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Panasonic G85 review - is there any need to get an Olympus E-M1 Mark II for video?


Andrew Reid
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Here's a more fine-grained test, comparing reducing contrast to -2 versus lifting shadows +2. These were taken this morning shortly before and after a rainstorm, so the lighting conditions changed at times while I was shooting - so a couple of clips may be a bit too bright, others a bit too dark. Tell me what you think.

 

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On 1/5/2017 at 11:13 PM, toxotis70 said:

do you think its 1 stop better than gh4 in low light - high iso ?

I would never have shot over ISO 800 with the GH4. If you watched my videos or those of Fredrik's you'd see that the shadows are cleaner at higher ISOs with the G85.

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2 hours ago, jonpais said:

Here's a more fine-grained test, comparing reducing contrast to -2 versus lifting shadows +2. These were taken this morning shortly before and after a rainstorm, so the lighting conditions changed at times while I was shooting - so a couple of clips may be a bit too bright, others a bit too dark. Tell me what you think.

I downloaded the 4k file and made some screencaps for anyone who is interested:

vlcsnap-2017-01-07-13h47m21s145.png

vlcsnap-2017-01-07-13h47m38s203.png

vlcsnap-2017-01-07-13h47m55s900.png

To me, they are pretty near to each other, e.g. I dont seen any night / day like difference (if you guys do, maybe thats actually a thing that I dont see it, means I am easier to please :D). However, I believe that the highlight rolloff and shadow detail is best on Contrast -2,  but then again I stared at those screencaps for quite some time...

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4 hours ago, jonpais said:

Here's a more fine-grained test, comparing reducing contrast to -2 versus lifting shadows +2. These were taken this morning shortly before and after a rainstorm, so the lighting conditions changed at times while I was shooting - so a couple of clips may be a bit too bright, others a bit too dark. Tell me what you think.

 

Jon just wondering what lens you are using for these tests?

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2 hours ago, jase said:

To me, they are pretty near to each other, e.g. I dont seen any night / day like difference (if you guys do, maybe thats actually a thing that I dont see it, means I am easier to please :D). However, I believe that the highlight rolloff and shadow detail is best on Contrast -2,  but then again I stared at those screencaps for quite some time...

I had a difficult time deciding which I liked most, too!

1 hour ago, mattpitts74 said:

Jon just wondering what lens you are using for these tests?

The Leica Nocticron.

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So I've been reading old panasonic white papers trying to figure out their Cinelike D and Cinelike V curve. Cinelike D always reminded me of SONY's cinegamma so I had to experiment with it. Anyway according to the panasonic white paper's you must underexpose by 1/2 a stop to expose the curve correctly. This makes sense cause overexposure with cinelike d looks particularly horrible. With all settings at defaults with the exception of -5 NR and -5 sharpness I got spectacular results underexposing cinelike D by 1 to 2/3 of a stop ! 

I am not planning to run a bunch of tests so I am sticking with the Cine gamma curves. 200-800 ISO is ideal for the G85 sensor with a slight dip in DR above 400. I keep my NR to -5 as the NR can be really aggressive above 800 iso.. My next two tests will be for in camera sharpness and saturation on both cine profiles. I notice at 0 saturation with Cinelike D the image looks hella saturated but the color rarely clips. The saturation was built specifically for this gamma curve. Panasonic obviously knew what they were doing when they made the cine gamma and the only thing that should be tampered with is the in camera sharpness. I think we are over thinking these settings....

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16 minutes ago, kidzrevil said:

So I've been reading old panasonic white papers trying to figure out their Cinelike D and Cinelike V curve. Cinelike D always reminded me of SONY's cinegamma so I had to experiment with it. Anyway according to the panasonic white paper's you must underexpose by 1/2 a stop to expose the curve correctly. This makes sense cause overexposure with cinelike d looks particularly horrible. With all settings at defaults with the exception of -5 NR and -5 sharpness I got spectacular results underexposing cinelike D by 1 to 2/3 of a stop ! 

I am not planning to run a bunch of tests so I am sticking with the Cine gamma curves. 200-800 ISO is ideal for the G85 sensor with a slight dip in DR above 400. I keep my NR to -5 as the NR can be really aggressive about -5. My next two tests will be for in camera sharpness and saturation on both cine profiles. I notice at 0 saturation with Cinelike D the image looks hella saturated but the color rarely clips. The saturation was built specifically for this gamma curve. Panasonic obviously knew what they were doing when they made the cine gamma and the only thing that should be tampered with is the in camera sharpness. I think we are over thinking these settings....

I really like Noam Kroll's cinelikeD settings. Contrast 0 Sharpness -5 NR -5 Saturation -5. With cineV he flipped the Contrast to -5 and Saturation to 0.

I exclusively have been using cineD with saturation at -5 as Kroll suggested. I do my post with a MacBook Air and the monitor does not calibrate well so since saturation in Panasonic cameras seems to be so robust, as you mentioned, I prefer to record less in camera. But I just got my GH4 this morning and only did a quick cat test in the 200mbps all-i... so we'll see when I get some further testing in. 

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1 hour ago, mercer said:

I really like Noam Kroll's cinelikeD settings. Contrast 0 Sharpness -5 NR -5 Saturation -5. With cineV he flipped the Contrast to -5 and Saturation to 0.

