Fredrik Lyhne

That's pretty much my thoughts as well. If you nail exposure with v-log it's not that hard to get it to look better than the other profiles, but it's a little tricky. I need to practice more on that. 
I thought your Veydra test looked better than this which is why I asked. They looked really nice btw, and I'm not jealous at all...
I'm currently just on my 2014 MBP, so I don't exactly have the best monitor to judge things. Sold my LG 5K and will be ordering a new iMac next month.

Yes.

I haven't noticed that feature yet. Thanks for sharing! Congrats on the new camera. When are you getting the PL 12-60mm to go with it  

Firmware 2.0 for the Panasonic GH5 has been officially announced, and will be available for download at the end of September 2017.
I've been testing a pre-production version of this on my camera thanks to Panasonic, to bring you my first impressions of the new features which include:
Professional 400Mbit ALL-I intraframe codec for 10bit 4K 4:2:2
"Open Gate" High Resolution Anamorphic Mode (4992 x 3744)
Hybrid Log Gamma with view assist feature for HDR shooting
New and improved autofocus engine for video
Performance optimisations and bug fixes
Read on to find out what it's like to shoot with...

No, that's not what it's for. 
Usually on shoots we don't have much time to eat, so what you do is dangle some sausages in front of your mouth so you stay fed. 
If you're a veggie, you can use carrots instead. 
Also, the bit at the back is actually a mini microwave, so you can heat up some cofffee for your assistant. 

That thing looks like it will vacuum your house and carry a toddler through Disney World. Cool find though. 

I decided to shoot a short sequel to my GH4 VLog video "Chicago." Recorded internal at 8 bit on the GH5. Handheld with IBIS. V Log L.
 

Wrote up a little guide for people new to this and looking to buy their first recorder. And is the way I see the world of low budget recorders is they're ranked like this (starting from worst/cheapest to best/expensive):
Tascam DR22WL / Zoom H1 (I'd suggest skipping right over this tier of recorders! But hey, my first ever short film I did years ago was with a chinese shotgun running straight into a Zoom H1!! :-o Shocking but true... everyone starts somewhere!)
Tascam DR60D mk2 (the DR60D mk1, before the mk2 came out, is what I myself started out using for no budget shorts as a budding location sound recordist)
Tascam DR70D (the *minimum* I'd recommend for a location sound recordist, even if you're just a student / no budget guy. Although in desperate cases, you could scrape by with getting the DR60Dmk2, but doing the opposite and stretching for an F4 is very worthwhile. Certainly, I could travel back in time I'd just have gone straight for the Zoom F4 from the starts! *Except* the F4 didn't come out until a few years later...  you live in a very lucky time with so many wonderful options to choose from!) or Tascam DR680 (these can be found at bargain prices secondhand, which is what I did before I then later on purchased a Zoom F4 once that came out & I spotted an F4 at a good price)
Zoom F4 / Zoom F8  / Sound Devices MixPre6 (I skip right over the MixPre3, as the MixPre6 is very similar yet does so so much more at only a relatively small extra cost. Also I regard the three of F4/F8/MixPre6 as all on broadly the same level to each other, just varying slightly from each other in one area or another that ones might have a small lead over the other one. This is the tier where I'd see you're now reaching the semi-pro level)
Sound Devices 633 / Zaxcom Maxx / Sanosax SX-R4+ (finally you have now got up to the "industry standard" when it comes to recorders people use for small shoots, especially when mixing from the bag. If you're doing this full time as your job or hiring someone who is, then likely this is what is being used. Either that or similar gear, or even something better above this)
And if you considering ones priced above those last three....  you're surely doing this full time as a sound recordist and getting a healthy income from that, so why are you asking us here on Frugal Filmmaker? ha! :-P But yes, tonnes and tonnes more options exist at the higher end as well!
Finally, if you're considering something in the budget range within what I just covered, but isn't one of those that I mentioned, then it probably is *not* a good idea to buy if you're intending to be a location sound recordist. 
Something else only might *maybe* make sense if you've got in mind some other purpose for it, such as perhaps you want to record a band in a studio (which has very different needs / constraints), or you're the rare exception which proves the rule, or you are getting lucky finding some amazingly priced deal which can make an otherwise bad purchase decision then make sense if "the price is right".
For instance I didn't include the Roland R88, as I feel it is extremely poor value for money in 2017! However.... there was a time at the end of 2016 when the Roland R88 got a huge price drop because it was being discontinued. Even with that massive price drop, the Roland R88 probably still wasn't a smart purchase vs the Zoom F8, but the big drop in price at least made the R88 a somewhat competitive option worth mentioning in a round up of all the various choices. However, that sale is now long since ended, and the prices I see on eBay for a Roland R88 is even higher than what you used to be able to buy it new from B&H Photo! Clearly those eBay sellers are dreaming. 
Anyway, that was just one example which might have been applicable but isn't now, so I don't rule out the possibilities of something like that perhaps popping up again in the future especially if you very keenly look around for secondhand deals. But for over 95% of people reading this, that won't be applicable, and just stick to going with one of the main ones I mentioned earlier.
 
