John Matthews

My feeling is that H quality would be better than the lowest available bitrate in the camera (20mbps H.264 8bit) as it's 12mbps H.265 AND 10bit. I think the compression is about the same but with more color information. I haven't really tried the M quality- the compression seems massive in that though. It would probably depend on the scene. The quality of the H Proxy really looks quite acceptable. The L quality was a huge step down though. I'll need to try the M setting tomorrow.
Concerning the EOIS at the wide lenses and vlogging style videos, it seems rather unnatural (as the video above indicated). Sure, it the background looks stable, but the subject seems to bounce around everywhere like a pinball. I think it's probably better as a traditional gimbal replacement where the camera's a little further from the subject and the operator is carefully walking. I have the Panasonic 70-300mm lens and it has great Dual IS 2. I haven't really noticed an improvement to already one of the most stable setups on the market. In face, I'd say the EOIS interferes with the OIS of the lens. Again, I need more testing.

You'd have to try it, as there are a number of factors that impact the drive speed required for editing, the distance between key-frames being a pretty critical one.
If they've done a good job then it could work off a cheaper drive.  Of course, if you're anything like me then you've got an older SSD that's too small spare, so with the reduced file sizes then you could put them on an older drive and work from there.

Update is live:
https://av.jpn.support.panasonic.com/support/global/cs/dsc/download/ff/dl/s5m2x.html

Here's another video on the firmware that should be coming out within the next few hours:
 

M43 must come up with capable small bodies- PDAF and 4k 60fps. Instead, we've got very capable FF-sized bodies. I've still got some decent lenses for the system, but my patience is running thin as used M43 gear keeps going up (the opposite effect of what you'd think, but the need for small systems has skyrocketed).
I'm very curious to see what the new S5ii firmware does. Sure, it still has some limitations with regard to FF 60fps, but it makes up for it in other ways, especially tools.
I don't think Panasonic was expecting so many options for L mount APS-C. Sigma is going to start taking some market share from M43 IMO.

...and another one (I quite like his style, plus he's a Panasonic micro43 and Sony user as well):
 

Long since killed 4/3 for me.
Well compared with the G9 and OM-1 anyway.
S5ii vs G9 in the same body? Other than the longest of lenses, or unless you were heavily invested in a huge range of 4/3 glass, why would you?
And the OM-1, I love it for its build and handling and even how it looks, but if I had to pick just one to work with, photo, video or hybrid, again, for me at least, it’s a no-brainer, S5ii.
The teeny tiny bodies and lenses, for discrete use, fair enough but for work, nah.
I still don’t much care for it for stills though which is why I have moved to Nikon for that.
Same sensor in the Zf and Z6ii and I prefer both, in different ways, for stills and the result I am getting out of them is  near identical (as in as good or better but not quantifiably) but the Nikon user experience is better.
The Zf is the snappier but less ergonomically good than the S5ii but the  Z6ii with or without battery grip is nicer to use than the Lumix.
What I want is the guts of the Zf in the Z6ii body and that will probably be the Z6iii within the next couple of months.
If so, I am done and will have the perfect pair for my work; the S5ii for video and Z6iii for stills because I will trade the Zf and Z6ii for a single Z6iii.
If I had to rate them for use case, I’d say that the S5ii is more like a 65% video focused MILC and the Z6iii the opposite and around 35% video.
The Zf somewhere more like 50% because it’s highly capable for both video and stills but it’s issue is always going to be it is not a great lens platform and is really only suitable for small primes. I currently have the Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 on it and the results are great and it’s not an ergonomic nightmare, but a DSLR style body is much better to work with.
But back on the S5ii, it was already my first choice for video (alongside the S1H which I prefer actually in EVERY regard except AF and that is why I had to make the S5ii my primary and not the S1H) and there were only two things I held against it:
1. The shutter button sound and feel. Tinny and not great next to the S1H and that killed it for me for stills use. Moving to Nikon solved that.
2. I use it with a Smallrig cage, side handle and Rode Micro. Try that on a gimbal 🤪 The latest firmware upgrade takes it from being ‘OK’ without a gimbal to ‘absolutely perfect for my needs without a gimbal’.
What else is there in this class right now?
Sony A7iv? Arguably better for stills but not as good for video.
Nikon Z6ii? Equal for stills but not as good for video.
Canon R6ii? Some will prefer its full frame 4k 60p but otherwise I don’t think it’s quite as complete a camera as the S5ii. And if you were already in the system, no reason to change. 
The Z6iii will be the next interesting one I am sure, at least equalling the S5ii for video and stills but taking the overall experience to the next level. I think…
 

