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Apart from RED, ARRI, and BMD, and the latest crop of RAW-internal cameras, were there any other cameras that shot RAW internally? I didn't think there were many/any others that shot RAW internally?

Thanks 🙂 Yes, I'll be grabbing one when there's a reason for me to own one... No plans to go anywhere for quite some time yet, unfortunately! In terms of HDR, there are actually two conversations. One is on HDR acquisition, and the other is in delivery. HDR Acquisition - we already have HDR acquisition, and have had it for decades! The rec709 container has about 5.2 stops of DR (source from Sony) - so any time you're capturing images with a camera that has more than 6 stops of DR and delivering 709, then you're capturing more DR than you can output, which is why we talk about highlight and shadow rolloffs - we need to squeeze the 10+ stops of acquisition DR into the output gamma. In terms of HDR delivery, yes, everything that the colourists are talking about is relevant here. In terms of the GH6, I don't care about HDR delivery - it's about capturing the scene as it exists. The output format doesn't matter if I can't do that at the point of capture. or, if you're just interested in what's in and out of bounds, maybe a LUT that just colours anything outside that range with 100% blue to indicate clipping? I'd imagine someone would have made a technical LUT like that surely? The Veydras / Meike lenses would be perfect - especially with the better low-light of the GH6 better catering to the slower T2.2 from those ranges. I thought the consensus was that the Meike lenses were basically slightly different housings on the same glass? Still, both are great lens sets! I think this whole "MFT only has value because it's cheaper" thing is complete BS. When a person is able to go out into the field, point their camera at something worth seeing, get the subject in-focus, exposed well, compose appropriately, and get a high quality file onto a memory card or SSD, then who gives even the most remote flying f*ck what camera that was shot on? If Sony released a FF camera the a100C that was $99.95 would that make all other FF cameras problematic because of their price? "Oh, the A7S3 is a nice camera and all, but it's 40x as expensive as the a100C, so I just can't see how it's worth it". A camera is a box that you plug glass, audio, a battery, and a memory card into, and you point it at stuff and it turns light into digital files. Seriously 🙂 I mean, if we're going to hold onto MFT starting as being cheaper then why aren't we holding onto FF being film? I don't know about this R5 - FF cameras started off as film and I really don't like that they're all digital now. MFT was always digital - FF should stick to its roots.. it's so sad what FF has turned into really. 😔😔😔

