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My recent hobby is riding my electric scooter around the place for Little Camera Tests, and I've contemplated mounting a camera to the scooter to get some zoom-zoom shots, but also just to get a smartphone mount to be able to have navigation or whatever open. The challenge is that the scooter has zero suspension, and footpaths / sidewalks are not even remotely smooth. The bumps ripple up the handlebars with almost infinite transmission and actually make my wrists sore from the severity of the bumps. I'm forced to drop down curbs etc occasionally too, so that's a massive jolt as well. 1) is mounting a smartphone (iPhone) a reasonable idea? 2) what about an IBIS mechanism like the GX85?

Interesting. Olympus has the reputation for having superior stabilisation and of course have PDAF, but have been let down by lack of bitrates and other codec options (such as the open gate functions of the GH line) but maybe they'll rectify that on this new body? If they took some inspiration from the GH6 and implemented Prores then it could be a serious camera for those in the MFT ecosystem.

Is the E-M1X their flagship camera? For some reason no-one seems to understand their range and how the model numbers work.

It does depend on how good the compression algorithms are in the camera, but remember that action cameras and smartphones tend to be hand-held (increasing movement in the frame) and wider angle with deep depth of field (so all of the frame has loads of detail to compress) as well as high-res/low-bitrate.

Helium balloons?

Use however much you need, but be aware that how much you need can vary radically depending on what you're filming. 50Mbps is tonnes if you're filming a talking-head with a blurry background, but point you camera at a tree while there's lots of wind, or during rain or snow, or at the ocean, or from a moving vehicle, and the 50Mbps you were loving before might make you cry. Also, if you're filming in higher frame rates and then conforming to normal speed to make things appear in slow motion then your bitrate will get stretched accordingly. 50Mbps is 25Mbps when viewed at 50% speed on a timeline, etc. You can't add bitrate in post!

Thanks! That's really interesting - I wouldn't have run into that yet as my current Custom modes are all based on P mode and I normally use it with manual lenses and thus have control over the aperture and focus with the camera being auto-SS and auto-ISO.

Thanks - I wasn't sure and hadn't gotten around to googling anything yet.

These aren't from the same night as the above, but I'm guessing that these were similar setups, but taking images as a timelapse.

@webrunner5 Nice shots! Getting sharp images of far-away objects is likely to be heavily dependent on the weather - I've spent a lot of time using my FD 70-200mm to shoot the sunset, and when I put it on a 1.4x teleconverter and use the 2x crop mode all you see is heat shimmer. If I use the same setup to focus on a close subject then the image is crisp, so it's not the optics, it's the distance. The combination of 200mm with 1.4x and 2x crop gives an equivalent of 1120mm, which is all kinds of fun to get steady video with. This setup was using the 4K mode so I could stabilise in post because even in this setup there was image shake and I had to stabilise in post - the image shake was coming from the ground through the limestone pillar!

WOOF!

If you're trying to get low-light performance then the speed booster was never the right approach anyway. The speed booster is actually for something different - for seeing the full image circle of a lens when the sensor is smaller than that image circle. IIRC @Andrew Reid found several (or more) lenses that covered FF even after being speed boosted, so the sensor coverage wouldn't be limited in many cases either. You'd want to see the full image circle if you were interested in the lenses imperfections, which is mostly the source of lenses being 'cinematic' BTW, rather than the perfect modern lenses that are more sterile than a hospital and do not impart any emotion onto the images they create, leaving the film-maker to have to compensate for it elsewhere, representing a lost opportunity.

Looks like it might be time for this gem again....

I'm in the market for an MFT zoom lens and keen to hear various opinions (to help me work out what I want, or to point out things I haven't thought of). Primary use will be a do-everything walk-around zoom with the GX85 but also potentially with the GH5 (or GH6 in future). I currently have the 12-35mm f2.8 and found the concept to be great but the 12-35/2.8 specifically to not be long enough, and using the 2x digital zoom at the long end with it wide-open it was really soft, so I figure I either need a lens that's sharper or longer. I figure my options include the below. Panasonic LEICA 12-60mm F2.8-4.0 ASPH. POWER O.I.S. Looks like a great option, and I've heard good things from people using it with GX85. I like the fact it has stabilisation so I'll get dual IS, and the aperture only gets slower when you zoom, and for DoF that's fine because the longer focal length will compensate. It's about $500, which is ok. Panasonic LUMIX 12-60mm F3.5-5.6 ASPH. POWER O.I.S. Good focal length, only loses a stop compared to the 12-60/2.8-4 and is a lot cheaper at under $200. OM Digital Solutions : M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 12-100mm F4.0 IS PRO Longer reach (which is welcomed) and only loses a stop of light at the wide end compared to the 12-60/2.8-4. Has IS so I'm assuming can do dual IS with Panasonic cameras?? It's $1000 though, which is very expensive. Is this sharper than the Panaleica 12-60 when wide open at the long end? That would be worth something to be able to crop in and get even more reach. OM Digital Solutions : M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 12-200mm F3.5-6.3 Crazy long reach, but still welcome as I could use it for sports. No IS. Slower, although 200mm (400mm FF) is pretty darn long so DoF would still be rather thin. About $650 which is substantial for such a slow lens. Panasonic : LUMIX G VARIO 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 II ASPH. POWER O.I.S. Middle length zoom (for this list anyway) that's slow, but has IS so stabilisation should be excellent? Sub $300 so ok price for an all-rounder. In terms of DoF, the 12mm at 6ft distance at f2.8 gives a DoF of 9ft and f3.5 gives a DoF of 14ft, neither crazy bokeh but enough to give some background defocus for a subject. In terms of the longer reach: - 60mm at 20ft at f4 has a DoF of 4ft, which is good for portraits and separation and shouldn't be too tricky to focus - 60mm at 20ft at f5.6 has a DoF of 5.8ft, similar to the above - 100mm at 30ft at f4 has a DoF of 3.3ft, similar to the above - 200mm at 60ft at f6.3 has a DoF of 5ft, similar to the above The slower lenses will be slow at the mid-points of their range, but the 12-200mm F3.5-6.3 is likely to be somewhere between f4 and f5.6 when at 60mm, which is similar to the 12-60mm zooms. I don't really need the larger apertures for the low-light, and I don't really need the last-level of sharpness from the "Pro" lenses as I only edit on a 1080p timeline. Part of me is tempted to just buy a sub$200 Panasonic 12-60mm F3.5-5.6 and see how I go, but if it's not quite what I want then I'm a third down on the price of the PanaLeica 12-60 f2.8-4. Advice?

