DSLR/DSLM video Archives - Budget-stretching tips for filmmaking, animation, motion graphics & visual effects

Before & after color grading comparison of flat scanned 35mm on the Outpost DVD

The British independent low-budget (£200,000 according to wikipedia) feature Outpost directed by Steve Barker achieved something pretty extraordinary– it rose above the endless flood of made-for-straight-to-DVD movies that belong to what I call the “post-Alien subgenre” (a group of soldiers/technicians who don’t like each other are stuck somewhere isolated/dark/claustrophobic, waiting it out for a specified amount of time until rescue/safety, while being killed off one by one by a mysterious & obscured creature/entity)… by being bought up by Sony and given a limited theatrical release in the UK.

Ok cool story, brodawg. Yeah so on the DVD there are deleted scenes that appear to be from an assemblage edit of the flat transfer film scan footage. Which means you can directly compare that to the look of the color graded final feature, if you’re into that kinda thing. It was shot on (Fuji) 35mm, so the flat transfer holds 13-14 stops of dynamic range (good prosumer video cameras and DSLR/DSLRish cameras hold 7-10 usable stops). The color grade’s bleach bypass/ENRish look is kinda par for the course considering the genre, but it’s definitely well crafted. And if you wear an eye patch, have a parrot on your shoulder, and use the word “booty” in a non-hiphop way, you can even rip the deleted scenes and try mimicking the final result… which would be pretty useful for anyone who’s learning to color grade. BUT THAT WOULD BE ILLEGALZ.

Here be the Outpost DVD on Amazon.

The simplest way to add production value to your film: Avoid white walls & wardrobe

To me there’s four explicit things that differentiate professional films from their student/amateur counterparts (other than marketing budgets, ha)…

Sophisticated lighting
Extensive foley
A lack of white-walled interiors
A lack of white wardrobe

Numbers 1 & 2 usually cost some mucho money. But 3 & 4 don’t, so you should totally jump all up on those for your projects.

Go to the Apple trailers page and watch a bunch of ’em. Count how many times you see white-walled interiors versus color ones. Usually the more fantastic & stylish the film, the darker the color of the walls… and even with “realistic” films, the walls that “feel” like they’re white are actually light gray or beige or light blue. That’s because professionals know to avoid putting white on-camera, because it limits your lighting options since you’d have to walk on proverbial eggshells in order to not have it blow out overexposed. And that’s working with film and its 13-14 stops of dynamic range, as opposed to your (assumed) DSLR/DSLM/video camera’s 7-10 usable stops. Which means you should be extra concerned about avoiding white walls.

So you can either choose locations with that in mind, or you can score extra go-getter points by painting your location’s walls. House paint is pretty cheap, especially considering the visual difference it makes for your film. If just hearing the concept of spending a day laboring away to make your bedroom’s walls mauve or pistachio sounds like absolute insanity to you, then –REALTALK– you may not be cut out to be a filmmaker. No-budget filmmaking is 60% moving heavy objects. Wait, unless you have a big trust fund… then just hire someone else to do it and soldier on.

Yeah so anyways, get those white walls out of your film and it’ll not only look better, it’ll convey the mood/tone better (omg the scary room’s walls are bLoOoOood rEd), and will give you more lighting options without fear of blowing out the walls to yucky clipped white. The lighting thing is especially true if you have limited light modifying gear, which is probably your case. Unless the aforementioned trust fund thing applies.

And needless to say, that stuff applies, like, tenfold to white wardrobe. Because limiting how contrasty or varied you can light your actors is like shooting yourself in the foot. This is something that I’ve seen occur in a lot of student and amateur films. What’s most hand-to-forehead inducing about it is how easily avoidable it is. So don’t put your actors in white clothes in like direct sunlight, unless they’re supposed to be visiting from the afterlife. As with walls, “white” wardrobe in professional films are usually actually a little darker. Often a preexisting piece of white wardrobe will be lightly dyed, though I have no direct experience in that, so I can’t offer any advice or suggestions on doing it yourself.

Checkity these details from the last of the above framegrabs. Note that the towel on Sally Field’s shoulder is blown out white, with the same RGB values as the blown out practical light units.

