Panasonic GH5S 4K / 240fps low light monster

[webrunner5]

3 hours ago, jonpais said:

It’s turning into IBISgate. Hardly a single iPhonedo viewer bought the rep’s  lame excuse, not even the fellow sitting next to him. ? 

I don't think Jon is buying a GH5s! But he was not buying a GH5 either.

 

 

[jonpais]

true enough. ?

[webrunner5]

4 minutes ago, jonpais said:

true enough. ?

I can see from what you shoot not having IBIS would not be a very good fit at all.

In reality it probably is not a very good fit for most people.  I doubt they are going to sell them left and right to the average person.

But I am more of a Tripod guy, or have to have a camera rig that weighs 25 pounds to balance it.

[jonpais]

1 minute ago, webrunner5 said:

I can see from what you shoot not having IBIS would not be a very good fit at all.

In fact, I’ve hardly used IBIS at all since shooting models, except when wearing the easyrig. Most of my recent stuff has been on a tripod or slider. Oh, and the BTS shots in my last video shot by my assistant with the G85.

[webrunner5]

Wow maybe you are a Candidate for the GH5s. The low light ability is a super update from the past m4/3 stuff. I mean it opens up a lot of new venues.

I have really given up on m4/3. I don't even own one anymore. But I have to admit this had poped into the Radar for sure. I like the lens sizes for sure and the selection you have from others.

[jonpais]

Are you kidding? I already pre-ordered two of them, and a MOVI.

[Fritz Pierre]

OK...late to the ball...just saw Matt Fraser of Panasonic call the DR on the GH5s at 14stops!!!....whereas Nick Driftwood called it the same as the GH5...at 12 stops.....14 stops is well and deep into Cinema Cam territory...I know they tweeted and measured with the EVA before it was out in the wild and then before release it was called at 14 stops....Matt Frazier claimed it could also hold 14stops at 2500 ISO....can anyone confirm?...this would be extrodinary!

[Emanuel]

3 hours ago, Trek of Joy said:

IBIS on the GH5s would impact GH5 sales, especially with the G9 now in the lineup. There are better m43 cameras for stills than the GH5, the EM1.2 and now the G9, now the GH5s is arguably a better video option unless you want IBIS. They needed more than the sensor to differentiate them. The price increase is the head scratcher for me, whack IBIS, but add the hotrod sensor - sell them both for $2000, not add another $500 to one. Feels like a page from the Sony playbook with the a6300/6500. If they were developed at the same time and the intention was to release the GH5s first as claimed in one of the interview videos posted, its really odd the GH5s wasn't announced or ever mentioned when Panasonic started teasing the GH5 at Photokina in late 2016, or when it was officially announced one year ago.

Finally, I'm reading now someone to firmly concur my POV on topic, already expressed earlier in these pages. I could just diverge on the idea they don't matter to lose GH5 sales when I actually believe they're pointing their business decision only in order to collect much more money into their own pocket, not exactly the best to their customers' bank account. Sure, there's no charity organization over here. Takes for both sides as well. It is what it is.

This won't put me out to have pre-ordered the GH5S as the best cinema camera available for the price, but doesn't let me the part of fool to play either :-)

[webrunner5]

2 hours ago, Fritz Pierre said:

OK...late to the ball...just saw Matt Fraser of Panasonic call the DR on the GH5s at 14stops!!!....whereas Nick Driftwood called it the same as the GH5...at 12 stops.....14 stops is well and deep into Cinema Cam territory...I know they tweeted and measured with the EVA before it was out in the wild and then before release it was called at 14 stops....Matt Frazier claimed it could also hold 14stops at 2500 ISO....can anyone confirm?...this would be extrodinary!

I have heard that number thrown out by some Panny people also. But with using V-Log L on paper limits you to 12 stops. I just don't know. This sensor, this camera Ought to do better than the Gh5 does. I don't really see how something that obliviously does better in low light not have some more DR! I guess we will find out soon.

[Emanuel]

21 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

I have heard that number thrown out by some Panny people also. But with using V-Log L on paper limits you to 12 stops. I just don't know. This sensor, this camera Ought to do better than the Gh5 does. I don't really see how something that obliviously does better in low light not have some more DR! I guess we will find out soon.

On native ISO2500 or even higher, for sure because GH5 will always show less than any GH5S value. Doesn't necessarily more than 12 stops. But as you said, we'll know very soon.

[webrunner5]

I am really amazed someone who had a Pre release one didn't try to do a DR test. At least side by side to a GH5, heck even to a GH4.

[noone]

I would think it will have DR that starts out about the same as the GH5 but ramps down at a more gentle rate. 

For RAW stills at ISO 2500, the GH5 on DXO has about 10 stops so maybe this might have 10.5 (just a uneducated guess), maybe a fraction more?

[Mattias Burling]

From 43rumors,

"If you add a Speed Booster XL to the GH5s you get in DCI 4K a crop factor of 1,149x with 35mm lenses." 

Thats basically full frame.

[seku]

I couldn't believe 12+ stops either in VLOG-L, but Samuel Bilodeau  from Mystery Box (they did the official "Horizons" Panasonic HDR Short for the GH5s) states that you can use 14 stops under nearly all circumstances, with detail up to 16 stops (very noisy tho, but detail still there).

