We just finished a commercial film production and thought I share some insights on why we have chosen to shoot this with the GH4. Our key requirements have been

1. 10Bit 4k capability (greenscreen project!)
2. Light weight (we had challeging camera angles and limited budget for rigging => e.g. birdeye shots with shitty rig)
3. Long battery life (we didn't want to add external battery solutions => our rig had very low weight limitations)
4. Problem free (e.g. no overheating)

So after long discussions choosing between Sony A7s II and GH4, we decided to use the latter one and I don't regret this decision.

We had a lot of challenges but they have not been regarding camera choice, more related to the customers corporate colors (yellow turning green in shadows) and lighting the massive greenscreen. The only real challenge on the GH4 for us was the shitty HDMI port but we solved that with adding a Zacuto Port Protector (without that, it would have been a nightmare!).

But judge for yourself, feedback welcome! (note: the project required massive effort in post production)

http://www.rigitscript.com/

I have a nice Panasonic Plasma hooked up to my workstation. I am in the process of grading my short film (with AE and Colorista) and I was thinking to do all the color directly on my plasma. Since blu-ray will be the medium for delivery and I do not own a pro grade balanced monitor. In After Effects all my grading projects are in rec709 color space.

Any thoughts on that? Are there any pitfalls to look out for? Thanks!

today I´ve tried some different codecs after I downloaded hdcinematics' DSLR Post Prep Utility and here are my findings among Cineform HD (which I normaly convert to), Avid DNxHD and just mts. I usually transcode to CF, because Premiere Pro has a hard time to decode avchd on the fly, when it´s getting serious (multiple streams...).

In Premiere Pro the response time to dragging the time indicator along the timeline was worlds better in both CFHD and DNxHD. Between the latter two I couldn´t really make out great differences here.

So I went into After Effects to check the same thing there. Here I got no mentionable timely difference in response time to my wild dragging of the current time indicator. Even the mts performed equally, compared to CFHD and Avid.

BUT: The adpative resolution came down to 1/4 on both CFHD and mts. On DNxHD it stayed on full and then eventually came down to 1/2 while maintaining a great response time. I didn´t expect that.

Tomorrow I will redo my rendering tests, my preliminary results just don´t make sense right now.

Wanted to share the video and, if you like it, please vote for me on the link below.

Vote Here

Filmed on my Canon 600D(1920x1080 @ 24fps) over two days. I only decided to enter the competition at the start of January and the deadline was the 20th so I didn't have as much time as I would've liked, fitting it around my day job(animator/3D generalist). Decided to spend 2 weeks planning and refining the idea and a week to put together an animatic and then assemble everything from there.

Location is in my flat, actress is my wife(who is an actress, handy!), I've still got a lot to learn about lighting so I'm not entirely happy with the look. Lamp lighting for the sofa and laptop close up shots and we have no plug sockets downstairs so just had to suffer the ceiling halogens :(

Used a bare bulb for the close up shots of the hands which I'm happier with(the typing one worked best I felt)

I used the Tamron 17-50 2.8 for all of it, I'm kicking myself for not using the 50mm 1.8(what was I thinking!?) mainly on a tripod and a shoulder rig for the final shot outside the door.

Edited in Premiere and graded in After Effects using Colorista II, once again I was short on time but was able to get a general warm hue on the live action shots and a green hue on the computer screens in fitting with the Amelie movie and the colour palettes used for her appartment and the outside world. Ended up being so tight on the deadline I didn't get to do a noise reduction and sharpening pass unfortunately.

I was going to just do the computer shots in after effects and apply a filter to get the screen look but after some tests it actually worked best just filming the monitor so I stuck with that, most of it is just me manipulating layers in photoshop in realtime(in the splitscreen email shot the cursor that appears is the move one if you look closely, couldn't find a workaround for that :) )

If there are any lighting/gaffers on here living in the London area that are looking for projects to get involved in I'd love to hear from you, it's definitely a weakness.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it. If you voted, thanks very much!

Comments and feedback welcome.