dgvro

Yeah, I could tell pretty quickly this camera's IBIS wasn't performing as good as my GH5, which again probably gets outperformed slightly by the Olympus. It's a shame, really had me considering returning my XT4 but compared to the GH5, the slightly neater form factor and usable autofocus is just something game-changing for me in terms of casually bringing the camera with me way more places. I used to NEVER want to bring my GH5 anywhere for some reason.
I've since come to realise how great the image quality is too, beating my old GH5 easily at anything higher than 1600 ISO and seeming to have (in part due to ISO performance I guess) cleaner slowmotion 1080 etc all the way up to 200fps (240fps just pushes it a bit too far and most clips don't look good enough, but this is how it goes with cameras' absolute max VFR FPS, I know). I appreciate other little XT4 victories that were limitations on GH5, such as way beefier codecs when you consider you get HEVC h.265 10-bit even in the high frame rate 1080 modes. I used to hate knowing that mixing the 10bit with 8bit(VFR) on my GH5 maybe meant not being able to grade them quite as hard with the 8-bit mixed in. In 4K (up to 30p) the HEVC 400MBPS codec is fantastic to have, and 200MBPS h265 up to 60p is always gonna be enough for me too, given the extra % visible image info saved in h.265 for a given bitrate vs h.264 (40% or something apparently?) Oh, and HLG availabe in all the recording modes. I never got my hands on v-Log with the GH5 and was always bummed I suddenly couldn't use HLG in the high framerate slow mo modes.

I was really, really thinking of downgrading to an XH1 or XT3 but I'm pretty hsppy and trying to just let it go, hope for a firmware improvement.
If an XH2 comes along with something like 4K in higher framerate and better IBIS, I just might be trying to jump ship then.

Again I've found that the XT4 IBIS actually plays a bit nicer - when using a manual lens setup that lets you enter the focal length setting yourself - if you enter a shorter focal length than the real one. There's still plenty of stabilisation on offer to filter out real hand shakiness, but the camera thinking it's at a shorter focal length (say x0.7) seems to mean the grabby 'catch-up' jitters of the sensor are mitigated a lot. It just works better for me. I'm still afraid to try anything longer than about 35mm on this camera handheld for video though. The IBIS just gets defeated and exasperated by anything Tele.
 
With the Fuji electronic lens protocol being opened up to third parties more lately I'm hopeful about the future in terms of competitive lenses and adaptors too (definitely going to get the Viltrox speedbooster at some point, it was a godsend on my GH5. Fringer sounds great too, I'm torn, I'm not fully all-in on needing usable AF or anything so may go Viltrrox 'booster route)

Another cool thing I noticed: with the XT4 I seemed to able to record 400mpbs clips for several minutes at a time to a Sandisk card that's only really around <V30. No idea why this is. My GH5 would always see the same SanDisk card lose the recording in under a minute.

Oh, and stills! I'm not really a stills guy at all yet but obviously this is the camera for a hybrid shooter, I like what I see from it so far and look forward to snapping more and more with it. Again, nothing since my Panasonic GX8 all the way through models up to GH5 really gave me that feeling (well, except for when I owned an XH1 briefly, which seemed very good), the stills just always felt like a struggle, mediocre results.

Man, yeah. Lots of complex emotion on this for me over the last week. I’m a white Minnesotan, working 6 days a week even during COVID-19... I thought about photographing/video documenting, and I agree it is incredibly important work and that things must be seen. 
 
But my heart is broken. Just straight ripped apart. I just got home from two days In Minneapolis/St. Paul, and I’m glad I didn’t bring a camera, and I left my phone in my bag. There’s a LOT of I guess I’d call it “social justice tourism” going on, and that just sits uneasy with me. Like, people were posing with their friends and signs for selfies, and then leaving the sit-in at the capitol before it was done... even more selfies with the George Floyd mural at Cup Foods. Don’t get me wrong, it is good that those people are at least engaging on some level, but social media is already drowning in this stuff at the moment, that isn’t necessarily an efficient vehicle for change. 
 
I don’t need pictures to communicate what I’ve seen with my own eyes. I saw the entire capitol lawn filled to bursting with beautiful peaceful people all afternoon, championing full institutional overhaul of the oppressive system... which by the way was organized and led by FREAKING HIGHSCHOOL STUDENTS, who were all more articulate than yours truly.
 
I worked alongside hundreds of my fellow Minnesotans ALL DAY yesterday as we packed food and household supplies for our neighbors in need. We were tired. We were drenched in sweat. It was beautiful. Emotions, events, words and actions are in the highest contrast in this moment.
 
Sometimes you’ve gotta leave the camera behind and commit your full self to being present. And I must say this: while the news has been reporting both the peaceful protests and the unrest, the time devoted to each is woefully disproportionate to the time Minnesotans have been devoting to each. Yes there has been some destruction and some violence. But there is an immeasurably larger effort of peaceful demand for justice.
 
Heres the only picture from today, snapped by a construction worker on an adjacent building and texted to one of the church food drive organizers. All of those bags of groceries were gone within half an hour. The need is real, but Minnesotans are rising to the occasion, government or no government.

Frontline riot photographer...what is that ? Wedding photographer, I know... but Frontline riot photographer.
"...I'm risking my life to cover this story (gunshots, rocks, fire, tear gas, etc.)"
I think it's the etc. that pose a problem here. Anyone with a camera "feel the need to document" the riot. So cool, you don't have to travel to war zone like Syria or Yemen to be in the boots of a photojournalist, just go downtown, to get a shot of adrenaline. The smell of tear gas is so exciting my dear ! Do you think I should take a ND filter, because yesterday I couldn't focus well with the flash grenade. No joke, last time I saw on the news, a lady with a gimbal running with the protesters. Next is what ? slow mo with a Phantom ? 360 VR ?
The same people are taking pictures of homeless, you know...to document poverty. All of that, to feed social media and get followers. Pathetic.
When you introduce yourself saying:
Frontline riot photographer.
"...I'm risking my life to cover this story (gunshots, rocks, fire, tear gas, etc.)"
it's an insult to photojournalist who died, doing their job.