This video answers a lot about EIS high. I look forward to trying this out on Monday. This guy tried out lots of APS-C L-mount lenses- I was surprised how many there are now. Also, there are some that could be amazing with that 1.43x crop in EIS high. Here's the S5i with the Sigma 10-18. I imagine this would be a cheap, great combo.

I've long thought that if Panasonic makes just a little smaller L-mount camera (FF), they'll kill M43, especially with all the APS-C lenses now available. Right now, it seems M43 only has 4k 120fps and widely available smaller lenses; the rest is practically a wash, including price. 
 

I like the idea of Auto-WB and have done it many times. The only issue I have with the idea is when the camera decides to alter the WB mid shot; then I need to go through the footage and try to correct. It always seems to look strange. Panasonic, in general, isn't so bad at this, but my camcorder (VX980/81) is more agressive with this.
If I shoot in daylight WB and just make sure I don't turn on any lights (or add daylight lighting), the shots will look generally great. If I'm off a little, I can correct the whole thing at once.

Thinking about this more, I think there are three different approaches.
The first is to shoot manually and get it perfect every time.  Not even the pros do this with completely controlled sets.  Colourists say that they're always making small changes to WB on a shot-by-shot basis, even on big budget productions, so this is only mentioned to make sure we understand that we will be dealing with small changes in post.
The second is to shoot on a manual WB.
This will mean that you're going to get errors in the WB, potentially being quite noticeable, but they're likely to mostly be in the warm/cool Temp direction.
The third is to shoot on auto-WB.
I've found that, on my Panasonic cameras at least, the WB errors are pretty minor, and the WB is pretty close - even if the lighting is quite variable and I'm taking shots from different angles and in different locations etc.  
This means that you'll be making only very small corrections, but they could be in the magenta/green Tint axis as well as the warm/cool Temp direction.  We're quite sensitive to Tint errors, so this means that adjusting these is a bit more fiddly, and can take some practice, but is perfectly possible.
I know that when I shoot I am very likely to completely forget a manually set WB, and will end up shooting a whole evening at 6500K and it'll be so warm it'll look like I shot it through a jar of honey, so I shoot auto-WB and therefore inevitably have to make minor corrections in post but never have to make large ones.
Going back to the minor curves that are part of the Look, and how we can't un-do in post because we don't have a complete profile of that camera/look combination, shooting on auto-WB will mean that these get applied to the footage in a place that will likely only be a very small distance from where they should have been if the shot had perfect WB.  
Obviously this still depends on your camera, the profile, your colour management pipeline, the tools in your software, your skill in applying them, and the weather and position of the stars etc...  so this is also something that you would be best testing for yourself too.