I think the GH6 is a triumph of incremental upgrades that provide a real difference when shooting run-n-gun video in the real world. With the headline features so prominent, it's easy to miss the many smaller improvements that can actually make a big difference to shooting. We talk about cameras like they're museum pieces or engineering spectacles, but often these things don't translate to the real world. The following are my views of the GH6 from the perspective of a travel videographer upgrading from the GH5. I've tried to include as many example images as I can - please note that these aren't fully graded and are often compromised due to me pushing the limits of what is possible from the GH5, what was possible under the circumstances, and what my limited skills could create... But let's get some obvious things out of the way first. Things I don't care about..... Autofocus The AF is improved. People who used the GH5 AF will like the GH6 AF, and people who didn't like the GH5 AF probably won't be moved by the GH6 AF. I don't use it, basically ever, so I don't care. If you do care, then good for you.. move along, nothing to see here. Extra resolution There's more resolution, but the GH5 had enough resolution for downsampled DCI4K and lower resolutions, and the 2x digital zoom and ETC modes provided useful cropping modes as well. The extra resolution doesn't really matter to me. Size and weight I care about this a lot actually, but it's not substantially larger than the GH5 from the front, which is the dimension that matters when filming in public. The extra depth is immaterial when you have a lens on the camera. The extra weight is unfortunate, but isn't that much and is well worth it for the fan and screen improvements. Internal Prores Prores is a professional codec that offers considerable improvements throughout the whole workflow. I'm not going to say much else on this as I created another thread to talk about this but it's great to have the option, and I definitely appreciate it. Many people were happy with the GH5s codecs, especially the 10-bit 422 ALL-I codecs, which were a shining beacon in a sea of poor-quality IPB cameras, but even those have been improved.... Huge improvements on h264/h265 codecs The GH5 had 200Mbps 1080p and 400Mbps DCI4K, but the slow-motion modes are limited to 150Mbps (4K60) 200Mbps (1080p60) or 100Mbps (1080pVFR up to 180fps) and the effective bitrate dropped significantly when you conform your 60p or 180p footage to 24p - as low as 13Mbps!!. The GH6 has 4K60 at up to 600Mbps (SD card) or 800Mbps (CFexpress type B) - an effective bitrate of 320Mbps, and in 1080p240 800Mbps which is an effective bitrate of 80Mbps. Oh, and these are all 10-bit 422 ALL-I, as opposed to the GH5 8-bit 420 IPB. Oh, and also also, the 120p is now in 4K too. If you're shooting sports this is a big deal as often players are in direct sunlight, depending on the time of day there might not be much ambient fill light, and any reflections from the field may be strange colours such as green grass, or various coloured artificial turf, which will drastically benefit from the 422 10-bit when colour correcting footage. The extra bitrate is also great for having clean images when players may be bright against a very dark background really highlighting any compression nasties on their edges. The ALL-I will be great in post too. I'm curious to see what the 300fps looks like in real-world situations, but I've shot a lot of sports with 120p and it seems slow enough to me. Dynamic Range Boost This is a big deal for anyone recording in uncontrolled conditions, and especially for travel. This isn't a vanity exercise or BS tech nerdery, this is a real creative consideration. When you're shooting travel, the film is about the location and the experience of the people in that location, and the weather is a key consideration of this. With the GH5 I often had to choose between clipping the highlights (ie, sky) and exposing for the people. I also chose to expose for the sky on my XC10 and in combination with 8-bit C-Log recorded a large amount of spectacularly-awful looking footage of my honeymoon. Here's a frame of C-Log SOOC from that debacle: The shot was also mixed lighting with the subject in the shade, being lit by a coloured Italian shop-front immediately behind me that was in full sun.... Being forced to decide between the subject and the sky is problematic if the shot you want is "person at location X at sunset" and you can't feature that person and also the sunset. It's also relevant for anywhere with tall buildings that create deep shade - the below is a nice dynamic image but it's a tad overdone and not how we actually see the world: My experience with shooting the OG BMPCC / BMMCC is that their ~2 stop advantage in DR over the GH5 almost completely covers this gap. Images with someone standing in-front of a sunset no longer feature either an anonymous shadow person swimming in technicolour-grain or a digitally clipped sky. The GH6 DR Boost feature will help in these situations, allowing subjects to be filmed in-context rather than only in select locations were the light is just right but the scene is irrelevant. Would more be better? Sure. I can hear lots of people thinking "go full frame then - moron" but the GH5 was (until now) a camera with a unique set of features not bettered by any other offering for this type of travel shooting, so while the current alternatives give with one hand they also take away with the other, normally taking away a lot more than they give. Full V-Log Having a