Towd

On my GH5 that lights up when I've enabled Bluetooth or wireless.

So sad. He was one of my favorite writers and video bloggers. With his unique and interesting insights, he could easily entertain even when discussing a mundane camera bag or consumer lens. He certainly contributed to my love for the m43 format. It's a sad irony that as we find new life being breathed into the these smaller cameras, we have lost one of their most talented advocates.

Looks like they went full retard with the full frame aesthetic.

I think it just adds flexibility in post. You can sample the full image down in post to a 4k image, or you can do a 1:1 pixel center extraction of a 4k image. Or you can reposition your 4k image and pan and scan inside the 5.7k camture. Or you can apply post stabilization pass without cropping in on a 4k extracted image. Of course it is also helpful for anamorphic.

Overall, I'm pretty jazzed for the GH6 as an upgrade for my GH5. Key improvements for me are: 4k 120fps in 10 bit 420 4k 60fps in 10 bit 422 Open Gate (my favorite way to shoot my GH5) 5.7k 60fps in 10 bit 420 All new color engine built from ground up. I'm hoping this means rec2020 gamut with full VLOG. If Panasonic is listening, I hope we'll get a 24-30 fps version of 5.7k Open Gate shooting with 10 bit 422. That would be pretty amazing for greenscreen and high detail capture. All in all though this adds some some nice flexibility for high framerate capture in 10 bit which is all I've really been pining for beyond full VLOG. It's also nice to know the MFT format is not being abandoned by Panasonic.

Yeah, I feel the same, but seeing some new m43 sensors on Sony's website makes me think someone may pick it up and run with it. It is still my favorite system for casual shooting and travel photography. I've been lurking in the medium format thread and I think @kye may be on to something regarding a medium format system as a supplement to m43. If money becomes no object for me at some point, I could see picking up a large format system for messing around with once in a while for that unique look. But 90% of the time, I'd still just want to grab a trusty and compact m43 camera and have fun. Hopefully, capitalism and the free market (or Panasonic) will take care of us diehards. 😎

Ahhh, well it might end up being real which would be awesome. I'm certainly not against an insane 120 fps at that resolution, and it would just open up more shooting possibilities. I know a lot of this has been posted as rumors a while back, but just seeing that there are new m43 sensors officially coming out of Sony makes me hopeful that we have not seen the end of m43. It's still my favorite format due to size and flexibility. So--- fingers crossed!

That would be a great option if it is real. I can't find it on Sony's site though. Do you have a link?

Whoops. Totally posted the above in the wrong thread if someone wants to delete it. My apologies. 😂

Found this IMX492LQJ poking around Sony's website. https://www.sony-semicon.co.jp/products/common/pdf/IMX492LLJ_LQJ_Flyer.pdf It's a multi-aspect sensor that does 8k video and has an all pixel readout of 8432x5680. The 17:9 and 4:3 modes are subsets of this. I think it has a global shutter mode too. Could be an very interesting chip for the next generation of M43 cameras. I used to not care so much about 8k video, but considering a GH6 will probably need to remain competitive for a 5 year or more product cycle, it is probably something Panasonic should think about as it will be competing with full frame cameras and cell phones that already offer 8k. I'd personally probably shoot 99% of the time in some 4k 10 bit VLOG mode, but having the option of going to 8k video capture for special situations could be ideal. Honestly, if this offers great (S1 like) color science and a full 10 bit VLOG in 4:2:2, I could be happy with this camera for 5-10 years. Fun times! I'm still hopeful for the future of M43 now that we've had a round of full frame camera releases from all the major manufacturers.

Yeah, The Hobbit in HFR was a surprising wake up for me regarding why I like 24fps. Everything just popped out and looked weird, and I remember a lot of people liking the look. The newest TVs with their "frame smoothing" feature that generates in-between frames on 24p content drive me just as crazy when I visit a friend's house. I don't think it necessarily means we'll never be watching movies at 120fps in 32k, but it seems we'll need some technical revolution to help blend in all the cheats used in narrative content from sets and fake backgrounds to VFX. Maybe in the next decade or two, someone will invent some A.I. filter to better blend the fakery into the real stuff before we run our 120fps export.