Good question.
I think the fundamental challenge of making corrections in post is having the tool operate in a colour space that matches the footage as closely as possible.  
For example, if your footage is in Linear, and you have a node in Linear, and you adjust the Gain wheel (which literally applies gain by doing a simple multiplication) then they match exactly and the result will be a perfect exposure or WB change, just like it was done in camera.  If you get your colour management pipeline correct then you can get this practically perfect adjustment for LOG footage too.
The challenge comes when the camera records in 709.  This is mostly because cameras don't just do a CST from Linear to 709, they apply all sorts of "make it look lovely" sort of small tweaks.  When we record in the wrong exposure or WB then these tweaks get applied wrongly.  For example, the profile might compress the skintones, and do so by expanding the reds and yellows on either side.  If you shoot a clip where the skintones are too yellow then your skintones might get expanded rather than compressed.  No CST will un-do all these small tweaks, so you're left with an image that's curved in all the wrong places rather than all the right ones.
So, what happens in practice is it comes down to the individual profile you choose (which will have its own unique set of tiny curves that make that look) and your own ability to manipulate it using the right combination of tools to get the most pleasing result.  My results vary mostly based on the luck that I had when correcting each individual test image - your results will likely suffer the same variance unless you're a far better colourist than I am.
I'd suggest you do your own tests.  Either find a spot in the shade on a sunny day, or even better is to do it on a cloudy day.  Do a manual WB against a grey card (or piece of white copy paper if you don't have a grey card), then just shoot a clip of yourself (or a volunteer model if you can get one 🙂 ).  Then shoot a range of test clips setting the Colour Temp manually.  Then just pull them all into post and see which tools seem to work the best for you, and which gives you the more pleasing looks.
One thing I did notice was that I had trouble getting the blacks and shadows to be right when the skintones were dialled in, with them tending to be the opposite of the original tint on the image (ie, if the image was warm then the correction ended up with cooler shadows) so with everything else being equal that might be a reason to go warmer so you get a bit of colour separation in the final images.

As you were the one that asked for skin tones, was there a specific situation you were thinking of when you asked?
I thought your question might be related to your adventures with the GX850 and shooting out in the real-world?

Thank you so much for this hard work. I'm going to look further into this during my holiday.
Yes, some of the images with wrong WB and underexposed would be expected to be trash, but it's nice to know there are some editing techniques that save it a little. In all honesty, I'd probably just go for monochrome or tint if this were to happen to me.

Shot a bunch of test shots, this time with skintones.  I shot the usual shots gradually under-exposing, but instead of changing the WB in-camera manually to create the off-WB shots I bought a pack of flash gels and held them in front of the single LED light.
Also, as @John Matthews enquired about skintones, I have just done a first attempt at grading for the skintones rather than the chart.  I looked at the chart of course, but considering that people is what the audience is looking at in the image, skintones are vastly more important.  So I didn't try to get the greyscale on the test chart perfect, or correct the highlights or shadows perfectly, etc.
The first image is the reference.  Those following that are each one-stop darker than the previous one.  Then comes the gels.  The gels are so strong they're essentially a stress test, not how anyone would / should / will be shooting, but it's nice to see where the limits are.
The first set is using only the basic grading controls and no colour management:

The results aren't perfect, but if you're shooting this horrifically then you don't deserve good images anyway!  What is interesting is that some images fell straight into line and I felt like I was fighting with the controls on others, but this had no correlation with how large a correction was required.  I suspect it's my inexperience and getting lucky on some shots and unlucky on others - sometimes I'd create a new version and reset and have another go and get significantly better (or worse) results than the previous one.  No single technique or approach seemed reliable between images.  
The next set had colour management involved and grading was done in a LOG space:


I also felt this set was very hit and miss in grading.
This next set was a different set of tools again, and I added the Kodak 2383 Print Film Emulation LUT at the end.  I did this because any serious colour grading work done in post is likely to be through a 'look' of some kind and the heavier the look is the more it obscures small differences in the source images being fed into it.


Next set was a different set of tools, but keeping the 2383 LUT in the grade:


...and the final set was adding a film-like grade in addition to the Kodak 2383 LUT.  I mean, no self-respecting colourist would be using a PFE LUT as the only element of their final look...  right?


