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I agree with @mercer that it's true in my experience. I've shot at length with the GH5, including doing many tests to try and understand the best settings and colour grading treatments, but when I bought a BMMCC, put a lens and monitor on it, and then waved it around at the beach, pulled it into post and did basic adjustments, all of a sudden I had some of the best images I'd ever shot. My level of cunning was no different when shooting on the BMMCC than on the GH5, either before or since, so I think it's a valid test. The images I got from my Panasonic GF3 and vintage lenses also had some magic to them that the GH5 does not willingly provide either. As you know, I've tried and tried to find what explains these differences, designing and executing test after test with controlled and isolated variables, and come up empty on basically every occasion. There are some interesting comments in there from Masanori Koyama, and although a lot of it is "PR level" communication, it is interesting the way he talks about the overall vision and hinting at how they are trading-off features against each other. I'm really looking forward to seeing the 1080p Prores HQ and the RAW files that come out of the GH6 once the firmware update is released.

I'll cross my fingers that it's genuine and fully functional. If it is then that is an absolutely blindingly good price!

There are cameras just becoming available that have sufficient DR to expose the sunset properly as well as get the shadow-side of a face well enough exposed to be able to see who it is and what they're doing, which is ultimately the goal. The GH5 doesn't have enough DR for that, however, and I don't think the P4K does either. That's really more the territory of things like the A7S3 or S1H. I definitely understand the priority of getting the shot over the image quality of it. I shot videos with the OG BMPCC and BMMCC and they were just too slow to work with, and didn't offer enough stabilisation to get the shot. The shots they got were lovely, but the GH5 can get a significant amount more shots just because it's faster to use and so you're rolling with less delay, or the shots are steady enough from the GH5 but not from the others, etc. I've lost count of the various things I've tried, but I wasn't able to isolate any perceptible differences. The conclusions are that: either it comes from a variable I haven't tested yet, or it comes from many variables that when isolated don't provide an appreciable enough bump to be discerned if I can't understand what the variable(s) are, then I can't optimise them, and so if I want it then I have to just buy it Sadly, the cameras that have it are normally impractical (ie, they don't get enough shots in the situations I shoot in) and potentially they're also far too expensive. One challenge that any discussion on camera tech faces is that there are so many variables being discussed. Just off the top of my head, these are (some of) the things that are at play when comparing two cameras: IR/UV filter on sensor OLPF Bayer filter (or X-trans, etc) sensor itself (and the modes it is configured to use) analog processing circuitry ADCs digital processing algorithms (and, if it's not an uncompressed Linear RAW codec) image scaling / down-up sampling NR sharpening colour space / gamma transforms compression (both the bitrate/bitdepth as well as the quality of the algorithm and processor) Needless to say, just because two sensors share the sensor and the "colour science" doesn't mean that those are the only variables at play. Far from it. When you compare two cameras, you're comparing all the factors above and more. Not sure which part you think was out of my ass. I'm speaking from personal experience here. One of the primary things I have done over the years, in videography as well as in other pursuits, is to validate the things that "everyone knows" personally, to ensure that they are true. As I'm sure you're aware, at least a third of the stuff that "everyone knows" is actually total BS, and can be proven so quite easily, should someone have the capability to perform even basic tests and, more importantly, to have a desire for the truth. I could match them sufficiently to intercut them, but I was talking in the context of the mojo of the image from the BM cameras. The match was just fine, but the magic wasn't there. I shoot in very different situations and with very different goals to probably every other person here. I shoot super-super fast. I walk, carrying my camera in one hand by my side, wearing a wrist strap, and with my finger on the power switch. When I see something about to happen (I've done lots of street photography so am anticipating things all the time) I start to raise the camera up to my face, and while on the way up I turn the camera on, and about the time I get the viewfinder to my eye I hit record. The camera is set to auto-expose using SS, so while it is adjusting that I am then finding the composition and manually focusing the lens (I shoot with fast aperture primes for low light and a modest amount of background separation). This takes perhaps 2s. The result of this is that I often miss the moment, because I was too slow. If I don't miss it entirely I am often using a clip starting with the first viable frame in the edit, and sometimes the shot only lasts a second or so. I have in the past gotten only two usable frames and ended up doing a very slow slow-motion transition between them for a time-stands-still kind of moment. To this end, the idea of me modifying literally anything about the shot is beyond ridiculous. This isn't every shot I take, but it's quite a lot of them. I shoot what happens, I don't direct, I don't control, I get what I get and I use what I can. I end up with footage that suffers poor DR, exposure problems, mixed lighting temperatures, stabilisation issues, etc. When I'm shooting, every second counts, so when I say I would like a nicer codec and someone suggests a camera that would cause me to miss entirely many more shots, it's a silly suggestion. The reality is that the GH5, while not the best in any single area, is actually the camera with the most overlap between a range of critical factors that allow usable images to be collected in difficult situations. Any increase in image quality normally comes at the expensive of some practicality that is simply not a factor for most shooters. I know I'm by far in the minority in this sense, but in a way I'm the perfect GH5 user. Anyone that can take a huge sacrifice in something that the GH5 was really good at wasn't really at the centre of the aim for this camera. To that end, the GH6 is really the only replacement for the GH5. The P4K is deficient in so many areas that it makes about as good a replacement to the GH5 as a Mack truck makes as a replacement to a rally car. Yes, but not me. The lust for shallow DoF is really what has ruined camcorders in the marketplace I think. Critics of the GH line who suddenly now NEED great AF (as it it has always existed, which is hilarious) will tell you that you can't possibly film an interview with fixed focus because if the talent flexes a muscle wrong then they'll be out of focus. I mean, if your DoF is only a few CM deep, and you're filming a sit-down interview for heavens-sake, you don't need that DoF at all, just move the talent closer, film them in front of a screen-screen, or *shudder* stop down the lens a little!