colour profile that is supported natively by Resolve is a huge thing for me, as it allows WB and exposure adjustments to be done in post without screwing up the colours. This is important because in shooting travel there are times when you can't even stop walking to get a shot, let alone have enough time to pause, get exposure dialled in, and heaven-forbid to pull out a grey-card and do a custom WB! A great man once said "tell him he's dreamin"! This lighting all looked neutral to the naked eye - GH5 HLG SOOC: The advice I got from the colourists on that was to lean into it and just pick one or the other and balance to those, but sometimes the mixed lighting isn't really something you want to lean into.... GH5 HLG SOOC - look at the colour temperatures on the grey sleeve from what appears to be the strip-light from hell hanging just above their heads: Better Low-light performance Filming in available light in uncontrolled conditions often means needing to use high ISO settings. This is a shot I've posted many times before, and the BTS of me shooting it, in a row-boat lit only by the floodlights on the river bank maybe 50m away. Notice that the smartphone taking the BTS photo couldn't even focus due to the low-lighting. It was using the GH5 in full-auto (likely a 360-degree shutter) and with the Voigtlander wide open at F0.95. I don't know what the ISO on the shot would have been, but there's quite a bit of noise, especially considering this is a UHD clip downsampled from 5K in-camera (200% zoom on a UHD timeline): I don't mind the quality of the noise actually, and it responds to sharpening really well giving quite an analogue image feel, but if the image is this noisy then the colours aren't going to be at their best, and that isn't desirable. There are a number of fast primes on MFT (ie, faster than F2) but getting sharp images wide-open is problematic, even from the very-expensive Voigtlander f0.95 primes. The GH6's improved low-light is great, and not only does it allow recording in ever-darker environments, but it also allows the use of modest lenses and faster lenses stopped down to be within a higher quality part of their aperture range. An extra $1000 cost on the body of a camera seems like a lot, but if it saves you $500 on every lens because you can buy slower lenses then it's an investment that has a reasonable return. ...and lest you think that the above is an extreme example, having good low-light performance is really just about filming people doing what they're doing, and in case somehow you haven't noticed, it's dark outside about half the time and people go out into it and do things. Another example, here's a shot taken right at the end of blue-hour: and minutes later, here's a shot showing what you can get when lit only by the light of a phone, and providing a reference for how dark this location was: Think of the benefits of better low-light performance here.... it's very low-light, mixed colour temperature lighting, and the main feature is skintones. The noise on the GH5, with the Voigtlander wide open is pretty brutal: New Screen My XC10 has amongst the nicest ergonomics of any camera and a big part of that for me was the tilt screen that didn't get in the way when using your right hand to hold the camera and the left to support the camera and manually focus the lens. The fact that the new GH6 screen allows for both tilting as well as for flipping is great. Contrary to what many believe, the 'flippy' screen is actually very useful for filming things other than yourself. Any time when you cannot stand directly behind the camera is when the flipping screen is useful. I have used it while filming out of windows (such as in moving vehicles, filming the view around the corner of a panorama framed by an arch, or taking a sneaky shot of the kids around a corner without them spotting me and pulling faces). Sometimes you need to hold the camera in funny ways to get a shot: They're also very useful for those who want to take vertical photos from a low or high angle. Fan The GH5 never overheated on me, even in desert conditions, unlike my iPhones have on many occasions, and the GH6 will never overheat either. It's not an "improvement" in the sense that it doesn't offer anything new, but it is a guarantee that all the extra other features won't come at an unacceptable cost. Having a camera that overheats is just stupid, and Panasonic doesn't insult us by providing tools that aren't reliable. Punch-in while recording Checking focus while recording is a pretty fundamental thing, and the GH5 didn't have it (and didn't have the best focus peaking either) but now the GH6 does. Boom. Custom Frame Guides The frame guides on the GH5 were worthless - pale dotted lines that were difficult to see under ideal conditions, let alone while holding the camera at arms length in a moving vehicle. The GH6 has custom frame guides that have a much more visible outline and also dim the out-of-area image, making it super easy and intuitive to use. Frame from @Tito Ferradans review on YouTube: I might be tempted to engage this for a 2.35:1 permanently and then choose what ratio to use in-post when I get to editing. I've tried to shoot for this ratio before with the GH5, forgot and couldn't see the frame guides and intuitively composed like normal, and then downloaded the footage and found that I'd framed every shot too close for the ratio. Fail. Buttons and controls The GH6 has more programmable buttons than the GH5 (which was already great), and the extra custom slot C4 on the mode dial is very welcome. I