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GH4 4K Panasonic video camera, official topic
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  • There's nothing mysterious or magical about the skin tone complaints. The rendering of the color on the side of a truck or a building facade isn't going to disturb anyone. Poor color rendition on a face will.

    It's understood that there's no such thing as "skin tone", in the abstract. What kind of lighting? What angle? What kind of skin? Etc. But there are common characteristics seen in the way DSLRs render skin, and most people don't find it attractive. This may only mean that they don't find DSLRs appealing generally -- that DSLR issues with compression, low light and color come to a head, as it were, with skin tones. But it's not a big fantasy. Just look at the facial blobs on a lot of GH2 footage.

  • I don't know what these charts mean, Driftwood, but I'll take your word for it. Could you explain to a layman how it shoots 100 Mbps, which many of the unwashed, who claim to see horrible artifacting, aliasing and moire, consider to be inadequate, utilizes 200 Mbps?

  • Intra heaven @200Mbps and 8x8 adaptive transform on the GH4!

    Finally, my GH2 Intra Settings have been beaten with the forthcoming release of the GH4. Quite spectacular results show at 24p, 25p/30p & 50p/60p 1080 and with adaptive 8x8 and 4x4 transform the compression requirements under H264 Level High 5.1 profile are adequate and comprehensive enough to allow great pictures with superb motion - much improved.

    Here's two pics at 25p showing Intra with a fairly detailed image using around 90Mbps and a death chart proving it fully utilises 200Mbps.

    gh4 intra 200mbps 1.jpg
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    gh4 intra 200mbps 2.jpg
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  • One thing worth mentioning - this was shot on uncoated Cooke lenses which can add some color cast/flare effect while shooting directly into the sun. Reid also states in his review that his manual white balance was off from the very beginning. If you grade the images you will also notice that default saturation on the files is relatively high (typical of mfr settings) and things start to look more natural when desaturated to around 85% in the NLE. I preceded to warm up the WB a little and the files looked fantastic to my eyes.

  • I would really love to see the videos of some of these posters, who can't even spell their own name correctly

  • @Astro @Vitaliy +10 at least. Thanks for trying to stop this endless.......

  • The skin tones blurb, plus the "colors aren't rich enough" etc...argument is soo totally boring....as is the "Cinematic/Filmic" rave.. If you don't like the Gh4 then simply buy the Black Magic Camera and make great movies, the endless pixel picking and debating reminds me of guitarists endlessly debating over does Alder sounds better than Ash ..or Nitro sounds better than Acrylic...yada yada or such and such a handwound pup makes a guitar a zillion times better, its basically nonsense, because composition, ability and all the rest of it matters at the end of the day and minute image and sound details will not be noticed. Most of these newer cameras are good enough to make a great movie or doco or music vid, but if you endlessly debate pixels on forums you wont have time to do that...will you?

  • now what we need is 100 more posts about lack of 5-axis ibis

  • @blackspot @cantsin

    I think it will be about 10th series about "skin tones". You can just go back on topic or search and find my (and any sane man) position about "skin tones flame".

  • @cantsin

    Are you an alien ancestor? I mean that you have different ratio of sensors in your eyes compared to other poor humans.

  • @jonpais As far as I understood, these are ungraded camera files. Of the five provided by Andrew, I didn't pick one to make the camera look bad, but this issue appears in all of his files. Yes, white balance is bad, but no reason why the skin tones have so little gradation within their color scale.

    Here's another grab from a different file, at 90% jpeg quality.

    andy.jpg
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  • My initial thought was also that skintones look unnatural, but I think It's more about lack of detail on areas like skins and solid like areas. So basically it's about codec and bitrate (some of you disagree with this probably). There was some 1080p All-intra footage that didn't suffer this skin- problem...

  • @Vitaliy: better chroma resolution.

