Leaderboard

I did sell one of my two R5 and added a R5c as I posted in the other thread. At the beginning I was not too happy about the R5c but now I like it more than the R5 other than the battery issue that basically makes it a rig only camera. And I did not buy it due to the time limit as it was not an issue for me other than 4k 120…. Initially it was for the 8k 60 and audio on the 120fps. I filmed 5 days of MTB and 2 days of Surfing in the last two weeks, and I reach out more to the R5c (A cam) than the R5 (B cam). They are quite different, the R5 even more with the new FW is a really good hybrid, the R5c is a cinema camera that you can turn in a great photo camera, it seems the same but when you use them both you realize the differences. Plus for the R5c: 8k 60 RAW 4k 60 much better quality than R5 4k 120 with sound and noticeably better quality than R5 S35 5.9k RAW XAVC much easier to edit than h265 Face only AF, AF around the point only Cinema OS makes more sense for filming. False color, waveform, magnification while recording etc… Customization of what to show in which screen VF vs LCD vs HDMI, safe marks etc. Port protector let you flip the screen Media playback UI, I really hated at first, but I discovered how to control it with the touch screen and joystick (not the wheel as I was used) and is better that the R5. Still lacks lut support and a quicker way to delete videos imo. Plus for the R5 Battery, battery and battery so no need to rig it and cables that can break etc... More AF zones type, Animal and Car AF IBIS (although I find it a problem in some cases like on gimbal with long lenses and wobble on wide angles) Faster switch photo video (I thought that the R5c would bother me but for my usage is non issue and I do switch quite frequently) C1-C3 modes this is so needed on the R5c Bigger UI font Wifi works in video mode too (this is ridiculous on the R5c that only works in photo mode) AF the way I use it is very similar in term of performance some stuff are better on the R5 and some on the R5c I really wish they would merge the two functionalities. If it would not be for the battery challenge, I would probably sell the R5 and get a second R5c.

I just ‘treated’ myself to another new (used) lens for my L Mount based system 🤑

Let's not forget they had the C70 and R5C to launch! LOL ; ) Well I must admit they've convinced me with tne R5C though so I should be grateful to their fake limit... 8K60p is priceless to my book :- )

Sure it was a random limitation, but every camera contains limitations that could have been solved better by the manufacturers. And in this case the camera really does overheat quickly in an unhealthy way, so it's not a completely senseless limit. The 5D2 also shut down when it became too hot, and nobody did talk about it. I think the limitation was not something to be happy about, but it also by far wasn't the scandal of the decade. Who else is giving great 8K with excellent autofocus and stabilization evern now, 2 years later, for such a low price? Anyway, the issue is over now and I'm very content having 2 R5 and 2 R5C with timeless capabilities and even 8K60. I was the most extreme complaining person about Canon in 2015 when the competition was the A7R2 which was way ahead, but right now there are hardly any wishes left.

Man, love your posts! < 3

Canon went back to its bad crippling habits. Once you have a habit it’s hard to break it. They tried breaking it, but they quit attending their EOSHD counseling sessions and went back to their old ways 😂 A real shame. I want an R5 now, but I do feel bad for all who held off on the R5 or bought the R5C because of this fake issue.

Really eager to see if this might be the Foveon sensor which is (finally) coming, or indeed something even more into the cinema direction. 😁

Sad to see Canon play us like this. Sold my R5 a long time ago and lost a chunk of money. This dude has measured the temperature of the outside of the camera when recording with the new firmware. It seems to stabilize to around 102 degrees Fahrenheit around 60 minutes and then stay there in 4KHQ. I wonder if the sensor gets noisier with these temperatures sustained. Have you noticed anything Andrew?

Not sure if this has been shown yet?