That means a white dish towel will blow out on a $230 million superhero studio film shot on Red Epic… so a white dress shirt will likely do the same on your project shot on a DSLR. I assume that since it was a minor prop, they didn’t bother to dye it, or maybe they didn’t realize it was going to sit on her shoulder or whatevs. But there’s no way they’d have a piece of wardrobe doing that.

Also worth noting is that some folks feel the same way about using pure black wardrobe, which can appear on-camera as pure formless black in some lighting situations. Though this is less perceptually disrupting than a blown-out white shirt, in my opinion.

I’ve shot projects where white walls and shirts were beyond my decision-making control, and I had to work around them. All of those projects would’ve turned out better-looking had the white been replaced with something else.

Best starter filmmaker lenses for mirrorless cameras: Nikon IX rises from the grave

Listen up, I feel like this is kinda a big deal. So you’re dirt poor. Or a student. Or a dirt poor student. Or a dirt student (agriculture major). And you wanna put an earnest effort into seeing if you can cut it as a filmmaker. So you buy a mirrorless camera that shoots video, and you go the ultra-frugal route and get only the body without kit lens.

So here’s what ya do about lenses: get on the ol’ eBayz and search for “nikon ix”.

These lil’ dudes are dead lenses. We’re talkin’ in a sealed coffin dressed in their mom’s favorite outfits. They deaddddd. They were made for Nikon’s Pronea cameras, which were part of APS (Advanced Photo System), a failed consumer photo film format thingee from the 90s. Made for a now-extinct film format, these lenses can’t work on present Nikon or Canon DSLRs because they have rear protrusions that would hit the reflex mirrors.

Well now we gunn git our George Romero on, bcuz these now be ZOMBIE lenses. Their putrifying little lens hands are reachin’ up out of the dirt in front of their little tombstones. Except instead of wanting to eat our brains, they wanna help you get yr filmmakin’ on, deep discount style — because they can work great on Micro Four Thirds, NEX, Sony E-mount, NX, and whatever else mirrorless cameras with a lens mount.

Once you apply all my advicey thangs listed later in this article, you’ll find yourself with some nice video-friendly lenses that are lightweight with good optics, with a useable focus throw, hard stop focus ring, and a clickless aperture… at an incredibly affordable price. You can have two filmmaking-ready zoom lenses that span from 20mm to 180mm for as little as $60.

They may not be Nikon’s finest lenses, but they’re still Nikkors made with mid/late 1990s lens technology. I really don’t think you’ll find this kind of quality at these price points. Here’s your shopping list…

1. THE LENSES

20-60mm f/3.5-5.6 (black model)

This is the first lens you wanna grab, since short focal length lenses are generally more sought after. Made in Japan, weighs just six ounces, close focus of 1.1 feet, 52mm filter thread, and a seven-bladed iris for nice fourteen-point lens flare sunstars– kinda a minor thing but I’m not too into six or eight pointed sunstars (fyi: odd number of blades creates double the number of sunstar points, and even number of blades creates the same number as blades). Actually, all the Nikon IX lenses are seven-bladed, hooray. Originally $380 back in the day, this guy usually goes for $15-40. Mine was brand new dead stock, $15. That’s absurd.

60-180mm f/4-5.6 (black model)

Made in Japan, 9.5 ounces, close focus 3.9 feet, 52mm filter thread, seven-bladed iris. It originally went for $245, and can be found for $15-60.

So with those you’re covered pretty well, focal length-wise. But if you care there’s an in-between zoom…

24-70mm f/3.5-5.6 (only available in black)

Made in Thailand, six ounces, close focus 1.1 feet, 52mm filter thread, seven-bladed iris. Original price $160. They show up on eBay for about $15-50… mine was new dead stock.

And here are the later white models… note that their eBay prices are generally the same as the black models, though specs-wise the black models seem to be a better choice. The differences are in italics.

20-60mm f/3.5-5.6 (white model)

Same specs as the black model, except this one’s made in Thailand instead of Japan.

60-180mm f/4.5-5.6 (white model)

Alright, this one is considerably different than the better black model. Made in Thailand, 9.5 ounces, close focus 3.9 feet, 46mm filter thread, seven-bladed iris, and it has ten elements in seven groups while the black version is eleven/eight. It originally went for $100-150, which was a lot cheaper than the black model. Note that the minimum f-stop is 2/3rds a stop slower as well.