Interesting video. Seems lots more people are getting their hands on these in the wild now and really exploring what they have to offer. This guy prefers it to the S5 in real-world use.

Maybe he found an audience more gullible than camera nerds? The politics are probably easier to navigate too, considering that you can make videos about the dead without worrying about lobbyists or PR departments and audience members can't ever fact-check you! I suppose there is always the possibility of getting a fatwa declared against you, but that's nothing compared to the retribution of Canon fanboys when you criticise Canon about, well, anything really.

It's a pretty simple thing for a camera to monitor the current draw and then enable / disable things based on that info, but Canon typically favours reliability (in their cinema camera lineup!) over features, so they might have disabled it to be cautious. Human psychology views losing something as a much more traumatic event than not getting it in the first place. A common sales tactic is to hand the product to the person because then if they don't buy it they have to hand it back. From this perspective it would be a nicer experience for users to not expect a feature and not get it than to think they're getting it and then not get it, so if it did IS for some lenses and not others, the person who plugged in an IS lens and it worked would then curse every time they plugged in any other lens and it didn't work.

Like they say... gotta be in it to win it! I'm just guessing here, but you prefer 4K images don't you? I shoot travel, often on the more adventure side of travel too. I love it when people tell me to control the scene. Please tell me how I can better control: a landscape being shot out the window of a moving helicopter a sunset the buildings and people in a large city a cave while taking the tour a museum or world heritage site (eg, Pompeii) an amusement park with rides a market in an emerging economic country etc Next you'll be telling me I don't need a weather-sealed camera because I should just control the weather! To directly answer your question, yes, I need more DR. and more robust images where I don't have to choose between photographing the sunset or the scene in front of it. I bought the OG BMPCC and BMMCC specifically to study their images, both for the colour science and for their mojo. I have studied them at length - you can find a small proportion of the tests I have done littered all through these forums over a period of years. I am yet to locate almost anything that accounts for these factors that you claim do not exist. No, but I have shot both the OG BMPCC and BMMCC alongside the GH5 and tried to match the GH5 to the BM camera on many occasions (just search). P4K footage looks like GH5 footage, but better. Neither looks much like the OG. You don't like videographers do you? I see this kind of dismissive prejudice all the time from snooty "film-makers". The general tone is that "real film-makers" shoot in controlled conditions and should be free to create images that have nice colour and background separation and images that are expressive, and the people that don't shoot in controlled conditions should be happy with footage that looks like it was shot with a smartphone from 6 years ago. It's kind of like when people say "go back to wherever you came from - you're not welcome here" only instead of 'here' being a place, it's a level of image quality.

