I thought this worked okay when I first tried it, but I've had no joy since. Anyone else experienced this problem?

I don't actually want to create a multi exp, I simply want to use the overlay to align individual shots to create tracking movements of larger objects like buildings. This is where I think Panasonic missed an opportunity, with what would make a useful creative feature.

If there was an onion skinning preview that just engaged an overlay with the previously taken shot, it would open up some really interesting opportunities.

Currently, I seem to only be able to get to the 1920 X 1080 setting when I choose HD, but then it shoots in Frame Rate of 60fps.

Please advise.

The other day I was involved in a discussion about "85mm" lenses, and the differences between the characteristics of a certain FOV lens on "full frame", compared to how it looks on a crop sensor. A "native" lens can be designed to perform just like it´s other sized sibling, but when one is into vintage lenses / lenses that can be used on multiple systems it gets far more complicated! Lately I´ve been thinking a lot about lenses that work across different camera systems and the different qualities that are exhibited, depending on the size of the sensor. I´m not thinking so much about the obvious depth of field related changes as to how the overall feel of the image and subtle optical imperfections alter the image with the same lens used on different systems. I´d like to think of aps-c or s35 as base sensor / imager size over "full frame", at least for us who have video as the main area of camera usage, however, many lenses where designed for "full frame" and although the differences on s35 and aps-c can be rather small, I find the differences increase exponentially the smaller imager you put it on.

Hence I have come to search for vintage full frame lenses which will exhibit appealing qualities on a gh2 or a blackmagic design cinema camera. Now, what is appealing to me might not be appealing to you, but I will try to define my own criteria and I hope you can supply yours and add to this thread.

I have been building two main sets of vintage still lenses after ditching my canon fd´s (they were not getting the use to justify having them). For one, I have been buying c/y zeiss optics and I have been adding m42 mount lenses as I have come across them or found some interesting aspect which could fit in with the rest. The c/y´s will no doubt be a mainstay in my arsenale for years, however the ultimate reason why I pulled the trigger on the full set was the advent of the metabones speedbooster – I much prefer how they look on a slightly bigger sensor over a smaller one and I have high hopes for the speedbooster. The reasons for the preferred vicinity to "native sensor size" are:

1. less pronounced CA. I have become a bit allergic to aberrations of late.
2. nicer transition to OOF areas, wide open or stopped down.
3. More obvious contrast/microcontrast "sweet spot". (I think this is down to a slightly larger FOV)
4. Usability wide open, much in line with the criteria above. A lens which looks sharp in the center on full frame or aps-c might just look soft on a smaller sensor because there´s less contrast between edge and center.

With the m42´s it´s different. I like very much how they look on the gh2 AND f.i. the fs700 or BMD, so I find them extremely useful for video, across systems. So what is it I´ve been looking for?

1. Low(ish) contrast
2. Pleasing (sort of neutral) OOF and bokeh, also when stopped down.
3. good price / performance ratio.
4. great CA control
5. reasonable color match
6. good distortion control / flat focal field

I have mainly been searching through lens databases (on possible candidates), comparing sample images.

Now, this set consists today of the following lenses:

20mm flektogon f2.8 29mm meyer optik, pentacon f2.8 37mm Mir-1b f2.8 50mm Pancolar f1.8 58mm Helios f2 135mm meyer optik orestor f2.8 200mm meyer optik orestegor f4

I´m still looking to add a few but for the ones I have / I´ve had I can say the following:

20mm flektogon - I prefer the f4, as it´s tack sharp wide open. (f2.8 needs to be stopped down to 4-5.6) 29mm Meyer optik is sharper / has less blooming (coma) than the pentacon wide open.. maybe half a stop brighter as well - otherwise they are remarkably similar - both useful wide open. Bokeh can be both expressive and sort of neutral depending on where you place the focal field / subject and f-stop. 37mm Mir is a great "normal" lens on the gh2. Too slow? No. Just right. I want to add a macro ring to help out close focusing. Great value for money and beautiful OOF transitions thanks to the 10 blade aperture. 50mm pancolar - a bit too low in contrast to fit the others well. Not a fan of it´s bokeh. 58mm helios f2 - rock´n roll short tele on the gh2. Wonderful out of focus rendition and also nice transitions thanks to the round aperture. 135mm meyer optik - beautiful and tack sharp tele. Notoriously nice OOF / Bokeh rendition. Low in contrast and needs a push in post to match most of the other lenses. 200mm meyer ... - used it very sparingly so far. Not super sharp wide open. Not a preferred lens on gh2 sensor.

In general, I´ve had some issues with mechanics in cold conditions (needed to clean out and lubricate some helicoids) but they have been put to very good use already. I traded away a 35mm flektogon which I felt was a tad harsh in contrast in comparison to the others anyway (great lens tho). Another thing which is down to physics - the wider the lens, the more restless / harsher the bokeh is. The performance of a certain FOV does not quite match what you´d get on a larger sensor but this will only be a problem in case you are looking for really wide lenses in which case you are better off with native lenses anyway. The difference is mainly where you place the camera. (between different sensor sizes).

