FHDcrew

Mixture of 8 bit and external 10 bit. The first location is definitely 8 bit. 
 
 

So cool to have this thread created. Hope everyone is well; haven’t been active in a while. Still love my Z6.  Super nice 8 bit image and if you nail your WB grades very nicely. Neutral with I-dynamic on high or Nikon flat with I-dynamic (for very extreme scenes) provides nice colors, decent flexibility and range in post. Grades nicely in Davinci. Autofocus is usable, nowhere near what the latest Canons and Sonys can do but still really solid. If you can get an Atomos Ninja Star you can record oversampled 6k>1080p 10 bit 422 prores which gives a beautiful image and grades just as well as anything out there. One of the best 1080p cams for the money in that regard. 
 
4k 10 bit out of the HDMI to something like a Ninja V looks great; the image holds up with really anything else (Canon R6 II, Sony FX30, etc) but it’s not my favorite setup in terms of ergonomics, weight or battery management. Nice to have as an option but I’d much rather have internal 10 bit log. That being said, the internal 8 bit is great most of the time. 

Mixture of 8 bit and external 10 bit. The first location is definitely 8 bit. 
 
 

So cool to have this thread created. Hope everyone is well; haven’t been active in a while. Still love my Z6.  Super nice 8 bit image and if you nail your WB grades very nicely. Neutral with I-dynamic on high or Nikon flat with I-dynamic (for very extreme scenes) provides nice colors, decent flexibility and range in post. Grades nicely in Davinci. Autofocus is usable, nowhere near what the latest Canons and Sonys can do but still really solid. If you can get an Atomos Ninja Star you can record oversampled 6k>1080p 10 bit 422 prores which gives a beautiful image and grades just as well as anything out there. One of the best 1080p cams for the money in that regard. 
 
4k 10 bit out of the HDMI to something like a Ninja V looks great; the image holds up with really anything else (Canon R6 II, Sony FX30, etc) but it’s not my favorite setup in terms of ergonomics, weight or battery management. Nice to have as an option but I’d much rather have internal 10 bit log. That being said, the internal 8 bit is great most of the time. 

So cool to have this thread created. Hope everyone is well; haven’t been active in a while. Still love my Z6.  Super nice 8 bit image and if you nail your WB grades very nicely. Neutral with I-dynamic on high or Nikon flat with I-dynamic (for very extreme scenes) provides nice colors, decent flexibility and range in post. Grades nicely in Davinci. Autofocus is usable, nowhere near what the latest Canons and Sonys can do but still really solid. If you can get an Atomos Ninja Star you can record oversampled 6k>1080p 10 bit 422 prores which gives a beautiful image and grades just as well as anything out there. One of the best 1080p cams for the money in that regard. 
 
4k 10 bit out of the HDMI to something like a Ninja V looks great; the image holds up with really anything else (Canon R6 II, Sony FX30, etc) but it’s not my favorite setup in terms of ergonomics, weight or battery management. Nice to have as an option but I’d much rather have internal 10 bit log. That being said, the internal 8 bit is great most of the time. 

Let's take a moment to appreciate the old treasure that is the Nikon Z6 OG, which couldn't have aged better even if it were deposited in an oak barrel in Scotland for the past 6 years.

First of all it is £650 now.
Secondly of course it is full frame whereas a lot of the other options for this price are crop sensor.
Many of the other mirrorless full frame cameras have aged quite badly. The Panasonic S1 is superseded by a smaller cheaper camera with better AF. The Canon EOS R classic has been superseded twice by the R6 and R6 II. The formula of Z6 on the other hand has only merely been tweaked with the Z6 II that doesn't add a huge amount extra, because it just doesn't need to.
And the Z8 / Z9 are insanely more money than £650.
I like that it has such nice colour science out the box. It also has better custom picture profile management than Canon.
The IBIS is superior to the Canon EOS R3 in every way, let alone the EOS R5 or R6 II.
The 4K video and 6K sensor is superb in low light, better than the 8K+ stuff.
And despite now being very cheap the top LCD and enormous, detailed EVF hold up very favourably today, in fact the EVF competes with some of the best even in 2024.
The ergonomics are excellent, it doesn't put a foot wrong in terms of what it tries to do. And what it doesn't do, you probably don't need. OK, so there's no 4K/60p, or faster stacked sensor, and 120fps is limited to 1080p, but everything feels fast and responsive, including the on-sensor phase-detect AF.
It is much smaller and lighter than the Panasonic S1 or S1H, yet with phase-detect AF and a very similar sensor under the hood.
Z mount has also ripened well... It has a really good line up of lenses and adapters now, including the nifty Leica M mount autofocus adapter which will turn every manual focus lens into a fast and snappy autofocus optic.
Plus it's the only mirrorless mount that adapts to Sony E!
So you can put your native Sony mirrorless lenses on there and everything works.
I can't think of a better deal for £650 at the moment on the used market for cameras.
Curious to hear other opinions and what's changed in Nikon land since it came out those long 6 years ago in 2018.
I can't for the life of me think of another 6 year old camera that has aged this well.