http://ironfilm.co.nz/which-sound-recorder-to-buy-a-guide-to-various-indie-priced-sound-recorders-in-2017/

This bloke shows how he bought a mid-tier 2017 iMac, pulled the screen off then replaced the CPU with an Intel i7, added an SSD and 64GB RAM to apparently achieve faster performance than any other 2017 iMac. Perhaps this is the type of hybrid Hackintosh that makes most sense for the DIY handyman.

Just keep in mind the 2017 iMac 27 i7 is twice as fast as a 2016 MBP or 2015 iMac 27 ONLY on *some* things -- specifically transcoding H264 to ProRes proxy. Considering that's a very time-consuming part of many H264 4k workflows, that's really useful. It's also limited to FCPX; the performance difference varies with each software.
The 2017 iMac 27 i7 is also about 2x as fast (vs a 2015 iMac i7 or a 2016 MBP i7) on the GPU-oriented BruceX benchmark, but this is also a narrow task. On other GPU-heavy or mixed CPU/GPU tasks like Neat Video, it's usefully faster but not 2x faster.
On a few H264 long GOP 4k codecs I tested, the 2017 iMac 27 i7 seems marginally fast enough to edit single-camera 4k material without transcoding (on FCPX), which is a big improvement from the 2015 iMac 27 i7 or 2016 top-spec MBP. However multicam still requires transcoding to proxy, and if you want to really blitz through the material, then proxy still helps.
If you now or will ever use ProRes or DNxHD acquisition, this picture totally changes. It then becomes less CPU intensive but much more I/O intensive. You usually don't need to transcode in those cases but the data volume and I/O rates increase by 6x, 8x or more.
 

I have top-spec versions of these: 2015 iMac 27, 2017 iMac 27, and 2016 MacBook Pro. I do FCPX editing professionally. In general the new 2017 iMac 27 is much faster on FCPX than the previous 2015 iMac and also the 2016 MBP. The FCPX performance improvement (esp. in H264 transcoding and rendering) of the 2017 model is far greater than synthetic benchmarks would indicate.
The 2017 iMac 27 is the only machine I've ever used -- including a 12-core Mac Pro D700 -- that was fast enough to edit single-camera H264 long GOP 4k without transcoding. While it's about 2x the performance of the i7 2015 iMac 27 when rendering or exporting H264, and 1.6x faster on the GPU-intensive BruceX benchmark, it's not equally faster on all FCPX tasks and plugins. E.g, it's about 12% faster on Neat Video and 18% faster on Digital Anarchy flicker reduction.
In theory you'd expect the 2017 iMac to be fastest on GPU-oriented tasks since the Radeon Pro 580 is much faster than the M395X in the 2015 iMac. However in FCPX the greatest improvement I've seen is in encode/decode and rendering of H264 material. There were Quick Sync improvements in Kaby Lake but I didn't think they were performance-related on H264, rather they expanded H265 coverage, but maybe I was wrong.
Below: time to import and transcode to ProRes proxy ten 4k XAVC-S clips from a Sony A7RII, total running time 11 min 43 sec. It's interesting in this particular test the 2016 MBP was actually faster than the 2015 iMac, so a 2016 MBP is no slouch -- it just can't touch the 2017 iMac 27. Unfortunately I haven't tested the 2017 MBP. All tests repeated three times. 
2015 iMac 27: 5 min 37 sec
2017 iMac 27: 2 min 40 sec
2016 MBP: 3 min 46 sec
 

