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Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
What are your thoughts on this camera for shooting a no-budget feature?
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11 Replies
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I don’t see why not. It’s a fantastic bang-for-the-buck camera. Do you have any specific questions about it?
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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It’s very plausible to do a low to no budget feature on it. Pick up the body, get a set of older lenses (I use three old AF Minolta lens), and purchase an adapter for those lenses for micro 4/3. If you pick up a t2i or t3i you’ll pay less for the body, but you’ll likely pay a lot more for the lenses and thus pay more total for a camera and a set of lenses in comparison.
From a shooting standpoint, no moire or aliasing (so you don’t have to worry about certain wardrobe or locations causing issues),high quality digit zoom, a record time that will run till the SD card is full (hours), and if you wanted to you could hack it to get insane bit rates as well (though I prefer using unhacked, as the image quality is still very pleasing).
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My thoughts were to use the included 14-42mm hybrid lens.
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Can you recommend any specific SDHC cards for this camera for recording max bitrate AVCHD video?
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That kit lens in my experience will work for wide shots (at 14mm) but not good for a shallow depth of field due to low aperture (3.5-5.6). That pretty much applies to most kits lens really. In addtion to the 14-42mm I own and use:
Of all my lenses though, I use the 50mm 1.8 the vast majority of the time. If I were to recommend just one lens that is cheap and could be used for narrative work it would be that. Jason would be the guy to ask for the Nikon lens info though.
As for SD cards, just make sure it’s rated at class 10 and no lower than 16gb. If you hack the GH2 to higher bit rate it will take up more data per second, thus reducing your record time (another reason why don’t like to hack mine).
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If it’s any help, we’ve just begun pre-production on a low/no budget feature, Saving Dinah, using Lumix GH2s. We’ll be shooting in August. We’re upgrading the GH2s with hacks and patches available at Personal-View.com. Audio will be acquired using Zoom recorders.
The plan is to shoot most scenes with two or even three of the cameras in order to be more efficient, and not push the actors and crew too hard.
With the hacks, and respecting the limitations of the cameras, we should have no trouble with final output suitable for D-Cinema.
At least, that’s the plan.
Regards
Stephen Best
https://stephenbest.ca -
Why are the hacks and patches necessary?
Todd Erwin
Director/Producer -
Why are the hacks necessary? A standard Lumix GH2 at 24 fps, which is what you need to use for features, records video at 24 Mbps. Use the various hacks available and you’ll be recording at over 150 Mbps which produce a much better image, one that can handle without degradation color correction and effects.
However, rather than getting a 6-8 hours of video on a 32GB card, you’ll get about 30 minutes.
Regards
Stephen Best
https://stephenbest.ca -
Why are the hacks necessary? A standard Lumix GH2 at 24 fps, which is what you need to use for features, records video at 24 Mbps. Use the various hacks available and you’ll be recording at over 150 Mbps which produce a much better image, one that can handle without degradation color correction and effects.
However, rather than getting a 6-8 hours of video on a 32GB card, you’ll get about 30 minutes.
Regards
Stephen Best
https://stephenbest.ca -
The hacks are not ABSOLUTELY necessary. I shot the feature film “Love or War” on an unhacked GH2, and it looks great. It can be graded in After Effects using ColorGHear to minimize the compression artifacting found in all DSLR footage, and produces outstanding results. Granted I hacked the camera afterward, and now I shoot with the Quantum version 9B hack at 150Mb/s and it grades like RED footage. So there are solutions to shooting on a low data rate DSLR.
You can see the results on my reel, most of the footage is from “Love or War”, and 80% of the footage is unhacked GH2.
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