Many seem to think that Canon cameras have more cinematic picture profiles built in, and I have to agree on that. But GH cameras have the desired sharpness and less moire. Using filters to manipulate the uncompressed image on the GH cameras seems to provide results that look more like the picture profile on the Canon 5D. Samples below illustrate what I mean. On the right is the ungraded version from the camera as such.

I am not sure if it would have been possible to achieve the result on the left had the grading not started already when shooting.

@thepalalias: yep, thats so true! I even sometimes catch myself thinking this or that setting, lens or camera with a better DR will do the job and give me the perfect look. But its not the technology that makes great cinema. Great technology in the hands of true artists is the peak of the mountain though.

What people associate with "cinematic" is quite different and subjective. Just have a look at Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut". You can bet most people writing on this forum, when shown an excerpt from that movie without knowing where it came from, would say it's a horrible example for a non-cinematic video.

For some "cinematic" is even associated with nostalgic attributes like "no more than 24 frames per second", vignetting, or optical artefacts from anamorphic lenses.

If you want to use "cinematic" only to characterize undisputed welcome attributes of a moving picture, I'd recommend to just define it as a "moving picture created in a controlled environment, following a written story, where significant effort has been invested in creating a pleasant visual experience".

Very funny, thepalalias and i just had a similar conversation today. Cinema has more than a 1000 faces, sometimes with incredible depth of field (orson Wells, Stanley Kubrick) sometimes with absolute Videolike non motionblur ( i think it was Syriana). I saw a great movie years ago that was filmed on a shit mobile.

I think artistic truth and Vision, being faithful to a good concept and avoiding every kind of clichee and everything having its purpose, nothing being there just for eyecandy (Bresson calls this the postcard-motif-syndrome) are some of the aspects of great cinema...those people would have done cinematic magic on an iPhone...

@svart

Couldn't have put it better.

When I'm not working on something, I'm out with my GH2, practising. Mostly I practise transition shots. Then I come back and edit them together. If they will edit together.

Next I look at timing. Once you transition-into a shot and then transition-out, you're locked into a shot's timing. A 1-second shot, say, (of someone in a restaurant listening to another, lifting their eyebrows and then going back to eating their salad) can jump, whereas 1.5 seconds looks exactly right.

It took me a full 18 months to get anything out of my GH2 which approximated a film-look and a cinematic "suspension of disbelief" at the same time.

When does a grain of sand become a mound? A pile? A mountain? How many grains exactly...? No one knows.

"Cinematic" or "filmic" is nothing more than a classification of various elements into what is familiar. In this case, an actual film or movie. To isolate the adjective "cinematic" and ascribe to it, a specific element of production in metaphor or physicality is pointless.

Grain is not cinematic, neither is dynamic range or a certain lens / mic etc. Although, without some of these key components, the whole can certainly appear less cinematic. A hand or an eye, nose, brain etc. by itself is hardly a human- although, those parts together along with other organs does seem to equate to what our expectation of a human is.

Continuing in this pretentious vein, what is "fun"... specifically? It's what you ascribe to an experience or situation that meets certain parameters: The activity, location, the person you're with, time of day, mood etc. In isolation, 'fun' does not exist in any particular element.

@LPowell

I agree for RAW images. However, we are not dealing with RAW images in movie mode. We are dealing with compressed and altered images. Lot's of things can be done(Lifting shadows, Noise Reduction, ...etc) in the alteration of the image to simulate more dynamic range.

Now I agree that this is not truly increasing the dynamic range. However, you can't get the video without these alterations since there is no RAW mode for movies. Therefore, you might as well optimize those alterations to either give you the flattest image for post processing or give you as close to the final image that you are after.

In my opinion if you can't shoot RAW in camera then you should get the image as close to its final state as possible in camera. Basically, if you are going to lift shadows and alter the colors in post you might as well do that as close to the source as possible(In camera) if you have the equivalent in camera tools to do it.

Then the question becomes "how good are the in camera dynamic range enhancements". For the GH2 they basically didn't do anything at all for most scenes and when they did work they worked inconsistently.

For the GH3 I think we will see in camera DR enhancement modes that are equivalent to what is shown in the picture I posted above for the E-M5. With "Gradation Auto" the E-M5 exhibits a very nice and consistently broad dynamic range even though that DR is simulated. If you have to simulate the DR whether it is in camera or in post processing you might as well do a good job of it.

A good example of a camera achieving more than its theoretical dynamic range is the full spectrum GF1 I have. It has the same 8 bit 4:2:0 limitation that the GH2 has. However, it interprets more light than a stock camera. While the total dynamic range of the image is still limited by the 8 bits. The actual image that it shows can have a much flatter look by interpreting the extended light into the regular spectrum light. The modified GF1 can go much deeper into the shadows than a modified camera can. It is not a real increase in dynamic range. However, it can be just as affective.

