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GH1 perfect for Hexacopter work
  • Recently did a gig for mining client and used a hexacopter for close shots of machinery. The weather was against us, wind, rain and dust so we were limited for time but managed to get some good stuff. We used GH1s for entire project. The hexacopter had GH1 plus Panny 14mm pancake total weight approx 850gm. Vimeo Password: watpac

    Cheers Truestory

  • 17 Replies sorted by
  • Looks good. Wasn't a fan of the early vignetting style but everything else was really good. How did you do some of those "toy" shots? A plug-in or lens? What other lenses did you use aside from the 14mm? What ISOs, etc...? GH1 still holds up nice.

  • I double like this! Great Stuff - Inspires me to get a Hexa, Have a fair bit of experience flying cameras around on RC places. That Hexa stuff is rather good.

  • very nice. is it your own hexacopter? mind telling which model it was?

    it looks like the shots could have used some post-stabilization, and I would really advise you to get a variable ND-Filter, to lose the strobo-effect when doing interviews, or mostly also anything else. keep your shutter at 1/50th if there is no special reason to make it shorter, use NDs if you want shallow DOF. :)

    I thought you got some marvelous shots of the machinery, i like the music and the editing- there seems to be something wrong with the people smiling while you slide in front of them (near the end)

    they look somewhat irritating, I think its because of the short focal length and the point you told them to look at..

  • Nice work!

  • Looks pretty good!

    When talking about GH1... Can somene help me out?

    Next week I'm doing a documentary portrait with hacked GH1. I'm little worried about the image quality (noise) and sharpness. I'll have the 14-140mm and 20mm lens with me. It will be all inside, mosty tripod shots, probably some dolly suff. I will have couple lights there (up to 500W) and probably sunlight from roof windows. Must be shot at 25p. I need an advice from a GH1 user what I should be aware of, maybe some limits of the camera when shooting this kind of project? And I need a tip for a GH1 patch settings - as I said - tripod shots (no fast action), maybe dolly, people (skin tones), 25p.. I need to get most out of this camera as this project is really importnat. But I need a fairly stable settings.

    Thanks guys in advance!

  • Very Nice must of been fun being around all those big boys toys. I have to agree get rid of that vignetting at the start it really reduces the look of your film to cheap and tacky at the start,glad it was gone into the film but the Start is really important to grab the viewers attention. I could be wrong but I would say it was put together with FCP X by the Font used. Great use of the Shrink Ray Plugin Works Really well With the Tonker Toys. Copter Work Looked Good but I also Would of Hired a Good Sized Jib For Some Of the Shots instead of using the Copter. Have to agree with above about a variable ND-Filter also or use 2 polarizing filters back to back if you aready own some. I did like the Shots of the Opratators with their vehicles or equipment but agree it did look odd but I can't put my finger on it.

    Top Notch Work With a GH1 If the Paying Client Is Happy thats What Matters.

  • @MarkV When in doubt, over expose and then darken in post. You can hide lots of FPN/noise by darkening a bright shot easier than you can brighten an underexposed shot. I don't push much past iso 800 on the GH1, but on the GH2, ISO 1600 is the max cleanest iso. Overall, do some tests for yourself and when in doubt, shot black n white smooth and you can go max ISO and it will look very decent.

  • @Craig_R Copter Work Looked Good but I also Would of Hired a Good Sized Jib For Some Of the Shots instead of using the Copter. This was a remote location gig so had to take minimum gear, hexacopter was broken down to fit in suitcase. Video was shot in 2 days due to unforeseen severe weather pattern so we had no time to set shots at all just go hard 32 hours straight.. Project was edited in FCP7 & Motion 5... lenses used were 7-14, SLR12mm, 14-140, panny 14 & 20mm... Cheers

  • @truestory You did a fine job and used the GH1 nicely. Contrast and grading are generally excellent. There are lots and lots of eye candy in the video, so some scenes could perhaps benefit from allowing them to be viewed just a bit longer. But that's just my thinking.

    I had to look closely to see some of the usual GH1 features. The usual GH1 feature that is visible right away is the in-camera sharpening for video when using Lumix lenses, but many like that sharpness. I had to develop special GOP-2 iW settings to avoid in-camera sharpening as much as possible, and of course use manual focus lenses. But then the actual resolution of the GH1 becomes apparent, which is closer to 720p than 1080p.

    @MarkV If possible I would try to remain at ISO-400 and below. I took the liberty to take a sample image from this great video that shows one characteristic of the GH1. If you look at the wheel in the background you could see how the GH1 transitions from the shadows to black through a "gray patch" that shows as grey mosaic. To avoid this would mean slightly illuminating the shadows or otherwise be able to lift the shadows on location a bit and then in post production lower them back to get a clean transition for shadows.

    The image was obviously taken from the compressed Internet video, which slightly exaggerates this GH1 feature.

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  • looks great. How about a picture of the HEX rig.

  • Thank you for the tips! So I should stay low with ISO and lift the shadows on the set. But also - anyone got a tip on the ptools settings for GH1 at 25p?

  • pics of the rig, pretty standard hexacopter.

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  • If you are shooting PAL with a GH1 depending on your situation there are two patches I would recommend. L.Powell has 2 patches which are perfect for my situations. 1. 44mbps in camera playback patch.. Good for all shooting extremely reliable, 100% for me so far. This is the best patch for all Hexacopter work as all other patches I tried failed miserably due to vibrations at startup etc.. Plus you can review your footage after each flight to make sure your shots are ok.. 2. 75mbps flow motion V2.. Great for extra detail but can fail in certain hi detail situations (95% reliable).. I have 6 x GH1s for location work with various patches so I always have an alternate camera if one plays up.. for the night shots I set ISO to 800 which is the maximum before noise becomes an issue. Everything was shot at 720P50 with 1/100 shutter..

    cheers

  • I wish I could share the GOP-2 iW settings, they are PAL 25p and 90% reliable. Only the most detailed high contrast scenes fail, as bitrate rises above 60 mbits and inside the camera even higher. They are the least sharpened and can be slightly sharpened in post without penalty.

    However, only working settings are in the camera right now and no possibility to re-hack at the moment and risk a working setup. The settings are on the edge and rising bitrate even a bit would cause loss in reliability. There was not much interest in these settings while I was working on them, but they produced the most organic and non-sharpened image from GH1.

  • @truestory

    Thanks! But.. wait.. @LPowell ´s Flow motion V2 is working well on PAL GH1? I thought it´s designed only for GH2s.. Can you point me somewhere? This could be very interesting as you said its 95% reliable.. The thing is I can´t find these GH1 patches here..

    @aki_hartikainen

    Oh man... you should share your settings.. I might give them a shot next week...

  • Sorry, late night little sleep...I meant the L.Powell 75mbps Peak Reliability Patch V2...

    Cheers

  • @MarkV Unfortunately I did not write the settings down as I was fiercely testing different settings to combat aliasing and sharpening and after many tries as the last ditch attempt turned on the original Interlace Wrapper configuration at GOP-2. Much to my surprise this reduced the sharpening and aliasing to minimum and have stayed on the GH1 I use ever since. Due to the way the image is scaled on the GH1 the aliasing is still there, but not exaggerated in this configuration.

    I made a blog posting about it while I was studying the subject last spring, if it is okay to link to it, this is what triggered the hunt for less in-camera sharpening: http://www.fourseasonshd.com/cgi-bin/csvsearch.pl?db=db1&tp=tp19&search=vintage1