Beritar

Hi,

I think I have an issue with my GH6. I have not used this camera a lot because I mostly use my S1 and my S5II but there is something weird about the AF-C in video. Something I never seen on any cameras I've owned and one of the reason I always found the camera to be very soft in video.

Here is my issue :

When I use AF-C in video ("Continuous AF"), the AF is fast but it is not accurate. Whatever the AF (speed/sentitivity) settings or the AF mode I use ("1-zone" on the video I've posted).
I can clearly see the difference when cropping inside the videos in 4K/C4K and 5,7K below 48fps (24/25/30fps). Everything above 30fps works well (48/50/60/100/120fps), 5,8K  Open Gate 30fps works well too but with a lot of pulsing (the Open Gate on my GH5 is faster and has less pulsing).

The most surprising is before recording (with "Continuous AF" "Mode 2" activated), the focus is perfect, but right away when I press the rec button the focus become innacurate.
The AF-C is still working but it is innacurate. Easy to see with the "Enlarged Live display(Video)" function. I can still get accurate focus while recording but I need to use AF-ON or to push the shutter button to force the camera to get the good focus while recording, but of course it's not a solution.

I own some M43 lenses (Pana 10-25mm, 25-50mm, 15mm, 25mm II, 12-32mm, 100-400mm, Oly 25mm Pro, Oly 45mm Pro) and all my lenses are impacted but not the 25mm f1.4 II. This is the only lens to have accurate AF-C in video when using frame rate below 48fps, no need to press the AF-ON button, so it's really weird.

All the lenses and the GH6 have their last firmware. I have of course tried to reset the camera. "Focus limiter" is off. 5,8K Open Gate and Burst photo AF-C have accurate focus (as well as every video modes above 30fps).

A exemple of the issue with the 10-25mm in 4K 30fps and 5,9K 30fps. In 4K 30fps the continuous AF is not accurate unless I push the AF-On button. In 5,9K, there is a lot more pulsing but the focus is accurate.

So, either my sample is defective (but why only with C4K, 4K, 5,7K below 48fps ?) either the GH6 has a big issue with the AF. Maybe someone using the GH6 could test ?
Thank you.

22 hours ago, Framed_By_Dan said:

Yes I'm on the latest firmware. I was very keen to see what the 6K/5.9K looked like...glorious! Anyway, yes I think bringing the highlights down might be my own undoing, thinking it's "better" in a way when it's probably not. Just knocked it back a touch to -1 to see if that helps. Boosted saturation back a touch too, I find when underexposing the colour tends to disappear so anything I can do to negate that helps.

I do like Cine V, colours are nice especially skin tones, but still just a touch too punchy for my liking when I am grading on top later. I use a slightly tweaked Cine V for quick turnaround jobs where no grading is required. 

I agree, 6K/5,9K on the S1 is just fantastic. 
Yes Cine-V is great for skin tones, I use this profile when I want nice skin tones or when I shoot in low light since the GH4, usually I bring the contrast down a bit and the image looks great.

11 hours ago, Framed_By_Dan said:

Hmm, I have to disagree, I still think there's something going on with the S1 footage. I use Natural tweaked a bit and it's definitely a bit plasticy looking compared to V-Log. Skin texture doesn't shine through the same either.

My settings for Natural are as follows:

Contrast -5

Highlight -2

Shadow +0.5

Saturation -3

Hue -0.5

Sharpness -5

NR - 5

I definitely felt the profile out the box was much more contrasty and had increased saturation compared to the GH line and have spent a bit of time getting them to match fairly closely. One other thing I noticed significantly is the terrible highlight roll off compared to the GH5/GH5S. Perhaps I'm exposing my image wrong/overexposing more on the S1 but if the meter shows anything beyond +2/3 over the highlights clip easily. I have to be super cautious. Compare that to when I shoot my GH5/GH5S/GH5 II (GH5 II especially) I can be pretty confident going to about +1, +1 2/3 and still not having super harsh clipped highlights. 

Most of the time the information is still there to reign in the highlights through a curves adjustment in post but I'd rather get fairly close in camera if I can. It's just a bit off putting when filming. 

Am I pushing the adjustments to the profile too far? I recently shot Flat with no adjustments except sharpness and NR down and it looked great (save for the highlights still being a bit hot). Some aspects of the colour came out a bit better too, however I can't completely switch to Flat due to having a couple of the older bodies in my fleet which don't have Flat.

I have thought if I replace my GH5 with an S5IIX and shoot with a baked in Rec709 conversion (I like Davinci's CST for V-Log) that could be a way round it. Trouble is minimum ISO of 640 and I don't have time to use ND on run and gun shoots such as weddings.