A speedbooster is basically a magnifying glass for your sensor, that bumps it up one size. So a m4/3 sensor becomes APS-C (aka s35), or APS-C becomes full-frame.
This is only possible with a mirrorless body (short flange distance) and SLR glass (long flange distance). The speedbooster fits in the gap in between.
The GH5 shoots 4K60 and has extremely good IBIS, better than the A9 you tried. And if you use it with a newer Panasonic OIS lens the two IS systems work in tandem and the stabilization becomes pretty incredible.
Photo IQ wise, the GH5 will come fairly close to your 5DII, just without that FF look. But If you add a Metabones "XL" Speedbooster, your crop factor would be around 1.3X, which is halfway between your 5D and the crop Canon bodies (7D, 80D, Rebels etc). The cheap speedboosters don't allow you to control the aperture on Canon EF lenses, while with the Metabones, you could, although AF will be mostly unusable in video, and slow (but usable) for stills.
The A9, 5D4, 1DXII all obviously have the FF look built-in, and are of course better photo cameras, as well they should be at 2-3X the cost of the GH5. None match the ergonomics and practicality of the GH5 for shooting video, though.
Actually, the 5D4 crops to about 1.7x when shooting 4K, so that doesn't even get you FF for video. The Canon MJPEG codec is also a lot heavier than I'd want for traveling, too.
Sony's lenses let you use their AF, obviously, but kinda suck for pulling focus manually, as they're fly-by-wire. They're also not much smaller/lighter than FF DSLR glass. If I was on vacation I wouldn't want to carry FF glass at all. I would want the GH5 with native glass.

Its the close season so I won't be in a stadium for a couple of weeks yet to do an exact test but I'll offer you this in the meantime which I've just done.
This is a picture of my Philips Hue LED strip light in my kitchen taken with a Fuji X-T2
One of these images is shot with the electronic shutter and the other one is shot with the mechanical shutter.
For a bit of actual real world perspective on this camera threatening scenario, also here are a random collection of shots I've taken with the X-T2 at a football stadium with LED boards around the pitch.
If you point any camera with an electronic shutter at an LED light source its likely to have more bands than a music festival.
The fact that you can clearly see it in the EVF while you are taking the shot should alert you to the fact that you need to switch to mechanical.
Did I shoot those football images on electronic shutter? 
Nope.
Not a fair test then?
It is because its do with where these boards will actually be and hence an indicator of the real world potential of this issue.. They're not exactly on top of anyone and being the only source of illumination.
But there is a much bigger reason why its a fair test of real world use of a camera with electronic shutter for sports.
The reason for that is in the third picture. If you are tracking action at 1/4000th shooting at 15fps the rolling shutter is horrendous with an electronic shutter.
Its a far bigger problem.
And a very, very real one.
Because it will be affecting far more than 2% of your shots and thats why you just wouldn't shoot with an electronic shutter in the first place.
Anyway, here is an article from Richard Butler on DPReview explaining why you should use mechanical and not electronic shutter when shooting at high shutter speeds with artificial light. It was six weeks ago though so, hey, maybe the rest of the camera industry has made some massive leap in the meantime meaning only Sony have a problem now.... 
Otherwise why would it be such a shock horror revelation when you've already wrote a piece about it being 'a thing' ?
https://***URL removed***/articles/5816661591/electronic-shutter-rolling-shutter-and-flash-what-you-need-to-know/2