If the GH3 gets a slight increase in real sensor dynamic range and a large increase in simulated dynamic range I think it could be a real benefit.

@svart I simply refused to even let anyone turn on that movie after seeing the image quality in the previews, and that was a decade ago. If my amateur friends could easily exceed the image quality back then, then there was no excuse for an established director to choose not to. I mean, if they want to try something, that is fine - but I was not going to be forced to support it. :)

On the other hand, it is easy for me to look past codec flaws on for instance a 7D and just enjoy the movie.

@LPowell And of course the sensorgen data shows some other interesting things about the GH2's RAW dynamic range vs others.

Note, in this case I am comparing the ISO measured closest to ISO 160. (not the one numbered closest to 200), not the ISO with maximum dynamic range (which was sometimes a bit better in some cases) nor the one labeled closest to ISO 160.

Stops of Dynamic Range at Measured ISO 200 (sensors range from compact to FF)

• Canon Powershot G12 9.8
• Olympus PEN E-P3 9.8
• Panasonic GX1 10.1
• Canon S100 10.5
• Canon Powershot G1X 10.5
• Nikon D3100 10.7
• Canon 1100D 10.7
• Canon 60D 10.7
• Nikon J1 10.8
• Canon 50D 10.9 (included because I still use it for stills, not for the hacked video mode)
• Panasonic GH2 10.9
• Canon 5DMkIII 10.9
• Canon 550D 11.0
• Canon 5DMkII 11.1
• Canon 7D 11.2
• Canon 1DMkIV 11.4
• Panasonic GH1 11.4
• Nikon D3200 11.7
• Nikon D3s 11.7
• Olympus OM-D_E-M5 11.9/11.7 (measured ISO 200 is pretty much in the middle between the two ISO)
• Nikon D4 12.5
• Nikon D7000 12.6
• Nikon D800 12.7
• Nikon D600 13.1

Once again, note that several of these cameras have additional dynamic range at other ISOs. The D7000 in particular has 14 stops at measured ISO 83.

1) the absence of characteristics traditionally associated with video (TV studio lighting, clipping, line enhancement, interlaced footage, etc,)

2) certain tropes, conventions, narrative abstractions, indirection and withheld information, difficult to codify, but instantly detected. If those elements are powerful enough, they can surmount video characteristics to give the sense of cinema.

There are Pixelvision shorts and features (resolution of less than 100 lines, dynamic range, 2-3 stops at most) which are undoubtedly cinematic and, thanks to the abstraction of the image, can be far more cinematic than far "better" formats.

@Svart is tapping on it.

There are just a handful of fundamentals where image is concerned that will be enough. If you want cinematic, learn:

1. Frame Composition
2. How to Spot Decent Acting
3. How to Write Dialogue
4. Tone
5. Getting good Audio

All of these things will get you to something that "feels" like a movie very quickly.

I think cinematic means other things than just how a camera works. The largest part of cinema to me is being able to adeptly transition from scene to scene and keep the story flowing. This comes from knowing what you need and what you don't need in a shot and either not shooting something that doesn't have a meaning to the plot line or throwing it away. A lot of amateurs will shoot a lot of stuff and hope to cut it together later and that always feels choppy and out of proper timing. Usually someone just calls this "artistic" but that's a cop-out. A professional will have every aspect of a scene already plotted and done before the camera ever rolls and most of the time will do very little "filler" shots. This isn't to say that sometimes a scene just doesn't come together as a director had imagined and needs to be cut differently, thrown away or reshot. I worked on a short film a while back where we ended up throwing away a whole scene(1 day of work) just because it messed up the timing of a later scene. Cinematics is all about balance.

Many are using bushes as the willing test subject especially right now when there are many kinds of hues that are difficult for the GH cameras.

I think cinematic also means strong color saturation, which the GH cameras often struggle to produce. But with a little bit of science and art of color filters the situation can be improved, and sometimes quite dramatically even. Attached is a quick sample that was taken using a set of color filters and later graded for strong saturation. The original as it came from the camera is on the right.

Dynamic range, fps and careful exposure seems to be covered, so here's the inevitable "it's in the work methods" comment. Cinematic, as in "what we usually see in movie theaters": every shot planned, controlled camera movement on dollies, focus pulling, crane shots, steadicam shots, artificial lighting and/or controlled ambient light… and as said before, a real plot :)

Hacked GH2 and a small crew that knows what it's doing will get you that kind of "cinematic" shots. If done as commercial production, even minimal crew with rented gear, cars to get to locations etc. will cost at least the price of a GH2 per day :)