tosvus

Sounds like you distilled this down really well. For now, for my shooting I think the GH4 would probably be the best way to go, but it will be interesting to see how both compare in real life.

+Should be a low light beast ---No internal 4K is a really big minus in my book -lenses (selection, size) ..ok 120 fps for 720p, would have been a plus if it was 1080p, now I'm not sure. ? No mentioning of price yet, I think, but guessing it may be around $2K or higher? I still think the Panasonic GH4 sounds really good. This will probably mess up Canon's sales unless they do something drastic though.

Anyone surprised??

not THAT algorithm... The one that works on the 10 bit 4K to make it an 8 bit 4K....

I'm sure when the gh4 starts hitting stores there will be people showing that it is possible to pull out 444 and somewhere between 8-10 bit in a image downconverted to 1080p from 4K 420 8bit. The exact performance will depend on the algorithms that panasonic utilized.

Regarding bitrates, just keep in mind that unless you use a codec that compresses each frame separately (think jpg for reference), most codecs store only a few keyframes, and in between, only record the difference between each frame, so lower bitrate is ok considering there are less changes between each frame at higher framerates.

it is not interpolation or dithering. Pretty much everyone gets that you do get true 4:4:4 (i.e less color compression). The 8-bit vs 10-bit is a bit more difficult to agree on. It is clear that even with the worst possible method of downconverting to 8 bit, you can retrieve at least on average 25% of the difference between 8 and 10 bit. The best scenario can yield the full 10 bit original (no dithering). However, I doubt panasonic implemented it this way. I will put together a simple spreadsheet. This is pretty basic math..... I'm not sure why you seem agitated with Panasonic either. AFAIK, they have never said this. Guys who understand math brought it up and it was validated by the gentleman referenced in the article. No offense, but I don't know your credentials, however his are pretty impressive... Google his blog and you can see he knows more about color-space, dithering, dynamic range etc, than you or I ever will... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx zephyrnoid: "The way this works is quite technical but it essentially amounts to using the extra pixels present in the 4K files to rebuild the lost colour information. Neighbouring pixels are summed to create a super pixel with a greater bit depth and better sampling. It requires a lot of processing power and a finishing codec good enough to store the extra colour data (10bit 4:4:4, with CineForm and ProRes being suitable choices) which is why the camera doesn’t do it internally. It does require a transcoding step in post but the increase in quality over the 8bit internal 1080p codec will be marked. The message is clear. Even if you’re working in 1080p, shoot 4K on the GH4 if you want the best quality." That's pure fakery. What matters to me is the ORIGINAL RAW Clut. It's not 10Bit 4:4:4. So they are trying to convince you that by widening the color space via dithering ( AKA Interpolation) that 'magically' a wider gamut has been recovered. That's incorrect because the the orginal space off the sensor was 8Bit 4:2:0 The 4K>2K hat trick is just that. A TRICK A trick because pixel density has NOTHING at all to do with capture color gamut. Sorry to be so harsh. You will discover this when someone runs Imperical Chroma Key tests. Panasonic Please stop this nonsense!

good points, though keep in mind that the algorithm panasonic uses to go from 10-bit to 8-bit could in fact make sure the 4 pixels average out to one 10-bit pixel. There are also variations in between they could do, so accuracy would range from 25-100% depending on the algorithm.

As others have mentioned, motion film cameras were never "FF", so unless you go for the feel that was created by Digital FF DSLR's in the last few years, you might as well stick with APS-C or similar for video. Besides if you want ultra-thin DoF, you can accomplish that with something like a speedbooster & sigma 18-35 f1.8 zoom. In the end, FF or APS-C doesn't mean much. There are other qualities far more important to get great video/film.

For photos, I have done a similar test on m43 lenses by opening the RAW files in DXO instead of Lightroom, and disabled all corrections. You are right that it changes a lot, but in the end, I am building a system around GH3 (and later GH4), so this does not bother me, and for instance if you look at the 35-100 I own (I do not own the 12-35 yet), it is incredibly liberating to stick a camera with a 70-200 equivalent 2.8 lens in what I would consider a tiny camera-bag. If you are want the ultimate in quality that works on any lens, go with a Nikon mount lens and adapt it for sure. The FF glass is of course no compromise (easier to design glass of that size), and for sure, manual focusing will be better etc. Plus if you want to leave m43 completely, you can probably use your glass on another camera-system too. (unless you go full frame)

while I think it is good to point out it works best on a panasonic camera, your judgement seems a bit harsh, and not in agreement with most of the owners of that lens. ps; the pana 25 had pretty bad CA on my gh3...

lots of lens-flares :)

