After having spent a week with the Panasonic GH4 camera freelance Director and Video Journalist Nicos Argillet wanted to see if the Canon C100 camera and C300 camera’s footage would intercut well with the GH4 on a job.
See Nicos with the Panasonic GH4 at play first then after his thoughts on GH4, C100 and C300 interplay watch his footage with those cameras.
One week with the GH4
I had to fly to Georgia in the Caucasus to direct a documentary for France 5, one of the french national TV channels. I thought that it would be the perfect opportunity to test the GH4 in a real production environment and see how it would match our C300 and C100 in the field. Here is a quick edit of the results.
Note that I am not a colorist nor a pixel peeper but a director and DP that is trying to understand his tools and share what he learned.
All shots were only slightly graded in Premiere CS6 using the basic color correction tools to match exposure and roughly set the black/white/saturation levels.
All C300/C100 shots are C-Log. All GH4 shots use the Neutral profile with sharpness and noise reduction set to -5, contrast and saturation between -3 and -5, depending on the scene. Master Pedestral was set to +10. This is the profile that work best for me after doing some test during my first week. But you are welcome to share yours !I didn’t try to match the tints as I wanted to check the results «out of the camera», sort of.
Note that the GH4 had a Schneider True Match Vari ND in front of the lens, so that may give it a twist.So, What did I learn ?
Looking at the landscape shots from the GH4, I have to say that I am pretty impress with the results. Shooting in 4k and editing on a 1080p timeline gives a pretty close match in terms of resolution and a very nice rendering to my taste. On the dynamic range side, the GH4 is definitely not as good as the Canon cameras. It maybe not completely obvious of those scenes but the GH4 just can’t handle as much difference between highlights and shadows. The reason for that is the noise level. All shots on the C300 where done between 850 and 1600 ISO when the GH4 was set to 200 ISO.
To my eyes, the noise of the GH4 is as visible at that setting as 1600 ISO on the C300. The other thing I noticed is that the GH4 can be very noisy on the dark part of the image. When for instance shooting a mountain top with a forest below, setting the exposure to protect the sky, the forest, although clearly visible, would become really noisy. Even though it seemed to capture those dark stops, it was capturing it with a lot of noise.
Please see the rest of Nicos thoughts about his experience with the Panasonic GH4, Canon C100, and C300 cameras HERE.