I will preface this by saying I do not know all of the intricacies of digital stabilization or IBIS; I know the limitations, how they work, and what exceeds their capabilities but would definitely defer to a camera engineer on the specifics of why one system works better than others. With that said, I can see why it would be plausible for smaller sensors to handle digital stabilization better. Just because the data is raw doesn't mean the information coming from the smaller sensor has the same resolving power or quantity of information as the larger sensors. The raw data from a smaller sensor will have less color data than the larger sensors otherwise there'd be no reason to make larger sensors. With less color data, it would take less processing power to stabilize the footage digitally (similar to two pictures shot from the same camera...the one with lots of color will be substantially larger than the one with less color in the scene). I do think the fixed lens helps, and I think like you said; GoPro, DJI, etc. had more incentive to get it right vs the MILC camera makers, but I don't think incentive is the only reason it works so well in smaller cameras. Another challenge is always battery life as well; the more processing power used for Digital IS, the worse the battery life will be; for larger cameras that could become a real problem. As far as sensor size for IBIS, I am quite familiar with how it correlates to a car's suspension; but where the two diverge is that once again battery life is a concern with cameras whereas it is not a concern with cars. A larger sensor will require a more power hungry IBIS system to stabilize the larger sensor vs a smaller sensor. IMO larger sensors and smaller sensors have relatively the same amount of "sensor travel" ability because the body size has nothing to do with the image circle. MFT sensors like the GH5 have an MFT image circle which will limit the sensor's travel just like the larger sensors. Regardless of the specifics, Canon has clearly caught up and passed the competition in the IBIS department for their FF cameras. For Digital IS, I think at least for now the action cameras are still far ahead of gyro, IBIS, lens IS, and the digital IS from the other makers. I had this problem with my footage shooting runway shows where they put a digital backboard behind the models, the flicker was terrible.....I added deflicker in post using Davinci Resolve and it did a great job. The main downside that I saw was that rendering was far slower, and so was editing, so I would recommend if you want to try this then complete all of the edits to the project first, then add the deflicker effect. You might be able to add an adjustment clip and add the deflicker there to fix the whole project at once, but I did not try that. I have used deflicker in the past for timelapses but this was the first time I needed to use it to fix regular video footage. Seems like a lot of fine print that goes along with gyro stabilization. Now that is impressive, seeing the before really shows how much the gyro stabilization helps; it is definitely doing more than I thought it was. It would be really cool to see a camera with gyro, IBIS, lens IS, and digital IS all enabled at the same time. It would be nice if all cameras offered gyro stabilization, it would be one more tool in our belt for stability. I would still prefer IBIS over gyro, but it would be nice to have options like in DR where you get to pick from 3 different types of post stabilization and get to test each one to see what works best for that particular shot. I would imagine that Canon could implement gyro stability at least in their cameras that have the electronic level since clearly they already have a gyro on them. Not so sure about the C70 and others in the cinema line. It does seem to me that Canon is playing a lot of catch up these days.

It was all a fake limit!!

I admit I have done my share of complaining haha especially on Canon!. So has done Andrew in pretty much every gear article on this blog :). And no @Andrew Reid I actually have never tried 1080p. I have the 3 custom modes set to 4K HQ, 4K60p and 4K120p. Never use 8K either. For my use though, just like Emanuel mentioned I never record long clips. No interviews and things like that. Anyway, good to see that this limitation isn’t one anymore for anybody using this camera

Surprise surprise, a massively cheaper camera sold a lot more than an expensive camera! "Solution": you can't have a broken VF if you've removed it entirely 😉 Mine is removed completely!

