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I had to google that! 😆😆😆 Regarding the camera though, I saw this review in my feed - IIRC it's a mixed bag? Is the film for it expensive?

Predicting the future is much harder than people realise. IIRC most people who predict things get them wrong, but there's a cognitive tendency for people to change their memories of their predictions so they weren't wrong (or weren't as wrong as they actually were). I've definitely experienced this when I've predicted something and wrote it down, then later on read my predictions and realised they were worse than I had remembered they were. I hear people regularly predict things and then later on their recollection of their predictions is substantially different to my recollection of their predictions. Writing down your predictions is quite brave, I think. Sharing them with the world even more-so! 🙂

One claim for 32-bit was that you could adjust gain so that you had lots of headroom and therefore wouldn't need a safety track in addition to normal level audio - do you think that 32-bit actually achieves this in reality? I know lots of folks recording video in uncontrolled conditions (e.g. travel or docos) would appreciate a built-in safety track... for me personally, going straight into my camera is always limited to stereo and that means I have to choose between mono+safety or stereo without a safety, when I'd rather just have both.

Unless you have a reason to have part of your signal path in 1080p. I shoot GH5 using the 1080p 200Mbps ALL-I mode so that I can edit in 1080p smoothly on my MBP laptop without rendering proxies. Before I settled on that workflow I did comparisons between the 5K h265 open gate Long-GOP mode, the 4K h264 Long-GOP mode, and the 1080p ALL-I mode, using my sharpest lens, stopped down, on a subject directly lit with harsh lighting and lots of fine detail, and then pixel peed my heart out trying to see differences. They were there, but WOW did you really have to look HARD to find them.

The original claim by @The Dancing Babamef was.... My reply was simply that YouTube is good enough to show the difference between: Resolution X sensor -> Resolution X timeline -> Resolution X YT upload Resolution >X sensor -> Resolution X timeline -> Resolution X YT upload It doesn't matter if X = 4K or 1080p, YT quality on both of them is enough to see differences. I think people form the opinion that YT is completely useless and don't think it can do anything because of the way it handles grain (i.e. a bloodbath) and the high quantity of very low quality uploads where the footage has been crunched way before it made it to YT. I'm yet to understand what makes a YT upload look worse or better, but there is definitely a lot of variation across different channels / videos. In terms of a 4K sensor -> 1080p timeline -> 4K export-> 4K upload, that can benefit hugely from a little bit of sharpening. Most of the people that think that 1080p is completely inferior to 4K are seeing the extra YT bitrate from the 4K YT stream, or are simply looking at sharpness, which is easily compensated for in grading.

I know a small amount about linear power supply design, so if you can get a good image of the circuit board I'd be happy to have a look over it and see what I can see. If it's using a normal AC transformer / rectifier setup then your options will be limited based on the secondary windings that the transformer has. Often transformers will have dual secondaries to enable them to be put in parallel or series depending on if there's 220V or 110V being input. Lots of older products would include some sort of switch that would connect the pins in the right way so you could have either 110 or 220, but I don't see those much anymore. Still, the circuit might be modifiable.

From memory the GH5II wasn't a bad update on the GH5, with a few useful (albeit incremental) improvements. I think it didn't get a lot of attention because it wasn't flashy and due to the fact it wasn't the GH6, but my recollection is that it's definitely a better camera than the GH5.

Just watching Blooms review of the FX30 and he's got a little segment talking about Topaz and shows with/without comparisons...

When did I state that YT doesn't degrade the image capture?

Interesting. Any idea if the circuit is physically modified from the fully-functional 49MP version, or is it crippled afterwards? The reason that I ask is that (my understanding) of CPU manufacture is that they only manufacture the highest clock-speed version of a particular model, and then they test all the chips off the line to see how fast they can actually go. Some will fail at the highest speeds and only work at lower speeds so get labelled and sold as slower clock-speed versions, and if they need to sell more lower-speed ones then they just disable some fast ones. The whole idea of over-clocking rests on this premise. I figure that maybe it's cheaper to just make the fanciest version of the sensor and then disable the more advanced functionality afterwards? Not that this helps us as good luck unlocking it, just curious.

