DEFINITION April 2018

71

THE GRAND PLAN USER REVIEW

THE SENSOR IS FIXED LIKE THE ONE IN THE GH4 AND IS BRAND NEW, SOMETHING WE WEREN’T EXPECTING

WELCOME TO THE GH5S The GH5S is an exceptional camera for professional users. The sensor is fixed like the one in the GH4 and is brand new, something we weren’t expecting. I think they saw an opportunity to compete with Sony for the low-light capability. When we’re shooting the in-car stuff for the show obviously the light conditions change dramatically over the day. Also when you’re shooting at night you have lights in the car to illuminate the presenter which is a safety concern really as it can be dazzling when you’re driving. We did change the position of the filming light so it’s almost directly above them, the area above the handbrake so it’s not in their eyeline, to make it as safe as possible. With this camera you can have the light on its absolute minimum setting and not only does it mean that you’ve got more than enough illumination for the presenter but it also lets you see what is going on outside. Normally you just lose everything out of the window; this way you see everything that is going by so if something is being referenced outside you can probably see it with a very sensitive camera like the GH5S. Also the spot metering has been improved. It’s a simple feature but one that I don’t think anyone else has. It’s the ability to move the spot meter which is fixed in the centre of the frame in most cameras; you can move it within 90% of the frame. The GH4

has it within 80% of the frame. So it’s much closer to the edge of the frame. The timecode was a big thing that we were asking for from Panasonic. On the GH4 we’ve always used an external timecode input into the microphone input in the camera. This wasn’t ideal and means that there’s an extra process in post-production: they take the audio and stripe the file with proper timecode to go into an edit suite. Now you have proper broadcast timecode embedded into the file and you can jam it through a regular BNC cable through their flash synch on the front of the camera. I’m just talking to them about the functionality of how that works because at the moment you have to go through a few menu steps to jam the camera and then it generates the timecode locally on the camera. I’m keen for it to work in that mode but also in a mode where you can literally just feed it timecode as you would for a lot of broadcast cameras. You could have all three cameras on the same timecode and if it changes, it does on all the cameras live rather than having to re-jam. Chances are it won’t be able to hold a frame accurate synch between cameras with the current method they’re using. It makes such a difference in the edit in terms of time. The costs can quickly mount up because of the amount of footage we generate. Someone has to process all that data even if it’s not used, then they’ll go through it and decide

@DEFINITIONMAGAZINE |

@DEFINITIONMAGS |

@DEFINITIONMAGS

APRIL 2018 DEFINITION

Powered by