One of the things I've been told is that because 24 fps is just over most people's threshold for persistence of vision, the brain has to work a little harder to fill in the gaps than it does at 30, 48, 60fps, etc. So it helps trigger the imaging/imagination part of your brain to more readily accept what you are seeing. It sounds a little pseudo-sciencey, but I've noticed that anything from sets to VFX pop out to my eye as fake at higher frame rates. Even 30 fps has a cheaper looking quality to me. Personally, for sports or ultra-realism, high frame rates make sense. And there have been film formats before the digital age that experimented with high frame rates, but they never seem to catch on for narratives. 24fps may have been chosen somewhat arbitrarily and with cost in mind, but I think it has remained a standard for a reason. Another advantage to 24 fps is it can be easily halved, quartered, thirded, and more without partial frames. Kind of like how we have 24 hours in a day or 12 inches to a foot-- only luddites use weird things like 100cm to a meter. 😉

Hey @Marla. While you are trying different settings, you may want to check out an autofocus guide that Panasonic put out for the GH5 and G9 cameras. It goes into what the various settings are doing, and may help you find a combination that works. https://www.panasonic.com/content/dam/Panasonic/Global/Learn-More/lumix-af-guidebook/LUMIX_AF_Guidebook_1809.pdf

Your essentially correct on the VFX side for capture, though the 2K for visual effects has less to do with masking flaws than it takes 4 times as long to render a 4K frame than a 2K frame. It's a cost saving measure. Yeah, VFX houses will charge more for 4k shots, so some project with wall to wall VFX will probably look to save some costs by mastering at 2k even today. To Kye's point, recording in a higher resolution than your delivery format is a good way to deal with all the stuff that may be happening depending on your camera and recording format. (Lossy compression, debayering, chroma subsampling, etc.) You don't have to shoot in raw, but minimally it is best if you can record in 4:4:4 so you're not throwing out chroma information. Or just shoot 4k 4:2:2, for a 2k delivery. But if Avengers was recording in 6.5k uncompressed ArriRaw, I'd hazard to guess they had detail to spare. Yeah, I've been told that it is still common for a film to get mastered at 2k and then have the post house do some fancy up-res for delivery in 4k for cinemas that have 4k projectors. There are more and more films that are mastered in 4k though. I just find it interesting that some of the biggest tent pole films are still mastered in 2k. I read an article a while back that streaming services would outpace Cinema and broadcast TV in the move to higher resolutions and that's pretty obviously what we are seeing today. It is probably one of the reasons Netflix quickly made the jump to require that their own original content be captured and delivered in 4k.

Meh, even Avengers: Endgame was mastered in wait for it......... Digital Intermediate (2K) (master format). At least according to IMDB. Granted, it was captured in ArriRaw 6.5k... go figure.

Yeah, and this is exactly my point. If you are Christopher Nolan and have as many shoot days as necessary to block and frame your shots for an I-Max camera, more power to you. But with shrinking budgets and shoot days, I don't understand why anyone would want to complicate their life by going for a "full frame look" when what they should probably be really concentrating on is just getting their project "in the can" as efficiently as possible. But I know I'm not changing any minds here ranting on the GH6 rumors thread. You guys already get it! 🤣 I just hope Panasonic does.

There's a solution to that - it's called Manual Focus. Yeah, AF pulsing is terrible. I've never worked on a project that used autofocus... EVER! Maybe some day AF will be there, but I'm talking about doing a small racking manual focus pulls between people in a group shot because one person is positioned a foot or two off the focus point. To me that is as annoying as having one person in a group shot out of focus. Unless you are really trying to draw attention to a rack focus, I feel you want your focusing to be invisible to the audience because nobody cares how blurry your backgrounds are! They just want to see the subject in focus. 😄

Thanks! I came to M43 due to the GH5, and have grown to love the format due to its versatility and lens options. It is just so tiresome to see doom and gloom day in and day out mostly due to some groupthink consensus that full frame is the future, or necessary to achieve a professional look. Anecdotally, I worked on a long form project that was shot mostly in full frame and it was a nightmare in post. So many good shots had to be scrapped because the subjects were not all in focus or drifted in and out of focus. This wasn't just a missed focus problem that could be corrected by perfect focus tracking. Even when the subject was bang on in focus, a shot could be annoying or distracting because in a 2 person shot or group shot with multiple talking heads another person might be a couple feet off the focus point and look soft. Micro racking focus back and forth was even more distracting. Its also worth noting that Hollywood has toyed with large formats in the past like VIstavision, Showscan, and now I-Max. They are beautiful formats if you have the time and resources to deal with them, but for every day bread and butter work, I find large formats unnecessarily cumbersome.

