After working a little bit with my GH1 I want to share with you which settings I think are the best to get a good looking Piece of Footage out of this funky little Cam.

First of all I choose the Motion Picture Mode as my desired Setting. Which sounds like making sense. You can choose it with the big Knob on the right of the Cams upper Body. It shows a Cam and an M behind it.

With this mode set you can go to the Menu, choose the Motion Picture Menu and set the Exposure Mode. With this you choose which two settings are available to change by turning the front dial. Clicking it changes between the two. Choose M here, as it gives you control over the Aperture (change the f-Stop to the lowest number possible ) and the Shutter Control (50 for normal 25p, 100 for Slo-Mo Shots played back at 50 Frames slowed down to 25p). This gives you the most Film-Looky Images. The lower the f-Stop the more blurry gets the defocused background. And 50/100 as the shutter speed are the film-likest shutters to get. If you don’t set them right your Video will look like Video, not like film.

The Next one is a bit Tricky. The Filmmode. This can be used in two ways.

One is the Instant looking good kind of way. Use this to have footage to drop Footage into your iMovie, cut and render. For this one you can choose the Stock-Emulation you want from the Filmmodes available. Just click the Filmmode Button on top of the Cam and browse through the Filmlooks.

The second one is the make it look good in Post kind of way. Here we want a flat and not overdone Look. No burned out whites, no crushed blacks. Not too much contrast and not digitally sharpened. We archive this by creating our own Filmlook. Go to the Filmmode Menu by clicking the Filmmode Button on top of the Cam. Browse to the My Filmmode and set it up with the following Settings:

• Contrast -2 (As a lower Contrast can be changed in Post, but a to harsh one will burn your whites and crush your blacks propably)
• Sharpness -2 (As a higher sharpness will be done digitally propably and can be done better in Post. And film isn’t sharp anyhow to start)
• Saturation -2 (As a higher Saturation could burn or crash individual Colors. You can do that in Post but with better control over it)
• Noise Reduction -2 (Again. You can better do this in post and there your Image might not get that blurry with the right software)

Choose this Settings every time you record. You can even use it for raw Photography, as the same principles are used there. If you don’t do Raw you should choose another Filmmode thou…