Well, I tried my hand at video blogging again. Not sure how successful this was, but there is quite a bit of info in this video regarding the patches I am trying out and how well they work for video outdoors. Trying to match the focal lengths was a real bear and I could only get them close. Still, it worked out all right.
I built a cheap rig to be able to run them together, pointing at about the same spot …
You can see that I shot the GF3 (left most) with the Olympus 45mm 1.8, which of course fixes the 45mm focal length in stone for this test. The second from left os the GH2, which is sporting the 14-140, set at 45mm. The next camera is the G5, which has the 45-175 mounted. And finally the GX1 with the Pentax 50mm 1.4 set at f/8 – the only manual lens in the test and one of the better performers.
The patches I used were:
- GF3 – Cake 2.3, whose bandwidth averaged about 49mbps at 30p, which should be approximately triple stock.
- GH3 – Cake 2.3, whose bandwidth averaged about 65mbps at 24p, almost 4x stock.
- G5 – stock, whose bandwidth averaged about 28mbps at 60p.
- GX1 – Galaxian V1, whose bandwidth average about 35mbps, approximately double stock.
So some nice figures here, and it shows in the footage. I don’t get quite the video quality I wanted from this test (I do later on in part 3,) but this test discusses sound as well, and I show how panning looks when mixed down to 30p for the Internet.
Speaking of audio, I used the patch mechanism (see Vitaliy Kiselev’s amazing work here: http://www.personal-view.com/ and please contribute if you use the patches) to improve my audio as well and find that it makes a small difference. The audio settings for each camera are:
- GF3 at 384 kbps mono
- GH2 at 448 kbps stereo
- G5 at 192 kbps stereo
- GX1 at 384 kbps stereo
I use a TASCAM DR05 with a Giant Squid lavalier mic for the early part of the video log, but after that I switch between each camera’s audio as its video is presented and at times I mix them all together. So you can get a real feel for how you might like to handle the audio in your own videos. I have never liked the idea of adding a shotgun mic to the camera, but I might try that one day. For my own blogging, having the TASCAM in a pocket with the Giant Squid attached to my shirt provides more freedom of movement, so that is my way for now.
And lastly, the actual video
