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Official Panasonic GH3 topic, series 2
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  • Finally a half decent video thats not on that f**king 12-35mm lens an isn't compressed as hell, much better!

  • Skin tones seem improved over gh2. That's good news.

  • Not really enjoying the moire or the 24p motion. As features go, this thing is looking amazing with wifi and all. In terms of straight up IQ, I think the stock GH2 eats this thing alive in all honesty. Until I see a real DR comparison, I've not seen one example where there might be improved DR... at least nothing in the highlights that goes beyond the capability of GH2 in a visible way. All these test videos make me really cringe... I'm far from a pro and most on this forum are far better cinematographers than I will ever be, but damn if I couldn't do something way better in just an hour or 2 with this cam.

    Can't believe I'm saying this, but even the initial footage that came from the NEX5n looked far superior to what I've seen so far.

    I'm just going to pretend the video with the exorbitant amount of moire was done with the 12-35mm & sharpening at the maximum setting, because that was seriously silly. Still confident that we'll see some great stuff from the GH3 soon enough!

  • I don't know what some of us are complaining about. That last video was actually pretty good. It looked pretty filmic to me. It didn't look plasticky at all. This wasn't even what I would call a deep test of the camera and already I see a lot of good signs about the camera.

    Skin tones look GREAT. Also there's PLENTY of detail and resolution. Even if it's not 100% exactly the same as the GH2 it's not far off IMO. The stock codec looks immensely flexible to grade. The colors in general look very smooth and rich. Again this isn't the definitive video, but I think you can start to see that there are a lot of positives to the look of the GH3 footage. I think it's gonna be a great starting point with possible further improvements. I think the GH3 is gonna really shine with old manual glass.

  • The video above by John Twigt is much better than the previous samples from the same location, except it became more of a Magic Bullet test than GH3.

    Whoever uploaded that moire ridden sample on the same shoot needs to go back to school. John's video didn't test detail and moire that well, but there were a few shots that included fine horizontal patterns, like the brick work and the metal corrugated panels that all held up quite well I thought.

    I wouldn't be too fast to throw the baby out with the bathwater, just yet anyway.

  • @spacewig While I get what the author is saying, I'm pretty certain most of us would notice the difference recording 10-bit into 176mb All-I, which VK and Driftwood have kindly given us. Who knows how far the GH3 could be pushed in terms of recording bandwidth...and yeah we'd use it :)

  • While VK, Driftwood and others have given us exceptional results from the GH2, it's not 10 bit. That's a limitation of the camera, they can't do anything about it.

  • That last footage definitely made me feel better, but it still looked very canon-esque to me. Really questioning the resolution..

  • Here is a sample video of the kind of events that I shoot. They are all in extremely poorly lit climbing gyms that are more like caves. I was pleased with the content of the video. However, I think the GH2 has some shortcomings that I would like to remedy with a GH3 + 35-100m F2.8, + GoPro III.

    The first issue occurs at 2:01 into the video(Use the link below to jump straight to it). I need to shoot wide angle and 60p with a 1/120th shutter(because of the fluorescent lighting). The only lens that I have that shoots wide with a fast enough aperture is the 14mm F2.5. However, you can see in the video that it shot with ISO 6400 @ F2.5 and the noise is just too much.

    In addition my only option with the GH2 is to shoot at 720p @ 60 FPS for these slow motion shots. With the GH3 I hope to be able to shoot clean ISO 6400 in video with 1080p @ 60 FPS.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=M_RmkGfZ-Mo#t=121s

    The second issue is that I sometimes need to go really wide in low light. M4/3s simply does not offer many AF m4/3s ultra wide and fast lens. The best option is the 12mmm F2.0 but that is $800 and it really isn’t ultra wide at an equivalent of 24mm in 35mm terms.

    Therefore, I am going to get a GoPro III with its F2.8 lens and mount it directly to the hot shoe of the GH3. Its low light capabilities are not great but its ability to go ultra wide with a reasonably fast lens and shoot at 120 FPS should work perfectly for close up slow motion shots like the one in the link below.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=M_RmkGfZ-Mo#t=27s

    Finally I need a fast telephoto zoom lens with IS for the times when I shoot sport climbing in larger gyms. I shot the video below with the 45mm F1.8 and the 2.6x and 3.9x ETC modes. The video is simply too shaky for those focal lengths.

