From the course: Video Gear

Benefits of the Panasonic FZ1000

From the course: Video Gear

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Benefits of the Panasonic FZ1000

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- Rich, there's a lot of things to like about this camera. First, it's very familiar to any user who's ever used a DSLR-style camera. - Yeah. - Feels the same. The only difference here is, of course, that we don't have any interchangeable lens. But there's some pretty impressive specs on this camera. - Yeah, I mean it looks like a DSLR, it's technically a mirrorless camera, but it's nice ergonomics here. I'm just gonna pop this off for a second and hold that, we'll put this thing... It's comfortable, it feels good in the hands, a nice, notched grip. - And I was surprised, actually, it's rather plastic-y feeling on the outside but because of that it's really lightweight. I mean this is a camera that you could travel with very comfortably-- - We put it on the end of a jib, and it was great because it was so easy to move that jib around and get smooth shots. - So this is a 20.1 Megapixel sensor on here, so it's great. Obviously, like all Panasonic cameras, this is a micro four thirds sensor. The lens on this... Now if you see this, it's advertised as 25 to 400. (laughter) And it actually behaves a bit differently. When I was shooting HD video, it was going to something like 417. I'm like, 417? It's kinda strange, it was essentially just measuring it differently. Because as you zoom, it will show you the estimated focal length. And when I went in to the 4K mode, which is a UHD mode, - Yup. - It essentially was doing a crop factor on the sensor, and it was registering as about between 37 and 600. Think of that range, that's a 16x-plus range zoom. - Oh, it's incredible and on the side of lens here we have a couple switches, we can turn image stabilization, or we can also go between how the ring here on the lens is going to interact. So we can go between zooms, so it becomes a zoom, or we can go switch it over to focus, which gives you manual focus control. - Now I did try using this as a powered zoom. My feeling was, you know, could I actually zoom on camera? Because it's not a physical ring, it's more of a servo-type, like you turn it, it keeps going, you could essentially... You know if you spun that it keeps going forever, right? - Nope, just keeps going. - So it's more like a speed knob, like go left or go right. Pretty straightforward stuff. But it did work well, and with focus peaking, which it has built in, no firmware hacks, nothing else. I found that manually focusing this camera wasn't bad. I love, on the back here, we have the ability to switch between auto-focus continuous, so it's always adjusting focus on the fly, auto-focus single, which means you set it and then once you start recording it stays locked in with whatever you did, or truly manual focus, and you just go to manual focus but you do need to flip the switch on the side of the camera. - And it's just this little ring right back here and speaking of buttons, it's actually pretty sparse back here. Really kind of intuitive on terms of controls. Obviously we have an overall control up here, for selecting different priority modes, you know, aperture or shutter priority mode. There's some custom function buttons back here. Now we do have this articulating flip-out LCD on the back of the camera. It's a little small for my tastes, Rich. It's not gonna win any awards for amazing display. But it's nice, of course, because you can flip it around if you're, you know, shooting yourself. Wanna do selfie in 4K, sure, why not? You can absolutely do that. And as you mentioned, the real sort of popularity of this camera is going to be it's 4K. It's UHD, as you pointed out, but of course that doesn't mean that it can't do HD resolution. And it does that 4K internally, which is great. - Now, with the dials and the buttons on this camera, it's well laid-out. If you've shot on a GH4, GH2, or GH3, it seems really familiar. You've got custom function buttons you can assign. It's got a dedicated record button. That other dial on the top, Rob, I love it. This camera has a built-in time-lapse mode. And it has the best of both worlds. I could be recording raw while still assembling a time-lapse movie. I don't usually use that movie, but it's awesome because you could do a quick test in the field... Oh yeah, that's working, and see it back. And then just know that when it went into the raw file it got that much better. - Yeah, it's a great little camera. But, like we've done with previous camera reviews, let's come back and we'll dive into some of the cons about this camera and we'll also dive into some of the menu controls.

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