i’ve been wanting to compare the video quality of my newly acquired Sony NEX-5N against my hacked Panasonic GH2 and Sony DSC-HX9V since i took delivery of the NEX-5N more than a week ago. i finally got the chance yesterday to spend an afternoon at disneyland hong kong to do that. i shot plenty of footage with the three cameras. my first attempt to shot a scene using the three cameras in turn was the parade. i tried to shoot with my left hand holding the GH2 on a monopod set taller than myself while my right hand was holding the NEX-5N. it wasn’t very successful because i simply couldn’t keep the monopod still while trying to frame the NEX-5N through the EVF (the sun was too bright for the LCD Liveview). i therefore ended up with most of the parade shot using just the GH2.
on a side note, i noticed at one point in the parade (when i had lowered the monopod to checkout the GH2 – lucky i did) that the GH2 had stopped recording. i tried to review the last recorded video but it said it’s an invalid format. i turned off the camera and turned it on again to resume recording. i was pretty sure i had lost the footage. when i returned home i gladly found out that not only the file had not gone missing, it was playable. file size of the video is over 4gb though. so i suspect the camera stopped recording because it had hit the 4gb limit. but this doesn’t make sense because AVCHD is supposed to be not subject to the 4gb limit. in the past, before i had the firmware hacked, i’ve had many recordings over 4gb. anyway, i will explore on this later.
i managed to record a few other outdoor scenes using the three cameras. i will be posting them in the coming days.
meantime, i have put together two clips i shot during the musical show “The Golden Mickeys”.
“The Golden Mickeys Song” shot with NEX-5N and GH2:
footage straight out of the camera were used to make these clips. i didn’t bother to record the sound separately but i did use an external microphone on the GH2 (just because it was already there and i didn’t bother to remove it). the microphone used is Sony’s ECM-ALST1 (which i had bought for A55V).
normally i would try to remove all too obvious hand shaking footage like zooming. but i have kept them in these clips because i wanna demonstrate what a difference the powered zoom of HX9V makes and the auto focusing capability of the video optimized kit lenses. the 18-55mm and 14-140mm kit lenses were used on the NEX-5N and GH2 respectively. while i was pulling out the monopod out of my backpack, a staff came up and told me politely that tripods are not allowed (although strictly speaking mine wasn’t a tripod). so i guess these clips really put the image stabilizer into test.
“You’ve Got a Friend in Me” shot with NEX-5N, GH2 and HX9V:
shutter priority mode (with shutter set at 1/50th) and auto ISO were used for both the NEX-5N and GH2.