Panasonic GH6

[kye]

2 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Well, I have to eat my hat 😳 😂

I did another test and ran each camera on standby using previous settings. GH5 lasted around 1h 50m and GH6 lasted 2h 17m.

Now, the GH5 battery is older and has been through quite a few cycles, whereas GH6 battery is brand new.

So why is everyone saying GH6 battery life is way worse? Aside from the fact that when recording it does eat battery a little bit faster, maybe it's because the GH6 battery is not fully charged until all the lights on the charger go out, and people don't realise that?

BTW, in standby mode GH5 died around 5 minutes after the red flashing indicator, and GH6 was more like 10 minutes.

Great news and thanks for running the test.  Did you have the DR Boost mode on or off?  Perhaps that is a bit more power hungry?

6 minutes ago, FoxAdriano said:

Please don't laugh because I'm not an expert in photography. Out of curiosity: with GH6 when you make stills, you usually use Manual or semi-automatic profiles, for example with aperture priority, etc. etc.

Instead I would like to know if in the video, do you usually use the AUTOmatic White Balance or the white preselection?

In video it is highly recommended to get the White Balance (WB) correct when shooting.  

The best way is to manually white balance at every location with a grey card (a physical thing you carry that has been designed to be a completely neutral grey - they're widely available to buy).  If you manually white balance then it will get the white balance right in every location.

Choosing the right WB preset (e.g. Daylight, Clouds, etc) is quicker and much more convenient and should give a pretty good result.  I'm familiar with the videos you share on YouTube and this is probably the best bet for your work.

Choosing auto-WB (as I do) means you have to fine-tune the WB in post, and this can be extremely difficult, and the WB sometimes changes during the shot, giving you all kinds of colour problems to adjust in post.  I wouldn't use this mode unless you absolutely have to.

[FoxAdriano]

I thank you for your valuable advice. MAYBE is it also useful to manually set the White Balance to 5,400 Kelvin degrees for all the shots and then correct them in post production? But maybe your advice is even better. Is it right?

Right now I have a bigger problem to solve. 😉 Yesterday I bought a lens hood to screw on the NISI VND (on 12-60mm Leica) for making videos. I don't usually take stills. Today I tried to take some stills and unfortunately I see the lens hood on the corners of all the photos. I attach a photo.
But if I make videos, I don't get this problem at all. I have analyzed it and there is no problem in the video.
Can you tell me why?
I don't know whether to buy another lens hood or remove the lens hood only when taking pictures.
What do you recommend to me?
Thank you

[hyalinejim]

17 hours ago, kye said:

Did you have the DR Boost mode on or off?

On

1 hour ago, FoxAdriano said:

is it also useful to manually set the White Balance to 5,400 Kelvin degrees for all the shots

Yes, this is a good middle ground for shooting outdoors, especially when it's sunny. If you can see the LCD properly (and if not you can use the EVF) you can decide to raise or lower the temperature depending on the colour of the light and/or aesthetic preference.

1 hour ago, FoxAdriano said:

I tried to take some stills and unfortunately I see the lens hood on the corners of all the photos. I attach a photo.
But if I make videos, I don't get this problem at all

That's because the stills use the full height of the sensor in 4:3 aspect ratio. The video clips are a 16:9 crop and so the vignetting is cropped out of the frame.

It's such a small amount of vignetting that it would be easy to manually crop in post for stills. However, if you turn IBIS off for stills it might disappear altogether.

[mercer]

@hyalinejim Since ProRes requires less processing, then theoretically you should get a little better battery life with ProRes as well, right?

[hyalinejim]

@mercer Ha Ha! Maybe! I did indeed update to the latest firmware and I do have the free 128GB CFE card from Panasonic. But I think I'd reach the limit of the card long before the battery would die.

If you're right the battery life for ProRes C4K should be somewhere between the two figures I posted.

 

[FoxAdriano]

I will do some still tests.

[FoxAdriano]

4 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

That's because the stills use the full height of the sensor in 4:3 aspect ratio. The video clips are a 16:9 crop and so the vignetting is cropped out of the frame.

It's such a small amount of vignetting that it would be easy to manually crop in post for stills. However, if you turn IBIS off for stills it might disappear altogether.

But I could try simply shoot stills in 3:2 format instead of 4:3, because it is cropped enough from top and bottom to eliminate the mild upper corner vignetting.

[kye]

5 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

@mercer Ha Ha! Maybe! I did indeed update to the latest firmware and I do have the free 128GB CFE card from Panasonic. But I think I'd reach the limit of the card long before the battery would die.

If you're right the battery life for ProRes C4K should be somewhere between the two figures I posted.

If you record 1080p Prores HQ then that card should be good for about 94 mins, 422 should be longer...  Just in case you're feeling like more testing would be fun 🙂 

Great to hear the 2h 17m GH6 result was with the DR boost mode on.  I can't think of what other features would drain a battery so much that it would reduce that battery life significantly.  Thanks for doing these tests.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again.  Even basic tests frequently prove that a significant proportion of "what everyone knows" is actually just plain wrong, or so oversimplified or limited in context that it is either so useless or misleading it has the same effect as being wrong.  If you can test it yourself, you really should.

