Panasonic G7 Does anyone use the 4k prefocus feature

Brisn5757 wrote:

The Panasonic G7 camera offers a lot of features but I'm wondering how useful some of the features are.

An excellent feature if it is useful to you.

To me, it is fun to use, can open up my door of high speed shooting which was only possible on specialized gear. But in reality it is rarely used because I shoot still object most of the time.

They are actually sort of high speed shooting, good to catch action particular to capture the critical moment of happening, like balloon burst, fire burst, bird catch an insect in air to tiny facial expression changes etc...

Making use of 30 fps of video recording technique (or 60 for for G9 etc, that could be very fast burst shooting of the industry, but sadly Panny has to improve its CAF), and MP4 encoding such that even low spec models can support these features without the need of a super fast CPU nor deep buffer. Olympus goes another pure still burst shooting way such that it limits the feature to its flagship model only.

Using the 4K prefocus feature you end up with a lot of photos and after finding one or two photos then you have a lot of photos to delete.

It depends on which 4K photo mode you used. The S/S and 4K Photo mode are no different from usual 4K video (but not limited to 16:9, and 180 degree rule of shutter speed is meaningless to observe), could end up with a lot of frames. On another hand, the Pre-burst 4K Photo mode, will be limited t0 60 shots only.

Does anyone use the feature?

I used it a few times so far (since GX85 in 2016). Among the latest was to shoot friends hung on a sliding cable downhill (a few seconds shooting recorded from the time the gate open and all the way passing through in front of me, 70~80% of shots in focus). The other was to shoot my friend who blew the candles on the birthday cake. I can pick a few  frames capable to show the best facial expression of that event...

Might search for some older works of our BIF expert member Trevor, who had posted a lot in of very interesting birds in action shots here on M43 forum from his G85...

The same with the 4k burst mode but you have one second gap to take the moving subject which you can easily miss if you delay in taking the shot ,

Therefore Panny provides the Pre-Burst mode. The shooting will start recording when the feature been selected on a rolling basis, but only the 30 images taken from the 1 second before the shutter hit will be saved, and further 30 shots after the shutter hit. Therefore, as long as we enable the feature, point the camera to where the action will happen, we shall never miss the critical moment.

It is very good for the scenario when we expect thing will be happened, prepare our camera well before the happening. But as the recording will stop 1 sec after shutter hit, we can't keep on recording throughout the event.

So there is the other 2 4K photo modes (only difference is how we start and stop the recording) which can't do pre-shutter hit recording, but can take as long as we wish (subject to the video time limit?).

but then there's the unlimited 4k burst mode but you do end up with a lot of unwanted photos to delete else your memory card will get full fast.

4K video can eat up a lot of space relative to HD video, but at the end a 32Gb SD card can take 42min 4K video (as per P.34 of G7's pdf manual). I suppose it could be a lot more than we usually need for the purpose of shooting 4K photo...

I'd be interested in hearing from someone that has found usefulness in the 4k photo feature.

Brian