Note: I believe it´s difficult to switch lenses with acute focal fields between different sized imagers and not get very differing results.. For my m42 set I´d normally not use all for one production but choose a few depending on priority, like f.i. one or two wides, one or two tele´s to contain the slight differences in coatings, color e.t.c. However, they match remarkably well despite transgressing manufacturers and brands. I´d guess it´s because they are in the vicinity of one lineage of optics manufacturing.

Samples to follow.

I commented off hand that if you're desperate enough you can get higher bit depth from merging frames together if you have access to 50, 60p etc. Oh, this also works if you downscale a higher resolution to a lower one within a higher bit depth space as well - so for all you people down scaling footage, if you're able to do that in a 16-bit space and save a high bit depth format then you'll have something to gain. I didn't speak for practicality, only that it can be done.

When I wrote my program to count unique colours in very large resolution 16-bit tiff images, I didn't see other software that'd do that. As the array would require tremendous memory. If you want to know the way I managed to do it I had a simpler way to do it which required processing power over memory, and that was to sort the pixels in an array from smallest colour value to highest essentially, that way you could simply not add +1 to the unique colour count if the same colour appeared more than once in a row.

I had other reasons for doing this, it's part of my experiments with image stacking, but I've done it with various image sources, scans, jpegs from shitty cameras with no raw, raw, jpegs from better cameras, snap shots of two frames in video.

Been told it's "cant be done" many times. Because the information from one from to the next isn't the same - well no, that's exactly why it works, even in the worst case scenario of a tripod locked off shot of still life with nothing moving it works.

But if you're recording 50p, blending every 2 frames together just speeds the footage up to 25p, the average of the two frames still contains the same amount of motion blur/movement as recording in 25p at the same shutter angle, though it may be divided into 2 sections over the 1 frame instead of 1 long section of motion.

Generally that shouldn't be an issue as 180 degree is accepted as general purpose good shutter angle which leaves space between the movement/motion blur anyway, and if you wanted none you could shoot 360 degree.

Now to the screenshot - R, G, B bit values, these represent how much of the scale Red will use on it's own (regardless of what green and blue is attached to - the same goes for Green and Blue etc), a value of 6-bits would mean, the image only has 64 differing red values in total. I made this to identify problems with some images.

Unique Colours is the total number of colours, an 8-bit image has a maximum value of 24-bits here, but that would be very hard to achieve, as it would have to have every combination of colour, hue, intensity, saturation in the one image etc from bland to neon, and the image resolution would need to be 16.7 million pixels or over.

The Unique Colour Factor - A 1920x1080p image has 2,073,600 pixels in the frame, a value of 50% would mean it would have 1,036,800 unique colours in the image, this percentage can be used as a factor of colour quality and separation.

The first example is a single frame grab from some A7s (720p 120fps) video I downloaded off the net (I was going to use my GH2, but I left it at work this afternoon), it's placed into Photoshop and converted to 16-bit and saved as a tiff (partly to rule out any conversion to 16-bit as the contributing rise in bit depth counting, and also because the program I wrote only reads 16-bit tiffs at this time of writing).

The second example, is the first 2 frames in 16-bit mode in photoshop, blended with opacity at 50% for the top layer, flattened and saved as a tif.

The fourth is the same but with 4 frames.

As you can see, the more you stack, the more in between values with higher precision than 8-bit arise, about ~9x the unique colours.

It should only be logical, even if the video or two photos is of on a tripod of a still life, 2 pixel values will have variance in them over the two frames, especially since 8-bit has high quantisation error compared to higher bit depths, variable noise, micron image movement etc, so if you have one that's 241 and 240 for example, the in between value cannot be represented in 8-bits.

Unfortunately I'm working tomorrow, but that means I can get my camera back before Monday, so I probably can shoot some footage with the lowest contrast settings and see if I can induce banding in something and post up an actual video sample.

So I have a question. If I shoot at 24fps, or 30fps, the compression artifacts are certainly visible. If I were to shoot at 60fps, and render it as 24 or 30-- not in slow-motion, maybe frame blending-- the renderer would have two frames to combine into one. Would this extra data enable me to reduce the compression blocking in the final?

Apologies if this is a stupid question.

Frame.io acts as a home base for all your creative projects. It replaces the hodgepodge of using Vimeo, Dropbox, and Gmail to work with media files online. We solve cloud storage, client review, transcoding, and light asset management into one seamless app. We have great tools for video like time based comments and annotation so you can draw directly on video frames. We have version control and comparison tools built in so you can see what’s changed over time. Frame.io is social too. Every action performed is tied to an individual user and tracked so you get notifications about what’s going on. It’s built for teams from the ground up so you can create a private workspace for each project you’re working on and decide who has access to what.

http://frame.io/

After shooting mostly with Panasonic cameras, and so use to a super sharp image, I'm not sure what people think about the 5d2 these days for web delivery? A few years back, it seems like everyone was requesting the 5d2, but things have changed, is it still an acceptable image today? Should I shoot a test for the client, or am I overly critical of the softer image compared to the gh2? I can drive myself crazy with this shit. Just looking for opinions and advice from my peers thanks

Basically speaking, I have a situation where I may want to insert frames that are generated from the surrounding frames. For example, if I have a one-frame gap between 00001.MTS and 00002.MTS, I'd like to generate that frame from the last frame of 00001 and the first frame of 00002. Or, perhaps I could find those moments when the camera goes out of focus, snip those frames out, and generate new replacement frames.