have my GH5 configured to be C1 1080p24, C2 1080p60, C3-1 1080p120, C3-2 4K24 (in case there's something I'd need 24p for), and C3-3 as 4K manual everything for shooting camera tests. The first four modes are ones I want to just be one dial away while I'm out shooting, so having the extra one is really useful. The GH5 also saved the preset focal lengths for the IBIS on a per-profile basis, so when you switch profiles you switch focal lengths. This is important because when the camera goes to sleep it wakes up but forgets the focal length and goes back to the default one for that profile. As such, you could duplicate profiles and use them to swap between focal lengths, like if you were recording sports on a manual zoom lens, just to name a purely-theoretical example that no-one would ever contemplate.... Better IBIS The GH5 IBIS is great, and when you shoot with fully manual primes and without a rig, is an important function. Having improved IBIS on the GH6 is very welcome and can really help salvage shots that wouldn't otherwise have made the cut. One of the killer features of action cameras is that you can put them anywhere and get a huge variety of images while out in the real world, and that works for MILCs too, but if you're balancing on a chair and shooting at full arms-reach to get a shot and the IBIS isn't able to take up the slack and stabilise it, then it won't make the edit. It doesn't matter how good the stabilisation of something is, there are instances where it will fail, and I seem to keep finding them. USB-C port The Prores and high bitrates will chew through storage and the ability directly record to an SSD would be spectacular. Being able to charge the camera with USB-C would also be useful in some instances. In camera LUT support I'm yet to see how this is implemented but LUTs can be great references while shooting. You can use LUTs for things like false-colour, sure, but I'll be very interested in experimenting with ones that are very high contrast to allow for better visibility in bright conditions, and other more extreme applications that help you get the shot. I normally use the EVF on the GH5 as it eliminates ambient light and adds another point of contact for better stabilisation, but sometimes you have to use the screen and it's not always ideal, so these could be useful for that. Better colour science? The GH5 colour science wasn't winning any awards, and the GH6 combination of V-Log + Prores + higher bitrates + higher DR seems to be noticeably better, which is a welcome improvement for me, especially as I am struggling to shoot in difficult situations often involving mixed WB lighting and other nasties. The latitude tests from CineD look spectacular: This will allow huge flexibility for imperfect shooting conditions. Many times I pull up the shadows in an image (maybe I was trying to get the subject and the sky in the shot - shock horror) only to find the shadows a tinted awful mess. If they look like the above then it will be tremendously useful in practice. 4-channel audio recording with the XLR module This is slightly tempting for me. In post I want a stereo ambient sound, and I also want a directional audio from a shotgun mic, ideally with a safety-track. I can get either of those with the GH5 pretty easily by using the Rode Videomic Pro Plus with the safety-track feature enabled, and simply unplug it when I want a stereo ambience track using the cameras internal microphones (which are good enough if you're only using this in combination with music and other sound-design). But the problem is that I don't know when something will happen, so if I'm recording stereo ambient sound I don't know if my subject will say something at the same time that a car goes past behind me, and I also don't know if my subject will say nothing while I'm recording directional mono audio and then before I know it we'll be somewhere else and I'll have no ambient audio from that location. If this situation seems far-fetched, you've obviously never been on a tour bus in a third-world country before, where you might get dropped off near a small market, you then walk though the market with your group, where there is a stall every 5 steps with a different composition / lighting / and ambient sounds, and there is literally only room for people to walk single-file and you don't have time to stop at each interesting booth for a minute as you capture different compositions and audio options without losing your tour guide. Being able to stop for a few seconds, smile at the person there, and grab a few seconds of action with directional audio and ambient sounds would be really useful. I don't fancy the added size of the module though. Audio screen The GH6 has an audio button function that brings up an audio screen showing all the audio things you'd want. Perfect for quickly checking how the audio is going. With so much going on while shooting it's easy to forget to look at the meters OSD, and having everything in one place seems excellent. I've screwed up the audio on many occasions, so this will be quite useful. In summary.... The GH6 has tonnes of little improvements that I think will make it a much more useful camera when out in the field recording things in difficult conditions as they happen. It looks like Panasonic has done a great job in not just grabbing headlines, but in actually taking the things that niggle or limit real shooters and making them better. Now, if only the world would return to a state where I'd feel remotely comfortable wandering out into it with a camera in hand.....

