Panasonic AG-AF 101
Well we tested it...
Nice little camera for the price.
The mbps are quite low: 21 VBR 1080x1920 or 23mbps 720x1280.
I must say that the pictures are nice, not as nice as the DSLR's IE: CANON
5D MKII, but we not comparing....
The Panasonic has time code, yippie helps with editing and taking notes on
location. The video/audio outputs are all live at the same time, that's a
bonus. HD-SDI, HDMI and compo-shite.
We shot green screen and blue screen as a test for a production we consulting
on. The results were very good and clean. I must add that blue keys better
than green, in fact the same goes for the Canon. Must be the codec.
The 1080x1920 60fps is a great advantage.
The DRS is shit, makes the pictures very noisy..
Also the film mode has a nice look but the knee is linked to the curve, kind of takes control away. The HD Gamma and knee set to high is clean and bright. The fact that it uses SD cards is very cool in that they are less expensive and at the low data rate one can record 3 hrs onto a 32gig card, nice for concerts, but for drama or similar projects its still good to change cards at around 40 mins. (paranoid) SD card must be a class 10 or you wont be able to shoot 50/60fps or variable. Pity you can ramp the VFR (variable frame rate)
The chip size being bigger than regular video cameras in its category is a
plus. The depth of field roll off is very nice, not as shallow as the full
frame 35mm stills or even 3 perf 35mm (SONY PMW F3), but still a nice option when using fast lenses.
We tested 50mm/85mm/200mm Nikon lenses and found the results to be fing good
and sharp with no visible chromatic error, in fact less than a 2/3" chip.
Still it's nice to have the choice over depth of field.
Great surprise was shooting on a 2/3" lens, strange.. You must use the
double (2x) or it looks like your shooting down a barrel. But the cool thing
is the lens is still very wide and long. Its a strange one to figure out.
Micro 4/3rds ? A big plus as so many very good lens options are a available
to us now; at a fraction of the 2/3" lenses from the past.
We did find 2/3" lens with 2x has a bit of chromatic error, but not much.