30-60mm f/4-5.6 (only available in white)

Made in Thailand, weighs a ridiculous 3.4 ounces, close focus of 1.1 feet, 46mm filter thread, seven-bladed iris. I don’t really see a point in getting this one if you can get a 20-60mm instead… other than its insane light weight. Unless if you need to tie your camera to a helium balloon, I dunno.

2. NIKON G TO MFT LENS ADAPTER

So with the G-Type adapter, there’s a little ring that allows you to have stepless aperture control. Booya. To me this is a huge deal– to be able to have minute control over how your highlights look is important to me, as well as being able to do simple iris pulls during a shot (like when you follow an actor through a tunnel or exiting a building into the sun). Kinda a big deal to have this feature using a $20 lens. One downside is that you’ll have no f-stop indicator to let you know what stop you’re shooting at, though this isn’t really a big deal with digital cinematography and its WYSIWYG LCD screens… and this is coming from a snobby, fluent practitioner of the Zone System.

Here are a couple low-priced adapter options for MFT cameras… I’ve used them both and they do the job. But the Fotodiox’s aperture control ring is way, way better than the Fotga.
Fotodiox Nikon G to MFT lens adapter (about $26)
Fotga Nikon G to MFT lens adapter (about $10)

The Fotga’s ring isn’t dampened at all and it has annoying click-stops at wide open and a little past closed. The Fotodiox will travel the entire iris range without engaging an annoying click at fully open or closed, and the ring is somewhat smooth and dampened… well worth the price difference.

Or if for some reason you wanna get a high quality, first-class adapter with a nice smoothly dampened aperture ring (and without any clicks), then here ya go…
Novoflex Nikon G to MFT lens adapter (about $260)

3. FOTGA LENS ADAPTER MODIFICATION

Alright, let’s say for some reason you have to go with the Fotga adapter. Remember when I mentioned iris pulls a minute ago? Well trying to do that with the Fotga out of the box is a headache. That’s because of those annoying aforementioned clicks on the aperture ring. When you have your iris open all the way and you try to smoothly close down a little, there’ll be a clumsy pop as you disengage from the click. Even if you never do an in-shot iris pull, it’s still annoying.

But luckily the aperture control mechanism is pretty simple. It’s just a little bolt jutting into the inner barrel of the adapter that pushes the lens’s aperture actuator lever (the same thing that the camera engages to control the iris). So if you carefully study the actuator lever’s behavior and how it corresponds to the adapter’s bolt, then you can grab some needle-nosed pliers and bend the end of the bolt a little so that it pushes the lever more towards the open iris direction.

By doing this, you’ll reach fully open iris before the adapter’s ring is able to rotate to the “open” click.

If you do it right, it’ll still completely close the iris before the ring rotates to the “lock” click… which means you’ll now have full adjustable range of the iris without engaging the annoying click when wide open. If it takes a little adjusting to get it right, no biggee, it’s a metal bolt and can withstand a little bending. Plus, it only cost like $10. Just make sure you thoroughly clean out the adapter of any metal flakes from using the pliers on the bolt… you don’t want that stuff getting on your sensor or rear lens element.

Whether you’re using a modified Fotga or a Fotodiox, the rotation throw is really short, so doing a smooth in-shot iris pull might be challenging. If you think you’ll need it, I’d recommend this Varavon Sling thingee… it’s a little awkward looking (and I feel like it should have a little fist at the end of it), but it’ll increase the rotation radius to help make up for the adapter’s ring. I have one and it works well for iris pulls.

4. FOCUS RING REMEDY

The Nikon IX focus rings suck. Like suck really hard. Like horribly bad… sucky majoris. Look at this photo:

See the tiny little sliver of a ribbed ring at the very end of the lens barrel? Well that’s the focus ring. It’s way too small to put a geared ring on it for use with a follow focus, and the focus throw is tiny. All the IX lenses are like that. But here’s how to fix that.

First, get a 52mm-82mm step up ring for each of your IX lenses. You can get them for about $2 each on eBay, but with a long ship time from China.