I did a quick google and couldn't find (non paywall) stats on how many TVs get sold by resolution, so this isn't something we're going to answer. However, if you look at global income levels I would suggest that TV sales are more impacted by the US and EU than the people living on less than USD$5 per day:

You said "some would argue that is a bit of progress" and I pointed out that the DR hasn't increased and the battery life also hasn't really increased. That was 5 years after the OG BMPCC. Personally, I think that given the huge increase in size and the time elapsed they could have made more substantial improvements to it. If you can't see it then that's fine - more power to you, but just because you can't see it doesn't make it fake. Otherwise, most of the stuff on earth is fake because I haven't seen it. Actually, I think that a staggeringly huge number of people have 4K TVs now. That's the whole point of the manufacturers flogging 4K and then 6K and now 8K and 12K. They aren't doing that to sell more cameras, they're doing that to sell more TVs. Go to your nearest big box store and see if they even sell a 1080p TV above a certain size.... I just went to target.com and looked at TVs from 30" up (they sell tiny portable ones too) and the cheapest one a 50" 4K for $319.

Remembering we're talking about editing here, and not colour grading, the Speed Editor is quite modestly priced, and the jog wheel (which is the thing you're interacting with most of the time) is super high quality. Having something where you can add one-press functions is really useful too. Lots of tasks can be hugely streamlined with this kind of tweaking. Something that saves even a fraction of a second can save hours or even days of work per project - the average feature film contains about 2000 shots per hour of edited footage and when you think about how many times an edit is adjusted and tweaked during the process.... With numbers like that it adds up really quickly.

The % numbers are coverage of various colour spaces. sRGB and Rec709 are almost identical to each other and are the "normal" colour spaces, and Adobe RGB and P3 are the "extended" colour spaces which give more vivid colours (ie, they can get more saturated colours). sRGB and Adobe RGB are standards used for still images and Rec709 and P3 are standards for video. This diagram might help.. the coloured area is the colours perceptible to the human eye:

You can get adapters to screw 1/4-20 threads into the larger one, if that's the issue.

Actually, a number of people that stood out on social media have had offers to transition onto more "mainstream" editing gigs. Remember that there have been a smattering of people that won various Vimeo Editors Choice (or whatever it was called) and that got you real attention. I've heard the odd mention from people saying those lead to getting job offers. Now there's an entire shadow industry of people either shooting/editing for YT on shows where there's room for a camera operator, or just editing when the people shoot their own material. Lots of channels I watch have done a "we're hiring" mention on their channels, even ones you wouldn't think are large enough or have enough followers. So "professional" is taking on a new meaning in that sense. IIRC Casey Neistat used to edit about 1-3 minutes of final edit per hour spend editing when he was doing his daily vlogs, and I've paid attention when other vloggers casually mention their stats and it's something like that. If that was true then a professional editor would get a week to edit a typical "hour" show (40-50 mins), which seems in the ballpark, but I'm not sure if that includes the time spend by the DIT and Assistant Editors also likely involved. More likely they get a 1-week turn around timetable, which is quite different. I also notice that almost no YT people that edit their own work use control surfaces either, which is crazy as a simple analysis shows you that you can get crazy ROI on these things.

Yeah, ok, you convinced me. You perfectly nail every shot. You've also convinced me. Remember back in the good old days when any camera that didn't require a loan or long-term savings plan had contrast-detect auto focus... you'd hold it down to take a photo and it would slowly rack focus from the mountains on the horizon to the tip of the lens hood, then slowly rack back to the horizon again, before deciding to focus on the branch you happened to be shooting past. Now THAT was the kind of auto focus anyone could get similar results from! Today - well, they've definitely gone backwards... It's sad.

