Panasonic GH5 - all is revealed!

[AKED-M]

I made a few videos with ect. telecrop and took jpegs out of them. They are traight ooc, copied to an iphone via wifi and now send here. In brackets the FF numbers. 
Quite asonishing. 

12 mm (24) with the 12-60er
100 mm (200) with the 100-400er 
400 mm (800)
560 mm (1120) also 400 with 1.4 Ext. Telecrop 
1120 mm (2240) 400 with 1.4 Ext. Telecrop + 2x Digitalzoom
2240 mm (4480) 400 with 1.4 Ext. Telecrop + 4x Digitalzoom

[sanveer]

I don't know how many people use Auto focus on cameras for shooting anything. We shot a short film on a Canon 80D. The focus is pretty good. But in low light, close distance focus and when no individual is in the frame (or someone walks into an empty frame), the focus jump and the ability to figure out who to focus on is a joke.

The problem is not so much of whether is can focus accurately or whether there is any focus jump. The problem is there are many conditions under which a camera with auto focus is just a joke, and can never replace a human being. And the fact that a lot of it is absolutely unpredictable.

IMHO while dual pixel and all that marketing jargon sounds great, the fact that algorithm are far from great right now, means, that the hit and miss rate is huge.

Samsung Smartphones (and much smaller sensor cameras), have far better focus locking on subjects, and yet those too have their limitations.

I posted it here because I am genuinely curious to see whether someone actually shot an entire short film, documentary,  wedding or music video, or corporate work etc on Auto focus on a camera with dual pixel (canon) or something like an A6300 or even A6500. I think users' exaggerated claims have kind of pushed the facts into the realm of dreams. People say things more for effect than for their actual worth.

[webrunner5]

39 minutes ago, sanveer said:

I don't know how many people use Auto focus on cameras for shooting anything. We shot a short film on a Canon 80D. The focus is pretty good. But in low light, close distance focus and when no individual is in the frame (or someone walks into an empty frame), the focus jump and the ability to figure out who to focus on is a joke.

The problem is not so much of whether is can focus accurately or whether there is any focus jump. The problem is there are many conditions under which a camera with auto focus is just a joke, and can never replace a human being. And the fact that a lot of it is absolutely unpredictable.

IMHO while dual pixel and all that marketing jargon sounds great, the fact that algorithm are far from great right now, means, that the hit and miss rate is huge.

Samsung Smartphones (and much smaller sensor cameras), have far better focus locking on subjects, and yet those too have their limitations.

I posted it here because I am genuinely curious to see whether someone anyone shot an entire short, documentary,  wedding or music video, or corporate work etc on Auto focus on a camera with dual pixel (canon) or something like an A6300 or even A6500. I think users exaggerated claims have kind of pushed the facts into the realm of dreams. People say things more for effect than for their actual worth.

Oh I can damn near see a Wedding being shot all using AF. Not as the only one there. With the main person shooting stills, I could see it happening.

But you are correct. Most of newer cameras are really set up to focus on people. People's faces. Like you said what happens when there are no people to shoot? I know for damn sure in low light, sucky contrast situations, well hold your ass if it will focus. But the touch focus does mostly work in that situation.

But at my age I Need a larger screen to do manual focus. Like a 7" one! But so many of these newer lenses have no aperture rings, and what rings they do have a all fly by wire. It  just is expensive as hell to have all the gear you need to do video lets face it. The camera on average is the cheap part compared to the rest of the stuff!! It seems to never end the money you need to spend. 

[Fritz Pierre]

7 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Oh I can damn near see a Wedding being shot all using AF. Not as the only one there. With the main person shooting stills, I could see it happening.

But you are correct. Most of newer cameras are really set up to focus on people. People's faces. Like you said what happens when there are no people to shoot? I know for damn sure in low light, sucky contrast situations, well hold your ass if it will focus. But the touch focus does mostly work in that situation.

But at my age I Need a larger screen to do manual focus. Like a 7" one! But so many of these newer lenses have no aperture rings, and what rings they do have a all fly by wire. It  just is expensive as hell to have all the gear you need to do video lets face it. The camera on average is the cheap part compared to the rest of the stuff!! It seems to never end the money you need to spend. 

Though I would never shoot a wedding, I can't imagine taking the risk of using autofocus on something that's so important to the client!...It's their one day and the wedding photographer/video gets only one chance to get it all right...as previously stated I've of course never done a wedding...but for anyone directing/producing a project of any kind, the assessment of risk/possibility/outcome lies squarely on their shoulders...for me personally that risk would be unacceptable.