It seems rather odd that the GH6 dual-gain sensor only gets an extra two stops of DR compared to the GH5, and form what you're saying it could be even less than a two stop advantage. The dual-gain sensor seems like it could be considerably more difficult to design / manufacture etc so only getting 1-2 additional stops seems rather odd. Or is the GH6 sensor tech just not very high DR without the dual-gain function enabled? It seems like they wouldn't have skimped on the DR after putting so much effort into this feature.

Panasonic have announced that it'll get external RAW with Atomos recorders. My question is, have any of the cameras with internal RAW started off with external RAW only? I'm thinking that the external RAW may be an indicator that they've chosen that direction, rather than internal RAW. This makes sense, especially considering that Prores is internal, so even those who want to use a professional codec have an option for internal recording and the run-n-gun minimalist approach that this offers.

According to the CineD tests, here's the GH5 and BMPCC: and the GH6 has 12.8 / 11.5, so it's almost 2 stops, and slightly over the BMPCC sensor, which has a size disadvantage, but it's a reasonable question - technology marches on and 2012 was a looooooong time ago in silicon technology. It'll be interesting to see how it feels when I get one - the differences between the DR on the two cameras is very obvious when you take them out in the real world on a sunny day, that's for sure!

It depends on what you're trying to do really. Before the DSLR revolution shooting a video was likely an auto-SS kind of situation and shooting a film was more of a completely controlled full-manual situation. Really, the concept of shooting something that looks like a film but is shot like a video (ie, with no control over the situation) is something quite new and quite indulgent, in a sense. To want it all, so to speak. I will be the first to admit that it's what I do, I absolutely want to walk around in the world waving a camera around with one hand and somehow miraculously getting silver-screen quality images. Vloggers and low-budget film-makers and corporate and wedding and event videographers are often in this camp as well. But the industry hasn't really caught up. It will, and I'd imagine that in 5 years or so many video-first cameras will have auto-eND filters in them that can do it for you. I look forward to that day, but in the meantime I just use auto-SS for my videos (as they are actually videos) because for what I shoot, speed matters in getting the shot, where I currently sometimes catch the moment only by a couple of seconds and if I added having to adjust exposure to my camera operating responsibilities then I'd often miss shots entirely.

The HLG profile isn't exactly a standard (I've tested it) but it's relatively close to Rec2100 so you could try converting from that to V-Log and try the LUT on that. @hyalinejim might clarify the exact settings for that, but if you have a moment you could potentially try?

I suspect that they might be pushing the limits of the current technology so who knows what would be possible and what wouldn't be possible. I do know that CPU manufacturers have been hitting limitations on the technology and then having breakthroughs to surpass those limits every few years for decades and decades, and they're normally related to how small you can make things, so having a 6K sensor with all the processing and all the ADCs etc might well be nearing a limit, especially once you factor in the dual-gain functionality. Both the C70 DGO sensor and the Alexa ALEV sensors are lower resolution and physically larger, so they might be really pushing it - who knows. Panasonic were pretty good about squeezing lots of stuff out of the GH5 in firmware updates, so I'd imagine they'll do the same with the GH6, so watch this space 🙂 The slow-motion is one thing the GH6 has really upped, with the 4K120 and 1080p240 10-bit at 800Mbps, which is a huge upgrade from the 1080p 8-bit VFR bitrates on the GH5. I wear polarising sunglasses basically the whole time I'm outside (Australia has much more glare than most other places) and I frequently see strange things like patterns in different types of safety glass and strange reflections / textures from objects etc that are to do with the polarisation of the light. Even the blue of the sky doesn't look even because the polarisation of the very left of the sky is different from the middle and from the very right side, so lots of strange polarisation happens in real life. I don't shoot with NDs so I normally don't see these issues, but yeah, it's an interesting one. Might be worthwhile getting a set of fixed NDs to give you flexibility in case you hit something that just reacts strangely with the vNDs you have, and then you can just dial things in and fine-tune with aperture if required.