Battery life is similar if you use current battery tech - I have personally recorded 49 minutes of uncompressed RAW from a single battery on the OG BMPCC. Depending on which SNR figure you look at, the P4K has either 0.4 or 0.2 extra stops of DR. Plus the P4K is almost 3x the size of the OG. Definitely sounds like a decade well spent...... *cough* *cough* *cough*

Are you suggesting that I cut up something like a soap opera (that's likely to be done to a timeline rather than with an eye for detail?). Not sure that would work because I'm cutting up travel shows, not narratives. The more I look at this stuff in more detail the more that I see that it's completely different. I can say that the travel shows I have cut up are several orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated than some of my favourite travel videos I have watched on YT. One video on YT I really liked literally just had shots, cut to the beat, over music, and had no location audio at all. Compared to this, the award winning edits I'm seeing from TV are from a different dimension! The footage I'm cutting up comes from YT and I just download it. I'm also thinking I should look for some music videos too, they'll be quite b-roll heavy and cutting with extreme sensitivity to the music is a big deal there too.

Cameras that downsample will benefit from that as the downsampling reduces the noise, compared to punching-in to a 1:1 readout. If you're shooting RAW then there wouldn't be so much of an advantage, except that the grain of the noise will be finer at higher resolutions. A pixel from S16 2048x1080 will be 2.93x the size of a 6K 6008x3168 pixel when you stretch both of the clips to the full timeline resolution.

Fair enough. Use a long lens and fill the frame with extreme motion, ideally the water in one frame should be completely gone in the next frame, otherwise the compression can use the top part of one frame to describe the bottom part of the next frame. Also, remove any NDs and set it to the fastest SS you can muster to get the most detail in the image and make the frames more different to each other (a blur in one frame looks a lot like a blur in the next frame). The idea of stress testing these things is so that you never hit a situation where the equipment will fail on you. The last thing you want is to have some situation you didn't anticipate happen and then learn the hard way that the card doesn't work. Surprises happen - you might think you're just shooting people who aren't moving much, but then a woman shows up in a dress that's got fine texture with sparkles and every frame is completely different from the previous one with tiny little movements and then the card stops working and you're left in the edit suite missing footage and wondering how to recover.

I didn't say "effed that up" - I said "nail every shot perfectly". Gee - you suggest that someone isn't perfect and they go off the deep end like you're calling them incompetent! How would you know? Have you done latitude testing across every WB and mixed lighting scenario? Unlikely. You might find that someone worth paying money to might look at a shot and say "see how I can do this on this shot and it looks great but this other shot doesn't quite work as well... if you had done X when shooting it then it would have been better - I know it's not the proper way but I find it works in this particular situation". As you said, lots of "fuckwittery can go on at weddings" - maybe there's a better way to deal with some of it. and if there is, then I'd say that my statement about not nailing every shot perfectly would then apply. If you're not a professional colourist who has worked for decades at the highest level then (brace yourself for this...) you probably have a lot to learn about colour. Well, to that I say - don't we all! It's worth saying that the LOG format typically gets its reputation because: it encodes the full DR of the camera (hopefully anyway!) it allows full support from the various LUTs and Colour Management profiles etc YT bros worked out it was "super pro" However, capturing something in a more 709-style profile actually has a bit-density advantage. Imagine that you record something to 10-bit LOG. It's going to distribute those bits across the entire log curve. You then apply a contrast curve to bring it to 709, which compresses the shadows and highlights and effectively squishes the bits in those areas together. That's fine, but it also expands the bits in the midtones, and especially skintones. This is why shooting 8-bit with flat log profiles can be tricky because of banding. Recording a 709-style profile to a 10-bit profile will give you more bit-density on the critical areas. We all love Alexa and RED images, and RAW to a certain extent, and I suspect that one of the reasons those cameras look so much better is the bit-density they have in the critical areas. I like HLG for that reason - it has the bit-density of 709 from the blacks up to about half-way up the gamma, and then compresses the highlights from there on up, where you shouldn't be putting skintones. Try doing an ETTR on skintones on a HLG camera and you'll notice that the skintones look terrible once you pull then back down from the highlights - that's because far less bit-density is being used up there by the gamma curve. I think you've accidentally replaced the word "auto" with the word "perfect". All Panasonic cameras will do the focus automatically. They don't do it perfectly every time, but it's a pretty good hit rate. Sony and Canon cameras have a higher hit-rate, but theirs aren't perfect either. I've seen many instances of them missing focus, focusing on the wrong thing, and even just sitting there not focused on anything. Panasonic has better AF than every historical CDAF and almost every PDAF camera from 7 years ago or more. If a camera should embarrass a manufacturer because a single feature doesn't keep up with the competition, then every camera would embarrass their makes many times over. Sounds like you might have also accidentally replaced the word "auto" with something far more rigorous... Do you think that randomly yelling "autofocus" every time someone says Panasonic is helping the situation? Or hurting?