For those that don't see it, it's on me to explain it better:
DPR run sponsored content and advertorial, which is often thinly disguised by appearance aside from the tags lost at the bottom of the page DPR are paid by Canon for the sponsored content DPR are owned by Amazon, with the end goal to sell more cameras Some people may not mind this or even see the implications but you have to appreciate that when you take money from someone you are beholden to them in terms of maintaining a good relationship. It's really that simple.
In order to maintain the good relationship and carry on going to the PR events for new camera releases, the unspoken rule is -
Don't criticise too heavily (6D Mark II) Favour the manufacturer who is paying the most Answer to Amazon, after all they are the owners and expect results There are two issues here, maybe some confusion as to how they relate.
Let's look at the 6D Mark II coverage on DPReview first.
For nearly every other site and blogger (including myself) the lack of 4K was big news.
This camera warrants strong criticism for lacking good video and the crowds agree - see the massive Reddit thread, forum reactions, Kai's video even and ironically Jared's video for clicks. They all criticise it for the lack of 4K.
DPR ducked it.
There is some tiny line about it and it's glossed over, but it warranted an entire article on the lack of 4K and the soft 1080p and moire.
Why? Because at least 1/3rd of the potential customer base for this camera is expecting it to shoot very good video.
Some may not care. So what? That's a moot point.
The crux of it is, DPR's editor is trying to maintain the close relationship with Canon's PR team, to keep the sponsored content onboard.
So the criticism is watered down compared to EOSHD and others.
This isn't hard to understand.
And now to the crux of what I am saying about the A9...
Did the A9 warrant a front page sticky post about banding?
A big long post warning sports shooters to be careful of the electronic shutter?
Yes it did.
But the 6D Mark II warranted one about the shit video mode, and only the A9 got it in the neck.
And that to me is deeply suspicious.
Then there is a separate issue with the A9 coverage and that it is the research is flawed clickbait and blown way out of proportion.
The problem with Jared's clickbate in the first place is that he only tested the electronic shutter at the football match and not the mechanical one.
Any talented pro would have immediately changed the settings at the first sight of banding and had the technical knowledge to understand what was going on immediately.
Had he done so he'd have got a different result and I for one would be interested to see if it fixed the problem, which would have made for an entirely different kind of article and video.
Instead we are none-the-wiser.
How is this useful?
The only take-away we have from the article on DPR is that the A9 has a serious banding problem.
... and that sports shooters who are the main target audience for the Sony camera should think very carefully about not buying it.
This is absolutely disastrous PR for Sony and a real trophy piece for Canon in persuading sports shooters, their key pro customer, to stay with the 1D X range and L lenses.
Sony's engineers and innovative technology does not deserve this kind of publicity.
Electronic shutters are the future and have huge benefits.
Sony should be rewarded for innovating.
Instead they are scolded for it and Canon get of the hook completely free for having a lazy, un-innovative product that doesn't even try. No electronic shutter. No 20fps. No 4K. No 5 axis stabilisation. No EVF.
And it doesn't end here...
The two most-read A9 pieces on DPR in the past 2 months have been about why the main target audience for the camera should think twice about buying it instead of a Canon. What's worse is both were flawed pieces of writing and research.
The article about a Canon pro making a hypothetical switch was pure tosh. They priced all the Canon gear way too low on the used market and then claimed it would cost 10's of thousands of dollars for pros to sell-up and switch lenses, even though all pros are different and not all of them need to suddenly replace $30,000 worth of telephoto lenses in order to pick up an A9.
The article was out of touch because for many pros, making the switch is as simple as buying a few lenses and the body, or using their existing Canon lenses, depending on their line of work.
And the article didn't even apply to enthusiasts... it completely forgot about them and again the main take-away from this pro-Canon propaganda was...
---
So when, dear DPR, is Canon going to get it in the neck in the same way? I'm not fucking holding my breath!
You all saw the Canon Rumors poll which is in no way a video-orientated site and very much full to the brim of photographers...
Nearly 40% of these photographers said they wanted 4K video.
So if you look at the narrative at DPR it is out of step with the people...
They're not addressing the negative side of Canon's products in the way that I and others expect them to do as reviewers.
When I tried to do it in my 5D Mark III review, it was the beginning of the end for me as a writer at DPReview...
I know it first hand! I've had account managers from retailers come up to me out of the blue at trade shows saying, we agree 100% with what you write about Canon, but in no way can give you an affiliate account because Canon are one of our biggest manufacturer accounts. With all due respect to Mattias (and I have a ton), You're not the one who has been forced out of DPReview by Barney who find my truth-bearing a bit inconvenient.
I know what I am talking about here and it's rude to suggest I don't.
So please bear with me... and try to appreciate the wider picture. It is not just about one article.
The least Jared can do is be more balanced and creative....
It's obvious that a 7700hz refresh rate light source interferes with a rolling shutter. 7700HZ!! So give us a fucking solution!
There was one right in front of him on the A9 and he chose to ignore it!
Don't dress it up for clicks and make a big attention grabbing headline out if it as if to paint the A9 as broken for all intents and purposes.
Otherwise the manufacturers won't bother innovating and everything new they introduce will be as conservative as possible so to avoid sales-killing problems like this.
Also let's see DPR readdress the balance to...
1. Test the damned mechanical shutter. Take Jared and his A9 back to that stadium and get him to do what any pro worth their salt does on encountering a problem... Use an alternative method available right in front of you! It's not hard!
2. Tell us how the mechanical and electronic shutter compare with regards to the banding so we can see how the solution stacks up!
3. Test head to head vs the Canon and Nikon pro DSLR cameras and see if they have banding too. Some pros claim they do. So let's see it!
4. Give Sony some fucking credit for being innovative... 20fps!! 4K!
Then when it comes to the 6D Mark II which underperforms by 5 years with regards to video, THAT is when the headline is warranted.
That is a proper fucking headline.
This effects each and every single person who will buy the camera, not just the ones who happen to use it at a sports ground with 7700hz ad boards without realising that maybe they should avoid using the electronic shutter! DUH!