Another from a couple of days ago... I think I've finally got my reference monitor setup, so my grading should be better.

If you record 1080p Prores HQ then that card should be good for about 94 mins, 422 should be longer... Just in case you're feeling like more testing would be fun 🙂 Great to hear the 2h 17m GH6 result was with the DR boost mode on. I can't think of what other features would drain a battery so much that it would reduce that battery life significantly. Thanks for doing these tests. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Even basic tests frequently prove that a significant proportion of "what everyone knows" is actually just plain wrong, or so oversimplified or limited in context that it is either so useless or misleading it has the same effect as being wrong. If you can test it yourself, you really should.

Thanks... and... ah, crap. That's exactly what I did! Looks like I'll have to start again with a config from movie mode, and try to remember what I had set. On the plus side, I haven't used this camera all that much, or the GH5 for that matter, so I'll have very little button memory to stuff up!

It's there but greyed out. (I think I must have scanned for it by ignoring all the grey options lol) Any ideas?

I think it's a common problem. Maybe one quarter of the laptops I see in the background of YouTuber videos have SSDs (or just HDDs) taped to the lid and plugged into the side. At a certain point it's more practical overall to put files on an external SSD, considering there's no difference in speed. If you're editing then you probably have enough stability to plug in a drive and work from that. Of course, I used to edit on the train during my commute and I'd literally be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on both sides (actually, it was worse - normally if there were a few men in a row then one would have to lean forward so their shoulders weren't up against their neighbours for everyone to fit). In that case, having a USB cable hanging out the side of the laptop would take up too much room and be vulnerable to people bumping it. I've edited entire videos while sitting next to people like that, and having someone stood over me too because the train was cramped even for standing room. In those cases I just pre-rendered proxies, but now I work from home or drive and so the whole train situation isn't relevant any more.

Yeah, I made that mistake on my last laptop, so this time I went with the 1TB drive, which allows ample room for proxies from several projects (I still have many projects waiting on editing where I shot them with long-GOP and rendered proxies already). There was no way I would even fit in one real project if it was the original footage, so I just assumed I could edit off an SSD in that case.

HELP! Does anyone know how to change the Exposure Mode (eg, aperture priority, manual, shutter priority) in a custom mode on the GX85? I cannot find it in the menus anywhere, can't assign it to a button, nada. I know that you can change the mode dial to M or S etc and then save that config to a custom slot, but this would overwrite all the settings in that slot with the default ones and I've got existing profiles that have custom buttons and the CineD profile selected and who knows what else - when I got the camera I went through every option and set them all how I like it and then saved and forgot about what I changed. I really don't want to have to create the profile from scratch again! @BTM_Pix @projectwoofer @PannySVHS

I'm surprised your Sandisk USB drive was so slow. I bought a USB SSD maybe 5 or more years ago that was as fast as my internal SSD in my MBP.

Yeah, but it pays to be first to commercialise it widely. Just wait for the TikTok advertising folks and music video folks to get a hold of it - someone can potentially make a bag of cash and a career for themselves if a big name music act sees you doing this sort of thing and wants you to do their next video. I'll rename him from "I compare smartphones to my original Alexa" Jet.

Many of the Panasonic cameras have Open Gate modes, going back to the GH5 which I own. On the GH5 the open gate modes were less sharpened than the 16:9 modes, which was definitely welcome. The GH5 also used h265 on the open gate modes instead of h264, which gives the same visual quality with half the bitrate, so in theory the image should be a little better in those open gate modes, however if you use normal spherical lenses then you'll be cropping out part of the image and therefore throwing away some of that bitrate, so it might even out. H265 is also harder to edit, so that's a factor too. On the GH6 you have the option of Prores which (in other cameras) is traditionally much less sharpened, but I'm yet to see any comparisons between the h264/h265 and the Prores. If you're using anamorphics then it's a no-brainer, just use it and enjoy!

Great news and thanks for running the test. Did you have the DR Boost mode on or off? Perhaps that is a bit more power hungry? In video it is highly recommended to get the White Balance (WB) correct when shooting. The best way is to manually white balance at every location with a grey card (a physical thing you carry that has been designed to be a completely neutral grey - they're widely available to buy). If you manually white balance then it will get the white balance right in every location. Choosing the right WB preset (e.g. Daylight, Clouds, etc) is quicker and much more convenient and should give a pretty good result. I'm familiar with the videos you share on YouTube and this is probably the best bet for your work. Choosing auto-WB (as I do) means you have to fine-tune the WB in post, and this can be extremely difficult, and the WB sometimes changes during the shot, giving you all kinds of colour problems to adjust in post. I wouldn't use this mode unless you absolutely have to.