Hahaha... So, packing up camera gear, driving to a waterfall, carrying gear to the waterfall, <shooting>, and then packing the gear up, trekking back to the car, driving back to your house, and unpacking your gear, somehow all take a negative amount of time? The <shooting> part in the middle is the same, and putting a few stills on a timeline is literally 2 minutes of work.

We all hear about Panasonic "needing" AF in order to stay in business, but my question is, how many people are saying that because they personally aren't buying Panasonic because of the AF, and how many are saying that because everyone else is saying it? I used to write electronic music in the 90s and 00s and anyone who knows that scene knows that there's a synthesiser called the Roland TB-303. It was famous for being so highly sought-after and that it was worth so much second hand. Everyone knew that units were selling for over $1000 second hand (basically 2.5x its retail price) but here's the thing... no-one could actually provide evidence that it was selling for that amount. There were article after article talking about how Roland should re-release it, lots of companies make clones, it was a whole thing. After years of this being the talk in magazines and stores and forums someone from Roland did some digging and they traced the stories back to a rumour that one sold for more than $1000. That rumour was so outlandish that it "went viral" and before you know it there were half-a-dozen of these things being listed for sale at that price and no-one accepted anything less. They couldn't locate a single sale at even remotely that price. Worldwide. Am I saying that no-one needs AF? Of course not. What I am saying is that I have witnessed a "fact" known worldwide become truth based on almost nothing at all except people who kept repeating what everyone else was saying. It was like a virus that needs people to copy itself, like those viral emails saying that everyones telephone number was going to be made public. I'd appreciate it if basically everyone shut up about it except for the people who actually would buy Panasonic but don't because of the AF. Otherwise we'll end up with Panasonic going bankrupt for no good reason, and we'll end up with cameras that have 50K resolution but still don't look as good as the 2012 Alexa. You and I are the noisy videographers on here that I think are actually in the minority with how we shoot. When I compare the patronage of these forums with other film-making / camera places like FB groups and YT channels and Discord groups etc, it is really freaking obvious that the discussions here do not even vaguely represent what most people are talking about in other places. I used to do websites and did the website of a (stills) wedding photographer, one of the highest charging and highest reputation ones in the city. It was a referral after he shot a wedding that I was best-man at, so I'd experienced his services too. His work was beautiful, but his base package (without prints) cost many times the average cost of a whole wedding, so he wasn't a cheap-and-cheerful option - he was in the top tier. He took the wedding parties to the same few locations, took the same shots with the same compositions, over and over and over again. He gave me a selection of his best shots to choose from for the website and I had to go through them super carefully to make sure that I didn't put multiple shots from the same wedding in there (doubles are a sign you don't have many clients) but it was difficult as the shots all looked the same. There were even couples and wedding parties that had the same clothing and flower designs - weddings are almost as cookie-cutter as actual cookies! He typically shot the formal shots and had a second shooter who was taking spontaneous shots, which were lovely and very unique, so it was a combination of both. It might be worth getting someone who also shoots (if they have the skills in post) as they might be able to either understand why you can't nail every shot perfectly, or might give you some shooting tips to improve what's happening in-camera.

