Panasonic GH6

[Mmmbeats]

I did follow up on shooting some quick test shots at 1080p, but then got very busy and couldn't get back to this thread.
Then, funnily enough, I had to shoot a project in 1080p (client request).

I'll post up some stills when I get a mo.

My initial thought were that the image looks sharp and detailed.

The 1080p pixel / pixel mode looked a bit mushy though.  I wouldn't use it personally.

[newfoundmass]

I know that 4K is, for a lot of projects, the minimum now, but it really would be unacceptable if the GH6 didn't have excellent 1080p. With the processing power that camera has there's absolutely no reason for it to be anything less. Looking forward to your findings @Mmmbeats

[TomTheDP]

I'm pretty sure all the older BM cameras including the Ursa have a dual gain sensor.

[webrunner5]

11 minutes ago, TomTheDP said:

I'm pretty sure all the older BM cameras including the Ursa have a dual gain sensor.

You are correct. All the Fairchild ones were, and even the PK4 is also.

[hyalinejim]

5 hours ago, Mmmbeats said:

I did follow up on shooting some quick test shots at 1080p

Thanks for doing this!

5 hours ago, Mmmbeats said:

My initial thought were that the image looks sharp and detailed.

The 1080p pixel / pixel mode looked a bit mushy though.

Good to hear that normal 1080 looks good. Can you control the amount of zoom in the pixel/pixel mode? On the GH5 there were two ways of doing it. One was pixel for pixel, more than 2x zoom, and was mushy. The other was exactly 2x zoom, a slightly wider crop, downsampled and with no artifacts.

 

[PannySVHS]

17 hours ago, kye said:

Great stuff!  Simple concept, clean compositions and overall seems like it was well executed.  With such strong content and cast it's best just to keep it simple and not have the production get in the way.  Well done 🙂 

Thank you, kye! If you only have one single wall you can point the camera at, and no way to do a medium wide shot;) you gotta be a humble.  But half a wall and no outside shots could have been enought too. But it would have been really edgy and very experimental then. Would be a great EOSHD challenge. 😉

That little BMMCC has a Fairchild as well @webrunner5 The Pocket 4K has a Sony inside I think, supposely the same one as in the GH5s and one of the E2 ZCams. So many different E2 Zcam models out there.:)

[webrunner5]

The PK4 Has a dual gain sensor. Says so right on the BM site. Ursa G2 does also.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicpocketcinemacamera

[kye]

8 hours ago, Mmmbeats said:

I did follow up on shooting some quick test shots at 1080p, but then got very busy and couldn't get back to this thread.
Then, funnily enough, I had to shoot a project in 1080p (client request).

I'll post up some stills when I get a mo.

My initial thought were that the image looks sharp and detailed.

The 1080p pixel / pixel mode looked a bit mushy though.  I wouldn't use it personally.

Great to hear - I'm also looking forward to any stills you're able to share.

I did a lot of resolution testing on the GH5 and comparing the 5K / 4K / 1080p modes on a 4K timeline revealed almost no difference and while editing the test together I sometimes had to look at the resolution of each clip to determine which mode it was in.  A bit of sharpening easily took care of the overall feel of the image, and once I had pixel-peed on the footage enough I learned where to look for the tiny little details that gave it away, but I there are so many things that are more important to an image that no-one would ever get to the point of having sorted them all out and get to this point.  VFX is an exception of course.

The pixel:pixel modes are always mushy because they're not oversampled, that's just the norm for any camera.  It's a wonderful place we've gotten to when oversampled images are the norm - I remember when Andrew was writing about how much better oversampling was and doing comparisons.

[kye]

Just now, webrunner5 said:

The PK4 Has a dual gain sensor. Says so right on the BM site.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicpocketcinemacamera

No, that's Dual Native ISO, not Dual Gain like the GH6 is.

Dual Native ISO is when the camera has two native ISO values that it can choose from and picks the best one to use at any given time.

Dual Gain (in the sense of the ALEV, Canon DGO, and GH6) is when the sensor has two outputs that each have a different gain and those two outputs are used simultaneously and combined with each other to create a higher DR image, in-camera, in realtime.

This is the info from ARRI - https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/technology/alev-sensors

Quote

The Dual Gain Architecture simultaneously provides two separate read-out paths from each pixel with different amplification. The first path contains the regular, highly amplified signal. The second path contains a signal with lower amplification to capture the information that is clipped in the first path. Both paths feed into the camera's A/D converters, delivering a 14-bit image for each path. These images are then combined into a single 16-bit high dynamic range image. This method enhances low light performance and prevents the highlights from being clipped, thereby significantly extending the dynamic range of the image.

