Official Panasonic GH3 topic

Tex

As a wildlife/bird shooter the GH2's ETC function is a "gift from heaven" - just an incredible asset. A GH2 mounted on a heavy tripod/heavy video head/lens support produces stunning files. Basically I get an EFL over 1500mm with the 100-300mm Pany lens at 300mm.

Currently the GH2's 4608 x 3456 sensor is "cropped" to 1920X1080. In other words, only the central 2 Megapixels of the sensor's overall 18 Megapixels is recorded.

Does the new GH3 employ similar technology?

Thanks!

mpgxsvcd

@LPowell

Did the 50 FPS file have 24-Frame GOP or 25-Frame GOP?

LPowell

Thanks to @AKED, who sent me some GH3 AVCHD and H.264 video files to analyze. It will take some time to examine them all, but the first two I've looked at reveal some interesting details. The AVCHD file is a 1080p50 28Mbps MTS file. The H.264 file is a 1080p50 50Mbps MOV file. Both files have the following properties:

High 4.2 profile in 8-bit 4:2:0 color depth
24-frame GOP with standard IBBPBB structure
Both 8x8 and 4x4 quant matrices used in I, P, and B-frames

The AVCHD encoders used in the GH1 and GH2 were only able to use 4x4 quant matrices. The extensive use of 8x8 matrices (as well as 4x4) in both AVCHD and H.264 GH3 files indicates a major upgrade to its encoder. If it works as efficiently as H.264 encoders used in other DSLR's, the GH3 encoder should be able to produce high quality images using significantly less bitrate than a hacked GH2 requires.

mpgxsvcd

@driftwood

1080p50 modes first, showing 4:2:0, AVCHD High Profile 4.2. This stuff looks the same as g5 in 50p mode.

Is that a bad thing? Will you be posting the videos for us to see as well? Also what about the .mov files. Those are the ones everyone is interested in, right?

driftwood

A few screenshots of analysis;-

1080p50 modes first, showing 4:2:0, AVCHD High Profile 4.2. This stuff looks the same as g5 in 50p mode. The high bitrate 50M Long GOP mode in the 3rd picture .mov mode shows a min QP of 4 and a max QP of 11 in the i frames - definite good signs.

4th Pic. Some of the scaling tables employed in the 1080p mov hi bitrate mode.

More stuff coming soon...

mpgxsvcd

@disneytoy

I wonder if we will get meta data in the .mov files. Would be nice to see the P, Profile, lens aperture, ISO etc. Silly that we don't already have that, even as a sidecar file.

You assume that everyone shoots in full manual mode and that the settings don't change during the video. How would you record the settings for Shutter Priority with Auto ISO? It would be continuously changing. There really is not a good way to record this for video. You could display it onscreen. That would be cool. Otherwise it changes too much to be useful for some people.

kazuo

Man it compensates vignettes???? And I had to sell off my C mounts. Time to seek out those TV lenses again

Jizzyjones

This camera has TONNES more new features than GH2, which didn't do crazy more than GH1 yet most still upgraded.

But for the UK, how on earth did $1300 convert to £1549? Surely it would be £999 region like the OMD.

jules

@Keller42 thanks!

disneytoy

I wonder if we will get meta data in the .mov files. Would be nice to see the P, Profile, lens aperture, ISO etc. Silly that we don't already have that, even as a sidecar file.

amateur

what is the dynamic range ? 14 EV? kills nikon d800?

mee

I think those complaining about those complaining should shhhh. It's our right, and perhaps duty to point out things which we like aaaand don't like about what we have seen so far.

Personally I only have two initial gripes that will put this camera out of my sites for now. 1) Price. $1000 would have had me saving pennies till november, but I think I will save those pennies for a nice voigtlander lens instead, and hope the price comes down on the gh3 just in time for Vitaliys lovely hacking skills to be utilized.

2) No 120 fps. I hope that is coming though, if only for 10 seconds (20 would be wonderful).

nod

@Mimirsan well they have the new canon 6d for only £250 more. I'm in at £995, but at that price it will have to be one hell of a sensor.

Jizzyjones

£1549........anywhere near that price is ridiculous, 1k more than I paid for my GH2. I was expecting it to be OMD priced at £999

Mimirsan

@nod Yeah we brits dont half get shafted! Wex go a bit OTT on their prices anyway.

MovieArmada

11 or 12 stops of dynamic range?

nod

The UK price is way over the top. £1549 Body only.

http://www.wexphotographic.com/buy-panasonic-lumix-dmc-gh3-black-digital-camera-body/p1532809

jhero · Screen Shot 2012-09-17 at 2.54.38 PM.png

Looks like zebras (record highlights) is in... Just not in beta firmware I suppose

Phew

I hope the touch to focus works as intended as it'll make rack focusing awesome

thepalalias

@aked @igorek7 Thank you guys so much for all the hard work so far and for the upcoming work on Wednesday. Sounds like you included an awful lot of the questions I added last week. :)

Also, thanks for shooting the GH3 pictures and footage. If it turns out you were able to shoot similar footage with similar settings on the GH2, you will have scooped the world. Also, if any of you or @Vitaliy_Kiselev wants storage for video files, I will be happy to offer FTP access on my site to upload them. But it sounds like you guys have got it covered, and there is always DropBox if you are just sending to a couple people.

I imagine the trickiest part of shooting any sort of comparison footage (other than getting the settings as similar as possible) would be making the lenses as similar as possible.

@DrDave I would not take the 44.1 KHz mention seriously, yet. It has not shown up in the official specifications, or anywhere other than DPReview (except when referencing the DPR article). The DPR article has also been said to have other errors in it, but I have not had a chance to read closely yet.

We do not know the samplerate for the GH3, but until we get any other data, I think most likely possibility would be 48KHz (broadcast standard) as used on the GH2.

bozfx

People complaining about the camera getting slightly larger, people complaining about no XLRs (which would have made the camera WAY larger), just shows you can't please everyone. I like what I see so far, but I'm reserving final judgement until I see more footage and learn more about the dynamic range of the camera. After all, it doesn't come out until November. :)

plasmasmp

Really sucks to not have the 1.86 crop anymore. Now all my lenses will be different and irritating.

5thwall

@disneytoy I think the benefit of TC is just that... TC! I always ask camera peeps to add an hour to the start time of each SD or CF card. For me it goes back to tape days. It really can help differentiate reels.

Not sure if the GH3 will do time-of-day timecode, but that would be very helpful, as well. With FCPX (which I am not endorsing in any way) you wouldn't really need to jam sync footage since the multicam syncing is pretty good. Setting TOD TC on multiple cams should at least get you very close - close enough for the software to make a good call on sync.

kazuo

This beta is already quite impressive. Let's hope they can iron out some kinks, like the moire we saw in the cat video.

DrDave

What's with the 44.1 PCM audio, is that a typo?

disneytoy

Regarding Time code. How do you sync the TC on multiple GH-3 and potentially the external audio recorder? If you can't "Jam" sync multiple devices, I don't understand the benefit of the TC in the GH-3?

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