can't decide on a new camera

[mercer]

Here’s my 2 cents... the X-T3 is great. I think it’s the best camera released last year. The GH5 is also great and offers some production elements that are unheard of for a camera in that price range.

But to keep in mind, to use both of them at their highest level, it will require a pretty good computer to edit the footage unless you’re okay transcoding to a different codec before you bring the footage into your NLE or using proxies. I’m unsure how proxies work with h.265 footage since it’s such a compressed codec that it still may require a fair amount of processing power to go through them.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the P4K. Even the 4K ProRes LT looks great with that camera but it will require some patience to get your hands on one and a little bit to rig up.

Good luck with your choice.

[thebrothersthre3]

1 minute ago, stefanocps said:

Just found this

What you think?

https://***URL removed***/forums/post/53141471

This could simplify some thing

I've heard that before. I've never tested it but I am pretty sure its BS. Downsampling 4k to 10bit 444 won't give you the same results as getting actual 10 bit 444 out of something like the C300 or 12 bit RAW out of a BMPCC.

1 minute ago, mercer said:

Here’s my 2 cents... the X-T3 is great. I think it’s the best camera released last year. The GH5 is also great and offers some production elements that are unheard of for a camera in that price range.

But to keep in mind, to use both of them at their highest level, it will require a pretty good computer to edit the footage unless you’re okay transcoding to a different codec before you bring the footage into your NLE or using proxies. I’m unsure how proxies work with h.265 footage since it’s such a compressed codec that it still may require a fair amount of processing power to go through them.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the P4K. Even the 4K ProRes LT looks great with that camera but it will require some patience to get your hands on one and a little bit to rig up.

Good luck with your choice.

I didn't recommend the Pocket as it didn't seem like he needed something with that much IQ power. Definitely a good option in general though. 

[newfoundmass]

The GH4, even in 2019, is a great camera and honestly, for how little you can get them for now, is one of the best "bang for your buck" cameras when you factor in all the cine features. 

The auto focus though is substantially worse than the GH5, the low light is also much worse than the GH5. And no IBIS stinks. 

[stefanocps]

2 minutes ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I've heard that before. I've never tested it but I am pretty sure its BS. Downsampling 4k to 10bit 444 won't give you the same results as getting actual 10 bit 444 out of something like the C300 or 12 bit RAW out of a BMPCC.

I didn't recommend the Pocket as it didn't seem like he needed something with that much IQ power. Definitely a good option in general though. 

i don t consider at all bm, tooc omplicated to use, while i want to have a cam that can be used as most as possible as camcorder, in term of speed of use. And anyway i wouldn t get into the nightmare of a never ending wait for it

[thebrothersthre3]

Just now, newfoundmass said:

The GH4, even in 2019, is a great camera and honestly, for how little you can get them for now, is one of the best "bang for your buck" cameras when you factor in all the cine features. 

The auto focus though is substantially worse than the GH5, the low light is also much worse than the GH5. And no IBIS stinks. 

Yeah it is definitely not a bad camera for what they go for now. Considering you get 10 bit output. Its also a very fun camera to use. Nice flip out screen, nice size, battery runs forever. 

The original BM pocket is around the same price with similar noise performance and internal 10-12 bit recording. Its a trainwreck practically speaking though compared to the GH4 and you don't get 60fps. 

[stefanocps]

2 minutes ago, newfoundmass said:

The GH4, even in 2019, is a great camera and honestly, for how little you can get them for now, is one of the best "bang for your buck" cameras when you factor in all the cine features. 

The auto focus though is substantially worse than the GH5, the low light is also much worse than the GH5. And no IBIS stinks. 

i wasn't consider gh4, definitely old machine, but the statemente about the color depth

[newfoundmass]

9 minutes ago, mercer said:

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the P4K. Even the 4K ProRes LT looks great with that camera but it will require some patience to get your hands on one and a little bit to rig up.

I don't recommend the Pocket4K mostly because of the battery life and the need to rig it up with better battery sources / external SSD, etc. Not ideal for documentary shooting other than interviews. 

[thebrothersthre3]

2 minutes ago, newfoundmass said:

I don't recommend the Pocket4K mostly because of the battery life and the need to rig it up with better battery sources / external SSD, etc. Not ideal for documentary shooting other than interviews. 

Seems like their are some pretty easy battery solutions but yeah. The XT3 battery life isn't great either but you can get a battery grip.

[anonim]

Olympus om-d em1 II?

https://www.e-infin.com/uk/item/3239/olympus_om-d_e-m1_mark_ii_mk_2_mirrorless_digital_camera_mft_(body_only)_

Even with so-so and not at all lowlight lens, little bit of pure walking:

 

[IronFilm]

10 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

 

If you pair that with a Ninja V then for around £1800 you will take care of the crappy monitoring situation with the LS300, add 4K60p recording and ProRes.

I can't think of any camera that is going to match that spec and ease of use for a one man band for anywhere near that price.