Do you use the last firmware on your S1 ? 
I never use the "Highlight" setting because it can quickly make the skin looking plastic.
Have you tried Cine-V ? This is the profile I use the most in low light and there is absolutely no difference in detail rendering between Cine-V and V-Log on my S1 with the last firmware.

On 5/24/2023 at 1:36 PM, hyalinejim said:

Yes, but I was talking about noise. Presumably, S1 709 is cleaner than S1 V-Log? I don't have an S1 so I don't know.

On the S5II it works, at least for the only L mount lens I own. Perspective is on by default and vignetting is user selectable.

Yes S1 709 is cleaner than S1 V-log but I don't understand how the S1 can keep every details without altered them if there is noise reduction. I only see noise, no sign of noise reduction. In any case, the S5II uses a different sort of noise reduction, much more aggresive with fine details.

Vignetting is corrected on the S5II but not chromatic abberations. On my 85mm Lumix S, I have a lot of them in V-log. In 709, they are corrected automatically.

10 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

It's worth pointing out again that the S1 must also be applying temporal noise reduction in 709 profiles, and if that's the look you're after you can achieve it by doing some NR in post for V-Log footage.

You should try to see the difference at 1:1 between your S1 with the last firwmare and your S5II with the 709 profiles and V-Log (like you did with Natural and V-Log on the S5II). I can assure you there is no difference with fine details on the S1 between V-Log and the 709 profiles, so if the S1 uses a sort of noise reduction, it's a very good one !

I used a lot of cameras and It's pretty easy to see when a camera uses temporal noise reduction, the details are inevitably altered, the same way as if you use noise reduction for stills, fine details become more "plastic".
While I liked these cameras, BMPCC 4K prores, NX1, NX500, G85, A7III, A7IV, A7SIII, and now the S5II in rec 709, they all used noise reduction and there was no way to disable it in video. NR destroys fine details to some extent (NX cameras were the most aggresive).
On the other hand, BMPCC 4K raw (of course) GH5, GX9 (very noisy), GH6 (only in Prores with both NR and sharpening at -5), S1 and S5, all these cameras don't show (or very few) altered details, just noise.

About the "look", since the first time I used V-Log in 2017 with the GH5, I tried to remove noise while conserving very fine details, I never succeded. It always end up like the cameras I listed earlier, noise is somewhat removed but the details too. And I don't speak about the time consumed to denoise the footage, Neat Video needs a very good computer to work in 6k, the loss of lens correction in V-log is also a problem, it is why most of the time I was shooting in rec 709 in low light with the S1.

4 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Yes, you're right - it is! Natural looks wonderfully smooth in comparison. It must be doing some pretty serious temporal noise reduction, even with NR at -10... and on the S5 and S1 I would guess it's the same, but without the smearing and detail loss.

There is definitely an advantage to using the method I describe for V-Log. I checked, and V-Log ISO 25600 pulled 2.66 stops is cleaner than V-Log ISO 4000 (as long as NR is at 0). So for regular V-Log shooters it means that it's better to ETTR even going up to very high ISOs rather than sticking at, say, 4000 and leaving that highlight headroom empty.

4000:

 

25600 pulled down 2.66 stops:

And you @Beritar this pushing of V-Log right to its upper limit using ISO will give you cleaner footage than just using V-Log at the metered exposure. It will be not-as-clean as Natural (which may be unNaturally clean 😉) but it will be unsmeared.

 

Try this LUT for getting V-Log close-ish to Natural:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqigXKnLl8T2zT6KswA2ruLvG6bbqORc/view?usp=share_link
The colour isn't quite the same but the curve is.

Anyway, fingers crossed that these and other issues will be fixed in the 2.0 firmware update in June!

Yes like I said (a lot of times 😅) the S5II uses nasty temporal noise and chroma noise reduction in low light with the 709 profiles even at -5, the difference with the S1 and S5 is stricking, especially on skin. There is also too much sharpening in 6K with these profiles, even at -5, it's night and day with the S1.
This is the first thing I noticed when I bought the S5II some months ago. Maybe (I'm not sure) the S1 and S5 use slight temporal noise reduction with the 709 profiles but it doesn't impact the details at all unlike the S5II.

Now I only use V-Log on the S5II because of the smearing and the over-sharpening of the 709 profiles, and I always overexpose by two stops like you did, it can change the colors and the highlights rendering a bit but this way it definitely gives lower noise, and like you said V-Log is free of smearing as long as you use 0 NR and 0 sharpness. 