The TLDR juicy stuff according to Samuel Bilodeau  :

Quote

After throwing up the footage we shot on our scopes, we're measuring the dynamic range captured by V-Log L at around 16 stops - after converting to HDR10 (PQ Curve) our brightness distribution runs between 0.01 nits on the low and 1015 nits on the high clip, for a contrast ratio of 10,150:1, or 16.63 stops. The lower 3-4 stops retained are increasingly noisy, but the detail is there. 14 stops are fully useable under nearly all circumstances, according to what we're seeing.

And the explanation in all its glory :

Quote

I'm not an engineer at Panasonic. All I can tell you is what we were told, and about what I'm seeing on our scopes when we record video as I mentioned in a previous comment (V-Log L preserving around 16 stops of digital data).

I do understand sensor design, however, and I will add an important clarification to what you hear in the video - a 14 bit sensor does not mean that it offers 14 stops of DR, the man says that himself. Dropping the effective bit depth at the ADC to 12 bit doesn't mean that it's lost two stops of dynamic range, you're just sampling each pixel with two fewer bits per sample - 4096 levels / sample instead of 16,384.

You're operating those samples on the same dynamic range of the linear light as the 14 bits, but you're decreasing the precision of detail within each part of the brightness range evenly, increasing the SNR without decreasing the DR. And that's assuming you're operating your ADC in a linear conversion mode - ADCs may also run in a log format. Again, I'm not a designer of the camera and I don't know if V-Log L runs on the ADC or as part of the color processing engine; I assume that the ADC operates in a non-linear mode because most ADCs do to preserve more detail across all stops of light.

Keep in mind that the final V-Log L output does not run the full set of available digital values on a 10 bit log scale, meaning it compresses further each unit of dynamic range (each stop of light) so that each is more-or-less allocated an equivalent number of bits for detail retention.

Whether you record with V-Log L on camera or using an external recorder, the images captured are equivalent in this regard.

Also juicy:

Quote

Oh gotcha, and yes - we only used the external recorder for ProRes recording of the 60p content. We did a comparison between the internal 10b 4:2:2 all-Intra H.264 and the ProRes 422 HQ and there's no difference in color correction, dynamic range or latitude that we could tell. You'll need the high capacity high speed SD cards I mention at the top of the article, though. We had a great experience with Panasonic's V90 SD Cards.

This makes me all giddy.

Btw, I love their blog, incredibly useful HDR explanations and workflows.

[IronFilm]

21 hours ago, jonpais said:

Not overly fond of bright night scenes that are more intense than direct sunlight. Maybe in small doses? I use lights - in fact, I love having control over lighting - so high sensitivity isn't a big deal to me. 

I generally want a scene to look *realistic*, doesn't mean it should look identical though! I might go a little brighter (or even a little darker, if that is the mood desired), but to be massively different in appearance to reality? Unlikely I'll take that path. 

[cantsin]

DR numbers don't say much. A camera might display 14 stops from a test chart, but if the lowest three stops consist of >50% noise, the camera will only have 11 usable stops of dynamic range.

For 14 stops DR with a clean signal in every stop, you'll need a high-end camera like the Alexa. 

With lower-end cameras/sensors, it helps a lot if they record in high-quality codecs (ProRes or DNxHR, RAW in the best case), with little or no processing applied to the sensor image, so that high-quality software noise filters like Neat Video can do their best job cleaning up noisy shadows using temporal noise filtering. 

[Vesku]

Movie film negative has about 14-15 steps DR but the shadows are very noisy. GH5s may have very cinematic or filmic DR with noisy shadows, GH5 even more. Arri or RED are not cinematic because their image is too clean. 

[IronFilm]

19 hours ago, jonpais said:

@DBounce Like you, I believe it was technically impossible to put IBIS into the GH5s without altering the body; and I don't buy Panasonic's excuse that they removed IBIS to satisfy the .0001% of filmmakers that object to it.

Panasonic didn't say they *chose* to remove IBIS, the benefits of not having it was just a thing mentioned in passing to point out "hey, it isn't all bad!"

Anyway, this video didn't need IBIS:
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f2b9xsAtnY 

 

 

[jonpais]

Panasonic said that in speaking with filmmakers, they learned that IBIS was creating problems when the camera was mounted on moving vehicles. So you’re telling me that Panasonic didn’t make a decision not to include IBIS? Sorry, my brain’s not working today or something.

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

Panasonic didn't say they *chose* to remove IBIS, the benefits of not having it was just a thing mentioned in passing to point out "hey, it isn't all bad!"

Anyway, this video didn't need IBIS:
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f2b9xsAtnY 

 

 

That video didn’t need IBIS because they’ve got the camera mounted to a $15,000 gimbal and a $100,000 golf cart - but having IBIS would not in any way have interfered with their workflow.

@seku The difference being that MB gets to actually work with those fourteen stops of DR, whereas us mere mortals must be content with seven or whatever.

[leeys]

2 hours ago, seku said:

I couldn't believe 12+ stops either in VLOG-L, but Samuel Bilodeau  from Mystery Box (they did the official "Horizons" Panasonic HDR Short for the GH5s) states that you can use 14 stops under nearly all circumstances, with detail up to 16 stops (very noisy tho, but detail still there).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but ultimately this is in a processed format where the gamma and tone curve has already been applied right? Even in raw stills a modern m4/3 sensor does what, ~13 stops of usable DR at most. You can bring up the shadows even more I suppose to get 16 stops but it's going to be all noise.