I'd argue the Sony FS700 secondhand for a similar price is pretty good at matching (or exceeding!) it for specs / ease of use. 

5 hours ago, stefanocps said:

i know what you mean, gh5 also is a real otpion for me too. What stop me is 1) it is old technbology right now.2/3 years makes a lot of difference.

Even though a GH6 is probably going to happen sometime later in the year, perhaps, the GH5 is still even 2019 a class leading camera and one of the best you can buy. 

 

[BTM_Pix]

6 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

I'd argue the Sony FS700 secondhand for a similar price is pretty good at matching (or exceeding!) it for specs / ease of use. 

True enough (and with an external recorder, albeit a more expensive one, it actually blows the LS300 away) but the OP has MFT lenses so I was factoring that in and it was also responding to his point about it being superseded if he bought one.

[IronFilm]

Just now, BTM_Pix said:

was also responding to his point about it being superseded if he bought one.

Don't need to worry about the FS700 being superseded! ?

As it has already happened.....

[BTM_Pix]

Just now, IronFilm said:

Don't need to worry about the FS700 being superseded! ?

As it has already happened.....

Its now getting to the point price wise of being silly.

If we get our Samurai V at NAB then it will be very tempting.

[IronFilm]

17 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Its now getting to the point price wise of being silly.

I've had my finger hovering over the buy button so many times with a FS700 over the last 18 months or so. 

Although, now that I'm buying a Cedar DNS2 next week, I'll be broke for a long time after thus no more big purchases for a while. 

 

18 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

 If we get our Samurai V at NAB then it will be very tempting.

Hopefully!

I'll give it a 50/50 chance as to if a Samurai V happens or if an AtomX SDI module happens. 

I'm hoping for a Samurai V, so we can use the Timecode AtomX module with it. 

Would fix up the biggest thing I don't like about the FS700, the lack of timecode input

[Kisaha]

13 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Although, now that I'm buying a Cedar DNS2 next week, I'll be broke for a long time after thus no more big purchases for a while.

You are buying the Cedar?!

Why for??

I decided to buy the CS-1M and the Rode ambio mic, by the way..

[kye]

8 hours ago, stefanocps said:

too sharp, a times seems so electronic image

The GH5 has a mode called Open Gate where it shoots with the whole sensor - 5K 4:3 video.  This mode has less sharpening than the 4K modes with the sharpening turned all the way down.  Also, you can soften things up in post quite easily too.  Your vintage lenses will also do that in-camera if you're using them for those shots.

I don't know what editing software you are using, but if you have the time and energy to do it, Resolve has a free version that you can use to basically make the footage look however you want it to look.  There are also LUTs that make the GH5 look like an ARRI Alexa, including the sharpness, so the image coming out of it is very flexible if you want it to be.

7 hours ago, stefanocps said:

Just found this

What you think?

https://***URL removed***/forums/post/53141471

This could simplify some thing

4K can be downsampled to create extra bit depth and colour information, however it depends on how the codec performs and how much noise there is in the signal (less is worse).  

The explanation is very technical, but basically it works because for every 1080 10-bit pixel you get after the conversion, you've averaged 4x 8-bit pixels, and so the average can be between the 8-bit limitation, and those 4 pixels contain all three colours before debayering.  In practice it will be somewhere between 10-bit 4:4:4 and 8-bit 4:2:0 depending on exactly how that camera operates, but the benefit is real.

7 hours ago, mercer said:

Here’s my 2 cents... the X-T3 is great. I think it’s the best camera released last year. The GH5 is also great and offers some production elements that are unheard of for a camera in that price range.

But to keep in mind, to use both of them at their highest level, it will require a pretty good computer to edit the footage unless you’re okay transcoding to a different codec before you bring the footage into your NLE or using proxies. I’m unsure how proxies work with h.265 footage since it’s such a compressed codec that it still may require a fair amount of processing power to go through them.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the P4K. Even the 4K ProRes LT looks great with that camera but it will require some patience to get your hands on one and a little bit to rig up.

Good luck with your choice.

If the OP is willing to wait for the computer to render proxies and take longer to render out the final project then basically any computer can edit any resolution.  We forget that people used to make broadcast TV in SD, which is 27x less pixels than 4K.  Resolution pretty much doesn't matter when you're editing (it matters when you're grading or doing other things) so that means you can render proxies and edit them nicely on a computer that is less than 4% of the performance required for 4K editing.  

I render proxies at 720p and edit them on my laptop on the train. My computer is perfectly capable of playing 4K files but I don't need the extra resolution and saving space on the internal SSD that I'm editing from are advantages too.

[thebrothersthre3]

There seems to be a lot of opinions on the downsampling 8 bit 4k to get 10 bit 444. The program you use to downsample and how you do it matter a lot. If not done right the extra information will just be tossed out the window. One of the benefits of shooting at a higher bit depth is better color accuracy and more shades of color. You won't get that downsampling 8 bit 4k as the color is already baked in. You also won't see the higher dynamic range benefits using a camera that shoots at a higher bit depth usually brings. 