Yeah, send me a few frames - happy to have a play.

I was really happy when I realised that the GH5 2x in 1080p was downsampled - it is even downsampled in the 1080p60 too, so if you shoot 1080p ALL-I codec then you get full-readout and 2x digital zoom downsampled in every framerate, and you also get the 1:1 ETC which is a ~2.5x zoom. How odd that the larger cameras don't have as good video modes in this way. The GH5 was the flagship though so maybe the S1H has those modes? Fascinating about the 16-bit output. I guess it might depend on the sensor mode. IIRC other sensors sometimes have a higher bit-depth readout mode with limited fps, and then a reduced bit-depth mode where they get higher fps readouts, so maybe the 16-bit can only happen at 10fps or something. It would be great to see if that's possible at the 60fps speeds that the DR boost feature can do for video. That makes sense. Potentially then it's quite a different equation for your ND setup, but I keep thinking that all you need to do is work out what the maximum and minimum amount of ND you will need in daylight and just buy a fixed ND that compliments your vND to give you that range. Then after sunset you remove the fixed ND and your vND should cover the range of shooting under artificial lights. ISO 2000 should be a good base ISO for most low-light situations, so you should be using your vND even after dark anyway. The GH6 is 5760 x 4320 and the GH5 is 5184 x 3456 so if you multiply those out then you get a 38% increase in total number of pixels, or a 11% increase in width, so not entirely sure where they're getting that number either. Still, it's more pixels, and not stupidly more pixels, which is probably the right balance. Yeah, odd, but I agree that the GH6 is a winner. I see so many tiny little improvements they've made - I was contemplating writing a summary of what improvements I see that would be relevant to me in the real world and how I shoot. The ISO performance on the GH6 is pretty darn good!

Makes sense. That means that 3 extra stops of ND are required between modes, but would someone really be swapping between them? Most likely someone would already own a different camera and have the NDs setup for that, so it would be dependent on the ISO they currently shoot in, wouldn't it? You're the first other person I know that shoots 1080p and uses the 2x digital zoom to get a downsampled 1080p from the ~2.5K middle part of the sensor. The quality is so nice and the 2X is so handy that my lens collection has evolved to make full utilisation of those, by having a 17.5mm as my default lens which gives a 35mm FFE FOV and a 70mm FFE FOV from the same lens with just a button press.

True, but I'm not sure what you were referring to? I've heard that most professional productions shoot Prores rather than RAW, and that RAW is typically only used by the big budget productions and by amateurs. I'm keen to hear more about that. it makes sense to me, but my experience of the internet camera ecosystem (YT, social media, forums like this) and also of most solo-operators is that they're completely insulated from the industry proper, who interact in parallel discussions like liftgammagain.com, the CML mailing list, etc, and who have very different working methods and mindsets to the whole topic of making films.

Great stuff - thanks for posting! Very nice overall production and really nailed the whole 80s aesthetic. Some great lens flares in there too, and some vertical streaks (at 2:30 from the neon sign) - how did you get those? are they a normal property of the Kowa? and, of course, I have to ask.... did you get to ride in the Ferrari??? 🙂

Absolutely! I find that most camera discussions happen in a vacuum, where there is little consideration of anything else involved in the process, which is especially perplexing considering that the camera is one of the least important parts of making a good film. In terms of workflow, I shoot the GH5 using its 1080p ALL-I codec, in preference to the 4K IPB one, because of workflow considerations. I'll definitely be exploring the Prores options of the GH6, but will also be quite tempted by the Prores on the new iPhones, which are probably one of the cameras that would benefit most from having a larger bitrate and some gentle encouragement not to process the living hell out of the image before it's compressed and saved internally.

The older I get the more I realise that people seem to operate without much consideration (or often knowledge) of history and the broader context. Changing your mind on a subject you've already expressed a position on also requires admitting you were wrong, which seems to be an unacceptable cost in many cases too. The human condition is a strange thing!