Yeah, I could tell pretty quickly this camera's IBIS wasn't performing as good as my GH5, which again probably gets outperformed slightly by the Olympus. It's a shame, really had me considering returning my XT4 but compared to the GH5, the slightly neater form factor and usable autofocus is just something game-changing for me in terms of casually bringing the camera with me way more places. I used to NEVER want to bring my GH5 anywhere for some reason.
I've since come to realise how great the image quality is too, beating my old GH5 easily at anything higher than 1600 ISO and seeming to have (in part due to ISO performance I guess) cleaner slowmotion 1080 etc all the way up to 200fps (240fps just pushes it a bit too far and most clips don't look good enough, but this is how it goes with cameras' absolute max VFR FPS, I know). I appreciate other little XT4 victories that were limitations on GH5, such as way beefier codecs when you consider you get HEVC h.265 10-bit even in the high frame rate 1080 modes. I used to hate knowing that mixing the 10bit with 8bit(VFR) on my GH5 maybe meant not being able to grade them quite as hard with the 8-bit mixed in. In 4K (up to 30p) the HEVC 400MBPS codec is fantastic to have, and 200MBPS h265 up to 60p is always gonna be enough for me too, given the extra % visible image info saved in h.265 for a given bitrate vs h.264 (40% or something apparently?) Oh, and HLG availabe in all the recording modes. I never got my hands on v-Log with the GH5 and was always bummed I suddenly couldn't use HLG in the high framerate slow mo modes.

I was really, really thinking of downgrading to an XH1 or XT3 but I'm pretty hsppy and trying to just let it go, hope for a firmware improvement.
If an XH2 comes along with something like 4K in higher framerate and better IBIS, I just might be trying to jump ship then.

Again I've found that the XT4 IBIS actually plays a bit nicer - when using a manual lens setup that lets you enter the focal length setting yourself - if you enter a shorter focal length than the real one. There's still plenty of stabilisation on offer to filter out real hand shakiness, but the camera thinking it's at a shorter focal length (say x0.7) seems to mean the grabby 'catch-up' jitters of the sensor are mitigated a lot. It just works better for me. I'm still afraid to try anything longer than about 35mm on this camera handheld for video though. The IBIS just gets defeated and exasperated by anything Tele.
 
With the Fuji electronic lens protocol being opened up to third parties more lately I'm hopeful about the future in terms of competitive lenses and adaptors too (definitely going to get the Viltrox speedbooster at some point, it was a godsend on my GH5. Fringer sounds great too, I'm torn, I'm not fully all-in on needing usable AF or anything so may go Viltrrox 'booster route)

Another cool thing I noticed: with the XT4 I seemed to able to record 400mpbs clips for several minutes at a time to a Sandisk card that's only really around <V30. No idea why this is. My GH5 would always see the same SanDisk card lose the recording in under a minute.

Oh, and stills! I'm not really a stills guy at all yet but obviously this is the camera for a hybrid shooter, I like what I see from it so far and look forward to snapping more and more with it. Again, nothing since my Panasonic GX8 all the way through models up to GH5 really gave me that feeling (well, except for when I owned an XH1 briefly, which seemed very good), the stills just always felt like a struggle, mediocre results.

The issue this video covers was already mentioned in several topics, but I promised a video explanation and fixes, so here it is.
Beware: long, boring, bad English.
 

If anyone besides me use HLG, here is a little normalization LUT I'm guilty of.
I didn't use any charts, so it may be slightly untruthful and inaccurate..
( :
No need to overexpose, it's designed to bring out as much DR as possible while still achieving black and white points.
 
 

Beautiful video, best stuff I've seen so far out of the XT4 (particularly handheld) really. His shots don't appear to make the IBIS issues (jumpiness is there) look so terrible.
 
I have the camera a few days now, I use it only with manual lenses. I've been pretty sickened with the IBIS issues, having come from a GH5, it's a lot worse. Very close to returning it and just saving money with an XT3 or XH1 but still undecided... I do own a gimbal (which makes the XT3 even more viable).
I think the best tactic I've found so far is to (avoid DIS at all costs), set the focal mount length to about x0.64 to x0.71 of the real focal length. The sticky, stepping, grabbiness of the IBIS is still there I guess but it's downscaled, mitigated to something pretty usable that, crucially, still is enough that it smooths out your actual UN-intentional hand shakiness. Its ugly little quantised steps in sensor movement are smaller, but there's still enough IBIS to look smoother than pure handheld without IBIS.

The huge catch here is that I guess Fuji doesn't allow you to set the focal mount length yourself when any lens is attached with electronic communication. So I don't know what the hell I'll be able to do then to improve the stabilisation stickiness. An EASY band-aid for the video IBIS imo would be to always allow the user to set a downscaled focal mount length like this to mitigate the over zealous IBIS.
 
Anyone else found similar stuff when testing the IBIS?
 
I know the DIS is bad (except for purely static 'tripod-like') shots, but I'm still unsure if IS Boost is helping or harming. Results seem to vary with it all the time.
Haven't used any OIS lenses with Fuji yet but I'm pretty sure I'm not really interested in them. For video the lens OIS always causes grabby stepping jitters imo and anyway it just reduces the glass options, so, so much.

A video from a professional DP.
He also reports "some weird IBIS issues".