It's something people get confused between, because it's so rare and.... innovative.

[TomTheDP]

1 hour ago, kye said:

No, that's Dual Native ISO, not Dual Gain like the GH6 is.

Dual Native ISO is when the camera has two native ISO values that it can choose from and picks the best one to use at any given time.

Dual Gain (in the sense of the ALEV, Canon DGO, and GH6) is when the sensor has two outputs that each have a different gain and those two outputs are used simultaneously and combined with each other to create a higher DR image, in-camera, in realtime.

This is the info from ARRI - https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/technology/alev-sensors

It's something people get confused between, because it's so rare and.... innovative.

Yeah the Pocket 6k and 4k are dual iso. The old pocket and the Ursa 4.6k models are dual gain cameras though. 

[kye]

2 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Yeah the Pocket 6k and 4k are dual iso. The old pocket and the Ursa 4.6k models are dual gain cameras though. 

I had a vague recollection about the OG pocket / BMMCC being dual-gain, but didn't know the Ursa 4.6k ones were too.  The Ursa's are S35 aren't they?  I wonder how the DR compares to the ALEV.  

[hyalinejim]

What do you guys think about the Freewell Vari ND magnetic kit for GH6 with DR Boost on?

It splits a Vari ND into its components which means you can do this:

- Mount the base ring which is one stop reduction, effectively base ISO is now 1000

- Add 2-5 Vari ND for shooting indoors

- Swap it for 6-9 when shooting outdoors (9 stops, if it's actual, is enough for me even in bright light as I'm not usually looling for very narrow DOF)

Looks like the colour cast is minimal but I haven't found much info on X pattern just yet.

They also do solid NDs which stack and I could get a 3 and 6 or some other combo. But I think I would give up a little image quality for the convenience of fine tuning exposure with a variable system. 

[hyalinejim]

15 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Can you control the amount of zoom in the pixel/pixel mode?

The answer, from looking at the manual, is no. There is an EX Tel Conv. mode but it doesn't work for video on the GH6. So there's no sweet 2x mode for HD shooters.

It looks to me that the only thing that comes close for 1080p is to set a custom mode to shoot 4K pixel/pixel and then scale it 50% in post to give a clean 1.5x zoom on a HD timeline. Or you could scale it to 75% which should give you a clean 2x digital zoom.

But of course, then you end up dealing with 4K files anyway which defeats the purpose of shooting HD. And also there's a bit of post work involved. And if you're aiming for the 2x then framing will be wider than what you want.

The beauty of the GH5's 2x Digital Zoom for HD was you just pressed a function button and the reach of your lens doubled.

[PannySVHS]

The 2x Digi for either 4K or HD are both missing on the Lumix S1.

Side note: The HD pixel to pixel mode on the S1 is a 3x crop making it close to S16. Shooting VLog at 640 ISO might give a noise floor equivalent of shooting 5120 in FF mode, which could still look alright as a compromise for using the lovely S16 crop lenses. No 2x Digizoom is a bummer. No 2x Digizoom on the GH6 is 6 times the bummer!

 

[TomTheDP]

21 hours ago, kye said:

I had a vague recollection about the OG pocket / BMMCC being dual-gain, but didn't know the Ursa 4.6k ones were too.  The Ursa's are S35 aren't they?  I wonder how the DR compares to the ALEV.  

Yeah the Ursa takes two 11bit signals while ALEV is taking two 14 bit signals. The URSA doesn't have the highlight retention of an Alexa and the shadows suffer from fixed noise pattern (noticeable when shooting 1600 in dim conditions). This was apparently less of a problem on the G2 though. Still pretty respectable dynamic range.

[kye]

18 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

The answer, from looking at the manual, is no. There is an EX Tel Conv. mode but it doesn't work for video on the GH6. So there's no sweet 2x mode for HD shooters.

It looks to me that the only thing that comes close for 1080p is to set a custom mode to shoot 4K pixel/pixel and then scale it 50% in post to give a clean 1.5x zoom on a HD timeline. Or you could scale it to 75% which should give you a clean 2x digital zoom.