  • @cantsin the screen grab DOES look like a magenta blob, now that you mention it :) But I have been shooting with the notorious GH3 for months now and my skin tones aren't chalky or magenta at all. I think it's all a matter of the light you shoot under, color correction, grading, etc. I've posted some of those clips in the GH3 best settings thread. They are far from perfect as far as color goes, since I'm new to all this, but most people who've seen the clips see that it's entirely possible to get good skin tones with the camera. And I find working with the GM1 that colors are improved. I have no doubt they will also be better with the GH4. You should keep in mind that these are some of the first clips Andrew has had the chance to work with, and he himself admitted that he'd made a few mistakes along the way, with exposures (I think it had something to do with the ND filters he was/wasn't using), etc. If I'm not mistaken, he also just applied a LUT in film convert that was intended for BM cameras. He admits that he was in a rush to post, and could have gotten better results had he spent more time grading the image.

    I'll add that I'm tired of all the posts saying Panasonic gives plastic skin tones. It's simply a falsehood. Screengrabs (ungraded, should be live in 30 min.) https://copy.com/EjcvwpX6xfCM

  • Richer color sampling

    What this mean exactly? May be wires are not properly covered by silver and filter before sensor does not have personal approval by Pope?

  • Here's a 1:1 screen grab from one of the camera files that Andrew uploaded to copy.com. IMHO: the same issues with not-so-great color resolution (artificially looking colors, especially when rendering white people skin) as in the previous GH cameras. Arguably, white balance - particularly on the green/magenta axis - is off in this shot, but this is still no reason why the man's skin in the foreground appears as an almost monochromatic magenta blob.

    Once again, Panasonic's engineers seem to have opted in favor of resolution/sharpness over richer color sampling in its image processing/debayering and codec implementation. I guess that that the GH4 will divide DIY filmmakers into two camps, those going for resolution + great ergonomics + run'n'gun capabilities + maturity and robustness (in everything from hardware design to software workflow) with the GH4, and those going for richness of the image (at the expense of practicality) with Blackmagic cameras.

    (The included screengrab is a JPEG at 80% compression quality because this forum allows a maximum file size of 2 MB. The original, losslessly compressed PNG screengrab (33 MB) can be downloaded here.)

    smoke.jpg
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  • @jonpais You're the one who said its in 'professionals' hands - that would include Voldermort. Looks like you're the one who's all butthurt. I couldn't give a shit about him or a maniacally defensive poster like you. But by seeing your previous posts about what is good video - doesn't surprise me that you'd feel that's 'professional'

  • @johnnymossville Yes, we can both agree and call a truce :)

  • @jonpais I'm not particularly fond of bad desktop publishing, but I am super glad pro-level computers and software are in the hands of amateurs, because it makes the tools available to as many people as possible. I think you and I can agree on this right?

  • @Johnnymossville very intelligent remark Because we all know that consumer cameras all have weather sealing, 4:2:2 10 bit output, time code, color bars, master pedestal, zebras, cineliked, shoot all flavors of 4K, have peaking, etc.

    I'm not sure I understand your comparison with desktop publishing though. This is awesome precisely BECAUSE it puts all these tools at everyone's disposal. What you do with it is up to you. In what way is anyone forcing you to endure anything in the process?

    @last_SHIFT does taking a swing at Andrew somehow make you feel like a big man? or do you think you're accumulating points by doing so?

  • @Ian_T +1 "Wait till someone does something special with this camera. Unfortunately...since it's a consumer and not pro-sumer camera..we're going to see a lot of the typical crap one would expect from a consumer (mostly on YouTube) plastic skins and all."

    A lot of what we are seeing is exactly this. It is a prosumer camera though, it's just that it's affordable for many amateurs. It's like desktop publishing when the mac came around 25 years ago. We saw a lot of secretaries pretending to be graphic designers and the quality of work suffered. The quantity went through the roof though.

    Which is exactly the way I would want it. Amazing tools like the GH4 can only be sold at the prices they are because of the volume of people buying them. We just have to endure a lot of crap in the process.

  • Did a grab from voldemorts video on a frame that looks really bad when scaled internally. It's a bit jagged in 100% too, but you can see 1) that it looks sharpened and 2) that it's pretty compressed. (there's additional compression from my jpg conversion, too) What we get straight out of the cam exactly is up in the air until there are factory copies out there.

    vlcsnap-2014-04-02-10h19m34s53.jpg
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  • I gotta agree with @RRR & @Tron about scaling within playback for your monitor.

    I like the Footage from both the BMC4k & GH4. The GH4 fits my work better as it seems the BMC4k doesn't look so hot ISO800 and above.