Then get two 82mm UV filters per lens from eBay or wherevs. They should be about $3-4 each. Just get the cheapest you can find. The quality of the threading & metal are irrelevant– you’re not going to be screwing & unscrewing them over and over, which is when that would matter. Once you get them, just carefully break out the glass… like maybe put them in a paper bag and just pop ’em with a hammer. Then carefully clean them out of any tiny glass pieces. Next, take all the shards of glass out of the bag and rub them all over your face. Just kidding, don’t do that. Because of that joke, I’ll probably have to get a lawyer now.

Now just stack all them doodads onto the front of the lens… step up ring + empty 82mm ring + empty 82mm ring. Now there’s a little more travel distance for focusing by hand, but more importantly you now have plenty of room to add a geared lens ring or whatever else.

Because the focus throw was so short to begin with, I’d recommend getting a bigger geared ring to help increase it. I’d suggest this one (these are what I use)… it should be about $17.
Geared lens ring for 75mm-85mm diameter from eBay seller up2uhk

Btw, I’d recommend you change out those screw clamps for my DIY elastic version so you can easily move it from lens to lens. You can read about it in my article about no-budget options for geared rings.

The focus throw is still far from ideal, but it’s now at least useable. And also, like all Nikkor lenses, the focus ring rotation is reversed compared to other lenses, but this is a pretty minor issue.

If you prefer a semi-permanent and more svelte-looking geared ring, you can use Half Inch Rails’ Zip Tie Lens Gears, though the smaller overall circumference will give you less of a focus throw than the other geared ring above. But whatever you’re comfortable with.

THE SUPER BIZARRO CATCH-22

Alright, something’s gotta give. Nikkor optics, stepless aperture, feather light, follow focus compatible with hard stops, and at the price of like four McDonald’s extra value meals? We live in a cruel, cruel world that loves to dangle such sweet globs of nectar in front of you, only to replace it with something grody like a stale McNugget with a hair stuck to it just as your hungry lips are within striking distance. Yeah so, here’s the issue: if you don’t find one with the rear end cap included, then you’ve got a little problem. That’s because the end cap model (Nikon LF-3) is no longer made. How weird & dumb is that? A piece of plastic whose compatriots cost ninety-five cents can mess this all up. Cool, whatevs, you’ll deal. I happened to already have an old Tamrom Adaptall 2 Nikon end cap that works though, so maybe there are some other older third party Nikon end caps that just happen to be long enough, I dunno. Maybe try going to a used camera shop and asking. They’ll often have a box full of random old end caps that you can sift through. The Nikon LF-3 and aforementioned Tamron one are both about 20mm or 7/8″ long if that helps as a guide.

That’s the 20mm long Tamrom end cap that works, and the Nikon LF-3 end cap will have that cute little Illuminati planetary alignment APS logo on it. I probably shouldn’t joke about that, I hope Jay-Z and Kanye don’t come after me.

But really, worst case scenario is that you just permanently keep one of those lens adapters on each lens and get MFT end caps, it’s not the end of the world. Just the world continuing with a little less money in your pocket.

The biggest catch is that it’s likely just a matter of time before other people figure all this stuff out and the IXs’ prices increase.

USING NIKON IX LENSES ON VARIOUS CAMERAS

They should totally work with up to APS-C sized sensors. The APS film negative was 30.2 × 16.7mm, so any sensor that’s APS-C or smaller should be fine. As far as sensors bigger than APS-C, I dunno, I haven’t tried.

One thing to look out for is that these lenses protrude from the rear mount, about 17mm.

So that means they’ll only work with cameras that are using a long enough lens adapter that the rear protrusion won’t hit the camera’s sensor… ie. is the Nikon 46.5mm flange focal distance more than 17mm longer than your camera’s? Though this is in theory, and I haven’t tried them on anything but a GH2.

If you hate reading words in paragraph form and ignored the above section, here’s a neat little list…

MFT: Yes.

Canon EF/EOS: No. There’s only a 2.5mm flange distance difference, so the rear protrusion will smoosh all up against your Canon’s guts an’ stuff.

Nikon DX & FX: No. Like with Canon, it’ll hit the mirror.

Samsung NX: Yes, in theory… though I haven’t tried it.

Sony NEX/E-mount: Yes, in theory… haven’t tried.

Note that this is as of July 2012, so in future times that list may become inaccurate. But you’ll be too distracted by flying cars and at-home plastic surgery kits to care.

