@jirab - fun edit! The girl is stunning. Disliked the fast multicolor tints, but loved everything else in your video!

@strancali Cross Fire Skin Tone Smooth -1,-1,-2,-1 ISO- 200 Zeiss 50mm ZF

& thanks!

@MartinD and @Driftwood, thanks for the version ci. info... I feel so archaic :P

@act - Nice footage - so glad I wasn't part of it though! :)

@rockroadpix this is freaken awesome! What was this setup again?

@mo7ies thanks! It's an indiSLIDERmini, not the smoothest slider out there.

@retrospective real nice! A couple of shots (:15, 1:05 for example) look like a slider, if so - which one did you use?

@conscius Great story, flows well.. just damn good.

@mo7ies it's really difficult to diagnose without seeing the footage. There are a ton of factors involved, one being the film mode, the other: the specific hack (also quality 24H, 24L, 60p, 25, HBR...??) and you'll have to bring @driftwood into the conversation to tell you how the matrix for that hack is interpreting the frame. And depending on which zone that color is supposed to be exposed in, versus which zone it was actually exposed in.

And as for the vid you posted: You can't use a vimeo vid as a true example. I've shot stuff that was completely clean, and picked up that kind of noise during mp4 export and/or vimeo conversion, but it wasn't there in the raw or graded footage.

@davidhjlindberg

Wonderful work. You say you used the Samyang 35mm 1.4 the whole time? Wonderful!!! Quick question: for the AMAZING shot of her by the water, what f-stop were you shooting at?

Thanks.

@mo7ies Without looking at your images (I am checking on a mobile) I would say that 1) it sounds like you are running into issues with the issues in the lower exposure range that the GH2 sometimes demonstrates 2) Shian has got the right idea and has tested this a lot, but in my own experience it is not guaranteed that the GH2 will perform poorly in that range - it is a range where it performs inconsistently. 3) I usually deal with the conditions you mentioned by shooting it properly exposed with a high bitrate setting (not CM Night, though, because it has slight issues dealing with haze) and then compensating in post.

To get back to what @shian said, the GH2 has an optimal exposure range (I will not comment on how many stops) where it performs very consistently. If you shoot your material in that range, you can generally get the results you want in post by modifying exposure, colors, sharpness and contrast. But if you shoot in the less predictable range, you may find the camera behaves less predictably - on top of that, underexposure can lead to elevated noise levels and the camera may have to compress the color information into a smaller range.

Try re-shooting that kind of scene with a very thoroughly tested intra setting meant for high detail and equally balanced for different conditions. I usually rely on Sedna for that sort of testing. Then shoot it properly exposed and see how the results fair in post. You may be surprised how much detail you can extract.

Other than that, all the usual shooting advice applies: make sure to get sharp focus through the haze and use focus assist to make sure - also make sure to get deep DOF and shoot at an aperture that gives a good combination of that with close to the optimal resolving power of the lens. For Cannon zooom lenses, f5.6 to f8.0 tends to give optimal resolving power and f11 trades a little bit of resolving power for depper DOF. I rarely stop down further than f11 with them.

Oh yeah, and make sure that the lens can get enough contrast and resolution to do what you want in the haze. Shoot controlled tests with RAw and JPEG at the same time to reference against. If the lens is not up to job, switch lenses. The 20mm f1.7 does a surprisngly good job at dealing with resolving throustant haze.

Ok this seems a universal issue across the hacks, please tell me what you think.

Scenario: landscape video, heavy fog covers NYC skyline making it very low-contrast and 2 stops underexposed (according to GH2's meter) so to keep at least some features visible, instead of the bland white screen at normal exposure.

What I get is mad dancing artifacts (macroblocks?) and uneven arches/bands snaking horizontally throughout the screen.

Unusable image, really. I tried Cluster v4 and Sanity v5, same thing. Clearly I'm hitting limitation of GH2. I'd like to better understand this, so to avoid unusable shots in the future.

I also noticed that sometimes parts of a perfectly lit image are also very noisy. Example: beautifully made video here, but look at the lower half of the marble column starting at 0:34:

Very very distracting noise... this one with Flow Motion... so the issue seems universal across all hacks.

What is it? GH2 hates shades of gray of certain luminance??