I thought that gyro would allow the camera to eliminate the warping as it would know the focal length and the cameras direction, but it seems to not be so. That was literally the only advantage of gyro stabilisation over EIS. I'd conclude that gyro is worth trying in post to see if it does better than EIS, but doesn't seem to have any advantage. Both are last-resorts compared to IBIS / OIS, or physically controlling the camera with a gimbal, tripod, monopod, slider, crane, jib, etc etc. (Disclaimer... the below might sound harsh, but it's directed at the theories you're presenting, not you! Hopefully my comments are useful and informative and correct some of the staggering misinformation floating around). That's nonsense. The data coming off the sensor is RAW - it's whatever the resolution is x the bit-depth x 3 (RGB channels). I think that Osmos and GoPros have the best stabilisation based on two factors - 1) they have fixed lenses and can tune their algorithms based on that, and 2) the entire success or failure of those products rests on how well they implement this feature. That's also partly nonsense. Man, the internet really doesn't understand WTF is going on with stabilisation. I realise that manufacturers measure stabilisation in stops. This is complete marketing crap - it's correct but irrelevant. Think of the suspension system on a car. The tyre follows every tiny bump on the road and the body of the car doesn't want to feel any of those bumps. The goal of the suspension system is to connect the two but without transmitting the shake from the road to the car. It's not a perfect parallel as there are differences between these examples, but it's good enough for our purposes. The cars suspension system can be viewed in two scenarios. 1) how well it smooths small bumps, and 2) what the maximum bump size is that it can handle. In the first scenario, you're driving down a road and there's a small pothole. You drive over it, you hear a thump from the tyres, but feel almost nothing in your seat. This is a reduction in the vibration, and in cameras, this is measured in stops. It is the ratio of how much vibration goes in vs how much gets through the mechanism. In the second scenario, you drive up a large curb. If you're in a small city car, the tyre flexes, the shock goes all the way in, but the wheel hits the end of the shocks and sends an enormous thump up into the car, sending you and the contents of your car flying. If you were in a huge off-road 4wd, you would hear a thump but the tyres and shocks would have enough vertical travel to absorb it. You would still feel it to some extent, but it wasn't a disaster. The second scenario is what you're seeing in your OIS/IBIS mechanism when you see the footage still have shake. This is what separates small sensors from larger sensors - it's the amount they can travel, not the "stops" of IS. The sensor simply runs out of travel and can't move far enough. The math is very clear. Take 5 stops for example, that's a reduction of vibration by a factor of 32x. So, you move the camera by 32 pixels but the image only moves by 1 pixel. You move the camera 50% to one side, and the image moves by 1/64 of the frame - in 4K that would be 60 pixels when you moved the camera almost 2000 pixels....and that's only 5 stops. This is why the stops don't matter. The issue is how far the camera can move the sensor. Larger sensors probably don't have as much room to move as a smaller sensor. This is one reason for having a MFT camera the size of a FF MILC - to accommodate this mechanism. The other biggest challenge is the wobble of IS (both OIS and IBIS) on wide-angle lenses. This is a problem because spherical lenses are, well, spherical, and sensors are flat. In terms of EIS, it's essentially a complete fail on behalf of the manufacturers to compensate, as GoPro and DJI have shown by doing it properly. I looked at a package that corrects lens distortion in post (and also does things like RS correction and flicker elimination) but didn't buy it as it was closer to $1000 than I would have liked, but it's possible. I could even tell you the math, but I haven't worked out how to implement it yet, unfortunately. Resolves EIS pipeline isn't designed correctly to do it.

The R5 has hands down the best IBIS that I have ever used, I shot handheld a few shots with a 70-200 at 200mm and it was incredibly stable while filming closeups of people as a B-cam; so I do think modern IBIS systems can equal or be better than the BM gyro results. The difference for me is that when IBIS fixes instability there is no weird jitter or warping that I saw with the gyro results...at least not with the longer lenses (35mm and above). The other benefit of IBIS vs gyro is there is no cropping required...with IBIS what you frame is what you get, with post stabilization and gyro stabilization you have no idea ahead of time how much cropping will be needed. For my particular niche in the industry (fashion), it is very important to not have to crop because the crop could be in the worse possible place (middle of the model's head for example), rendering the shot unusable. Just because it shoots 6K doesn't mean you want to leave tons of room around every shot and frame differently to accommodate post cropping later; sometimes you need the exact composition that you shot. Based solely on the video above, I think gyro stabilization is a lot like post digital stabilization....very good for certain types of movements and very jittery for others; whereas IBIS is excellent regardless of the movement. DJI's Osmos and GoPros have the best In Body Digital Stabilization (IBDS?) out there. The working theory is that because the data rates are lower due to the smaller sensor, it takes less processing power to stabilize them (and other action cameras) than the larger cameras which is why their digital IS works so well. Another theory is that the sensor is simply larger for regular IBIS systems so the IBIS naturally will have to work harder to stabilize it. The GH5's IBIS for example blew away the FF competition for years in the IBIS department. Manufacturers typically rate their IBIS system based on stops of light. For example, the R5 according to Canon has an IBIS rated at 8 stops of light...the highest in the industry for MILCs. Most manufacturers are rating their IBIS systems around 3-5 stops of light. I think the S5 was rated at 5 stops. Not sure who invented light stops as a measure of IBIS performance, but it is the standard now. You can read more about how it is measured here: https://www.canon-europe.com/pro/stories/8-stops-image-stabilization/ I will say, after this past week, the R5 without a doubt has the best IBIS I've ever encountered in a FF body. I could hand hold at 200mm and make it look like I was on a tripod for an extended length of time; very impressive in my book.

