buckster]

whatever sensor it is - I'm very impressed with it

pin "sharp", decent DR, and great colours

[PannySVHS]

On 12.7.2016 at 6:33 AM, John Matthews said:

Concerning white balance and other settings, I've been using Sunny (A3G3) and Tungsten(A3G3), depending on the project. I'm of the school of thought to maintain consistency and just stick with it, letting colors fall where they may. @Inazuma came up with A3G3. The reason for my using it was due to the blue channel dipping into the 0%-5%. Panasonic's implementation of the 8-bit codec is excellent, but there just isn't much information in that range because it (correctly) put most of the information in the 5%-95% range. The same thing happens at the 95%-100%. @jase is using a Tiffen filter to lower the contrast even further... resulting in a nice effect too. Finally, I think it's almost a toss-up between Standard or Natural, as long as everything is set at -5, the channels will be clean. I gave Natural a slight edge though.

Hallo John!

loving your findings. Went for the A3G3 and A3M9, but on my G6, outside in the late afternoon sun with WB at 7200 Kelvin, shot at Natural all -2.

The image out of cam looked so lala. I don´t know if the Canon FDs "attract" IR polution. The 28mm definately has not its strengths in strong sunlight compared

to the 20mm 1.7 Pana Lumix lens. Paired the FD with a China Booster.

But what amazed me was what kind of color I got from grading the footage, as always with my G6 I am amazed by the "hidden" color in that 24Mbit codec.

Curiosity enough, I shot 50fps for slomo, so only 28Mbits for twice the frames per second. Still, codec holds up amazingly well.

So can you explain your reasoning behind the A3G3 a little bit more. I don´t think I completely understood the technical aspects you were explaining.

 

By the way, grade is from the 28Mbits for 50p, so almost half of the 24p bitrate per frame!

 

Thanks a lot for your awesome contributions!

 

[Buckster]

5 hours ago, sanveer said:

I saw this video a few hours ago. I did not notice as great a difference as I was expecting (ala G7). But, the Crop factor on the GH4 is way too much. 

did you watch same video as me - substantial difference in background noise between the GH4 and GX85 in that test video

[alanpoiuyt]

Loaded up A3G3 on the white balance and Neutral -2. Looked good. Then I pulled out My A7s to refresh my memory what Brandon Li's Autumn Leaves -3,0,-3 looked like. Had to do some major grading to emulate the Sony. May have de-saturated the lemons a bit and the over-exposure of the auto ISO on the Panny didn't help but I thought the handheld stabilized sensor held up pretty well against the gimbal. All purely unscientific. Don't try this at home kids!

[tomastancredi]

4 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

But what amazed me was what kind of color I got from grading the footage, as always with my G6 I am amazed by the "hidden" color in that 24Mbit codec.

 

Indeed, amazing colors! beautiful...
how did you get that green? 

[sanveer]

14 hours ago, Buckster said:

did you watch same video as me - substantial difference in background noise between the GH4 and GX85 in that test video

I watched it on QHD Smartphone. There was fixed pattern noise in the background on the GH4, but it wasn't as much, as the difference between the G7 and the GH4. That was huge.

Maybe I need to watch this on a Bigger Screen. 

[John Matthews]

15 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

So can you explain your reasoning behind the A3G3 a little bit more. I don´t think I completely understood the technical aspects you were explaining.

Hallo @PannySVHS (German?),

Truth be told... I'm not an expert filmmaker or colorist. I'm just an English teacher who really likes filmmaking. When I purchased the GX80, I was very attracted to its feature set and form-factor. Now, I'm trying to find the best way to get the most our of it, either as a  gradable image or straight from camera. The way I have been trying for a gradable image (with filmconvert because it's easy) was to look into the red, blue, and green channels separately to evaluate them.

My informal evaluation showed this: the GX80 has a tendency for a noisy blue channel and a red channel with almost a "halo" effect to it. I know this because I downloaded camera files from expensive cameras to compare.

So for the WB A3G3 (which was a recommendation from @Inazuma) I could see that the blue channel got increased just a tad, keeping it further away from the bottom 5% IRE values in FCPX; hence, it had less clipping. IMO, the closer you get to the bottom or top 5% IRE, the more chances of clipping. I also liked the greens I could get after grading.

On 7/12/2016 at 11:55 AM, Kamil Sarnowski said:

When the image is 8 bit flat and desaturated, increasing saturation makes an artificial "plastic" look (due to a math of most saturation tools). Usualy it can be avoided by adding previously extracted color layer (in davinci: ilumination at 0, in ps: add color over neutral grey layer).

This is interesting, Kamil. I think I've seen the "plastic" look you're talking about, but not so much on the GX80 (or Panasonic) files. I've been told this before: don't reduce the saturation too much on a 8bit file... but why? I thought it was more about banding. Can you explain more? Also, some say with 8bit: "get as close to the final image you want in-camera." So, what are people shooting S-log, V-log, C-log? They've all got 8-bit versions, supposedly "ready" for grading, all of which look really flat and unusable out of camera.

Personally, I'm just trying to get the best, consistent, gradable image from the GX80 using it as the only "tool" I have? Since, Mr. Reid isn't publishing a more detailed review on its IQ, matters must be taken into my own hands. Any other suggestions?  

[Michael Coffee]

Gritty 

[Inazuma]

Personally I think that if you have a tendency to increase saturation in post then you should avoid setting it to -5 in camera because when you increase it in post it introduces more artefacts.