OKAY THIS LONG-ASS ARTICLE IS ALMOST OVER

So there ya go. Practice and shoot your own projects with these thrifty amigos, and instead spend your money on lighting & light modifying gear. If you get a sweet client project with a budget, then you just rent pro lenses like Zeiss CP.2s (or even a better camera). Honestly, if you don’t have much money, or are just starting out, this is such a no-brainer to me.

There’s definitely other pricier still lenses that are better suited for video out there, but maybe these will help someone get started.

Here are some sources I pulled some specs from, as well as some further info I’ve dug up online…
imaging.nikon.com/lineup/discontinue/lens.htm
photosynthesis.co.nz/nikon/specs.html#IX
heritagecameras.co.uk/nikon-ix-nikkor-aps-lenses…
photosynthesis.co.nz/nikon/serialno.html#IX
kenrockwell.com/nikon/ix-lenses.htm
photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/0090yh

Color-saturated fill light for a better composite

Here’s a useful technique that I came up with for shooting certain kinds of greenscreen stuff…

Make the fill light a saturated color (that’s different from the screen and the subject’s clothes etc, duh).
In post, isolate that particular color and then tweak it to match the hue of whatever the natural bounce light would be in whatever environment you’re compositing them into.
Though keep in mind that it’s always better to just use a colored fill light that matches your particular background plate. This technique is more for cases where you have to use one setup for several varied backgrounds.

For example, you can use a saturated magenta for the fill, and then use the secondary color correction in Color Finesse to tweak just the saturated magenta to appear bluish if they’re supposed to be standing on the belly of a giant, naked sleeping smurf or whatever. Another great thing about this technique is that you not only can control the hue and saturation of the fill color, but also the luminance of the fill, and quite easily at that. Of course, this technique will only be useful for certain shots, depending on the lighting and blocking.

Here’s a straight forward example of this technique from a shoot I was DP on. Because of last minute schedule changes, I had to shoot numerous bits of Snoop Dogg in just one setup, even though they took place in a multitude of settings. We could’ve shot him in neutral color and depended on conventional color correction to help color him into the background, but that usually looks pretty rookie & unsavory in my opinion, since any color adjustments to affect the “bounce/ambient” light will also affect the entire subject’s color, even the areas being illuminated by the key light. So with a magenta fill, we had some tweakable “ambient” light to match the backgrounds in post.

You can see from the original footage on the right that not only was I able to easily change the hue & saturation of the magenta fill, but also the luminance. More examples from the exact same lighting setup below…

Also, note that in these examples (which I composited & color graded myself) the tweaking of the magenta fill was done with just the “Hue and Saturation” effect in After Effects due to what was available on that particular workstation. Theoretically, Color Finesse’s secondary color correction would’ve given even better results.

The key to good handheld: The horizon line… particularly with CMOS sensors

Okay first, just to get some quick terminology clarified, there are three axes to change the orientation of your camera framing:

Pan (turning to look left and right)
Tilt (looking up and down) *As a side note, some people use the word “pan” to describe a tilt. Don’t do that, it makes you sound like a rookie cookie. Or maybe just a producer, ha.
Roll (making the horizon line rotate, as if laying your head on your own shoulder)

Pan & tilt are no problemo as part of anyone’s camera dynamics repertoire. But there is a huge caveat with roll. That’s because when us humans experience this in real life, our inner ear’s vestibular system does a primo job of conveying to our brains that it’s our head’s orientation that’s changing and not the planet earth’s.

So when a camera uses roll, that offset reaction in our vestibular system isn’t occurring, and in its absence our brain’s initial primordial reaction is that the onscreen world is changing in orientation… which is usually not what the film is intending to convey. Except when you’re faking an earthquake or the 1960s USS Enterprise being hit by a Klingon laser beam. I jest, but those are actually perfect examples of this phenomena– it’s the lack of vestibular system reaction that allows those illusions to occur. Who like totally loves that I used the word “jest”? We totally got some Shakespeare In The Park On The Internet On A Blog goin’ on.

Attention Star Trek nerds: that’s a 3 degree roll of turbulence inflicted on the ship, from the episode “The Corbomite Manuever”… ya know in case you wanna like run calculations on how that would’ve affected the warp drive’s dilithium crystals or whatever. In my defense, I had to wikipedia to find a nice trekkie vocabulary word like “dilithium crystal”. I MEAN IT I’M TELLING THE TRUTH.

