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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.

Is there an arms race in the microphone world to make microphones more and more directional? That would be the natural response to having to put the mic further away from the talent, and it's something that would be easily marketable as a single number... which is how manufactures get people to replace their perfectly good equipment with newer, marginally better, models.

I wonder how many videos it takes for a new camera to pay for itself in extra revenue. ie, where the YouTubers purchase price (whatever that might be for those with large sub counts) is overtaken by extra clicks that their videos get from having a new camera vs filming with the one they were using before. One of the things I've noticed in quite a lot of situations is that they (McKinnon, Matti, etc) often seem to have several of the new camera bodies on their shelves rather than just one that they'd need to buy to make the review videos. If It's an R5, let's say, and they had three of them, and a few nicer lenses, then that's a serious investment!

Also, if you're looking to up your quality of final edits, it basically doesn't matter what type of videos you make, upgrading your camera is probably pretty far down the list of what will actually move the needle in terms of outputs. I've seen inexperienced folks shoot with an Alexa and it looked like a poor quality student film 🙂

In all seriousness (or more than my last post at least), the formula for YT success is to make videos that can be found through organic searching (as this exposes you to new viewers) but also keep the content suitable to retain your audience (as this builds the channel over time). A video where you get a new camera and put that in the title is just as good as a van tour video where you put that in the title, or go to a new place and put that in the title, or whatever. These things are good for both organic views as well as your existing subscriber base. If I was just starting out on YT an FX30 wouldn't be a bad choice I don't think. These days all cameras are good enough, and Sony is popular enough that if you have problems then half the people in your YT circle can help you out because they're using Sony too. It's one of the reasons that ARRI are the Hollywood standard, everyone knows the system and are setup for it, as well as the image and products being spectacular of course.

and here's a channel with 825K subs that is filmed with an iPhone.... https://www.youtube.com/c/hannahleeduggan/videos What can we draw from these two amazing data points? How about... cameras don't matter than much 🙂

I'm willing to do my part!

Actually, and I know this might come as a bit of a shock, but mostly these people don't think about the cameras they use the way that camera YT does, and many of them just use their phones. Some of the ways I can tell this is that: they mostly shoot deeper DoF they mostly shoot in-camera picture profiles (or do a stunningly good job of grading footage so it looks like the in-camera profiles) if they do get a new camera they will typically not mention it, except if they screw something up and have to apologise for it by saying "sorry, new camera, I'll work it out eventually" if they do a video covering their essentials they will often just say the brand of the camera and some even say they don't know what the model is Also, and these probably will also come as a shock: Lots of them have been doing van life for years and years and aren't quitting anytime soon There is no way they would ever ever ever ever get rid of their dogs because they weren't a puppy anymore Outside of camera YT there's many many little niches where people care about things other than YT and equipment, aren't attention-grabbing narcissists, and genuinely care about living creatures other than themselves. SHOCK!!!!