Here are a few shots of home town in Dublin, Ireland. I wish I could do more but it was a really short trip and I had intended to travel to the famous Cliffs of Moher in the west of the country but weather was too bad. I think that would’ve looked epic! Plus I haven’t been there since I was a child. In fact I’ve been away from home so long sometimes I can be a tourist.
Shot with 30mm square front and 50mm round front on GH2 + NanoFlash@220mbit/s
Memories of Dublin from Edwin Lee on Vimeo.
The series of AVC-intra bitrate hacks/patches by ‘Driftwood’ are getting crazy popular.
His latest servings include “seAQuake”, an AQ3, 166mb AVC-Intra patch. It’s quite stable, but you’ll need very good SD cards. The GH2 hack community recommends SanDisk 95mb/s cards. I personally have a 32gig card. But one thing to note is that it can only record in roughly 4:05 segments (equalling 4.3gig) – this is because the card can only record a limited chunk before it needs to go to a new file. But new tests seem to confirm that the 64gig SDXC version can record longer.
Of course, I was thinking how great it would improve anamorphic footage.
I did a quick test here with the 50mm roundfront:
Usually I output to Vimeo with h.264 at 10000kbps. So this time when I’ve uploaded this seAQuake footage, it definitely looks sharper and less muddy. I can’t put my finger on it but I know it looks way better than stock camera footage. Though, in fairness, I think the 66mb hack 3GOP is already good enough for me. seAQuake’s 166mb does seem like a bit overkill.
I also tried out EX TELE with it but definitely not advisable with these kind of lenses. Lomo’s aren’t known for their sharpness and the EX TELE function only highlights it more! Oh well, guess I do need to keep my eye out for a tele anamorphic lens!
I’m spending Christmas holidays in my native Ireland next month so hope to shoot more anamorphic footage with the GH2.
You can find all the popular hacks compiled here.
Thanks again to Vitaly Kiselev and Driftwood.
I also did a quick comparison between the Panasonic GH2 (Micro Four Thirds) and Sony NEX-5N (APS) sensors, to see the difference in sizes:
NEX-5N with 30mm:
GH2 with 30mm:
NEX-5N with 50mm:
GH2 with 50mm:
The new 5N is ridiculously compact and light. And this is from a GH2 user speaking. Yet it packs a punch!
Look here, I can’t even see the camera behind the square front lens.
Ah, there it is:
I’ve got the 30mm lens on so it’s quite wide – not super wide but for a Lomo anamorphic I can’t demand much. But now that I have it on an APS sensor it’s great to utilise the entire piece of glass. The 30mm is the second-widest anamorphic lens next to the extremely rare 22mm.
