Noa Put
June 29th, 2014, 04:17 AM
A friend of mine shoots a few weddings a year and he bought the gh4 2 weeks ago, he asked me if I could take his camera with me to my next wedding as he wanted to have some real life footage to play with before he would take it to his next wedding. Now I had decided for myself I don't need 4K for this and even next year as my clients are not asking for it yet and from a business point of view it would save me the most money to wait until end of next year to upgrade my camera's.
I only regret taking the camera with me to try :) I actually liked shooting in 4K that much that I got a gh4 for myself 2 days ago, I know, call me stupid, but I felt the advantages of shooting in 4K outweigh any disadvantages that I found it important enough investing in such a camera now and as soon as my budget allows to get another 4K camera and sell a few of my 1080p camera's.
Here is why; ability to zoom into your footage, up to 50%, without any visual loss in image quality.
To give an example, yesterday the groom gave his mother flowers in the morning and she started to cry, as this happened unannounced I only had the time to start up my camera, point it to the right direction and press the autofocus button to focus right (I had the 12-35mm lens on which was at 12mm at that moment) I was standing a bit further back and had no time to zoom in as it was happening so fast I feared I would ruin the moment with that zoom. In post however I was able to zoom in 50% and get a nice and tight framed shot of that moment.
The cropped footage still looks nice and sharp, as if it was shot that way.
Another example was from the wedding 2 weeks ago, my gh4 was at the back of a small chapel during the ceremony with a 12-35mm lens and shot at 12mm. At a certain point I had to move to the front with another camera and leave the gh4 in the back, I noticed later in post that one of the guests had bumped the tripod legs and changed the framing of the camera, but again no problem as I just could zoom in and reframe in post to correct the error the guest had caused. And still a nice and sharp image. I kept that shot on location wide enough as I wanted to experiment with the cropping in post so that eventually gave the necessary room to correct any mistakes.
And also yesterday in church I let the gh4 run with the altar and lectern (my two cx730 where running the show, the gh4 was placed just for testing purposes) and here I could make use of the cropping ability to put teh focus more on the lectern or the altar or to crop me out of the image when they where doing the vows as I saw myself in the camera frame. This was a real eye opener being able to move my frame around on a unmanned camera and place it just where I wanted it and still have it nice and sharp.
The fact that you can zoom in up to 50% to correct any framing errors without any visual quality loss is hugh for me as I don't have a second shooter to rely on,
As I see it now I can make use of that cropping advantage for at least 2 years (non of my weddings I get booked for right now for 2015 ask for 4K delivery), I would expect for anything I shoot in 2016 could get a few requests for delivering 4K (that would mean my clients should be asking for it next year as they usually book me one year in advance) but it will take untill 2017 before I expect that 4K delivery might be equal then 1080p.
That was my reasoning behind my stepping into 4K right now and use it to my own advantage as long as I can, in a few years that advantage will be gone if you have to deliver in 4K but who knows, 8K might be the new 4K then :)
About workflow issues, I shot in a 100mbs codec which edits just fine on my 2 year old pc, actually I don't notice that much difference compared to editing 50p avchd, it's slower, yes, especially exporting but in my case I can export almost twice realtime to a 25mbs h.264 1080p mp4 file which is still fast enough for my purposes and during edit I hardly see any differences compared to edit avchd, only editing two 4K files in a multicam is not possible in realtime, it's doable but then my machine struggles but editing one 4K layer and 2 1080p layers is possible in multicam mode in Edius 7.
So anyone questioning the use of 4K, the cropping ability is definitely the main reason for me now. It doesn't mean I will get lazy when I shoot, just leave the camera wide and fix it in post but I can find enough reasons that it will help me as a soloshooter to deliver a better product being able to correct framing mistakes or give more point of views in post where I don't have the time to do that on location.
I only regret taking the camera with me to try :) I actually liked shooting in 4K that much that I got a gh4 for myself 2 days ago, I know, call me stupid, but I felt the advantages of shooting in 4K outweigh any disadvantages that I found it important enough investing in such a camera now and as soon as my budget allows to get another 4K camera and sell a few of my 1080p camera's.
Here is why; ability to zoom into your footage, up to 50%, without any visual loss in image quality.
To give an example, yesterday the groom gave his mother flowers in the morning and she started to cry, as this happened unannounced I only had the time to start up my camera, point it to the right direction and press the autofocus button to focus right (I had the 12-35mm lens on which was at 12mm at that moment) I was standing a bit further back and had no time to zoom in as it was happening so fast I feared I would ruin the moment with that zoom. In post however I was able to zoom in 50% and get a nice and tight framed shot of that moment.
The cropped footage still looks nice and sharp, as if it was shot that way.
Another example was from the wedding 2 weeks ago, my gh4 was at the back of a small chapel during the ceremony with a 12-35mm lens and shot at 12mm. At a certain point I had to move to the front with another camera and leave the gh4 in the back, I noticed later in post that one of the guests had bumped the tripod legs and changed the framing of the camera, but again no problem as I just could zoom in and reframe in post to correct the error the guest had caused. And still a nice and sharp image. I kept that shot on location wide enough as I wanted to experiment with the cropping in post so that eventually gave the necessary room to correct any mistakes.
And also yesterday in church I let the gh4 run with the altar and lectern (my two cx730 where running the show, the gh4 was placed just for testing purposes) and here I could make use of the cropping ability to put teh focus more on the lectern or the altar or to crop me out of the image when they where doing the vows as I saw myself in the camera frame. This was a real eye opener being able to move my frame around on a unmanned camera and place it just where I wanted it and still have it nice and sharp.
The fact that you can zoom in up to 50% to correct any framing errors without any visual quality loss is hugh for me as I don't have a second shooter to rely on,
As I see it now I can make use of that cropping advantage for at least 2 years (non of my weddings I get booked for right now for 2015 ask for 4K delivery), I would expect for anything I shoot in 2016 could get a few requests for delivering 4K (that would mean my clients should be asking for it next year as they usually book me one year in advance) but it will take untill 2017 before I expect that 4K delivery might be equal then 1080p.
That was my reasoning behind my stepping into 4K right now and use it to my own advantage as long as I can, in a few years that advantage will be gone if you have to deliver in 4K but who knows, 8K might be the new 4K then :)
About workflow issues, I shot in a 100mbs codec which edits just fine on my 2 year old pc, actually I don't notice that much difference compared to editing 50p avchd, it's slower, yes, especially exporting but in my case I can export almost twice realtime to a 25mbs h.264 1080p mp4 file which is still fast enough for my purposes and during edit I hardly see any differences compared to edit avchd, only editing two 4K files in a multicam is not possible in realtime, it's doable but then my machine struggles but editing one 4K layer and 2 1080p layers is possible in multicam mode in Edius 7.
So anyone questioning the use of 4K, the cropping ability is definitely the main reason for me now. It doesn't mean I will get lazy when I shoot, just leave the camera wide and fix it in post but I can find enough reasons that it will help me as a soloshooter to deliver a better product being able to correct framing mistakes or give more point of views in post where I don't have the time to do that on location.