[Stab]

1 hour ago, Fritz Pierre said:

Though I would never shoot a wedding, I can't imagine taking the risk of using autofocus on something that's so important to the client!...It's their one day and the wedding photographer/video gets only one chance to get it all right...as previously stated I've of course never done a wedding...but for anyone directing/producing a project of any kind, the assessment of risk/possibility/outcome lies squarely on their shoulders...for me personally that risk would be unacceptable.

I shoot weddings and I never use autofocus and probably never will.

Besides not wanting to be dependent on AF like you already mention, there is also focus as a creative tool. There is so much going on sometimes on a wedding day, that I need to seemlessly change the frame and focus to someone speaking or someone else who's listening. Granted, there are shots were it's easy to just tap and shoot but not in shots were multiple people are in the frame and the focus and frame needs to be changed a lot during the recording.  Also, I only have two hands and I couldn't tap the focus while holding the camera with my camframe. A manual focus pull with a follow focus however, is doable.

[webrunner5]

2 hours ago, Fritz Pierre said:

Though I would never shoot a wedding, I can't imagine taking the risk of using autofocus on something that's so important to the client!...It's their one day and the wedding photographer/video gets only one chance to get it all right...as previously stated I've of course never done a wedding...but for anyone directing/producing a project of any kind, the assessment of risk/possibility/outcome lies squarely on their shoulders...for me personally that risk would be unacceptable.

Well I would almost bet you could do it on a Canon C100 mkII. You have to do test footage with a video camera to see it's good and bad points. Shooting a wedding right out of the box, well NO!  I would never trust doing it on MF either. You Need to have a nearly continuous video going all the time, You can't have a bunch of cuts going on all the time to MF on stuff. And you can't have a bunch of back and forth, trying to get in in focus crap in it either. No way you are going to record 3, 4 hours of Wedding, Reception in MF without it looking like you were drunk LoL.

I have shot 100's of weddings in the day, but that was before anyone used video in it, unless you were a Kennedy or something shooting it with 35mm film! I don't know yet how good the AF is on the GH5, I doubt like hell it is as good as DPAF Canon has. But we are not too many years away from having great AF in Video Cameras I bet.

[SuperSet]

Autofocus can be extremely helpful when you're running on a gimbal or filming solo for Vlogging.

[webrunner5]

17 minutes ago, SuperSet said:

Autofocus can be extremely helpful when you're running on a gimbal or filming solo for Vlogging.

Yeah Casey Neistat has done pretty well using AF!  Maybe we can get Tim Sewell with his Canon C100 mkII to shoot a wedding in AF with it.

He might be able to answer how good the AF Realy is?? I don't think he has had it too long now though.

[zmarty]

53 minutes ago, Jn- said:

Hi ZMarty, I don't have yet a GH5 to test the above, but using an RX100 V uhd file it works great, as a test, thanks.  

The only issue is that the audio file gets converted to a much smaller one (aac 128kb) than what was in the source file.  Adding something like this does help  -b:a 384k ... any suggestions? can a "copy" of the origional audio file be incorporated into the ffmpeg command maybe?

Yeah we can change the command line parameters to get better audio. I can take a look later.

[Ken Ross]

On 4/2/2017 at 2:52 PM, noone said:

At 1.4x I think that clearzoom is at least as close to lossless as the Pansonic at 1.4x.

It is still very close to lossless at 2x and of course you can go to 1.1x or 1.2x or 1.3x or whatever you want to 2x as well.

You can change the setting from clear image zoom to digital zoom to 4x in which case above 2x you start seeing it though still could have uses in a pinch.

I have it set to clearzoom and the down button set to use to bring it up and then I can use the left and right buttons and use it on the fly. (I sometimes use other things with the down button but mostly it is set to clear zoom).

Those four images I posted above are 2 from the A7s and 2 from the GX7.         Regards the A7s shots, I actually prefer the clearzoom at 25mm with 2x applied over the 50mm image.      those were taken with the cheap little Canon 18-55 IS ii kit lens and I think it might be because being a APSC lens used FF, while it covers the sensor from around 24mm up, there is still vignetting (just not a black edge as there is below about 24mm).     Using the clearzoom has removed the vignetting.     It may also be that the lens is optically better at 25mm than at 50mm.