I'm sure there's software that does this that might be affordable. It may even be in After Effects, for all I know, and I'll go check that package out. But does anyone have any knowledge of such a thing?

Personally, I didn't care about the MFT information, it wouldn't surprize me at all if Sony would try to get piece of Panasonic's cake on the market. It was anyway just a rumor, unapproved information as my friend didn't see it.

But I would say the news about the new FF sensor in the mirrorless NEX body is quite sensational. It sounds to me also as Sony's very logical next step: just recently Sony unveiled its FF camera with fixed lens (RX1) and also FF interchangeable lens body camcorder. Sony learns and produces already now FF and also APS-C sensors which belong to the best on the world (in Nikon D800 / NEX-7, respectively). As release date I heard "as soon as possible as Sony desperatly wants to be the first one (?)"

Such a release would have many consequences. Sony's E-bayonet mount provides the possibility to use almost all lenses ever made, just like "our" beloved MFT cameras. The new FF NEX would ceirtanly not be cheap, but probably it would still cost considerably less than Leica M. So it will have enough customers. I belive that the prices for the venerable old good lenses would be pushed quite a bit upwards. By the way: my own experience about using old lenses on the newest high-end digital bodies is quite good: the most of my best old AiS Nikkors which were great on the 24×36mm film are also great on the D800. Nikon's recommendation to use only the newest expensive lenses is just a bull.... except the true that bad Nikkors still look just the same bad on the D800 like ever before :-)

If this whole FF NEX comes true, my speculation is probably 24MP sensor for start model followed by 36MP in the next step etc. It wouldn't surprize me at all if Sony after having its fingers already deeply into the pockets of consumer and professional domains now attacks also into the semi-pro world. Orwell's "1984" is getting true in the world of eletronics......

I've heard, that GH3 can record in 4K 20 frames per second and memory card capable to store 95 Mb/s. Therefore if we narrow size to 16mm (10.6mm x 6mm) is it possible to record RAW video?

In video mode replace exposure numbers with rotary disc shutter angle: 1/32 = 270° (?) | 1/48 = 180° (add) | 1/50 = 172.8° | 1/60 = 144°; | 1/96 = 90° (add) | 1/120 = 72° (add)

Add Frame Line - The aspect ratio frame  1.85:1 (35mm theatrical), 2.35:1 (Cinemascope)

Years ago, while flipping through 25fps video trying to find just the frame in a piece of video where somebody had smiled just right. (It was for a VHS tape-box slick). I discovered, to my amazement, that

People's true smile can last less than 1/25th of a second.

However, we do perceive that smile, register it and imprint it on our memory as that person's true smile.

I used movie cameras and video cameras for portraits for years before I bought my first still camera in 2009. French news crews used analogue video cameras as their main tool for stills, sound and video, rushing on motorcycles to beat deadlines.

There are lots and lots of advantages, all of them somehow tied to a better selection of still image; (i.e. one you couldn't have got using a still camera) to make up for the higher quality you'd get from a still shot - or even a series of stills. That holds true today, unless we have 60fps DSLR [burst mode, for minutes, or hours at a stretch]!

A few weeks ago, I spotted my favourite waitress nearby on her day off. Armed only with my GH2/Sigma 30mm/Driftwood Sedna 5/ HBR25fps, I had to set it to ETC mode to get in close enough and shoot about a minute or so while sliding the camera around on my café table.

Only today did I get around to asking her if I could use the shots and she agreed. So here's one random still and an animated series of just a few key shots of VLC frame-grabs.

I'm planning to do a comparison of various video modes and shutter speeds and I'd like in the end to export one video that mixes thge following material:

• 24p footage @ 2fps that will be speed up 13x

• 24p footage @ 2.5fps that will be speed up 10x

• HBR30 footage @ 2.5fps that wil be speed up 12x

• HBR25 footage @ 5fps that wil be speed up 5x

How should I handle this in After Effects?

TIA.

1. Are there any hacks out there for the GH2 that include the ability to shoot 1080p at 60 fps?

2. Do any/all GH2 hacks include 1080p at 30fps? Could you point me to a higher bitrate hack that does include 30p? I notice a lot of the hacks say they allow 24p, but it's very important to me to be able to shoot 30p.

I appreciate any answers/info/insight/advice you can give!

Highlight Recording: what's it set to spot? Above 80~85? 75? That'd be interesting to know. And, can you set it to something higher or lower? it'd be good to have depending on your "film mode", I think . Operating like old school DVX/HVX Zebras.

Frame Guide: Any way to add more? Say two more so that you could setup a 4:3 look around? Or have two horizontal ones so that you could setup a 2.35/2.40 loook around?

I did a search, didn't seem to be covered. Any info or discussion would be swell.