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USER REVIEW THE GRAND PLAN
THE GRAND PLANWITH PANASONIC GH5S
Jon Shepley from CreoKinetics explains how the new Panasonic GH5S will change Season 3 of The Grand Tour WORDS JON SHEPLEY PICTURES AMAZON VIDEO
think you’d get a nice smooth shot in a car. If you want a handheld feel to it then you could go down that route with a head or something like that. The problem is that when you’re shooting in a car, especially if you’re shooting the driver, the different parts of the car in the image, like the A pillar, the seats, the steering wheel, need to be completely solid in the frame otherwise it looks very odd. You get this image that is just kind of wandering around. Because the body and lens is fixed it’s literally an image that is creeping around the frame adjusting for movements in the car which you can’t see so it’s actually destabilising the image. Anyone who is dealing with a fixed point of reference in the shot would suffer the same problem.
camera; it was everything we needed it to be to work for our particular shooting situation. I think they realised that the market had split in two; there are people in the prosumer market who want an in-camera stabilised sensor because they’re using a lot of lightweight rigs. Then you have the professional side who are big users of the GH series cameras but don’t particularly want a stabilised sensor camera, particularly us, especially mounted to something like a vehicle. The GH5 camera is totally unworkable in this respect having a stabilised sensor. The problem is that quite often we get asked to put a stabilised head or a stabilised camera in a car. It’s one of those things that sounds like a really good idea as you’d
had major feedback on the GH5 as it turned out that the camera was just not going to work for us. That feedback went to the engineers in Japan who were very good about it and actually wrecked one of their GH5s by glueing the sensor in position, one of our requests as the sensor stabilisation didn’t work for us. To no avail in the end unfortunately, so I drew a line under it and just assumed we would have to carry on using the GH4s which are still stunning cameras compared to most of the competition. I was called into Panasonic for a meeting around November last year. They said that they had something exciting to show me and presented me with the GH5S. It was pretty much everything on my wishlist from the GH5 in a new
ABOVE Season 2 of The Grand Tour still used the Panasonic GH4 cameras.
DEFINITION APRIL 2018
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