I'd be doing some serious A/B tests between the cheap ones and your reference lights, especially if running them at 110V... but maybe they're fine - I'm not sure how LEDs work under-voltage.

Are you able to also post the GH5 chart for comparison? I tried finding it on the site, but I can't seem to find the high-res ones.. Maybe my non-existent German is the issue 😕

My comments are about resolution, in the context of downsampling, not bitrate. Yes, but if your comments about downsampling were true, then it wouldn't matter if God himself uploaded a video to YT, it would still be........ But, it's not, and therefore, it isn't.

One thing I'd miss would be the 2x digital zoom, which in 1080p mode would still be oversampled. The 2x on the GH5 is great and I use it a lot, and it's definitely better than the 1:1 mode which is a 2.5x crop. I'm still hopeful that some of these little touches will get into a future firmware update. Panasonic still has a decent firmware update owing (I can't remember if it's USB recording or USB charging that was promised but still hasn't been enabled). My understanding was that the GH5 took a number of firmware updates to really unlock its full potential.

There's a lot of opinions about how good YT is or isn't, but I'm not so sure. Here's a video from ARRI that is "only" uploaded in 1080p, but just looks fantastic... I own both the OG BMPCC and BMMCC cameras which are native 1080p sensors, and even shooting in RAW or Prores HQ and processing them in post, I still seriously struggle to get an image as detailed as the above, even though the above has been seriously compressed by YT. The BM 1080p cameras have a slightly softer pixel-to-pixel transition, simply because they're not 1080p 4:4:4, whereas downsampling cameras are all going to be 1080p 4:4:4, and YT has enough quality at 1080p to show these differences. With my GH5, the difference in resolution between the 4K mode that's downsampled from the 5K sensor and the 4K 1:1 mode is definitely noticeable, even though the 4K 1:1 is a very small crop and even if you adjust ISO, SS and aperture to create the cleanest and sharpest images possible.

I have found that to be true in the past. I've shot quite a number of resolution tests with the GH5 and have struggled to be able to tell which shots were which, even when I knew which were which, until I found a particular tiny detail in the frame that was the giveaway. If I wasn't pixel peeing then there's no way I'd be able to tell. I've also found that you can easily compensate for quite significant resolution differences by just adding some sharpening in post. The resolution purists are mostly just judging sharpness, not resolution.

@hyalinejim @Skropi Do you get streaks if you shoot: outside at night from streetlights / signs etc? during the day if you get the sun just out of frame but hitting the lens? during the day if you get the sun in frame? I think those are probably the only situations left that I would shoot that haven't been mentioned already.

Well, I couldn't find an actual Xyla test image, but the waveform plot doesn't show any meaningful bump in the noise levels next to the brightest patch vs the other side of the frame, so I'm guessing that means that there isn't likely to be any streaking within the DR of the camera. Of course, how many stops above clipping you need to go before streaking is visible above black levels is unknown, but the test images I've seen have had pretty serious clipping on the areas that the streaks originate from. Someone with an actual GH6 could setup a test, if they had the time and inclination, but from the tests I've seen online the streak behaviour varies significantly in magnitude and behaviour depending on the ISO values. Some values were more than others and some values had a lighter streak and others had a darker streak, so it would be a complex test.

I wish every time I encountered a terrible shot I could just turn 90 degrees and get a Vermeer!

Thanks, this is enormously helpful. It's so hard to judge things like DR from just looking at footage and even if someone tells you the difference then that's often not helpful either as I have no idea what the stops are when I shoot, but your descriptions give me a sense of it, so thanks. It seems that actually it wouldn't be an issue for me as I am basically shooting in similar situations to you, and while maybe I might have an outside/inside shot be very different, it's not a normal occurrence.

