Panasonic FZ200 quick test of 100/120 fps mode

Below is a quick test in very unforgiving conditions of the 100/120fps 720p mode of the Panasonic FZ200. As can be seen, there is quite a bit of false color in detailed parts of the water which seems to be because of a different and poorer downscaling method employed in this mode compared to the rather good downscaling in 1080p mode.

An important point to be made about the FZ200's 100/120 fps mode, is that most NLE's don't seem to unwrap it properly resulting in severely clipped highlights and crushed blacks and really bringing out grain and blocking. So once you've imported the clips, be sure to pull that info back in again. In Premiere you need to use a 32bit effect like RGB curves to recover this info - if you just use an 8 bit effect like the Levels effect in Premiere, your info will remain clipped.

Aside from the inferior quality compared to 1080p mode and moire, this mode still does resolve resolution better than Canon dslr's 720p mode. And the 100fps ratio makes for a wonderful basis for interpolating to extreme slow motion without motion artifacts. I found that if you clean and sharpen the source with Neatvideo and then interpolate to f.ex. 1600 fps, false color becomes much less noticable and you can acheive quite good results.

In the clip below the first three shots are untouched 100 fps, all I've done is pull image info back into visible area. The last three shots are interpolated to 800 fps using twixtor at default settings and recovered image info - otherwise untouched.

Panasonic FZ200 @ 100fps + interpolated to 800fps from Christoffer Brekne on Vimeo.