All in all, I am pretty impressed with how much latitude is in the files, and although lots of the above results aren't the nicest images ever made, if you're shooting anywhere close to correctly then the artefacts after correction are going to be incredibly minor, and if you actually shot something that was 2 stops under and was lit by a single candle using a daylight WB then you'd be pretty freaking happy with the results because you would have been thinking that that your film was completely ruined.
This is all even more true if your shots were all shot badly but using the same wrong settings, as the artefacts from neutralising the images you apply will be consistent between shots and so will have a common look.
I'm also quite surprised at how the skintones seem to survive much greater abuse than the colour chart - lots of the images are missing one whole side of the colour wheel and yet the skintones just look like you decided on the bleach-bypass look for your film and you actually know what you're doing.  The fact that half the colour chart is missing likely won't matter that much because the patches on the colour chart are very strongly saturated and real-life scenes mostly don't contain anything even close to those colours.
I'm still working on this (and in fact am programming my own set of plugins) so there will be more on this to come, especially as now I have a good set of test images.  
I think I should find a series of real-world shots that only require a small adjustment so I can demo the small changes required on real projects.

I guess once it's released we'll see a new round of strange AF testing from the YT camera gaggle!

New firmware update just announced: https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/firmware_update.html
 

We all know that cameras produce (sometimes dramatically) different images and image quality, and yet we also know that within a given price range those same cameras typically use the same sensors from Sony and are recording to the same codecs in basically the same bitrates.  It's maddening!
So, WTF is going on?  
Well, I just came upon this talk below, which goes through and demonstrates some of the inner workings in greater detail than I had previously seen:
It's long, but here's my notes...
Firstly, how you de-mosaic / de-bayer the image really matters, with some algorithms being higher quality and require higher processing power:
(Click on the images to zoom in - quality isn't the best but the effects are visible)


If you're not shooting RAW then this will be done in-camera, and if your manufacturer skimped on the processor they put in there, this will be happening to your footage.
If the camera is scaling the image, then the quality of this matters too:

and if the scaling even gets done in the wrong colour space then it can really screw things up:

There's more discussions in there, especially around colour science which has been discussed to death, but I thought these might be illuminating as it's not something we get to see that much because it's buried in the camera and typically it's not something we can easily play with in the NLE.
All these add up to a fundamental principle that I have been gradually gravitating towards.
If you're shooting non-RAW then shoot in the highest resolution you can shoot in, and just un-sharpen (blur) the image in post.
Shooting in the highest resolution means that your camera will be doing the least downscaling (or none), and most glitches and bad processing will be at the pixel-level, which means that the higher the resolution the smaller those glitches and errors compared to the size of the image, and un-sharpening de-emphasises these in the footage.  
You might notice that all of these shortcomings make the footage sharper, not duller, so the errors have made your footage sharp but in a way that it never was - it's fictional sharpness.
Also, the more modern displays are also themselves becoming sharper, so it's no wonder that footage all now looks like those glitch websites from the late 90s that were trying to be cool but looked like a graphic designer threw up into them...

FilmLight (who make BaseLight which is the Resolve competitor that costs as much as a house) seem to be on a mission to get deeper into the image and bring along the industry on that journey, and I'm really appreciative of their efforts as they're providing more insight into things we can do to get better images and get more value from our limited budgets.

I've had some great bits of luck recently by using search terms that reflect what a person who didn't know what they had would use as a listing title - 'camera light' and so on... then sorting by Ending Soonest.

I've purchased some new and some used. If you're super lucky, you can buy new for used prices. IMO, that is the time to buy. For Panasonic, it's during Black Friday. A few years back, I got the Olympus E-P7 with the kit lens and the Olympus 75mm f/1.8 for 899 euros. That's probably the best deal I've ever found for new. In France, you have leboncoin, which is very good too with some amazing deals from people who just want to unload material or just don't understand what they have. When you buy, you have the choice of sending it back. If you know your cameras, you can thoroughly test it. Buying off Ebay is an option too, but you never seem to find good deals anymore (I gave up). MBP is also a great choice, but they're too expensive for some cameras and lenses.

