Manual lenses with HD video?

[tribal-warrior]

I admit that the HD video option on the G2 was not a big priority for me. I would have been just as happy getting a G1. Even so, it would be fun to play around with from time to time. From reading reviews, it seems like Panasonic has restricted user manual control in the video mode (frustrating when camera companies do this - especially when they give you such freedoms in the still photography mode.)

Of course one way around this would be to use older, manual lenses via an adapter. That should give you complete control of the aperture, and I assume that the shutter speed would be fixed in relation to whatever frame rate the camera is running at. Out of curiosity, has anyone tried using manual lenses in the G2's video mode? If so, did everything go smoothly?

 

[MRfanny]

apparently you can now patch the G2 to allow full manual controls in video just like the GF1. the G2 also has ETC just like the GH2 so you get two focal lengths out of the one lens in video which is great.

 

[tribal-warrior]

the G2 also has ETC just like the GH2 so you get two focal lengths out of the one lens in video which is great.

I'm not familiar with ETC. I did a Google search but couldn't find anything on it. Two focal lengths? I hope that this feature is not using digital zoom lol.

Looking at the specs on the DPreview site, it indicates that the file size of the 720p AVCHD is 1.25MB/sec whereas the 720p Motion JPEG is 3.4MB/sec. Unusual...I would have thought that the AVCHD files would have been larger in size since that is the (slightly) higher quality option.

 

[MRfanny]

ETC in video crops the native resolution of the sensor, so it takes the actual 1080/720 from the sensor, so you could call it native sensor zoom? lol where as it would normally take the whole sensor and dump resolution to fit 1080/720. so your 50mm becomes roughly a 100mm natively hence two focal lengths from the same lens. your 100-300mm becomes 200-600mm =) and your 20mm becomes 40mm, something that comes in very handy when shooting on the go.

avchd is a very efficient codec, issue is its too efficient sometimes and runs on variable bitrate not contsant. the hacks for the lumix series is used to bump up the bitrate for better quality. on my gh1 i have hacked it to shoot at 40Mbps AVCHD and 70Mbps MJPEG.

 

[pellicle]

I admit that the HD video option on the G2 was not a big priority for me. Out of curiosity, has anyone tried using manual lenses in the G2's video mode? If so, did everything go smoothly?

I don't want to seem disparaging, but do you do any searching on these topics? Vimeo is full of people using alternative lenses. Many C mount and heaps of others.

my blog post on c mount adaptation on the G series gets something like 2000 hits a month and that's just a simple starter.

Here is some video taken with a GH1 and a tilt adaptor for focus control

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymx5zDjiaEc

as far as HD video it can only get better as the lenses are great!

 

[tribal-warrior]

I don't want to seem disparaging, but do you do any searching on these topics?

Yes, I generally do lots of searching on these topics...though sometimes I don't get the answers that I'm looking for from searching alone. For this particular query however, I thought I would just submit a post out of curiosity's sake and see if any forum members have been experimenting with the above mentioned topic.

 

[pellicle]

tribal ... try this link

http://vimeo.com/groups/gh1

 

[pellicle]

http://www.vimeo.com/12356159

lovely work with a 50mm

 

[radatax]

I've been using manual Nikkor (AIS) lenses with my hacked GF1 for video. The GF1 is set to full manual control - shutter speed and ISO on the camera, aperture on the lens. That way I can set the right shutter speed for a certain look (1/50 for 720p25) but on bright days, you'd definitely need a few neutral density filters to cut down light when you're shooting with a wide aperture.