In regards to Raw vs Log formats, while its nice to have a the ability to change color temp and ISO in RedRaw, etc. The Kodak Cineon system, a 10 bit RGB 4:4:4 Log format was the gold standard for over 20 years when scanning film for digital processing in VFX and later for Digital Intermediates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cineon Every post house on the planet worth its salt should be comfortable delivering professional results using a 10 bit log "digital negative". It wasn't until the rise of HD video acquisition over the last 10 years that raw became a thing. And the early reaction to Red's raw format was mostly met with derision due to its lossy (gasp!) compression format. Attitudes have definitely changed as people got used to the new formats. I think the big step up in the video/DSLR space was when we went from 8-bit video recording to a 10-bit log format like the GH5 offered. The 8-bit log formats from Technicolor's Cinestyle, to C-Log, S-log, V-log are just too prone to banding and color artifacts when pushed heavily. The ability to shoot raw is nice, but 10 bit log is a totally viable format for any post house to work with and deliver great results.

It is interesting that the top three spots on Andrew's list of the most popular cameras on EOSHD are all M43 cameras. Yet every day we have new posts bemoaning the impending death of the format. And here we are posting on a GH6 "rumors" thread that is 27 pages long and has been active for over a year. It really feels like the death of M43 if it comes, will be due to a self fulfilling prophecy in the minds of its users and not based in any rational assessment of its adoption or the interest of its userbase. If Panasonic does decide to abandon a market that they lead and tries to cram the L-mount down our throat it will be one of the silliest decisions a corporation could make. But I wont try to predict the future as it wouldn't be the first time corporate heads made a bad call. For the last year or so now Panasonic has been pushing adoption of their new full frame camera line and they probably want to give it as much room to breath and grow as possible. I think with the new release of the S5, they'll also want to give it some time for new adopters to buy in before they release any news about a GH5 replacement. At least that is what makes the most sense to me, but I do agree the lack of guidance from them and full support of the format a bit worrisome. For example, the EVA1 really should have been M43 with maybe a bundled EF adapter or an interchangeable mount-- that alone may have given their user base more confidence in its future. It is also too bad that the L-mount and M43 have such similar flange distances that an adapter between the two is probably not in the cards. That said M43 is still my favorite ecosystem and format and none of the full frame cameras have really pulled me away due to some combination of rolling shutter, cropped video, heat issues, or just the size of the bodies and lenses. The A7S III looks the most promising to me, but I'm still not entirely sold on the need to move to full frame due to weight/size of the lenses and the shallow depth of field that I mostly consider a negative for video. Anyway, It would be sad to see Panasonic walk away from a mount that arguably has one of the most diverse ecosystems of lenses and adapters on the market. Hopefully, we'll get some good news soon from Panasonic after they have given the S5 some time to sell through.

Touche'. It seems that Meike has tweaked the formulas a bit to reduce chromatic aberration, lens breathing, and contrast at least on the 35mm, so there may be other small tweaks they have made. I think however it is safe to assume based on the original post that the Meike lenses are derived from the original Veydras. I could have been more exact in my language. That aside though, all the resolution tests I've seen between between the Meike and Veydras show their performance to be very similar, so the MTF tests of the Veydras should be on par with what one can expect from a Meike. For myself I definitely lean toward a sharp lens with a neutral, clean image over a softer lens with character for many of the reasons you listed, and the Meike line seems to be an outstanding choice in that regard for m43. Now I'm just waiting to see what Panasonic's plans are with a possible GH6.

That was a great lens comparison. Now that we know the Meike lenses use the same formula as the Veydras, it's worth taking a second look at just how well the Veydra lenses performed in the LensRentals MTF optical bench tests. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2018/03/veydra-cine-mini-prime-mtf-optical-bench-tests/ The comparisons to Zeiss CP.2 lenses is particularly interesting as seen in the attached sample.

