UPDATE – full HD version now available [url]http://www.vimeo.com/15826664
It appears Panasonic have done a superb job. This footage is only Vimeo 720p and the camera isn’t representative of the final build, but it’s totally free from the kind of flakiness we’ve been used to with DSLRs. This image shows no sign of aliasing. As a result it looks smooth, detailed and rock-solid. Another benefit of no aliasing is no moire. Fine details have no false colour.
From the production team at Crews.tv:
This test was done purely as an experiment to evaluate its performance as a Film making / Television production tool. We did not test it against charts or other cameras, we simply took it for a test drive in what we thought would be its optimal conditions. Our goal was not to find its faults or decide its place in the market nor was it to choose sides in the ever political best camera debates. We are cinematographers who love their craft and love the tools that give us this ability.
Due to web compression the video shows some noise, but apart from that it looks flawless. Obviously the original 100Mbit output from the AF100’s HD-SDI will look even better by an order of magnitude.
The team also used some very nice lenses for the test.
The camera is capable of 35mm lenses, so we used a PL adapter and Zeiss Ultra Primes , choosing from our set as we saw fit on the day. We chose to record on the on-board SD cards with the AVCHD codec at 24 mbs but we also opted to use the HDSDI output, recording at 100 mbs on the AVC Intra HD codec to P2 cards. We opted to do this rather than recording to Nanoflash simply to keep it all Panasonic native.
The footage is not from the 24Mbit AVCHD, it is rendered from the HD-SDI output. Clearly the image scaling is great and HD-SDI is a great feature, but I’d now like to see how the AF100’s AVCHD at 24mbit stands up alongside it.
According to one member of the team, he commented on Vimeo that the AVCHD holds up surprisingly well.
More to come, I’m sure.
