@bkmcwd Did a simple test with your latest patch. Perfect motion, details and clean footage! More tests will follow! THX!

@ishvar Thanks for feedback mate. :-) Please tell me your impression again.

Great info driftwood! Looking forward to version X!

Also, you are absolutely correct about bkmcwd. He has a lot of determination and his GOP3 produces excellent results.

@inhousegoods - That GOP1 is GORGEOUS. Lens? Framerate?

@driftwood Excellent news, our rough cut has shortlisted to the top 20!

Voting is now open so any votes are greatly appreciated

Just to recap, we shot our film "Blade Runner in 60 Seconds" on Driftwood's AQuarius patch. Thanks to @Vitaliy_Kiselev @driftwood and all who are working hard to make the GH2 a beast of a machine.

http://www.empireonline.com/awards2012/diss/shortlist/17.asp

@Tifose I haven't compared them. The reason I stuck with the AQuarius was because I hadn't time to test Quantum V9 (that's the patch you're referring to right?) prior to shooting and I didn't want to load it for shooting without testing. I will be switching to Quantum patch soon. So the reason I stuck with the AQuarius had nothing to do with performance, merely convenience :-)

Anyone else noticed the sweet spot for Panasonic cameras exposure is 1600 ISO as seen in a Popular Camera Weekly magazine ?

@balazer thx, i just updated to
Driftwood Aquamotion ver2 AQ2 all round and spanning - great for EX TELE and 80percent recording

@driftwood

I do really like the look of both ISO 1600 and 800. If I'm not up there, I'm down at 160. Its not like I've ever paid close attention to why, but its mostly a grain thing. Anything over 1600 for me is no good unless it is going to be very desaturated or is in black and white.

@sohus As in sweet spot for low light exposures

The magazine reports that the ISO sweet spot can be seen on a read noise curve graph. The Panasonic G3 noise curve (the closest to our GH2) was said to have levelled out at ISO 1600, while the Nikon D7000 is almost a straight line across the entire ISO range, making the base ISO (100) its sweet spot. By using this sweet spot ISO setting and overexposing just before the point of clipping, noise can be kept to a minimum and the tonal range of a low-light image maximised. Overexpose as much as possible before highlight clipping for the lowest levels of noise.

Read noise is the electronic noise added by the camera to the image captured by the sensor(which already has 'built-in' photon-shot noise) It provides a constant noise background, so tends to be the noise that can be seen in the shadows.

When the light is low (low number of photons) and is then processed by the camera to achieve full tonal range, the digitiser read noise signal is brightened resulting in more noise in shadows. A way around this is that the ISO control boosts (gain) the sensor signal. At the top ISO end though the digitisation system cannot deal with as high a light level and the dynamic range drops.

To find the sweet spot on a GH2; the point at which the camera stops adding 'gain' (boosting the signal) as the ISO is raised is as follows. Manually set the exposure to nominal for the highest ISO setting on the camera.Then take a series of images of the same subject (with the same lighting), reducing the ISO one (1) stop at a time wihout changing the exposure. Process the captured images to the same brightness range and then compare the sequence. As the ISO setting lowers, there will often be a point at which the shadow noise starts to rise. The last ISO setting before that rise is your sweet spot for low light exposures.

I tried this last night and found it to be 1600 ISO too for the GH2.

Hey lads! All my new gh2 gear is on its way and I'm super excited to jump into the micro 4/thirds world! Just wanted to say thanks to driftwood and vitality for all their amazing work in what to most of us is a black box of information! Brilliant stuff! Looking forward to loading up Quantum! Interesting stuff in regards to iso, gonna do my own research now.

Interesting article here on best ISO setting. Certainly doesn't seem to be agreeing with ISO 1600 as the sweet spot. Seems to be 160 or 320 with greatest dynamic range.