The 2-bay Lacie at 400 megabytes/sec is probably OK. However that should be backed up regularly.
You will likely have to transcode 4k H264 to proxy for smoothest editing, no matter how fast the iMac is. Even on a 12-core Mac Pro with dual D700 GPUs that is often required. I personally would prefer the 4.2Ghz i7 CPU, since so much of video editing and transcoding is CPU-bound. You can save some money by getting the lowest 8GB memory config and using third-party RAM. The exact internal storage is up to you but I would not get the 1TB Fusion Drive. I have tested 3TB Fusion Drive and 1TB SSD iMacs side-by-side and for FCPX editing with media on external storage, there's no significant performance difference, nor difference in FCPX startup time. However SSD is simpler, might be a little more reliable and if you're using external media anyway, why not use SSD.

Photography has got to move forward.
We have been using the same shit for decades.
Mirrorless is a step in the right direction of course.
Samsung tried a very brave thing with a huge touch screen on the Galaxy NX, the only Android based Super 35mm interchangeable lens camera on the planet and customers didn't buy it.
So perhaps Canon's customers are to blame for Canon.
If all they want in 10 years of technological innovation is the addition of a swivel screen, then so be it.

I have a 2013 iMac 27 with 3TB FD, a 2015 top-spec iMac 27 with 1TB SSD,  2015 and 2016 top-spec MBP 15s and am testing a 12-core nMP with D700s. This is FCPX 4k documentary editing where the primary codecs are some variant of H264.
Even though FCPX is very efficient, in general H264 4k requires transcoding to proxy for smooth, fluid editing and skimming -- even on a top-spec 12-core nMP. If you have a top-spec MBP, iMac or Mac Pro, smaller 4k H264 projects can be done using the camera-native codec, but multicam can be laggy and frustrating. The Mac Pro is especially handicapped on H264 since the Xeon CPU does not have Quick Sync. In my tests, transcoding 4k H264 to ProRes proxy on a 12-core Mac Pro is nearly twice as slow as a 2015 top-spec iMac 27. For short projects with lower shooting ratios it's not an issue but for larger projects with high shooting ratios it's a major problem.
We've got ProRes HDMI recorders but strapping on a bunch of 4k recorders is expensive and operationally more complex in a field documentary situation. That would eliminate the transcoding and editing performance problems but would exacerbate the data wrangling task by about 8x. This is especially difficult for multi-day field shoots where the data must be offloaded and backed up.
However in part the viability of editing camera-native 4k depends on your preferences. If you do mainly single-cam work, and use modest shooting ratios so you don't need to skim and keyword a ton of material, and don't mind a bit of lag during edit, a top-spec iMac 27 is probably OK for H264 4k. 
Re effects, those can either be CPU-bound or GPU-bound, or a combination of both. Some like Neat Video allow you to configure the split between CPU and GPU. But in general effects use a lot of GPU, and like encode/decode, are slowed down by 4k since it's 4x the data per frame as 1080p. 
Re Fusion Drive vs SSD, for a while I had both 2013 and 2015 iMac 27s on my desk, one with 3TB FD and the other 1TB SSD. I tested a few small cases with all media on the boot drive, and really couldn't see much FCPX real-world performance difference. You are usually waiting on CPU or GPU. However if you transcode to ProRes, I/O rates skyrocket, making it more likely to hit an I/O constraint.
