A Few Thoughts About the Soon to be Released Panasonic GH5. Maybe we should all rush out and get one....

I have some experience with Panasonic GH cameras having, at one time owned two or three of the GH4's and various other G cameras. Two of my favorite lenses from the system were the 12-35mm and the 35-100mm f2.8s. Really nice stuff. I had good success shooting a large video project with the GH4 but at some point I sold them all because, while they were very good video cameras there were better conventional photography cameras on the market and most of my focus at the time was still photography, not video production.

I've been quite happy for the last year with my decision to settle on Sony cameras and now, along comes Panasonic to upset the apple cart and to fire up the somewhat irrational desire to make yet another (probably) ill-considered equipment overhaul. To squander a bunch of cash. To follow the siren call of the spec sheet; down the next rabbit hole.

Since few of us (and NOT me) have shot with the GH5 camera we're still getting all excited about the features and specifications alone. We haven't had an honest and detailed review yet about the actual image quality and performance of the new camera by any except the usual review suspects --- who like pretty much every camera they've ever touched.

My first reaction is that if you are a still photographer

A Minimalist's Approach to Video Production in The Present Moment.

The first moving pictures project in which I played a significant role was a television commercial for BookStop, Inc. (the first "category killer" book store chain) in 1985. I was the advertising agency creative director for the project which used: a television commercial, a multi-page, four color printed mailer (magazine style), radio commercials, and newspaper advertising, to open three, 100,000 square foot, retail stores in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. With my creative team we concepted the commercial and the campaign materials. I wrote the direct mail as well as the TV, radio and newspaper ads. We hired producer/director, Bruce Maness, to handle the television commercial production. 

As creative director for a big advertising campaign you should be involved in all the major steps and creative decisions. You are responsible for maintaining a consistent "look and feel" throughout. The TV commercials were the big chunk of the media buy and, since my print production team in the agency were all consummate professionals, I paid the bulk of my day-to-day attention to the TV commercial production. 

For the spots we created an 18 foot tall replica of the monolith from the Stanley Kubrick movie, "2001, A Space Odyssey." The monolith was created almost entirely of hard cover books. We hired animators to animate a comet flying through a star field which then exploded and coalesced into a our client's logo (with a bit of shimmer added in...).  The bulk of the footage was shot at night in a rock quarry (our "surface of the moon"). It was my first experience with huge, manned, cinema cranes and also with giant generators, and enormous 18K lighting fixtures. 

The entire production was shot on 35mm film stock with an Arriflex camera and then mastered on two inch tape. It was a time consuming process and presented an almost logarithmic learning curve for me. It was my very first TV project and we were out of the gate with a $100,000+ budget. It was highly successful. The campaign generated results that far exceeded our client's sales goals; the TV, radio, and direct mail each won gold ADDY awards that year, and the most exciting thing for me