[92F]

Question to hyalinejim

Can you film for a long time without significant heat problems, whatever the codec?
What strategy do you use for the ventilator?

Can it be heard with an external microphone?

[hyalinejim]

19 minutes ago, 92F said:

Question to hyalinejim

I haven't tested any of these things but from what I've read online there's very little to worry about. I think I remember reading that you can set the fan on low if you're worried about fan noise with an onboard mic.

It's too mild in Ireland to test these things. We're supposed to be experiencing Europe's heatwave at the moment. Here in Dublin the highest temperature today was 27C 😂

[FoxAdriano]

GH6: I need to shoot remotely Hi, I still don't know the GH6 very well and I don't understand, despite having read its manual. Should I shoot stills and video remotely. The GH5 did this and I also have the cable with the jack, but I don't understand if I can use it in the GH6. Thanks for some info.

[PannySVHS]

Spiffy stuff by a new face on youtube, at least to me. Sounds like a presenter from BBC. Super enjoyable to listen to and to watch, loved the colour board tests. The lenscap tests didnt do that much to me but still loved to listen to his voice. 🙂 Interesting findings presented in a very nice manner. Takeaway, DR Boost is terrific.

 

[hyalinejim]

8 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

DR Boost is terrific

I haven't watched the video yet (looking forward to it), but from my very limited testing I found DR Boost noisy in the midtones in a way that I wasn't used to seeing.

[kye]

20 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

I haven't watched the video yet (looking forward to it), but from my very limited testing I found DR Boost noisy in the midtones in a way that I wasn't used to seeing.

IIRC there's something about film that makes it have more noise in the midtones and highlights?  I know colourists often recommend applying noise in Linear prior to the conversion, which would impact the distribution across the Luma range.

Keen to hear more about your impressions - personally I like grain as it makes an image more organic - all the modern cameras with the same Sony-sensor-in-a-box look all seem sterile to me.

[kye]

On 8/12/2022 at 5:26 AM, PannySVHS said:

Spiffy stuff by a new face on youtube, at least to me. Sounds like a presenter from BBC. Super enjoyable to listen to and to watch, loved the colour board tests. The lenscap tests didnt do that much to me but still loved to listen to his voice. 🙂 Interesting findings presented in a very nice manner. Takeaway, DR Boost is terrific.

 

Good video, thanks for sharing.

One thing that struck me was that I'd like to see a comparison between the DR Boost On vs Off but comparing them against their lowest ISOs.  ie, [V-Log DR Boost OFF at ISO 250] vs [V-Log DR Boost ON at ISO 2000] and then [V-Log DR Boost OFF at ISO 400] vs [V-Log DR Boost ON at ISO 2500], etc.  That would then kind of be a test of how much ISO range you get in each mode.  

It sort of looks like it has a dual-native-ISO and that the DR Boost feature is using both at once and therefore doesn't have as large a range of clean ISO values you can use.  

[hyalinejim]

5 hours ago, kye said:

IIRC there's something about film that makes it have more noise in the midtones and highlights?

It's actually the other way around! The shadows have larger and more pronounced grain than the highlights.

 

Grey card, Portra 400, exposed at -4 stops, 24MP scan to middle grey, 100% crop:

 

Grey card, Portra 400, exposed at +4 stops, 24MP scan to middle grey, 100% crop:

 

[kye]

20 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

It's actually the other way around! The shadows have larger and more pronounced grain than the highlights.

 

Grey card, Portra 400, exposed at -4 stops, 24MP scan to middle grey, 100% crop:

 

Grey card, Portra 400, exposed at +4 stops, 24MP scan to middle grey, 100% crop:

 

That makes sense, considering that if a certain value gets applied in Linear, then the conversion to Log would reduce that difference the brighter the Luma value is.  

Funnily enough, my post to you took about 20 minutes to write, as I would write something, have a think about it, google it, read a forum thread / blog post / etc, think about it again, and then adjust or delete what I wrote.  My post ended up stating that the grain was higher in the mids and highlights as that was one of the dominant sentiments from what I read.

Thinking further about it, and thinking about motion picture film, wouldn't there be noise in both the shadows and highlights, as in a two-stage development process (original negative then positive for projection) one stock would put the noise in the highlights and the other would put it in the shadows (which is why there are rolloffs at both ends)?

[hyalinejim]

2 hours ago, kye said:

Thinking further about it, and thinking about motion picture film, wouldn't there be noise in both the shadows and highlights, as in a two-stage development process (original negative then positive for projection)

I'm not sure! Are the reversal stocks for motion picture print film very low ISO - like 6 or something? If so, then the grain will be negligible compared to the negatie.

[webrunner5]

I think a lot of the grain you saw when you went to a real indoor movie theatre was actually from the screen. It is not some shiny material by a long shot. It was designed to be non-reflective from different angles. Probably drive ins were the same.

[FoxAdriano]

Can anyone tell me what that celestial led is? I looked up the manual but didn't understand. I've always turned it on, both when shooting videos and stills. I thank you.