    So that will be quite an expensive kit. However, I will have everything covered from about 10mm F2.8 through 25mm F1.4 and on to 35-100mm F2.8. That is a very powerful kit when you consider how light it is and the fact that both the GH3 and the GoPro III can do wireless semi-live view to a smart phone. That will make monitoring and streaming very affective.

    The moiré and aliasing in the video for the GH3 probably won’t affect me because there are not a lot of fine patterns in the climbing gyms. I can see how it could be a problem for others though.

  • @manu4vendetta Less trees and wood and more of the tall blonde woman!

  • http://www.slashcam.de/artikel/Kurztest/GH3-Firmware-0-5.html

    Slashcam Germany made a small "pre"-review with the beta firmware. All in all same image quality not worse than the GH2. But with beta-firmware no sign of better dynamics and probably more moré. Better colours in low - light, but also more noise.

  • @frame that article says that GH3 it's easier to produce moire compared to GH2 but better than NEX and EOS (that doesn't say much). Still preproduction firmware.

  • A lot of people are thinking that a final firmware could cure the moire/aliasing of the gh3. I think it is just plain stupid, no firmware is going to change hardwired hardware properties of the down-scaling. From what we have seen it is 99% a Sony sensor and we can expect about the same performance that the other Sony, Nikon and even Olympus dslr video. The 16 megapixel could help compared to the higher resolution 24 and 36 megapixel Sony sensor as you will have less line skipping. But it won't be as clean as gh2.

    It is obvious that Panasonic has decided to outsource the sensor tech for economical or even technological reason. Sony is definitely producing the best sensor for photography nowadays and they are enlisting everyone to there exmor sensors. This must be a Sony sensor division strategy to capture the dslr market with tech and prices in volumes.

  • downrezzing is generally done in software, not hardware..

  • @svart

    Normally it is not true, pixel binning is happening on CMOS sensor and only reduced number of data is transferred to LSI. Otherwise we'll never had any moire issues and all the videos had same look as downsized photos. But, unfortunately, bus do not have enough speed.

  • Yes, Panasonic already discussed this near the bottom of this interview.

    http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2012/09/28/qa-with-panasonic-the-story-behind-the-new-gh3-and-compact-system-tech

    "Yes, it's not possible to read out the whole array at 60p. So this means we have to do some pixel combining. We combine 2 x 2 pixels on the sensor, so that makes just one quarter the data that we have to read out. This makes it possible to read out at 60p. Then we combine again to get the 2 megapixel video image."

    For first it does hardware binning then then it scales the ~4mp video image from the sensor to the final 1080p.

  • So it's partly hardware and partly software.. But if the sensor already downscales in hardware, then how does it read out for a full 16mp picture? Obviously there are different modes of readout then, which means that even on the sensor it's still software controlled.

  • Obviously there are different modes of readout then, which means that even on the sensor it's still software controlled.

    Yes, CMOS sensors have logic build in :-)
    ABout software controlled - software only set few parameters.

  • I believe what we are seeing in the initial pre-production firmware of the GH3, is what Nikon and Canon, and to a lesser extent Sony, have known for a while now, that is that you can't have a truely 50/50 hybrid stills camera/ video camera without sacrificing the video section.

    With the early GH series (GH-1, GH-2), I believe, the cameras where more Video-centric , maybe 60% video/ 40% stills camera. They were, in my opinion, design for video first and stills later. The moire and aliasing we are seeing seems to be typical of what we see when a dslr/slr manufacturer tries to up their "Stills" section game at the expense of the video section. Or when they use a sensor designed possibly by Sony or by a predominately stills manufacturer in their camera.

    Again, this is just my opinion!

  • @Manu4Vendetta

    There is actually some really nice detail and texture in this one. I'm almost 100% convinced that the aliasing and plastic-looking footage is most likely causes by bad picture settings and/or lens-issues now. Feeling better about the GH3!

  • @Vitaliy_Kiselev

    After the 2 x 2 pixel binning, the resulting picture is about 2.7K. Do you think it's possible to intercept that picture before it gets reduced to 1920? If so, that would be a monumental hack, turning the GH3 into a Blackmagic camera with 60P.

  • well, that shut everyone up :)

  • @Ralph_B yeah make it 4k would be nice too with 400mbps

  • Well, lens correction can cause some funky side effects. As many have pointed out, most gh3 videos with moire seem to have been shot through the 12-35 f2.8, so maybe the correction algorithm for this lens isn't suitable for the gh3's new anti alias filter or the pixel bining. Reworking the algorithm could solve this.

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