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/hd-uhd-2k-digital-cinema/534402-converting-4k-8-bit-420-hd-10-bit-444-a.html
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=79003

That said all I've found is talk on it. Would be interesting if someone actually compared it to see if it makes a difference in grading. I only found mention of one bloke who tried it and said it didn't grade anywhere near as well as 444 recorded internally does. That said he could have been downsampling improperly.

[kye]

2 hours ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

There seems to be a lot of opinions on the downsampling 8 bit 4k to get 10 bit 444. The program you use to downsample and how you do it matter a lot. If not done right the extra information will just be tossed out the window. One of the benefits of shooting at a higher bit depth is better color accuracy and more shades of color. You won't get that downsampling 8 bit 4k as the color is already baked in. You also won't see the higher dynamic range benefits using a camera that shoots at a higher bit depth usually brings. 

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/hd-uhd-2k-digital-cinema/534402-converting-4k-8-bit-420-hd-10-bit-444-a.html
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=79003

That said all I've found is talk on it. Would be interesting if someone actually compared it to see if it makes a difference in grading. I only found mention of one bloke who tried it and said it didn't grade anywhere near as well as 444 recorded internally does. That said he could have been downsampling improperly.

This is a tricky subject, but you have nailed it with your comment "seems to be a lot of opinions".  Just like everything else out there, if something is engineering or science, there will be a lot of opinions, and almost be definition they will all be WRONG.  People who have OPINIONS about engineering or science are people that don't understand FACTS.  I'm all for having opinions, we can talk about who likes what colour science, lighting design preferences, lens aesthetics or if someone is a good actor, but anyone who has an opinion about how many pixels are in the UHD specification is just stupid.  This is the same thing.

There is a huge level of knowledge about how to get accuracy beyond a certain bit-depth when talking about audio, as properly recorded and processed 16-bit audio can have better signal-to-noise ratios than is mathematically possible because of a technique called dithering which works by adding a very specific type of noise to the signal.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

Fortunately, ISO noise on high-quality 4K cameras is a relatively good version of that noise, so we can get a lot of the benefits.

Downscaling from 4K to 1080 also involves oversampling which when combined with dither can extract the extra bit depth and eliminate the noise that was added.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversampling

There is an audio format called SACD which uses a type of digital signal called DSD, which is a 1-bit (yes, the bit depth is one bit!) at 2.8224 MHz, and because of its clever use of noise and processing, can have signal-to-noise rations of up to 120dB, which would require a 20-bit signal from a traditional codec, but because it is oversampling (in a big way) this effect can be achieved.  Getting 20-bit from 1-bit is only possible because DSD has about 64x the sampling rate compared to 44kHz audio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

If DSD gets 19 extra bits from a 64x oversampling, then it shouldn't be impossible to do a similar thing with video and get an extra bits from resolution oversampling.

However, and this is a key part of the picture, you will only get perfect 10-bit 4:4:4 1080p from 8-bit 4K footage if that 4K footage is RAW and the noise is perfect.  Any variation in de-bayering, compression or any other processing that is applied in between that data coming off the sensor and the downscale will have a damaging effect on the final result, and this is where reality differs from theory, and it the overall quality will be different depending on the camera, codec, bitrate, subject matter, and probably other things.

If none of that made sense, then here's a TLDR approximation - adding noise to 8-bit helps with banding similarly to why adding noise to your footage helps with YT colour banding.  The mechanism is very different, but the effect is broadly similar.

Anyway, let's put this to bed and go back to talking about cameras ???

[MrSMW]

GH5 or XT3 at this budget.

If you already have the glass, then GH5 is pretty much a no-brainer.

If you fancy the change, XT3. The XH1 is a good alternative, but only if IBIS is a priority over the rest of the spec. IMO the XT series of bodies are a bit small & fiddly...and not quite as capable of course.

As I said over on the Fuji X forum where you are also discussing this 

[stefanocps]

10 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I've had my finger hovering over the buy button so many times with a FS700 over the last 18 months or so. 

Although, now that I'm buying a Cedar DNS2 next week, I'll be broke for a long time after thus no more big purchases for a while. 

 

Hopefully!

I'll give it a 50/50 chance as to if a Samurai V happens or if an AtomX SDI module happens. 

I'm hoping for a Samurai V, so we can use the Timecode AtomX module with it. 

Would fix up the biggest thing I don't like about the FS700, the lack of timecode input

wow this FS700 seems amazing. I have a couple listed in second hand for 1300 euro. Can you tell me more about this videocamera?

First thing i want to know is how it beahve in a not planned situation, is it fast enough the use of it?what about autofocus, stabilization and low light?Another thing crucial is what do i need to buy with it?

Of course lenses, i would go for a zomm lens to have it all in one, what lens would you suggest'Also i see it would need an externalrecorder. Which one will be needed? I fear all together the amount will rise enough above 3000 euro..

Most probably for an eng style at my budget gh5/gh5s or xt3/xh1 are the way to go