The other factor in this would be the quality of the LEDs.. things like flicker, WB, and CRI are all considerations that cost money but you really don't want to skimp on to lower the purchase price.

$10,000 isn't much. Lots of YouTubers will also have a dedicated cinema camera setup for their permanent 'newsreader' setups, like an FS7, FX6, or even FX9, in addition to their multiple R5 or A7S3 bodies that sit on a shelf and can be seen randomly in the background. One data point that stands out to me is Monica Church, who is a lifestyle influencer and also more recently a licensed real estate agent, and in this video actually spells out her income from each: TLDR: She has ~1.5M YT subs, with mostly 50-150k views per video, about 35 videos in the last year She's also active on other platforms too, and likely has lots of followers there too, so revenue is likely to be from cross-platform posts and eyeballs She says she's signed brand deals up to $120K (although who knows how many videos/posts that would involve) She says that prior to starting in real estate (which seems to be a huge amount of work) she was making $500k/a as an influencer, but then that went down to $300k/a and the real estate made $200k that year (IIRC that was her first year doing it) I know she's used a modern BMPCC camera (not sure if it was 4K/6K) but she's not a tech YouTuber so doesn't talk about the gear I suspect she's probably got a more monetisable audience than McKinnon etc, as she talks about all kinds of things that young twenty-something women are spending money on (rather than just cameras) but also this audience has greater lifetime value as if you can grab someone as your customer in early adulthood then you might have them as a daily/weekly customer for life, whereas that's not what happens with camera equipment which is only likely to be a few thousand a year. Influencers are (mostly) like old money - they don't want you to know how much money they make because you won't react well to it and there's no up-side for them if you do find out. This is obviously different if you're an influencer trying to look rich in order to influence people, but most have influence these days due to how relatable they are, not how rich and elitist they are.

How strange.. I remember shooting on the top of a hill right next to a large city and the boom op using a very directional mic to aim at the talent (only having to capture one person talking per setup) and essentially 'thread the needle' because on either side of many of the setups were noises like lawn-mowers, motor boats, etc. The audio was by far the biggest challenge for the shoot and was what caused the most time during filming. We even had to alternate between aiming up vs aiming down due to the odd helicopter that was flying by. The width of the pickup pattern saved the audio on that shoot, giving us only a few shots that we had to ADR.

How much do you shoot with really high DR conditions? I seem to be shooting quite a lot in conditions that exceed the DR of the GH5 so would imagine that those would run the risk of streaking.

I have kept my GH5 despite other offerings being a pretty amazing in many ways, for several reasons: I was looking for a backup camera / tiny camera and ended up buying a GX85 which further locked me into the MFT ecosystem, and I really don't want to have to re-buy all my lenses The GH6 has that horizontal streaking issue that Panasonic don't appear to be motivated to fix, and I don't feel motivated to risk having to fix in post (although I think with much careful fiddling it could be done) The GH5 can look great and although it's not the best colour science in the world, my ability to colour grade is definitely the weak link in my setup I started studying award winning productions in the same genre that I shoot (and I mean studying seriously, breaking down 45 minute episodes sometimes frame-by-frame, dissecting audio and sound design, etc) and the more I looked at Emmy Award-Winning stuff the more I realised that the images looked OK, but it was everything else around that (editing, sound design, narration, music, etc) that made it great It's reliable, I enjoy using it, and keeping it is free.... which is good because despite me buying it in 2018, the pandemic has meant that I didn't get to use it on nearly as many trips as I had planned to do before being tempted to upgrade Some months ago I bought a BM Resolve Micro colour grading panel with the goal to teach myself to grade the way that the pros mostly learned (using the basic tools but using a control surface) and kind of justified the purchase to myself by saying I would buy it to learn instead of buying a new camera. I had planned on just putting in an hour or so grading practice per day, but I got distracted with other things (life!) - however I found that I got noticeably better for every two hours or so I put into grading. I have a huge backlog of footage from past trips that a skills upgrade will improve but not new camera can influence, so I'm more motivated to upgrade myself rather than the camera.