Well, you may give people the impression that 8-bit means only 256 color choices per pixel, and 10-bit means only 1024 color choices per pixel. This is of course not correct. To take your ruler example, say the ruler is 10 centimeter long. That means you have 10 values in 8-bit, and 40 values in 10-bit. (This example is a bit unfair as the low numbers used may give the impression that the colors are way more off than they would be in reality, but that is another topic). Say your 10-bit ruler has a value of 39 The 8-bit ruler may on the other hand have values of 9,10,10,10. In this case, the value would be correct, though of course, there are several scenarios where it would end up wrong (but not likely as wrong as just one 8-bit value). As far as I can see, the resulting 10-bit value will be less accurate than a source 10-bit, but most likely well above 8-bit as well. I believe the down-converting process could actually try to hit the "39" thus be very close to 10-bit in practice, but whether this is something the GH4 actually works hard at achieving, is unknown to me.

There's advantages and disadvantages with m43. A benefit is that you can actually use some aps-c lenses with the speedbooster. That is not possible on aps-c cameras.

I suggest you check out the video examples at filmconvert.com. That should give you an idea of the power of post processing. I can certainly agree that you may find a camera that has better "out of the box" presets, or that can possibly be tweaked better in camera to suit your idea, than others. It certainly helps with minimizing work if you find something you can use as is - hopefully not at the cost of other useful video features though.

Agree. I get the feeling people confuse this with something like a 8-bit gif picture where they could have 256 colors, stored in a palette and that is all each pixel could pick from. While this is not my area of expertise, I will say that I have seen examples ranging from video-compression to disk storage algorithms that give mind-blowing results, and few normal people would understand how it could even be possible. If someone like David Newman is confirming this is real, I don't see any reason to doubt it.

should be easily testable as someone with an external recorder could do both types of recording on the gh4.

I'm sure you will see good comparisons soon. An alternative is also checking out the 200mbps for 1080p. I am pretty confident that will look great and edit easily. Also, keep in mind that relatively speaking, the more content you compress, the better it compresses. This goes for both higher resolution and for increased framerates. Try to compress a small picture with jpeg and it doesn't work well. A high rez picture however compresses much better.

you wasted a lot of effort proving my point, and clearly not having understood my original remark. Dslr sales are largely driven by stills photographers. I was talking about the filmmaking community. Besides, while Americans are a bit slow to adopt in general (bigger is better syndrome), we will start coming around eventually, I have no worries about that.

I didn't mean I don't believe you. I am sure some guys have commented that it's a good camera, but that doesn't mean it is the camera of choice for anyone with good budgets.. Besides, the D800 is more expensive than a gh4, and it has very little to do with the D5300 so this is off topic in my opinion.

I think the previous poster goes by a different definition of soccer mom. Afaik they mostly shoot full auto everything and will get very good results for the money with a d5300. For amateurs, it makes sense adding a few hundred to the budget and go for a bmpcc or gh3. Why work around limitations more than necessary, we have enough frustrations and limitations as is.

most celebrated is a mighty strong word for very limited anecdotal "evidence", no offense. I agree on lighting, but if you think along the lines of adding a bunch of trained crew for that, those productions would probably rent that arri. I don't see any reason to ever use D800 compared to the Panasonics, blackmagics or hacked 5dmk3 for smaller budget stuff, and most certainly not the D5300 which is what the topic is about..

I don't think this site is aimed too much at producers of content to big budget productions. Correct, you won't find GH2/GH3/Blackmagic, or D800 or Canon 5d mk3 there for that matter. (maybe any of these as funny experiments or very limited scenes where they don't want to risk more expensive equipment). The nice thing about a camera like the Blackmagic, is that it affords filmmakers who can't afford a big crew of lighting people etc to still end up with good footage. So: Nikon 5300 - soccermoms Blackmagic/GH2/GH3/GH3 - indie, smaller productions Arri (mostly) - large budget digital

I haven't tried the GH4 yet, but two points you may take into consideration; 1. I think you can get a speedbooster for your Contax Zeiss lenses. If you do, it makes the crop factor much closer, and the added light sensitivity will likely make up for most of the advantage a larger sensor would have with the same lenses. 2. By downsizing 4K signal to 1080p in post, theoretically it should boost the picture to something like 10bit 422 or better and I would expect it would hold up very well in grading.

Good article, Andrew. There sure seems to be a few annoyed/scared Nikon/Canon people on the forum. You may want to cater a bit more to them, even if *we* know they are wrong ;) haha Seriously though, there is no denying that the picture/video quality can be very good on a D5300, but it is about more than that (and it's built-in codecs falls flat against GH3, GH4, BMPCC as well..). Ergonomics, Audio features (esp. GH3/GH4) is in a different league, and with the speedbooster, they can compete with FF on DoF and low light performance. If you primarily want to take pictures, and some occasional home movies, the D5300 is great, but this is a FILMMAKING website.