So anyway, if you’re trying to give a handheld POV chase shot an energetic, actiony feel, then put in a lot of frenetic pan and tilt, but try to minimize the roll. In a nutshell, the mantra of handheld should be “keep the horizon line straight”.

Though there may be times that you want to induce disorientation, confusion and even nausea in your audience, and that is when you do use roll.

And there’s also an additional factor with roll when shooting with CMOS sensors. Good handheld camera craftsmanship in general is of über-importance due to the sensors’ rolling shutter. To avoid “jello-cam” you have to be firstmost concerned with fast, jittery panning… but lots of fast back & forth roll can also give your footage that jibble jabble gloopy glopple jiggle, as pictured in the framegrabs below:

So here’s a simple solution for minimizing roll: increase the radius of your support points from the camera, ie. maximize the distance between your hands. That way, when your left hand shakes half an inch, it’ll just create a 2 degree change in roll… as opposed to if it was one third the distance, the roll would be about 6 degrees. Here are a couple ways to apply this to your handheld shots:

If you’re using a rail system, put your handles as far apart as logistically possible.
You can use a cheap, light tripod with its legs together or a monopod and have one hand at the baseplate and the other as lower down as possible.

For a little more help, you can also use a bubble level on your hot shoe and adjust accordingly during the shot.

Making a crummy “emergency fader/variable ND filter” from RealD glasses

Okay, this is really only useful for some kind of weird desperate situation where you’re willing to sacrifice image quality for shallow depth of field. Or maybe you’re stranded on a desert island with your camera, but without your fader/variable ND filter. Annnnnnd you’re making a short film instead of trying to survive and/or be rescued. Annnnnnd the tropical foliage in the background is really visually distracting from your lead actress (a volleyball with a face painted on it?), and you’d really love to shoot at f/2.8 instead of f/22 (and not resort to using a crazy fast shutter speed– maybe it’s a romcom, not a WWII action drama). Annnnnd you just happen to have pocketed a pair of those RealD glasses from when you wasted $15 on Clash of the Titans 3D. This is the longest pseudo-comedic preface ever. But it’s my way of saying “Yeah, I know this is actually more just an anecdotal Mr. Wizard’s World / MacGyver thingee rather than something you’ll ever actually need to use”.

Yeah so anyway, do this:

Pop out the flimsy “lenses”, actually filters we’ll call them.
Flip over the right filter.
Put the right filter in front of the left filter.
Rotate it 90 degrees.
Enjoy all the loss of optical sharpness, chromatic aberrations, and color shifts those cheap quality polarizers are sure to cause.

That is all. Also, I’m totally dying to know if the volleyball face lady falls in love and lives happily ever after or not.

Panasonic’s GH2: If you’re an aspiring filmmaker then you really really really have no excuse anymore

You’ve probably already heard some stuff about the GH2 and how great it is for video. I bought one and days later used it for a client project, and have since ran some tests. This camera is a big deal. Seriously, I can’t believe this thing exists… for the money, it just can’t be beat. For now at least.

Pictured here with the 14-42mm kit lens, and Fotodiox adapter which puts to use old analog SLR lenses I already done ownededed. Neato.

No need for me to go over all the technical specs, that’s what the entire rest of the internet’s for. Here’s the bits that matter most in regards to low-cost filmmaking (I could care less about it as a stills camera)…