Half of the shots in this video I shot are in 8-bit rec709 but graded in post.  Learn your gear and 8 bit is just fine.
 

Half of the shots in this video I shot are in 8-bit rec709 but graded in post.  Learn your gear and 8 bit is just fine.
 

Glad I stayed in the Nikon system 😂 

Love this!  I am coming to the same conclusion as I shoot in 8-bit rec709 more and more.  And I find that having a color managed workflow helps a lot; the image is quite flexible when conformed to Davinci Wide Gamut; responds a lot like LOG does.  And if my exposure and white balance aren't too off, the grading experience is great.

Absolutely, if you can shoot 10-bit Vlog and are happy to grade it in post then there's no reason not to.
The main motivation for me is really in dealing with the older or smaller cameras that don't have a log profile built in, and being able to realise as much of their potential as possible.  The GX85 is my main camera now, simply because of size and form-factor, but as we have been reminded by @John Matthews in the "World's smallest DSLM that shoots 4k?" thread, there is still a lot of love for these small cameras.

And this is why ProRes 10bit 422 is plenty for even quite "high budget" productions to shoot in, and they don't "need" raw at all. 

You could go gyro stabilization?  Get a cheap action cam and hotshoe mount it.  Use it to log the data.

10 bit vs 8 bit. to make 10 bit really better than 8 bit, the camera has to be very quiet. when the codec is thick and the camera is at high iso, noise cancels the limited advantage of 10 bit over 8 bit. and most modern cameras shoot log at native iso of 800 to 2000, at which starting to show noise, even though the latest cams have good low light capabilities. 
for log shooting, in order to protect high light, it is typically to expose at about 60%-70% ire, and this is typically darker or underexposed, or ettl on the histogram. for most digital sensors, ettr when shooting and then push half a stop to one stop down in post to reduce noise makes the image looking darn good. shooting log ettl then pull up half a stop or a stop, you will see heavy noise in the shade frequently. 
personally, i think 12 -16 bit raw shooting is the best if wanting to do post cg. 10 bit log does not have much more benefit over 8 bit rec 709 if you shoot 8 bit rec 709 sooc. the reason why 10 bit log is useful is to match the color of different cameras in post. nowadays, 10 bit log is used as a quick leeway to 12 bit raw, which is not the right approach in most of the cases, imho. 

This is interesting, @kye, thanks for putting 8-bit back out there. Nice to be reminded that there is more latitude than I've perhaps remembered.
I've shot log almost exclusively for the past five years or so except for under-lit situations. I found 10bit vlog so easy to work with that I came not to question the extra bit of workflow vs the headache of getting anything in 8bit wrong. 

Those are good points. I would argue 10bit to 8bit comparisons almost never look like the 10bit file is 4x better. When shot properly, the 8bit file often indistinguishable to the 10bit file. The real question is: “Exactly how much can you screw 8bit up and still fix it?”

It is going to be subject dependant to what can be recovered or not and how that recovery looks and test charts are always going to be easy to bring back from the brink, as you only have 24 values of colour represented.  As you stretch and squash things out to try and recover information, then there are gaps or data being lost, but you will not see this loss with a limited colour palate on a test chart. For example there are only 4 shades of grey, so you aren't going to notice that you've lost 100+ shades of grey due to having to grade it so heavily or due to under or over exposure.  Having a grey scale and a gradient of colours on a test chart will show up this loss.

Would love to see skin tones!  I need to learn how to work with them given 8-bit limitations. That indeed always tends to be the trickiest for me to work on. 