This is where I get confused - there are actually 4 base-ISO settings aren't there? V-Log with DR boost and without, and non-V-Log profiles with DR boost and without. I thought that the ISO 250 was the Base ISO for non-Vlog profiles, and the 2000 was for V-Log and DR boost? The reason I raise that is that if you're talking about NDs, then people will be setup to expose with whatever profile they were using before, so V-Log GH5 -> V-Log GH6 DR boost. Very few people are going to have NDs for GH5 normal profiles and want to move to V-Log DR boost on the GH6 (and if they do then getting new NDs isn't unreasonable). Pity about the eND... it's basically the only thing that will get me to shoot manual mode rather than aperture priority, and I'd like to, but having to manually fuss with NDs is one step too far for me.

I did consider that but didn't think that you'd be doing anything as radical as a green screen or background replacement etc. What kinds of secondary adjustments would you really notice a poor quality codec? Genuinely curious. It all depends on what you're doing and the application of the format. Really this thread is relevant for people who aren't really sure of why Prores is a good feature, and often they're satisfied with h264 or h265 because they're "better", but if you're going to be doing work where you're really seeing the differences between these codecs then you're not the one who needs convincing! Sadly, lots of people start with the position that 'newer is better' and 'more is better' without actually applying those statements to the entire pipeline, to the implications on set or in post. I'd say that the quality of the encoder is probably more relevant in this case. As an example, the C100 provided an image that compared favourably to other cameras with double the bitrate, so obviously Canon had really made the encoder work hard and really get a good result. Cheap cameras can produce horrific results with heaps of bitrate. The difference that 8-generations of compression made was far far smaller than the difference between a C100 image and most other cameras, even those downsampling 1080p from a 4K sensor, so that's why I didn't consider it to be particularly relevant. I'm super happy the GH6 has prores and think it's one of the (many) great upgrades over the GH5, so I'm definitely with you on this one!

Absolutely. In the real world we're probably talking about the difference between 100Mbps h265 or 240Mbps h264 ALL-I (both from A73) vs 700Mbps All-I Prores HQ, or similar. Or, comparing Prores HQ with RAW but where RAW requires an external recorder and costs many hundreds of dollars and requires cables, extra batteries, more things to charge, etc etc.

DO NOT EVER THROW AWAY A WELL REGARDED LENS WITH GOOD GLASS IN IT!!! Seriously, I'm on the VLFV Facebook group and there are people constantly on the lookout for vintage lenses to re-house, and if it's a classic zoom then that may include those models too. Even if the front element is scrap there's probably another copy somewhere else where the rear element is scrap and together they'd made a great finished lens. These things aren't being made any more and are only going to get rarer. As the price of Leica R and CZ sets go through the roof people are talking about other lens lines more and more, eventually they'll get around to EF and zooms I'd imagine. Cool test - thanks for posting. If acting ability was critical for lens tests then I'd be sitting at my desk looking worried and compulsively drinking coffee too!! Especially considering that it looked like espresso shots with every sip being a bottoms-up situation!

The GH5 is relatively unique in that it offers a good selection of ALL-I codecs, which I use and are just wonderful in post. I guess other cameras would benefit from this though, as not many other models/manufacturers seem to have this included. Interestingly, I thought for the test I would encode and re-encode each codec over and over again until one of them started breaking down, but I setup ffmpeg to do that on a 1080p version (to save processing time) and after 8 generations on h264 IPB at the same bitrate as Prores HQ I had to pause because the file looked the same. At first I thought that ffmpeg was being too clever for me and just copying the stream instead of re-encoding it, but when I zoomed in crazily (something like 800%) there were subtle differences. So really, all else being equal and when given enough bitrate, they all do a great job, so it's really the other factors that I highlighted in my post that are the deciding factors. I suspect you are talking about this video? This is probably the part you're referring to? I found it hard to tell TBH, even with it moving, but that is a comparison between Prores on the Shogun, which is either HQ at 700Mbps or Prores 422 at 471Mbps vs the GH5 codec which is 400Mbps, so there's not much difference in the bitrate there. The 400Mbps is on the high side compared to most cameras bitrates, and with the GH6 in 5.7K they'd be looking at 1500Mbps or 1000Mbps, which are significantly more again, so the bitrates really are pretty serious. TBH, there's a point in diminishing returns with bitrate, not just because of accuracy vs bitrate, but also that if you multiply the resolution and bitrate by 9x (1920 x 3 is 5.7K) you're not increasing the size of the screen that the viewer will view the image on, so actually, once there is sufficient bitrate to render the screen to a certain optical quality it doesn't really require much more if you increase the resolution on the same display, or at least, it doesn't need to increase by a factor of 9. Of course, if you're doing green-screen or other hard-edged keying, cropping in post, stabilising significantly, compositing and other VFX operations then that's a different story, but those are specialist applications and not general ones.

