@bwhitz You mean being a film maker is like Renaissance art, where it's all done on commission, as part of a guild, with a whole team of helpers and apprentices? ;)

@hemp22

At the shootout in chicago I questioned the moderator regarding the use of nd filtration on the window. He said that none of the cameras used nd on the windows. When comparing the original footage with the corrected, it appears the dp exposed primarily for the window and brought up the shadows in post.

@Dbp

There were two shoots: one with lighting set up by a single dp for ALL cameras, and then a second shoot where each dp was given an additional 30 minutes to tweak the lighting setup without removing any of the original setup. The gh2 footage looked good in both.

@dbp

For a proper camera test, you'd have to have a wide range of scenes with consistent lighting, then shoot them all with each camera. Of course, that would take forever.

Zacuto came reasonably close, within practical limits. What nobody mentions here is the first round of the test, which consisted of shooting two scenes with each camera (same lighting in all cases) and giving everything a one-light grade.

I swear this will be the last time I point this fact out -- apparently nobody wants to hear it -- but this first part of the test did not cause anyone to swoon over the GH2, because the GH2's limitations were obvious. Its highlights and shadows had noticeably less detail than everything but the iphone4 and the Canon 7d.

Note also that, in the second portion of the test, the GH2 team lit to significantly reduce the contrast range and graded to increase color saturation. Except for the iphone 4 stuff, the other teams didn't. This may account for why the GH2 footage was preferred by many in the audience, particularly in scenes (like the Zacuto test) where resolution differences wouldn't be obvious.

GH2 Vitaliy/Driftwodd is still the No. 1 for 800 Dollar . . . Heeeeeeeeeee!!!!

@2many I normally overexpose as much as I can without missing the most important details in the scene to deal with shadow issues and then darken in post. I do not mind the shadows so much in other things (unless the shot happens to be having the sporadic "flickering shadow" issue) but it can be rough on skin.

Honestly, while there is always room for improvement, I think that the codec (within the limitations it works with) does a really good job in some of those areas with the right settings and takes it further than I have seen other AVCHD/H.264 cameras do. Have you used CM Night? It's at a whole difference performance level in terms of shadow macroblocking from Quantum v9c (though I have not compared to V9b, which they used for that test). There is still a noticeable gap vs JPEG, but much better.

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/60506#Comment_60506 http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/60002#Comment_60002

In the second link, CM Night is in the upper right and Quantum V9c is in the lower left.

@danyyel The GH2 has a much lower dynamic range than the RED, not just 1 to 1.5 stops. My testing suggested at least 2 stops at the bare minimum and scientific comparison may show even more. I can tell you this from shooting scenes with dynamic range that exceeded even the RED without HDRX with both cameras (though I have no comparison footage I can show at this time). And that's before we even deal with the GH2's comparative difficulty in dealing with the shadows under certain conditions.

@kholi For most scenes, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use HDRX. But it can be helpful on some of them - I used it to keep detail in the sky while I exposed for a backlit performer in shadow in a scene that used only natural light once. :)

@shian Well said, Shian. The difference I notice between the some of the other older cameras and GH2 is not the dynamic range, but the detail contained within that dynamic range. The compression artifacts and noise do a lot more to compromise it in some of the older cameras and is not uncommon for the camera to "blend away" some of the detail close to the highlights or shadows in certain shots, even if the camera can sometimes capture them (or for it to be so noisy that the detail gets lost in noise reduction anyway).

While the GH2 improved on that, the RED cameras provided consistently usable visual information within the dynamic range the sensor offered and I did not have to keep a close eye on it to watch for errata the way I do with the GH2 under very specific conditions.

As I said, I unfortunately did not have time to do the scientific tests I had planned, but my subjective reaction to the dynamic range gap was "a lot". :)

I don't think there will be chart in this years test, so we will have to see when it comes out.

Shouldn't this community be happy that it's even considered? If we all bothered what guitars and amps our music hero's used and argued about it ... hats off to taking a codec and camera, by you, far beyond it's original use.

@Shain "Don't believe me, take an F900, XD-cam or an HVX and chip chart it with a 5D and a GH2... they are all pretty much the same."

well I don't know what charts will tell you. But I just did a shoot yesterday with 7Ds and XF300's. The XF footage was almost unusable at how horrible the latitude was. Blows-out at about half the threshold of a 7D. You couldn't even see the sky on the XF footage, while the 7D rendered it perfect, clouds and all.

So maybe when measured, the DSLR images "technically" only has 6-8 stops of information. But the 7D really exposes like 11-12 stops.

"It is a myth that DSLRs have a significantly greater DR than any other standard HD video camera."

No, I think that this is a myth. DSLR have much higher exposing latitude. Again, when looking at charts and "recorded information", maybe not. But in terms of how much "light" you can expose for while shooting... DSLRs really have the advantage. HVX's, EX's, XF's all blow out so much faster, and have much worse shadow detail, than any DSLR I've shot with.

We may be taking about two different things here. DR and Exposure Range are two different things. If you're saying that DSLRs only have 5-6 stops in terms of how much manipulation and recorded information you have in post, then yea, that sounds about right. But if you're talking about how many stops you can actually expose for when shooting, then 5-6 is worse than a iphone. DSLRs are all around 10-11 stops here. Not 10-11 stops of workable range, but 10-11 stops of exposing range.

Say what you will about Zacuto, but I have no reason to dispute them. And this chart really seems the most legit to me out of anything else...

http://www.academyart.edu/export/sites/marketing/webcheckout/images/latitude.png

7D vs Alexa

http://nofilmschool.com/2011/01/hdslr-missing-dynamic-range/

Right around 8 stops, the sales pitch would call this 10 stops...but 9 and 10 are completely unusable. Which is why I asked the BMD folks how they were calibrating 13.5. How many stops between 80-20? Where does 18% gray hit white and black, they couldn't tell me. So how much is marketing, and how much of it can you use?

The GH2 has 8 and 1/3 stops - If we count those super noisy, and partially blown stops (but not fully), then the GH2 has 10.5 where you can still see a tiny bit of something there before pure black and pure white...but nothing usable. 18% gray (skin) blows out pure white at 3 to 3.3 stops over, and hits pure black at 5 - 5.3 under. (the variance is due to film modes - depending on which way the image is being pushed)

My tests and the number of "8.3 stops" is stuff you can use between 0-100IRE. 6 stops between 7.5 and 95, and 4 between 20 and 80.

You may say, well that just pertains to skin tone. I'm a narrative filmmaker. EVERYTHING in my world REVOLVES around skin tone. All my exposures are based on skin tone.

Lol sure