April Fools and other Madmen, Part I:  Who Sins the Most?  (2 Min. 30 sec)  YouTube | Vimeo

Each scene is designed to test the latest additions to our camera family (Panasonic DMC-GH1 and DMC-GH2) under various shooting conditions (i.e. low light, fast movement, file compressions, lens speeds, depth of field, etc).

Part I:  Who Sins the Most? • YouTube | Vimeo

Part II:  What a Piece of Work • YouTube | Vimeo

Part III:  Sound and Fury • YouTube | Vimeo

Part IV:  For a Muse of Fire • YouTube | Vimeo

April Fools and other Madmen, Part I:  Who Sins The Most?

Based upon an excerpt from 'Measure for Measure' by William Shakespeare

Produced, Directed, Filmed, Performed and Edited by Benjamin Karl

Copyright © 2011 American Firelight

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Settings:

DMC-GH1: ISO 800, 1080i AVCHD, Shutter 1/50, f2.5, Lens Panasonic 14 mm (2x crop factor)

DMC-GH2: ISO 800, 1080i AVCHD, Shutter 1/50, F2.0, Lens Voigtländer 50mm (2x crop) with 1:1 Crop Mode enabled (additional 1.8x crop)

Memory: RAW Class 10 SDHC 16GB

Lighting: 4 candles.

Audio: AT815b Shotgun Microphone connected to an H4N digital audio recorder.

Conclusions:

While both cameras handled admirably under extremely low lighting conditions, the 1:1 Crop Mode on the GH2 introduced a tremendous amount of noise, suggesting that it is an unusable feature in low light.

As a videographer I have been accustomed to 'push-white balance' and found it difficult to achieve in camera. Short of enabling the automatic feature, it has to eye-balled while adjusting the kelvin reading. This seems to be the case with most, if not all, DSLR Hybrid Video Cameras.

Using Apple's Final Cut Studio, I was able to reverse telecine the 1080i AVCHD to 23.97fps Apple Pro Res 422 for a beautiful filmic sense of movement. I used Color simply to push the highlights and crush out blacks, no additional color correction was performed. The footage with the 1:1 Crop Mode suffered a fair amount from pushing the levels, though the footage without the 1:1 Crop Mode stayed crisp even with extreme leveling.

Both lenses were beautiful and I was able to achieve some really nice bokeh without having the depth of field too narrow for ANY movement.

I had no issues with recording time limits, data write speeds or overheating despite leaving the cameras running for long periods while setting up shots and doing multiple takes with the large viewfinder fully lit the entire time (in previous tests with the Canon 5dMkII, I had a number of overheating issues under less taxing conditions).

The big take-away was not to use the 1:1 Crop Mode in low light. Otherwise, both cameras were very user friendly, easy to intermix, and produce a nice filmic image.

Benjamin Karl
President, American Firelight
americanfirelight.com

April Fools and other Madmen, Part I

A series of short scenes from the works of William Shakespeare.

Part I:  Who Sins the Most?  |  Part II:  What a Piece of Work

Part III:  Sound and Fury |  Part IV:  For a Muse of Fire

Photos

Cast & Crew Credits

Press, Extras, Advisories

Director’s Statement