With the Panasonic shots, the optical image is clearly better than the ETC shot though I would use the ETC one if I had to.       Again, the (same) lens is for a different format, in this case for a larger 1.6x APSC sensor so I don't have the vignetting issue and it may well be now that the lens is also better at 36mm of the optical zoom than it is at 18mm for the ETC shot so this time other factors favour the optical VS other factors favouring the clearzoom for the Sony.

Again, though this was never meant to be a Sony VS Panasonic thing but to suggest that if 1.4x is great with ETC, why on Mars wouldn't you want it variable?

Proving that there are 1/2 glass full people and 1/2 glass empty folks. It is what it and it is lossless. The Sony is not. But you do seem to be doing a good job in actually making this a Sony vs Panasonic thing.  

[noone]

1 hour ago, Ken Ross said:

Proving that there are 1/2 glass full people and 1/2 glass empty folks. It is what it and it is lossless. The Sony is not. But you do seem to be doing a good job in actually making this a Sony vs Panasonic thing.  

I really wasn't trying to make it anything of the sort.

Assuming ETC really is lossless (I dont), who wouldn't want it to be variable?

We can agree to disagree on anything/everything else though.

[Papiskokuji]

16 hours ago, sanveer said:

I posted it here because I am genuinely curious to see whether someone actually shot an entire short film, documentary,  wedding or music video, or corporate work etc on Auto focus on a camera with dual pixel (canon) or something like an A6300 or even A6500. I think users' exaggerated claims have kind of pushed the facts into the realm of dreams. People say things more for effect than for their actual worth.

I shot the following video with AF only on the A6300 and a came tv single.

 

[Ken Ross]

It is lossless, it simply crops the sensor. But while we're at, who wouldn't want Clear zoom to be lossless? See how that works?

[ntblowz]

Well AF on FS5 sucks and doesnt have IBIS  but I dont see many buyer like me see that as deal breaker lol, I dont see Sony fanboy denoucing FS5 or A7SII for crappy AF which is heavily bashed on GH5 atm.

[Ken Ross]

17 minutes ago, Papiskokuji said:

I shot the following video with AF only on the A6300 and a came tv single.

 

Can we, in keeping with the thread title, keep this to information regarding the GH5? This is slowly but steadily evolving into a Sony thread.

[ntblowz]

4 minutes ago, Ken Ross said:

Can we, in keeping with the thread title, keep this to information regarding the GH5? This is slowly but steadily evolving into a Sony thread.

Internet thread get derailed so that is norm?

[zmarty]

I tried out Variable Frame Rate today (VFR). While the feature works fine the codec selection is not so great. At least in 4K, VFR only seems to work when selecting 8 bit 100 Mbps. I am disappointed that it does not work for the 10 bit 150 Mbps codec. I shoot a lot of timelapses in log format (so for GH5 it would be V-Log L) and I would have hoped this camera would let me get rid of my external Atomos recorder. Not so much

[Andy J]

6 hours ago, zmarty said:

I tried out Variable Frame Rate today (VFR). While the feature works fine the codec selection is not so great. At least in 4K, VFR only seems to work when selecting 8 bit 100 Mbps. I am disappointed that it does not work for the 10 bit 150 Mbps codec. I shoot a lot of timelapses in log format (so for GH5 it would be V-Log L) and I would have hoped this camera would let me get rid of my external Atomos recorder. Not so much

This to me is a big disappointment. The camera should support 10-bit 422 from 2fps to 30fps. I hope Panasonic can fix this is in a future firmware update. Not being able to under-crank in the GH5's best codec is a let down.

I'm curious how you use your external recorder to do timelapses in log. Do you go to something like 2fps in camera and if so, how does the external recorder handle that? Does it also record in 2fps or does it fill up a 24p container with duplicate frames or something? Very curious about this. Thanks.

[Andy J]

Can you get a 1/2 second shutter on your GH5 and capture that on the Atomos in 10-bit timelapse or is the minimum shutter speed with that setup 1/24 of a second?

[gethin]

I'm not getting the fizz. Normally by now after a camera release I've seen some footage that has. I got the fizz when I first saw some hacked gh2 footage. In fact some of that still does it. Canon raw video. Even the BMPCC, a7s.  I get more fizz from my nikon d5500 vid.   It all seems a bit characterless, a bit sterile maybe (and goddamit Ive seen moire in 4k. Argh!)