Last weekend I had the privilege of shooting at the Sonoma Raceway during the GoPro Grand Prix. I was actually there to shoot another race happening the same weekend, the Pirelli World Challenge. These are essentially street cars (Ferrari, Chevy, Kia) that are, um, slightly modified. The team I was there with is The Racers Group (TRG) with Aston Martin Racing, and I was specifically shooting for the driver of car 09, Derek DeBoer, who's a native from my home of Ashland, Oregon.

Derek DeBoer, car 09, on the straightaway towards turn 10 on the Sonoma Raceway, August 24, 2014. Frame extracted from 4K video shot on Panasonic LUMIX GH4.

I was also shooting an assignment for Panasonic, as a Lumix Luminary, specifically to shoot 4K video to extract still frames from. On the Lumix GH4, 4K can be either 3840×2160 (16:9 ratio) at 29.97 or 23.98fps, or if you switch the camera to Cinema mode, you can shoot 4096×2160 at 24p. That's 8.29 and 8.85 megapixels, respectively. Think about that from a stills perspective… you can shoot 30 frames per second at eight megapixels. That's… a lot. And it's easy to extract a single frame from the video and export as a still. In fact, you can do it in camera, which I did on the track, then sent the frame to my iPhone over WiFi, and shared it from there.

Here's a video sample. The video clips are unedited, and not color graded at all. The video will pause on a few still frames, two of which you will see the original, then a graded shot. The latitude of the GH4 file is impressive. Notice in shot at the top of this post, I was able to pull up some detail in the grill on the front of the car. Pretty impressive.

The first clip is on YouTube, which supports 4K. The second is on Vimeo, which doesn't support 4K, but will look better if you're viewing this on an iPad.