Actually, for these I didn't use Colour Management (I know this will shock people!) and it was a bit of a surprise to me too, but the LLG controls just worked better.  The fact they're designed for rec709 might have something to do with that, perhaps, maybe... ?
😆😆😆
I normally make my adjustments in real projects using Colour Management, and they're fine because they're not a torture test like this with huge adjustments, but maybe I'll keep this in mind and if I get difficult shots then maybe I'll change to rec709 for one node and do the adjustments in that.
Cool, I'll work out the best way to post them.
TBH I don't know what "more latitude" really means.  For example it might be the amount you can shift something before clipping occurs, or before some level of visible undesirable aesthetic effect occurs, but this would be situation dependent and also user dependent.
If you can think of a way to test this then I'd be happy to have a look.  From memory, I think I set the blue image to a colour temp in the 6000s and the warm one to 3200, and neutral was in the middle somewhere.  The magenta and green images were setting the in-camera adjustment to the maximum it would go in those directions.  So, from that, these are very large WB errors to recover from, and (hopefully!!) much more than you'd ever encounter in real life.

Also, if anyone can think of any other tests I should do then I'm all ears.  Perhaps the one that might be useful is including skintones, so maybe I'll have to make a cameo in the test images.  
Realistically, the ability to recover skintones is probably the most important thing, and perhaps the most fragile.

Great work, @kye! I'd be interested at looking at the full resolution images if possible. After doing the WB tests, do you think there's more latitude in slightly blue, magenta, or green version. I remember that Gerald Undone did a test some time ago and found more latitude in a warmer WB than a bluer WB.

Love this!  I am coming to the same conclusion as I shoot in 8-bit rec709 more and more.  And I find that having a color managed workflow helps a lot; the image is quite flexible when conformed to Davinci Wide Gamut; responds a lot like LOG does.  And if my exposure and white balance aren't too off, the grading experience is great.

8-bit rec709 profiles are much more flexible in post than you might think.  I'm not saying they're as good as an Alexa or whatever, but they're a million miles better than people give them credit for.
Here's a latitude and WB torture test of the GX85, in the standard profile (8-bit rec709) customised to have reduced contrast but normal saturation.  
For each of the below, the left image is the properly exposed reference image, the middle one is the graded image, and the one on the right is the image SOOC.
Exposure latitude test - +3 stops:

Exposure latitude test - +2 stops:

Exposure latitude test - +1 stops:

Exposure latitude test - -1 stops:

Exposure latitude test - -2 stops:

Exposure latitude test - -3 stops:

Exposure latitude test - -4 stops:

Exposure latitude test - warm:

Exposure latitude test - cool:

Exposure latitude test - magenta:

Exposure latitude test - green (as far as it would go!):

Notes on the testing method:
GX85 shot in manual mode on cloudy day Exposure varied by changing lens aperture WB varied by changing colour temp and tint Tools used in Resolve were mostly Lift/Gamma/Gain, saturation, and some had a bit of Shadows/Mids/Highlights Notes on the results:
If it's clipped then it's clipped, there's no getting around that If you've shot a whole sequence in the wrong WB then shoot a test chart replicating the error, spend some time on the correction, then apply to all the shots... a bit of work but worth it to rescue a days shooting If you've shot on auto-exposure / auto-WB and want to correct the small errors then this is easily possible - it won't have gotten it nearly as wrong as what I have shown above Most cameras shooting in rec709 will do funky stuff to colours depending on their luma value as part of the look of the profile, so when you over/under expose and then pull things back the hues and saturation levels will have shifted around in odd ways compared to a normal exposure, but if it's a real shoot then you most likely won't have many dominant hues in the image and you only have to correct the ones that are in the frame and distracting, so the above is far more work than normal shooting would be  The days of needing RAW or even LOG to change exposure or WB in post are gone, and although the rec709 profiles often have lower DR than log profiles, they're much better than you think.
If anyone wants me to post full-sized versions with titles so you can flick back and forth then just let me know.
Happy shooting!

@PannySVHSdid you shoot with your Sony F3 at all?  🤣

Happy New Year, dear friends! My year was ambivalent and full of lessons. Film bizz in Germany is very rough and ungrateful if you are trying to enter the field of large narrative projects. I had an accident, a branch falling on my head. They immediately looked for a substitute for the rest of the whole gig and they still have not paid me yet due to some mushy accounting routines. Canceled jobs due to reasons intransparent to me. Got taken advantage by an upcoming director, working for free in advance of a contract. 😂 But I am happy about the things I learned and my passion for video and film is bigger than ever.