But of course, then you end up dealing with 4K files anyway which defeats the purpose of shooting HD. And also there's a bit of post work involved. And if you're aiming for the 2x then framing will be wider than what you want.

The beauty of the GH5's 2x Digital Zoom for HD was you just pressed a function button and the reach of your lens doubled.

That's a real bummer (or as @PannySVHS says and I agree with - 6x the bummer!).

I customised my lens set around that 2x feature on the GH5.  I had a 17.5mm and 42.5mm, but the 17.5mm (which was the default lens and on the camera most of the time) with the 2x zoom was 35, which is very close to the 42.5, so I swapped from the 42.5 to a 50mm lens, giving me more reach and extending the useful range of my setup to include 17.5 / 35, and 50 / 100mm.

Perhaps it will be coming with a future firmware update?  I mean, they already have the architecture in there to downsample a given area of the sensor to a given resolution, so hopefully it just means coding up the feature, or (if the firmware is based on previous GH cameras) simply enabling it and customising it for the GH6 sensor.

As you say, switching to 4K is an option, but it really defeats the purpose of filming with 1080p in the first place which is speed in post.

5 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Yeah the Ursa takes two 11bit signals while ALEV is taking two 14 bit signals. The URSA doesn't have the highlight retention of an Alexa and the shadows suffer from fixed noise pattern (noticeable when shooting 1600 in dim conditions). This was apparently less of a problem on the G2 though. Still pretty respectable dynamic range.

Interesting.  The 12K sensor isn't dual-gain is it?  I don't recall reading that anywhere.  Come to think of it, I also don't recall reading that it's dual native ISO either, and I do recall that it's low-light isn't that great compared to, say, the P6K sensor which is dual native ISO.

When the rumours were flying around about a BM box camera I was torn between wanting the 12K sensor as it does look beautiful and when configured in lower resolution modes has great readout speeds etc, and wanting the P6K sensor as it has the dual native ISO which gives better low-light at higher ISOs.

[TomTheDP]

9 hours ago, kye said:

 Interesting.  The 12K sensor isn't dual-gain is it?  I don't recall reading that anywhere.  Come to think of it, I also don't recall reading that it's dual native ISO either, and I do recall that it's low-light isn't that great compared to, say, the P6K sensor which is dual native ISO.

When the rumours were flying around about a BM box camera I was torn between wanting the 12K sensor as it does look beautiful and when configured in lower resolution modes has great readout speeds etc, and wanting the P6K sensor as it has the dual native ISO which gives better low-light at higher ISOs.

Yeah the URSA 12k is not dual gain as far as I know. It has that unique full RGB sensor which may give it an edge in overall look. Kind of like CCD sensors I guess.

[PannySVHS]

 

Some splendid colour. They went a bit overboard with grading, especially the red cloth of the suit is oversaturated as oversaturated can be and some bluish tint is showing the joy of grading a bit too much. But as a visual sketch and indication of what the GH6 is capable of, this is really something.

I cannot comment on the voice over style as I am not a fan of it. But a lot of talent and visual taste in this piece and great showcase of what to expect from this powerhouse of a camera. I hope Panasonic gets the streaking sorted out and follows up on Prores for all filming modes this SUMMER, please!

Anyway, one of the best showcases of any prosumer camera and its image quality I have seen.

 

 

[webrunner5]

Hmm I really liked the short, but still not a fan of the camera. MFT cameras on average to me just do not bring out far away background detail. I have a hard enough time at my age seeing detail lol, let alone seeing a camera that is not overall sharp. Yikes moment to me, maybe it is artistic to someone that can see. YMMV.

[hyalinejim]

2 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Some splendid colour. They went a bit overboard with grading, especially the red cloth

I totally agree. I'm travelling between continents at the moment and don't have access to a calibrated screen but on my phone it looks great.

The reds thing is interesting. I don't mind a certain amount of oversaturation of reds (you get this with classic Canon and also with Noritsu film scans) as it contributes a lot to vivacious skintones, which we also see here. But if it were me grading this I would have tried to pull the suit back a little bit using masks.

It's interesting to see forest scenes here. I often think Panasonic fails spectacularly with the greens and greys of woodland scenes, making everything look quite drab both in stills and video. It's not as pronounced in this vid but I still see a hint of it, I think. 

Overall a great video from a visual standpoint and miles away from the usual dross that gets posted using the standard profiles or VLog + Pana lut. It would be interesting to know which lut they used as a starting point for the grade.