I don't have any experience with those power zoom lenses, but one feature that I think would be of huge benefit from them is the ability to hold down the zoom rocker just a bit and do a smooth zoom during a shot. The more serious MFT lenses are nice, but I'm not sure that the manual zoom ring is damped and smooth enough to really pull off a flawless zoom during a shot, certainly my second-hand 12-35mm and kit 14-42mm zooms aren't. That was a thing that those ENG lenses were really good at weren't they? Definitely agree there. In terms of firmware updates, do we even know when the camera will be shipping? I haven't seen anything about it so am curious. No point having firmware updates if no-one has the camera!! I'll be curious to see what the math is like for shooting at, say, f0.95 in bright sun, at ISO2000 for high DR mode, and what that equates to in an exposure time. I did note that they improved the shortest shutter time of the camera, so maybe that is why. Not much good having a camera that can't expose properly in aperture priority mode while wide open at noon - that would be seriously embarrassing I'd imagine! In terms of ISO2000 compared to 800 (wasn't 800 the native ISO for Vlog on the GH5?) isn't it only slightly more than a stop more exposed? If so, you only need to add a single-stop of ND to your setup and it's the same. Or am I missing something?

I must admit, I'm not that surprised that a bunch of folks on a forum don't understand the market as much as they think they do! Still, it bodes well for both OM and also the MFT system in general, which by extension is good for all consumers as it encourages competition. As much as FF enthusiasts are quick to point out that FF is now a serious competitor to MFT in specs, I wonder if it wasn't for the MFT manufacturers pushing things forward if FF would be nearly as advanced now as it is.

I think it was the combination of the screen and the fan. I'm super happy with it as it's not too much larger and it's not larger from the front, which is what matters from the perspective of shooting in public and not gathering too much attention. By the time you put a lens on a camera, then depth of it is huge so a few extra mm isn't a big deal. My suggestion is to start with how and where you shoot and work backwards. For events you'll probably be valuing flexibility over other performance, so you're probably talking about zooms. Then the question comes of how much you care about having a long zoom range vs having a faster aperture. At one extreme you've got the 12-35mm F2.8 which is the fastest but shortest zoom, then things like the 12-60mm F2.8-4, then all the way to 12-100mm F4 and even the 12-200mm F3.5-6.3. I don't shoot events but my understanding is that mostly there is decent light, and many here have commented that the longer zooms work best because you're always just a zoom adjustment away from the shot. Especially with the improved low-light from the GH6.

The size comparison is available now on camerasize.com: https://camerasize.com/compare/#698,888 Panasonic DC GH5 is 0% (0.1 mm) wider and 2% (2.2 mm) shorter than Panasonic Lumix GH6. Panasonic DC GH5 is 12% (12.2 mm) thinner than Panasonic Lumix GH6. Panasonic DC GH5 [725 g] weights 12% (98 grams) less than Panasonic Lumix GH6 [823 g] (*inc. batteries and memory card). Panasonic DC GH5 dimensions: 138.5x98.1x87.4 mm (camera body only, excluding protrusion) Panasonic Lumix GH6 dimensions: 138.4x100.3x99.6 mm (camera body only, excluding protrusion)