Fusion Drive is pretty good but ideally you don't want media on the boot drive. SSD is fast enough to put media there but it's not big enough. Fusion Drive is big enough but may not be fast enough, thus the dilemma. A 3TB FD is actually a pretty good solution for small scale 1080p video editing, but 4k (even H264) chews through space rapidly. Also, performance will degrade on any spinning drive (even FD) as it fills up. Thus you don't really have 3TB at full performance, but need to maintain considerable slack space. In general we often under-estimate our storage needs, so end up using external storage even for "smaller" projects. If this is your likely destiny, why not use an SSD iMac which is at least a bit faster at a few things like booting? Just don't spend your entire budget on an SSD machine then use a slow, cheap bus-powered USB drive.
If I was getting an 2017 iMac 27 for H264 4k editing, it would be a high-spec version, e.g, 4.2Ghz i7, 32GB RAM, 580 GPU, and probably 1TB SSD. Re the iMac Pro, what little we know indicates the base model will be considerably faster than the top-spec iMac 27 -- it has double the cores (albeit at slower clock rate) and roughly double the GPU performance. However unless Apple pulls a miracle out of their hat and upgrades FCPX to use AMD's VCE coding engine, the iMac Pro will not have Quick Sync, so it will be handicapped just like the current Mac Pro for that workflow. Apple is limited by what Intel provides but this is an increasingly critical situation for productions using H264 or H265 acquisition codecs and high shooting ratios.

Since this work looks great already what would be improved exactly by using a different camera?  Maybe extra stops of DR or better color in some respects, but what would that really accomplish?
Lensing, composition, cinematic craft are strong already in this example.
Not being snarky here, truly interested at how images these days could be "3 times" better?
Certainly cameras can have more IQ over others, but to what end?  Would images in this sort of narrative be all that much discernible?  
(Unless you're doing some wild grade with RAW for more extreme  effects)
Aren't we to the point where it all looks good if you know what you're doing?

I am also a FCP X user and I've purchased the top-tier 27" iMac with i7, AMD Radeon Pro 580 W/8Gb VRAM, 8GB Ram, and 512GB SSD. It should be delivered by 6 July and I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.
I've upgraded from the same model (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014 with 2.5GHz i7, 16GB Ram and 512GB SSD) you currently have. Normally, I was planning to buy a 4K display and use an EGPU to extend the laptop's life. But when I calculate the total cost, it seems more logical to sell the laptop and buy the iMac. I was able to sell my laptop for £1200 and I bought the iMac with higher education discount for ~£2350.
I've had quite a bit experience with Hackintosh and I would probably easily build a killer and more powerful system with this budget but I didn't want to bother with its maintenance. That said, if you choose your parts carefully, you can easily build a reliable and more powerful PC with the option to upgrade its internal in the future should you require a more powerful machine in the future.

Hi Fredrik
   There has been some discussion  on this over at Creative Cow
https://forums.creativecow.net/docs/forums/post.php?forumid=335&postid=96047&univpostid=96047&pview=t 

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/videography/comments/6j535x/i_made_a_dank_meme
original source: https://tapas.io/episode/277406

I was under the impression that they use different codecs and you didn't have to transcode the Panasonic files? Could be wrong though...
Anyways, I don't think anyone uploading to youtube want or need 400mbs, so it's great that Panasonic offers a lower bit rate as well and they should be applauded for offering both. 

Panasonic get's praised because they offer different codecs for different shooters. Why is that so hard to understand? 

Panasonic get's praised because they offer different codecs for different shooters. Why is that so hard to understand? 

Panasonic get's praised because they offer different codecs for different shooters. Why is that so hard to understand?