I exclusively have been using cineD with saturation at -5 as Kroll suggested. I do my post with a MacBook Air and the monitor does not calibrate well so since saturation in Panasonic cameras seems to be so robust, as you mentioned, I prefer to record less in camera. But I just got my GH4 this morning and only did a quick cat test in the 200mbps all-i... so we'll see when I get some further testing in. 

the Noam Kroll settings work pretty well,his images always look so clean ! im playing with saturation as well, I think the ugliness in cine d comes from desaturating the color too much. My guess is that Panasonic designed the curve to pack in as much tonality and saturation as possible over the 8bit color space. It makes sense that they designed it to be shot underexposed as well hence the ugliness in the highlights when the image is undersaturated and exposed too brightly. Panasonic cameras lose saturation in the brighter areas of the image quickly so be careful with your saturation settings & exposure

also looking at the cinelike v gamma curve on the panasonic white papers it has the superior highlight rolloff compared to their other profiles. A tweaked cinelike v profile sounds to be ideal when you put things like noise and compression into perspective

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1 hour ago, kidzrevil said:

the Noam Kroll settings work pretty well,his images always look so clean ! im playing with saturation as well, I think the ugliness in cine d comes from desaturating the color too much. My guess is that Panasonic designed the curve to pack in as much tonality and saturation as possible over the 8bit color space. It makes sense that they designed it to be shot underexposed as well hence the ugliness in the highlights when the image is undersaturated and exposed too brightly. Panasonic cameras lose saturation in the brighter areas of the image quickly so be careful with your saturation settings & exposure

also looking at the cinelike v gamma curve on the panasonic white papers it has the superior highlight rolloff compared to their other profiles. A tweaked cinelike v profile sounds to be ideal when you put things like noise and compression into perspective

And he's a waaaay better colorist than I am, so he can stretch footage a little further than I can. I'll probably end up splitting the difference with saturation but I have to do some further testing. With the FZ2500, his numbers worked nicely for me, but we'll see. 

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9 minutes ago, kidzrevil said:

yeah these new wave of lumix cameras are amazing ! The G85 is giving me even better images than what I got in my gh4. Have you seen the gh5 footage ?

Yeah, both cameras look great. I have the GX85 and I noticed a slight tweak in color with it from the G7. If I didn't need the high bitrate 60p, I probably would have gone with the G85 instead of the GH4. The GH5 looks amazing, but again I am only interested in the high bitrate 1080p right now and since the 10bit 4:22 won't be released until April or the summer, I'll probably hold off a while. As soon as I am done this film I am working on, I am moving onto a BMPCC... I'll have the 10 bit 4:22 1080p... but that ibis does sound appealing. I loved it with the GX85... but one project at a time. But yeah... to answer your question... the footage coming out of the GH5 is insane. Really impressive. I dug your last video with the G85... how does it compare to the NX1 and XC10?

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its somewhere in the middle between the xc10 an the NX1 for me. It is sharp without being oversharpened like the GH4. Not as much resolution as the NX1 but this isn't a bad thing, the image looks more organic than the nx1. Also it doesn't give you crazy artifacts due to NR above ISO 500 like the xc10 ! Overall I like it, it definitely looks better with nikkor glass due to the speedbooster. The speedbooster adds extra character to this glass I can't quite explain it but long story short I love the g85

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1 hour ago, Grimor said:

What about people that recomend ETTR? I was thinking in Leeming Lut, when Paul's advice is to overexpose a little bit in Cine D.

I consistently found overexposing made color clip (especially red) in very weird ways. Setting the auto exposure to -1 or -2/3 a stop gave great results which is in accordance with Panasonic's documentation on the curve. I think ETTR works best with the non cine gamma curves since they are designed with a steeper curve

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18 hours ago, jonpais said:

Here's a more fine-grained test, comparing reducing contrast to -2 versus lifting shadows +2. These were taken this morning shortly before and after a rainstorm, so the lighting conditions changed at times while I was shooting - so a couple of clips may be a bit too bright, others a bit too dark. Tell me what you think.

 

standard is looking damn good straight out of the camera wow

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@jonpais

20 hours ago, jonpais said:

Here's a more fine-grained test, comparing reducing contrast to -2 versus lifting shadows +2. These were taken this morning shortly before and after a rainstorm, so the lighting conditions changed at times while I was shooting - so a couple of clips may be a bit too bright, others a bit too dark. Tell me what you think.

 

Wow...very beautiful with pleasant, organic color flair & balance I really like.

Quote

Standard photo style is for those who want to do minimal color correction in post; until I can grade as well as Noam Kroll, I'm going to avoid Cinelike.

Full ACK. It doesn't make sense to ruin very good, balanced colors with wannabe color correction or grading, at the end of the day it makes things worse and steals editors time without any benefit...In my eyes, it's NOT EASY AT ALL to apply a pleasant color correction or grading. It requires thousands of hours of experience, the fewest filmers have it. So the results would be rather a "color massacre", instead of improving original color look and balance.

Two questions:

  • You say, you used the Leica Nocticron F1.2 to shoot this footage...What about the look of footage shot with a Panasonic 42,5 mm F1.7 lens?
  • I assume, manual focusing...you shot this footage on tripod (it looks like this, because it's very stable), or handheld?

 

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