Bruce Dale of the National Geographic has shot this beautiful piece with the Panasonic GH2. The quality is seriously impressive! He presented the footage at Photokina yesterday and I was there to see it, looked fantastic on the big screen.
The only dissapointment is that my initial excitement about the sensor doing 1080/50p (60p in NTSC land) has been muted somewhat by the codec issues, storing it in 50i – there appears no way to get the overcranked 50p or 60p out of the interlaced AVCHD. I have the footage on my Macbook here in Germany from the prototype, and when deinterlaced I get 25p of course – not the original sensor output of 50p. But thankfully, we do still have the 24p option. I expect future hacks will enable native 60p in full HD mode.
I did discover a new function yesterday though. The super-slow shutters are now available in 1080p, great for timelapses and dream sequences. You can go as low as 1/2 in video mode on the shutter when previously it was 1/30.
The footage is also available for viewing in 1080p on YouTube. Someone has also managed to get it up on Vimeo (above).