Most compressed codecs will have a lower bitrate when there isn't huge amounts of movement. I'd suggest a stress test to max out the codec. One I have done before is to get half-a-dozen stills and put them on a 60p timeline at a single frame each, the point the camera at your monitor so that the whole frame is moving, and turn all the lights out, then set the computer to loop on that timeline, and hit record on a 24/25/30p mode. This ensures that no two frames will be remotely similar and it should stress the codec and push the camera to record the maximum bitrate for that codec. I've seen increases in bitrate by even 50% when doing this, compared to other test footage. I've tried pointing the camera at trees moving in the wind and this laptop test stresses the codec more, and is available even if it isn't windy and if you don't have any trees nearby 🙂

I'd suggest paying for some 1:1 coaching from a colourist, or someone that is very good at colour. I'd start by asking them to demonstrate how well they can grade a shot that has some issues - eg, exposure or WB or mixed colour temperature lighting etc. If footage is 100% properly shot anyone can just put on a LUT, apply some contrast and it will look great. The test is when things aren't great, and in weddings you'd have those issues from time to time I'd imagine. Have we forgotten the people that shoot narrative? They mostly don't care about AF, don't have long takes, and seriously care about the quality of the image. This forum has a few very vocal videographers (myself included) but that doesn't mean that no-one is out there shooting shorts or whatever. Noam Kroll shot a short on a single can of 16mm negative: https://noamkroll.com/shooting-a-no-budget-short-film-in-6-hours-on-ultra-16mm-film/ for a shooting ratio of something like 5:1. That's extreme, but even his original plan of 10:1 means you can do an entire short on one or two cards. A huge proportion of the people that I see in the film-making groups online are shooting narrative, which is the perfect situation for a Panasonic camera. Besides, the GH6 is getting record-to-USB in a firmware update anyway, so that makes things easier.

Yeah, I keep saying this but no-one wants to hear it. We had the OG BMPCC that shot RAW internal, had 13-stops of DR, and was under $1000, a decade ago. What we have now - lots of cameras that barely improve upon this spec, except in resolution. At the time there was the OG BMPCC (the camera we had and could afford) and the Alexa (the image we all wanted). The Alexa had barely more pixels but staggeringly better quality pixels. What did the manufacturers do? Basically zero improvement in pixel quality, but now we have 16 times as many of them. *eyeroll* BUT.... say that around here and the "progress is progress" people just shout you down. Andrew was right about us getting what we deserve.... and what we got was manufacturers that just bamboozled people with BS and then everyone swallowed it. Even with Yedlin proving that no-one could even see more than 1080p in most situations.

The setup I have been pondering is to have my MBP and an external display built for gaming or a laptop secondary display. Andrew reviewed one on the blog recently, but I can't find the link so maybe it's gone. I use Resolve, which works brilliantly with the BM display devices like the Ultrastudio 3G, and gives a clean HDMI out of the monitor window, similar to how you have configured your second monitor, only this bypasses the OS colour management and gives a completely controlled calibrated feed from Resolve, plus it's 10-bit which I suspect also helps. I believe they also work with other NLE's so that might be worth exploring? The one I have is powered directly from the laptop via thunderbolt and gives a 10-bit HDMI and SDI up to 1080p60, but there's also the (more expensive!) 4K Mini that does 4K: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-11 So I was thinking that I could pair my Ultrastudio with a USB powered HDMI-in monitor to create a second display completely powered by the MBP that is also great for editing and is nicely calibrated. On-camera monitors are probably too small (5-7 inch or so) and field monitors are probably too expensive, but I think there's consumer ones that also accept HDMI, so I might go in that direction. Combined with a MediaLight calibrated globe and a desk lamp I could probably have a dual-screen calibrated laptop setup in a lighting controlled neutral grading environment. Combine that with my Speed Editor and maybe a colour grading surface, and it would be a full editing setup that easily fits in a suitcase.