Thank you for the Lut, I will try it.
Yes I hope Panasonic will fix the 709 profiles, for now I still use the S1 for low light but I miss the S5II AF.

11 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Not if you ignore the meter! V-Log at base ISO 640 is simply ISO 100 pushed 2.66 stops to give extra highlight headroom. If you push it back down it should be just as clean as the regular profiles at ISO 100.

So you don't need more light at all you need to re-think ISO and metering.

In a situation where you would have shot Natural at 6400 you would add 2.66 stops to the ISO and shoot V-Log at 40000, then push the exposure back down with the real time LUT.

You can make a lut like this right now with LutCalc:

And then you will have a Rec709 file with low noise and none of the artifacts (and none of the highlight headroom, but you won't need it because you're burning in the contrast)

Also, you're not limited to the V709 conversion (that curve is a bit weird IMO). You can try more contrasty curves in LutCalc, while keeping the gamut conversion. Or you can load up your favourite third party LUT, add the -2.66 exposure and re-export it.

PS: It looks like Exposure Offset Adjust (to re-calibrate the meter) is limited to 1 EV maximum so with that selected you'd be looking to hit +1.66 on the meter instead of +2.66. This would be your new "zero".

No light needed, just ISO. Of course above a certain level I think you lose PDAF?

I must doing something wrong because VLog is definitely more noisy, did you crop at 1:1 to compare ?

I use LutCalc and I use a Lut with -2.6 stop correction in Real Time Lut, of course my ISO value is higher in V-Log. To match ISO 100 in Natural I must use ISO 640/800 in V-log, but with this value there are more noise than Natural at ISO 100, and yet I use a curve which crush the shadows a lot. Easy to see the difference when cropping at 1:1.

Both my S5 and S1 with Natural look cleaner, and this is not due to noise reduction because the footage is full of details, zero smearing, the same level of details as V-Log with these cameras. 

I also get banding using V-Log on the S5II, and of course the lenses correction are not applied (unlike with the 709 profiles).
 

1 hour ago, hyalinejim said:

This is why you're not seeing it. A baked in LUT uses V-Log as its base picture style so it avoids the nasties that are in the regular profiles.

I never use regular profiles so I don't care. But for anyone who does want to use them then a solution is to use this method. If you're after the lower noise of regular profiles then just create a lut that pushes V-Log down by 2.66 stops. And I think you can also set metering compensation.

It's not so simple. If you create a LUT that push V-Log down by 2 stops, you need much more light compared to the 709 profiles. 

10 hours ago, Framed_By_Dan said:

Anyone who’s got their hands on an S5IIX able to see if there’s improvement on the skin smoothing/noise reduction artefacts that are present in the normal S5 II in the Rec709 based profiles? Also what about highlight roll off? I have the S1 that I personally feel is a bit too smooth and has hot highlights when shooting in a Rec 709 based profile - although the information does tend to come back fairly well in post. 

I’d love to move on from my GH5 to something a bit better in low light and the S5IIX could be a logical option but I’ve noticed some quirks with S series cameras that I don’t get with the GH line. 

I appreciate any real world user experience.

I'm interested as well, I own the S5II and I can't use the 709 profiles on this camera, I don't like the fine details when cropping in low light even at low ISO, the S1 has just way better detail rendering in 6K with these profiles, the S5II just looks oversharpened even with sharpness at -5.

I'm almost sure the S5IIX has the same issue with ALL-I, maybe not in Prores but I don't want to use SSD for run and gun.

Note than neither the S5 and the S1 have skin smoothing/chroma NR with the 709 profiles.

8 minutes ago, Stefano Capasso said:

i have realized that i need to add too  much money for buying one of these camera, after selling my xt3. So now i cannot do this upgrade, unless i go for panasonic S5 which seems nice camera now at very low price. AF of it it is not as good as the other camera, but if it is similar to xt3 than can be ok and the upgrade worthy considering that i should add little money.

What do you think?

For me, the S5 (and the S1) is still a great camera, the AF is good for photos. For video it's OK if you have enough DOF or if you use 4K 60fps. 
I have both the S5 and the S5II and I much prefer the video quality of the S5 with most profiles. The S5II has too much details processing for my taste, except in V-Log.

22 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Why the bumping sharpness up to the limits in this comparison? I find the material not easy to observe and evaluate. The light looks rather very undifferentiated to my eyes in order to be able to form an opinion about the image quality of these cameras. They look all the same to me.

Why ? To see that both the A7III and S5II can't be sharpened (in camera or in post) because of the huge amount of noise reduction and detals filtering. The bad light is used to see how the cameras perform in difficult situations and how they use their noise reduction algorithm.