When I saw Johns post I did a little searching to see if there were other faster options around the 17mm mark..  just for curiosity here are all the options I could find:
Sigma 16mm F1.4 (large) Oly 17mm F1.2 (large) Voigtlander 17.5 F0.95 (MF) Panny 15mm F1.7 TTartisans 17mm F1.4 (MF) Mitakon Zhongyi 17mm F0.95 (MF) Laowa 17mm f/1.8 (MF) I'm guessing that if you care about having a small AF lens then there aren't that many options, but lots of people have had a go in that FOV range!

I'm thinking about replacing my old Pana 20mm F1.7 (with slow and noisy AF) with the Oly 17mm F1.8. I find I commonly use around 18mm as a focal length on zoom lenses, so having a fast (and quiet) prime at that length makes sense for me.

The 14-140 is definitely on my short list. I think I might go with the 17mm f/1.8 for indoor stuff/low-light.

My combo is usually the 14-140mm plus 25mm F1.8.
On my last 'serious' trip (almost two weeks of railway video/stills photography in Southern California), I took a G9 + 14-140mm + 25mm F1.8 (for low light), used hand-held, with G80 + 12-32mm used as an occasional tripod-mounted 'B' cam. I took the G80 instead of the (smaller) GX80 because it has a mic jack.
If I were doing a similar trip now I think it would be OM-1 (main) and ZV-1 (B-cam), but lens choice for the OM-1 would be harder as I recently bought a used Oly 12-100mm F4 IS Pro. It's much larger and heavier than the 14-140mm Pana, but it supports Sync-IS on Oly/OMDS bodies and the overall stabilisation performance is fantastic.
If you buy a used Pana 14-140mm F3.5-F5.6, be careful about which version you are getting. Panasonic sold the Mk 1 version (H-FS14140) in two different markings - white, gold and red 'HD' lettering (earlier lenses) or all white lettering (later lenses). Then they updated it to the Mk 2 (H-FSA14140) with weather sealing and all white lettering. AFAIK all are optically the same, and support Dual-IS and Dual-IS2. I've come across dealers who've mixed up the white-lettered later Mk 1 and the Mk 2 versions in their used listings...

I think this is about the sum of it, at least from the ‘quality’ side of things.
I think raw only came to iPhone with the 12, but could be wrong and for me as someone who only shoots raw, probably part of my personal ‘disconnect’ from photography using my phone as in I have not been using it’s full potential.
Also, whilst I don’t need to be in ‘full on pro mode’ all the time (when not actually working), I probably need to get out of ‘point & click phone mode’ when using my phone and use it more like a camera. If that makes sense?
Something I probably need to explore…
 
 

My friend takes stills of his family holidays and has an ancient relic (IIRC it's a Canon 30D?) that he would always take with him.  He is a minimalist and was sick of hauling it around so did his first overseas trip without it and used his iPhone 5 (current at the time).  He took a bunch of photos on the trip, but when I asked him about it his thinking wasn't clear.  On his next trip he took an updated iPhone (maybe an 8?) and took lots of photos again, but still didn't have clear thinking about it.
It was only several years later that he had a good reply, he said "The photos look fine but I realised that I never felt compelled to print and hang any of the photos from it".  He still can't define what it is, but something is missing for him.  I've looked at the prints he's got hanging in his house and the difference isn't obvious - it's not like his prints have shallow DOF or anything, they just have this timeless sort of look about them, and his iPhone pics all look like iPhone pics (unsurprisingly).
Even the RAW stills from my GF3 from 2011 don't look like iPhone pics, even the current ones.  It might be a matter of blurring the iPhone images a bit, and toning down the strong saturation and contrast, who knows, but maybe they'll get over that hurdle soon.  Maybe they already have - I still have an iPhone 12 mini and don't use the stills in my creative work.
TBH it's probably the "everything is awesome!!" processing that Apple do to their images.  Maybe the RAW images off the sensor are fine.