It has a swivel screen, which right off the bat will save lots of time and headache in a no-budget shooting situation. Otherwise there’d be some low/high/oddly angled shots you just wouldn’t be able to get without shelling out for an external monitor.
The Micro Four Thirds format has a sensor that’s slightly smaller than the size of 35mm motion picture film, which means it has a depth of field that’s close to such. Spherical-lensed, 1:85 35mm cine film (the most common format up until the mid/late 90s) has an image area of about 21.95mm x 11.87mm, and the GH2’s sensor in video mode is 18.8mm x 10.6mm (though nowadays nearly all Hollywood non-digital acquired films are shot on 24.89mm x 13.45mm Super 35mm). In my opinion, the mega shallow depth of field obtainable with the Vistavision-sized 36mm x 24mm sensor of the Canon 5D Mark II, while a nice option, is unneeded 99% of the time for video. And once you start shooting actual dramatic/narrative setups with focus-pulling, you’ll appreciate having more breathing room, especially if it’s a no-budget situation where you can’t afford to lose takes to focus problems. Bottom line: the depth of field “shallowness” is beyond good enough.
The video footage looks great. It doesn’t have the aliasing/moiré/pixel-skipping issues that Canon’s 5D Mark II and 7D have… thin diagonal lines are smooth and clean in the GH2. The rolling shutter isn’t too much of an issue, and the compression looks pretty good for AVCHD.
Probably the best thing about the GH2 is that you can use almost any old lens on it. This is huge. Once you make the jump into shooting with interchangeable lenses, the cost of glass usually becomes half the money involved. The flange distance (from back of lens to sensor plane) on the GH2 is really short, way shorter than analog SLR or DSLR formats. So if you simply get a cheap $30-40 adapter (basically just a metal ring that puts the lens further away from the sensor plane), then you can choose from literally hundreds of great old cheap lenses from ebay, garage sales, craigslist, whatever. Like go search for old Nikon F-mount manual lenses on ebay and behold. And on top of that, since the smaller sensor uses only the center of the lens, that means you can usually even resort to using ultra cheapo bad lenses, since most lens problems occur around the edges (you’re also scaling down to, and resolving for, only 1920 x 1080 pixels for video, which is very low res compared to still photos, so lower grade lenses generally should still perform perceptually fine). Take all that money you save and put it to work in front of your lens in the form of props, costumes, locations, actors, whatever. Just note that the effective focal length of 35mm still lenses will be doubled on the GH2… ie. an old 50mm Pentax K-mount lens will look like a 100mm in your footage. So you may end up buying a Micro Four Thirds lens if you like short focal lengths. One more note about using old lenses: if you don’t already own some, I’d recommend going with the Nikon F-mount adapter since there’s a lot of great old cheap Nikon lenses. And an added bonus: if you later get a Canon camera, you can use those Nikon lenses on it with another adapter because the Nikon flange distance is shorter than Canon’s.
The body is only $900. THAT’S JUST FARGING RIDICULOUS THAT YOU CAN GET A CAMERA THAT SPITS OUT FOOTAGE LIKE THIS FOR A PRICE LIKE THAT. I started out with super8, then Hi8 video, then 16mm, then DV, HD… all those formats & cameras had some kind of serious flaw in regards to cost versus quality, and what I see in the GH2 is none of that. This is by far the most bang for your buck I’ve ever seen. And I have a feeling we’ve kinda reached the ceiling for a while in that regard. So waiting around for something better & cheaper is probably not gonna yield anything other than wasted time.

$900 GH2 + $30 Pentax adapter + $220 Peleng 8mm lens = Footage that looks like this. Unheard of. You can peep the raw frame as 90% quality jpeg here.
Okay, so here’s the bad things about it…

You gotta deal with the audio issue… either record double system with something like the Zoom H4n for $300, or plug the GH2 into a BeachTek box. Orrrrrr… if you already have a miniDV or whatever camcorder with decent audio, then you can use that to record audio. Having the visual reference in the audio footage also can make synching sound to picture faster.
It’s usually out of stock, so finding one takes more legwork than just clicking five or six times in your browser. I have a feeling video production companies are buying them in three’s. I wonder if anyone has bought it not primarily for video… probably not, that’s what the Canons are for. REALTALK.
Using multiple old lenses makes using filters complicated. If you’re shooting in direct sun and wanna open up your aperture wider than like f8, you’re gonna need an ND filter. So to not spend mucho bucks on multiple screw-mount ND filters for all the varied lens face sizes, you either need to invest in a matte box & rectangluar filters (very expensive), or get one set of ND filters in a big face size and a step-up ring for each of your lens face sizes (not as expensive).

Of course, there are many higher quality, better workflow video camera options out there (duh), but if you’re looking for a camera to try out filmmaking or up your game from HDV/etc with minimal financial risk, then straight up the GH2 is it. Feel lucky you weren’t born twenty years earlier. Or thirty. Or whatever, you know what I mean.

Check out my recommendations for a barebones budget GH2 kit.