Seriously I can see the difference even when viewing in 1080P, both the A7III and the S5II smooth details a lot compared to the S5, to the point that adding sharpness in post just look like upscaled from a lower resolution.
If you can't see the difference and use the Panasonic standard profiles, you can buy the camera with confidence, but personally I see a big difference with the previous Panasonic S cameras. It is the most aggressive NR, and over sharpening (especially in 6K) i've ever seen on any Panasonic camera to date.

16 hours ago, j_one said:

I think this is the biggest thing that has started to have me considering returning the camera while I still have a week left to do so. Also, all the exterior footage I've shot and seen online looks leaning towards a magenta/brown tint too much. The latitude and banding issues in the S5 facebook group seems to fall on deaf ears when called out.

I actually thought V-log colors were better on skin and clothes in the studio scene in that video, but the green shadows are really not great when compared to original S5.

Yes I can really see a difference with my S5 since the first day I bouth the S5II. And the other profiles are even worse. I use a lot Natural and Cine-V in low light, there are just too much details filtering on the S5II with these profiles, it looks very similar to Sony (even worse than Sony at very low ISO) :
 

11 hours ago, deezid said:

Chroma and luma detail (in V-Log) look pretty much the same than on my S1H if not even better.
V-Log is the only profile with the banding problem though, even HLG is clean in shadows.

Can't say anything about the sRGB profiles since I would never use them.

Yes the issue is with the standard profiles, the difference is obvious :
 

However in V-Log they look very similar when sharpness and NR are set at 0 :
 

11 hours ago, deezid said:

To each their own. 
To me the heavy chroma filtering when shooting internally is an absolute no go. Skin looks lifeless and so does any kind any kind of foliage. That's only one problem next to the insane amount of oversharpening the cameras forces on your footage. 

The image lacks tonality and color separation and looks thin as nothing I've ever seen before, something that cannot be fixed in post. Fuji also really needs to work on their AF and IBIS.

The S5II on the other hand has no issues with that but has banding in shadows which hopefully can be fixed via a firmware update.

Btw. external ProRes on the S5II looks identical in every single way to the internal H265/H264 codecs, there's not a single difference in IQ even when pushing color a to the extremes.

The S5II also uses more sharpening and details smoothing than before (S5 and S1), less in V-Log and HLG but still noticeable when pixel peeping.
I "pixel peep" a lot because I use 6K to pan or zoom in post and with most profiles the 6K of the S1 really looks like a burst of raw photos and the S5II looks more like a burst of JPEGs with in camera sharpening and NR bumped up. And at this point even my old A7III (while noisier) keeps better details than my S5II in 4K.

On 3/13/2023 at 1:51 AM, Al Dolega said:

I think we may be getting to the point where the number of things the market is expecting/hoping to be fixed soon via firmware may be outstripping how many things I reasonably expect can be addressed in a single firmware (or several firmwares in a short timeframe).

I would love for the banding, oversharpening, smoothing, AF performance, and maybe even rolling shutter to be addressed/improved by the time my preorderd S5IIX comes in in 2-2.5 months, but I am losing faith in that happening.

AF on my S1 has actually been behaving itself recently so maybe I'll tell myself to wait until the S2 or S2H is announced.

Seriously I miss the S1 (but not its AF). In fact I almost don't use my S5II because I don't like it for low light even at low ISO. The rendering on faces is just bad because of over shaprening and (especially) smoothed out details. 
V-log is better but still not as good as before and not recommended for the cleanest footage, using underexposed LUTs to get ride of noise just doesn't work well because Dynamic range take a hit and above all you loose too much light doing this.

If you don't crop a lot in your videos, I think you will like the S5II though, but in my case if Panasonic doesn't adress the image quality with the standard profiles and really want to target smartphone users, I don't think I will use their camera anymore. I was tempted to buy an S1 again but the AF is really not good with low contrast scenes or when using Sigma lenses, it even struggles sometimes in good light with Panasonic S lenses ... 

I also use the Sony A7IV (and III) and it has better image quality in low light, there are some noise reduction at high ISO but there is absolutely no smoothing like on the S5II at low ISO. 
So Sony has great AF and image quality in most scenarios but it lacks good IBIS with >20mm lenses and it has no Open Gate mode.

It was really too much for Panasonic to make a S1 with the AF of the S5II ? 
I still hope.

8 hours ago, Sharathc47 said:

sean at Lumix live acknowledged the issue and said that it is because of Phase detect pixels. it's not solvable by just a firmware.  They are hoping to improve with next versions of cameras.

