I think one of the closest a-la Cinestyle profiles in Panasonic camera was the RETRO Profile in Lumix G2 - it holds picture characteristics that are ever closest to the famous Cinestyle, still no any hack or patch gives what this profile gives to shadows, middles, highlights, etc. like Canon DSLRs.

Unfortunately it's yellowish (kind of light sepia) and can't be modified by camera controls. I liked G2 when I owned it an year ago and now I still keep only three pictures taken with this RETRO profile. They were simple tests only from the first day I bought G2 that time, so they are not the best I took.

PLEASE, VITALIY, DRIFTWOOD AND OTHERS, MAKE A DEEP ANALYSIS OF G2 RETRO PROFILE AND TRY TO PUT/COMBINE SOME DETAILS TO YOUR LATEST GH1/2 PATCHES!!!

SUCH A PICTURE PROFILE WOULD BE ONE OF THE MOST DREAMS OF EVERYONE HERE.

2 months and 50+ comments - but not additional comments from the OP since their original post. Seems a little odd.

The dynamic range of the GH2 is not a strength but the resolution is. You can easily make things less sharp by using softer lenses, diffusion filters, fog, etc. but few other DSLRs can record similar levels of detail when called to.

As many people mentioned before, lighting and exposure are very key to getting the most out of the GH2. I usually overexpose slightly if I want to get good shadow detail because raising the shadows can be tricky.

You play to the cameras strengths if you are using it, or you rent/buy a camera better suited to what you are doing at any given point.

As far as I know, that part of the camera remains inaccessible. I have developed a set of standard inexpensive filters that can be used for white balancing, this atleast allows more saturated and thus cleaner colors for grading. I will post details in the other thread in a few more days.

@madrenderman "is a wrong thing, it's false, is true only if you do color correction in wrong way, on a 8bit space... if you do color correction in correct way (in 16-32 bit space) you have more room to work and you have a best video that you can grab from these informations."

Actually contrast could become too flat and separate midtone values could get rounded and encoded at the same value, in which case contrast would be lost. 32-bit grading helps only if there are variations in the recorded values but these variations could get lost by too flat contrast for scene lighting and camera settings.

Video has inherent bias for luminance over chrominance. Bayer type sensor has twice the green (luminance) area compared to individual color channels. Video then compresses colors even further (4:2:2 -> 4:2:0). On the GH1 AVCHD cuts to empty black before actual black and very dark hues are mostly gray macroblocks.

Film on the other hand has the same light sensitive area for every channel, so it is 4:4:4 to begin with. The channels are of different sensitivity, because light has to pass through several emulsion layers and yellow masks between layers to reach the most light sensitive emulsion (blue). This is good to consider if film grain is applied, because each film emulsion layer has slightly different grain. The closest thing for a video would be to have three separate CCD's and the Red and Blue sensors were tuned for different sensitivity and yellow filters for Red and Blue CCD's were used to modify contrast. This configuration would match film. So it becomes obvious that a filter or filters are needed for technically more accurate film look.

For this I have been experimenting with magenta color correction filters of varying strength. It will fix the bias for luminance adding chroma. It will also compress contrast, so the dark hues are encoded at higher and thus better values. If the strength of the magenta filter is -1 f-stop of Green, then you will have the same amount of useful shadow detail more before AVCHD cuts to macroblocks. Contrast could become too flat, in which case midtones will suffer. So it becomes a matter of finding the right amount of Green stopping power filter for particular lens and scene.

I mean its simple, if the 5dmiii would cost exactly the same as the gh2, i would always go for the canon. But it costs more than 4 times as much. If i invested in that region, i would rather add a little cash and go for the fs100. Or i would wait and see how the black magic cinecam or the sony a99 or the gh3 will perform.

And yes, i think the gh2 is sometimes overhyped, when people say at the zacuto it beat the red or ari or whatsoever. Thats just ridiculous. Still, for that kind of money its a damn wonderful tool and nothing gets close to it for that price!!

Lol, well its the gh2's sensor with a canon lens. So what? I would put a magic canon sticker on the case or do what ever possible to get such an image for such a price. So the anamorphic lens makes it cinematic, great. For the price of the gh2 you just do not get a better or nearly as good image anywhere.

partly true, but i think this one for example does not look videoish at all. Anamorphic of course adds to that.

@producer: have you ever tried out the gh2 with the right lenses? It might be easier to get "cinematic" (then again what is the cinema look? there is not that one cinema look; and imagine if all footage one day looks like out of a canon and the same, how tedious) with the canons. Yet they have their negative side effects, too. The biggest one, that they cost a lot more, at least those that are worthwhile.

Plus its easy to get a shot like the one you posted with a gh2. You might even get that shallow depth of field with a consumer camcorder, due to the closeness to the objective.

@Gabel Thanks, might come handy!

@Gabel could you explain carefully how you record externally in HBR mode. I have not tried this myself and I rarely use 25p internally because the quality difference to 50i is neglectable.

(excuses for the off topic question)

Same here. We'll probably never see the same quality in HBR as in 24p even with the hack. The Ninja makes sense in 25p, since you don't get the cadence problems like in 24p for external recording.

If you need ProRes right away, using a Ninja makes sense for sure – you save transcoding times.