Confused

I did an overnighter in nice conditions one week ago and brought no less than three cameras: The Panasonic GH2, the Olympus E-PL1 and the Canon S90. Fortunately these cameras and associated lenses are small enough to fit into the LowePro Slingshot 102 AW bag without problems. This is not the normal situation, though, but I wanted to test the new cameras. The S90 was used for a little time lapse sequence, which it is well suited to with the CHDK. The E-PL1 works as expected. It has less controls than the E-P2, but since is still very usable. The image quality good, as expected, and mostly depends on the lens.

I did some video filming with the GH2, but I haven't yet assembled the material. It is perfectly clear that it will take some time to learn to use the it efficiently and to find the correct parameters. The camera itself contains a lot of functionality and then there is also a jungle of unofficial firmware enhancements (hacks) that change the data video encoding parameters for even better video quality at the cost of  more storage space. The improvement in video quality should be quite big with some of the patches, even though the standard version in my opinion seemed to have noticeably better resolution than that of the EOS 60D, which I've had before. I installed one of the more popular ones, the FlowMotion patch. To evaluate these for yourself would be very time consuming, so I just have to rely on what other have written. Still, with or without any of these patches there are a lot of parameters to experiment with. I filmed last week's fatbike overnighter using the 1080/25p HBR mode with Cinema film mode and the other parameters at default. I later read that it would be better to use the Smooth film mode with the contrast and sharpness values turned down a little, since this would give better possibilites to do color corrections afterwards. It is fairly simple to turn up the contrast and sharpness in the video editor, but impossible to correct afterwards if the video has been recorded too much contrast that have exceeded the dynamic range of the sensor. A simple test (be sure to click it fullscreen and a higher resolution) can be seen below. The first section looks rather dull and flat with the Smooth film mode, but the second section shows the same material with some corrections applied.



Well, there is a lot to learn about the camera, video making and video editing. I've now reached the stage where I have a lot more questions than before, but that is just a natural progression.