I get asked a lot of questions about the GH4, but probably the most common question these days is “What does the 4K mode on GH4 do?”, I finally wanted to address this issue here today. In this article, I’ll outline exactly what 4K Photo Mode is used for, and how it can open up some new possibilities for future filmmakers.
Over the past few years, there has been a crossover trend between still and motion cameras. We all know that the Canon 5D Mark II essentially started the DSLR revolution by offering high-quality video recording in a DSLR, but lately the camera has had a lot of success in offering stills capabilities. Cameras like the Red Epic or Dragon that can shoot 5K/6K offer the unique ability to capture film and stills simultaneously, which gives DPs and cinematographers a variety of options.
Although most cinema cameras (including the Epic/Dragon) technically only capture video, the quality of the video is very high and the resolution is very high, making it easy to extract still images from the footage. That’s why Red named their camera system DSMC (or Digital Still and Motion Camera) and pushed hard for the stills capabilities of their cameras. Implemented on many high-end devices. Including cover shoots for magazines such as Vogue, GQ, W, Time, and Vanity Fair.
Shooting film with the purpose of extracting still images opens up a very wide range of possibilities and benefits for certain types of photography. One of the most obvious and simplest ways to illustrate this is to consider the fact that most DSLR cameras can only take photos at 10 frames per second in burst mode, at best. Video, on the other hand, can obviously be shot at many times that rate (such as 24 fps, 30 fps, 60 fps and beyond). This gives photographers more shots per second to choose from, which is useful when photographing fast-moving objects (such as animals or other wildlife) or capturing micro-expressions on a human face that might otherwise be missed using traditional Still camera shot.
Panasonic is well aware that photography and video are converging to an extent, and it wants to take advantage of this trend with the addition of a 4K photo mode on the GH4. The idea of this feature is very simple – put photographers into a mode of their camera that allows them to capture the most frames per second. Despite what the name suggests, the camera doesn’t record image sequences or still image streams at 4K resolution… Instead, it shoots regular video clips, which you can import into software like Adobe Lightroom and manually select the exact frames you want. Content you want to tweak and export.
You might be thinking – can’t I shoot a 4K video first and then grab a screenshot from it? The answer is of course yes, you can do it. However, there are many benefits to shooting in 4K photo mode, and it’s preferable to simply shooting regular 4K video and pulling screenshots later.
I think the two biggest benefits are “loop recording” and the additional aspect ratio options. Loop recording does exactly what you want it to do – it records a video loop continuously until you stop recording, and overwrites the previously recorded footage after the loop ends. The idea is that if you want to capture a specific moment (let’s say a bird flies across the sky) and that action takes 30 minutes to happen, you don’t want to find that moment just to capture 30 minutes of footage. Loop mode will keep removing extraneous footage until you tell the camera you have what you need, and ultimately it will make your file size smaller and your workflow simpler. More important to video shooters, however, is the second feature I mentioned: aspect ratio.
4K photo aspect ratio
Unlike Movie mode, which is limited to an aspect ratio of 16:9 when shooting (or 1.85:1 in 4K Theater mode, which is nearly the same as 16:9), 4K Photo mode gives you all the aspect ratios you’d expect from a stills camera of. Specifically, it can be recorded: 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, 16:9. This is a necessary feature for photographers, but it’s also beneficial for film shooters because it opens up the possibility of using anamorphic lenses.
For those who have no experience shooting anamorphic lenses, anamorphic lenses are able to compress more information onto the sensor than traditional spherical lenses. This is essentially done by warping (or squeezing) the image, resulting in an image like this directly from the camera:
When the image is decompressed in post, it will look completely proportional and will have its own unique character. Most notably, anamorphic lenses can create very wide aspect ratios, beautiful lens flares, and extremely shallow depth of field. That’s why they’ve been used extensively on Hollywood-level feature films over the years and remain the preference of many of the world’s top directors of photography.
In the movie era, anamorphic lenses would squeeze a widescreen image onto regular (non-widescreen) 35mm film stock, and then use special lenses on the projector to desqueeze the image when it was later shown. The exact same principle still applies today, but we’re just decompressing the image digitally rather than optically.
The problem with most digital cameras today is that they don’t offer the correct aspect ratio required to use most traditional anamorphic lenses. For example, if you use a 2x anamorphic lens on 35mm motion picture film, you will effectively capture a beautiful 2.39:1 widescreen image, which is today’s film standard. However, if you use the same lens on a 16:9 camera, you end up with an extremely wide 3.55:1 aspect ratio, which is too wide for most productions. It’s worth noting that there are anamorphic lenses designed specifically for 16:9 cameras (such as 1.33x anamorphic lenses), but they don’t really provide the full effects of 2x anamorphic lenses, so they’re not ideal to use. That’s why it’s so amazing to be able to change the aspect ratio of a digital movie camera to 4:3 or 1:1 so that a variety of anamorphic lenses can be used just like they did back in the movie days.
So not only does the GH4 now allow us to shoot in 4K, but we also have the ability to choose the aspect ratio, which gives great flexibility in lens selection. Not to mention, the overall image quality and resolution achievable when shooting anamorphic lenses on the GH4 is impressive. When you consider that 4K 16:9 footage has a vertical resolution of 2160, you can capture 2336 lines of resolution in 3:2, 2496 lines of resolution in 4:3, and a staggering 2880 in 1:1 Line resolution, it’s incredible. Assuming you have the right glass to use 1:1 mode, you can essentially capture (when decompressed) up to 5760 x 2880, which is pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, there’s still one major drawback to shooting in 4K Photo mode – frame rate.
Currently, the only frame rates you can shoot in 4K photo mode are 30fps and 25fps. Essentially, if you’re in NTSC mode, the frame rate will be preset to 30fps; if you’re in PAL mode, the frame rate will be preset to 25fps. If you select 24.00Hz Theater mode, the menu option for 4K Photo mode is not available. This is quite frustrating for many current shooters, as the vast majority of cinematographers who want to use anamorphic lenses are obviously doing it for the cinematic effect and therefore want to shoot in 24p. Currently, the only option is to shoot at one of the other two frame rates and adjust your footage in post, which will never produce results as powerful as capturing native 24p footage.
While I’m certainly not a camera engineer and don’t claim to know what’s technically possible and impossible with the GH4, I’d say it’s not impossible that this problem will be solved in the future. Obviously, the camera is capable of capturing beautiful 24p images at a variety of resolutions, so it wouldn’t be too big of a leap for Panasonic to introduce 24p recording as a 4K photo option in a future firmware update. Will this happen? Only time will tell, but for now at least Panasonic has raised the bar for other camera manufacturers, which will likely prompt some of their competitors to offer similar features.
For more information on the look of film, be sure to check out my guide to shooting images with a DSLR here.
If you are not using the latest Lumix GH4 firmware, you can download it by clicking this link.