The more I think about it the more I really like the idea of the GH6 going to some kind of multi-aspect sensor format like the JVC LS300 . It would silence the haters who think m43 is going to die, and would open up opportunities to shoot super 35 with adapted lenses. They could also expand the m43 spec to cover the s35 sensor area with a tweak to the name like "Micro Four Thirds Plus" or "Cinema", etc. So some lenses are m43 and some are labelled m43+. In regards to Kye's concern about a reduced resolution for people who just want to shoot m43, I ran some numbers using a 3.33 µm pixel pitch which is the GH5's pixel size and came up with the following at various image sizes: Super 35 (24.89 x 18.66mm): 7474 x 5603 or 42 mpix APS-C (23.6 x 15.7mm): 7,087 x 4715 or 33 mpix Academy 35: (21.95 x 16mm): 6592 x 4804 or 32 mpix DCI m43 like GH5s (19.26 x 10.2mm): 5784 x 3063 or 18 mpix standard m43 (17.3 x 13mm): 5196 x 3907 or 20 mpix m43 square (17.3 x 17.3mm): 5196 x 5196 or 27 mpix If Panasonic were to reduce the pixel pitch just a hair to 3.24 µm they could actually hit 8k in super 35 while slightly increasing all the other resolutions: Super 35 (24.89 x 18.66mm): 7682 x 5759 or 44 mpix standard m43 (17.3 x 13mm): 5340 x 4012 or 21 mpix I could also see them not going all the way up to true Super 35 and just topping out at the APS-C size for cost or heat reasons. But, with a slightly greater reduction in pixel pitch, they could offer 8k in APSC and ~6k in m43. If they had an easy way to swap between the various sensor sizes and could deliver 10 bit 24fps in 8k Super 35 and 120 fps in 4k m43 with a variety of frame rates in between in the way Red camera's work, they'd have a very interesting camera. This would also give them a good reason to charge $2000 for the camera on release as I can't see Panasonic interested in launching a GH6 for less than they launched the GH5.

Yeah, my point was just that while technically 23.976 is not 24.0 fps... for 99.9% of projects its all the same thing. And only the technicians such as DP and Editor care. I can't speak for every production in NTSC land but unless you are specifically targeting a DCP delivery, I don't know of anyone who shoots or edits at 24.0. It is interesting what you bring up regarding Youtube and other streaming platforms being mostly frame rate agnostic and just delivering whatever frame rate. I know I've watched PAL stuff on Youtube at 25fps. However, I'll still argue that NTSC 30fps and PAL 25fps are legacy formats from the broadcast days and not something a modern project should be using. Totally up to you. I still don't believe that "motion cadence" in the sense that frames are recorded at slightly variable timings which can be perceived or measured in any meaningful way is real. I do believe in jitter/strobing effects in high contrast scenes, rolling shutter, and users setting bad shutter angles which in turn lead to "motion cadence" issues. I think playback devices can contribute, and can also see how the dynamic range of a camera could affect perceived jitter due to clipping or contrast issues. That said, I'm still very interested to see if you can find the motion cadence unicorn. If you do run any kind of measurable test using an oscilloscope, pendulum, or consistently measurable device, I'm happy to run it through SynthEyes if it helps verify results.

Ah yeah... I remember trying the 24.0hz cinema mode on my GH5 for a while, but found it didn't offer as many frame rates as the NTSC mode and swapped back. So it looks like the FHD 10 bit 60fps is one of those missing modes. I know this doesn't help you, and would be incredibly annoyed to be shooting all the time in NTSC while living in PAL land. The whole drop frame timing thing in NTSC itself is very annoying, but in the US at least, 23.976 is just the "cinema" standard for most digital delivery except for a strict 24.0 fps DCP file. Swapping between the two I believe just involves adding or subtracting a frame every minute or so. Honest question, in PAL countries when converting a film at 24fps for playback on a TV, is one frame just doubled up every second? In the old days of 29.97 tube TVs we did an annoying 3:2 pulldown that used interlacing to breakup frames and convert them to ~30 fps since the TVs were really just running a 60hz interlaced signal. Modern HD TVs just run at the 23.976 rate. I think it is all very apropos for motion cadence issues users report from cameras. The playback device could possibly be creating hell for a viewer depending on what country they are in! Anyway, I'd love to see Panasonic expand the frame rates they offer in their 24hz Cinema mode. A FHD 10bit 48 fps mode at a minimum. Or they could just add a 10 bit variable frame rate mode that could go up to 60fps (or maybe 72 or 96 😃).