I have gone full circle, I used to shoot everything from a tripod, gimbal, or monopod; mainly because I started out shooting real estate photography and video. As soon as I started working with bigger projects and faster moving events stabilization equipment felt like a crutch that was holding me back; even the monopod started feeling clunky and too much fiddling; by the time it was the right height, pointed in the right direction, and the camera was ready, the moment had passed. These days I still have the monopod in the car but haven't used it in over 2yrs, I bring the gimbal to most shoots but usually either don't use it or use it only for a few min of walking shots, and the tripod I do use religiously for runway shows and long form static work. For everything else I shoot handheld. One thing I never do handheld though is try to walk; Other than GoPro, I have yet to see a single IBIS system that impressed me when walking. To me, if you are going to walk with the camera you need a gimbal, no exceptions. GoPro of course still has the best in body digital IS that I have ever seen, but they can get away with it due to the tiny sensor. This is why I still say no IBIS system (other than GoPro) truly works when walking, no matter how many stops of light the manufacturer claims. I had hopes that I would be impressed.....but I wasn't. The handheld static scenes were ok; about even with IBIS and about even with post stabilization; but the walking scenes were terrible as usual. Way too much warping, and jumpiness; it was obvious where the gyro stabilization was trying to fix the footage. I will be truly impressed when any IBIS or post stabilization can make a gimbal shot indiscernible from a handheld walking shot for the average videographer. There are exceptional videographers who can shoot handheld without IBIS and without post stabilization and make a walking shot look great (at least for a few seconds to a minute), but they are the exception. Personally, I am always trying to improve my handheld technique because handheld is by far the most freeing while also the most challenging. Shooting with the C70 handheld has greatly improved my technique, now when I shoot with a camera that has IBIS like the R5 I find myself shooting with much more stability and not needing any post stabilization.

The worst is stabilizing in post when someone is (not so carefully) walking with the camera. Everything just rhythmically blurring for a fraction of a second. It shows especially when there’s a lot of trees, traffic signs, etc in the frame.

Yeah, I suspect that it's often under the threshold of what is perceptible. I also have a theory that this threshold is getting higher over time as people slowly get used to cameras that expose with SS. Your comment about compression from online platforms is an interesting one, as, YT in 4K has more resolving power than basically any affordable camera had a decade ago, so that's actually gone through the roof, but peoples perception has dulled more than enough to compensate. I've actually gone the other way in my work - I used to shoot quite dynamic shots and stabilise in post a lot, whereas now my shots are much more static and I basically don't stabilise in-post at all. This forum used to be full of people talking about motion cadence, which despite never really getting a good definition was a pretty subtle effect at the best of times, and yet now people seem to be comfortable with the blur not matching the cameras movement, which I would imagine would be an effect at least one or two orders of magnitude more significant than motion cadence. I also find it amazing that people have adjusted to 4K being cinematic, when even now many cinemas are 2K, and every movie (apart from those on 70mm) basically had 2K resolution by the time you saw it in a theatre. How perception changes over time!

That is a very interesting phenomenon, and makes perfect sense when you think about it.....but I think in the real world it is nearly impossible to see in a typical scene. Your test scene had a lot of sharp edges and detail combined with a lot of shake and post stabilization; in a typical shooting scenario the camera is farther away from the subject, there's few if any sharp edges, and the camera is typically also moving in some visible direction; combine that with compression from online platforms and I don't think it would be discernable at all. The biggest problem I have with post stabilization is trying to balance the warping effect that post stabilization adds to certain scenes especially when shooting with wide angle lenses or the motion you are trying to fix. For me, I am more trying to smooth a too sudden motion more so than actual camera shake. When using it to smooth out a start or stop in motion it is quite effective but sometimes I have to try all 3 options in DR before finding one that looks natural. The one place where I think this phenomenon would be perceptible nearly always would be shooting detail shots for real estate. In real estate videos though you nearly always use sliders or gimbals for that very reason....too many sharp straight edges that would make any camera shake, post stabilization, or horizon tilt very apparent. I think at the end of the day nothing beats true stabilization equipment, IBIS, Digital IS, and Post stabilization are all just tools to get you "close enough" when "close enough" is acceptable.

I think i am gonna use gyro stab to some degree but not 100% cos I like the handheld look, just to smooth it out. On some other particular shots I might use it more extensivly. I would also try using a gimbal with a gyro to get it as smooth as possible as I hate that robotic walking gimbal look. Or I would just use my air2s for those perfect floating camera shots. Dunno, need more experimetns. The softwae is just getting developed (I use with gyroflow for now, but I hope either Blackmagic will add support for Sony or the former will produce their promiced plugin so the workflow becomes more intuitive and simple). If I had to choose which one to get - stable footage or motion blur, I would choose stable footage, if that what I need. Some times you must have a motion blur. Just prioritize what you need.