Toronto Snowstorm

Toronto Snowstorm (4K)

There was this report of a mild snowstorm hitting in Toronto, so I got my camera ready and went out to shoot some video to test my GX8, which I hadn’t used much since I got it a few months ago. I wanted to also test the Panasonic 25mm f1.7 which I had done some simple tests with. The entire video was shot with that lens.

I was suprised how well the combo performs at night. There’s only one shot where I used ISO 2000 (the second shot in the video) and it was still pretty clean. It can look a little mushy in the sky or where there’s lots of snow moving quickly, but that has more to do with the 100mbps bitrate limit. Here’s a 1:1 crop of that shot:

The rest was mostly shot at 400 and 800, overexposing a little bit. I prefer to overexpose and then in post bring the exposure down since that helps with the noise in low light when the camera is encoding.

With my GH2 I would usually record at 1/40 or sometimes even 1/30 when shooting at night, to be able to capture more light. With the GX8 I didn’t have to do that, all was shot at 1/50th.

After recording I went home and quickly edited and uploaded the video right away, so I didn’t spend any time doing any major colour grading. I just reduced the exposure in a few shots and adjusted the white balance in a few other ones. Also I didn’t have to do any denoising like I used to do with my GH2.

I used the Cinelike-D profile set to:

Contrast 0

Sharpness +1

Noise Reduction -5

Saturation 0

The curves on highlights and shadows were set to normal.

My camera ended completely covered in snow, I was really glad it is weather sealed. While the lens is not weather sealed, the included hood helped a lot with the snow and I made sure to keep removing the snow.

Make sure to check it out in 4K or download the original video from Vimeo with better compression.