They use too much noise reduction like sony, it's in every S series camera. Otherwise a dynamic range of 12.3 with a 12bit adc is quite difficult. Wish they would use stacked 14bit adc sensors upto 60fps instead of nikon z9 sensor in future products.

I don't think the issue is Phase Detect because V-Log on the S5II (while sharper than before) has not the insane sharpening and chroma noise reduction that the standard profiles have.
Moreover, nor my A7III and IV smooth details like this at low ISO and yet they use Phase detect.
There are just bad processing going on internaly on the standard profiles with the S5II.

9 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

What about Vlog for the S5 II and GH6? @deezid cheers

About the GH6, I've not used it a lot but even with HLG and V-Log (H265) and I feel the details rendering is slightly different compared to the GH5, maybe because of some details filtering ("Intelligent detail filtering" from Panasonic) but there is a difference, like if the GH6 smooths and sharpens some details in the same time, a bit like with the S5II standard profiles but far less pronounced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55RygnQqAbU

I think Deezid used the GH6 a lot more than me thought and said Prores has less noise reduction so maybe the details rendering is better than with H265. 

These days, many brands use a lot sharpening and different type of noise reduction, sadly most of the time there is no way to disable them.
It is true that there is no chance your clients could spot the loss of details, but I use Panasonic cameras since a very long time and I loved the way I could crop or extract picture from my videos while retaining a lot of details, like a true Jpeg picture without too much noise processing or digital sharpening. We can't do this anymore with the S5II standard profiles because there are too much processing going on internally, exactly like on smartphones.

5 minutes ago, PannySVHS said:

Hi, didn't you state, that VLog for the S5 does not show this noise reduction and processing? @Beritar cheers

V-Log on the S5II is way less impacted, it looks "almost" similar to my S5. It has slightly more sharpening (maybe more spatial or temporal NR from what I've seen in the CineD test), and tint is more green than the S5.
The real issue is with the standard profiles for the S5II.

9 hours ago, deezid said:

That's what's also called the smartphone processing approach, apply tons of spatial and temporal filtering and another layer of heavy sharpening to compensate.

This is my thought exactly , Panasonic must want to target smartphone users, It's the only explanation and it's a very bad new.
But some people can't see the difference or sometimes prefer the over sharpening and mushy details of the S5II, so I am not surprised.

Another test between the S5II and the S5, this time with the Natural Profile (640 ISO) :

I'm not a fan of extreme sharpening but it's not really an issue if it can be dialed down enough, the important thing is to keep details.
The S5II uses a lot of sharpening at -5 but it also uses a lot of details filtering (look at the orange background) ,and of course adding sharpness in post can't help to recover details.
I think I never seen an imaqe quality so bad from a Panasonic camera of this price (V-Log has less issues but this is not the always the best profile for some situations).

22 hours ago, deezid said:

The color rendering, especially skin tones has been improved quite a bit in V-Log between the old S Series and S5II.
Much warmer skin tones.

However, the banding in near black areas (very similar to OLEDs after a bad Calman calibration) and also the heavy sharpening (similar to GH6) are quite concerning.

Do you know if the GH5II also has the heavy sharpening from the GH6 ? My GH6 and my S5II are very similar about sharpness, rough sharpening even at -5 with the standard profiles but also less fine details than S1/S5 and G9 because of the new "intelligent details" processing in the GH6.
I really hoped Panasonic didn't put these processing on the S5II but it looks even worse.

13 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

I don't care about lab tests at all, I care about real world performance. The noise reduction is a much bigger issue than any lab test. Hopefully Panasonic fixes that in a firmware update, because I should be able to control the level of NR that's going on.

If you shoot V-log there is almost zero noise reduction on the S5II, however I still prefer the V-log image coming from the S5/S1.
But yes Panasonic really need to fix the image quality with the standard profiles.

5 hours ago, FHDcrew said:

Maybe the ever so slightly decreased latitude is that quality decrease Panasonic kept saying when they tried to defend doing with Dirt-From-Defocus AF 😂 

From my experience (I have the camera since a month), the latitude is not the only downgrade, detail rendering (less in V-Log) and motion quality are also worse than the S1 and S5. But a lot of people will not see the difference, especially those who shoot in a very well controled environnement and those for whom 1080P is enough quality.

14 hours ago, Sharathc47 said:

Please extend clips to 30 seconds atleast

Another scene and "subject"  :

For those who want to see the difference in image quality between the S5 and S5II (and the smoothing) :

Cine-V2, ISO 800

V-Log is the only profile without this smoothing on skin.