GH5 Best Panasonic GH or G series 1080p since GH2.

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Ned Kelly

Active member
I want to upgrade from my GH2, money's not the problem, but since the GH4 and onwards, most of the 1080p vids I've seen have been downscaled from 4K, or shot 1080p with V-Log. I'm asking about in camera recorded 1080p. Thanks.
 
The reason you are seeing mainly 4K scaled down to 1080 is because the results are generally better than acquiring at 1080. The last camera that I shot with that had a great 1080HD image straight from the camera was my Sony F35.
 
Ned Kelly said:
I want to upgrade from my GH2, money's not the problem, but since the GH4 and onwards, most of the 1080p vids I've seen have been downscaled from 4K, or shot 1080p with V-Log. I'm asking about in camera recorded 1080p. Thanks.
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Your comment about up-gradeing from your GH2 takes me back to this 2012 comment that shocked the industry “Panasonic GH2 video better than Red, Arri says Coppola” If you want to read it yourself click on this link. http://www.imaging-resource.com/new...c-gh2-video-better-than-red-arri-says-coppola
 
I can tell you for a fact that the GH5 has the best 1080p image since the GH2. The GH3 & GH4 did a really poor job at downscaling in camera, but the GH5 uses the whole sensor (no crop) in both 1080 and 4K modes. The AVCHD image finally works alongside my C100 for quick turnaround work and it's one of the main reasons I pulled the trigger on buying the GH5.
 
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The GH5 does scale very different now then it did with the GH3 and GH4. The older cameras used a process called pixel binning which just crudely combines pixels to get the sensor down to 1080p. It led to aliasing and moire artifacts which were minor compared to other DSLR cameras but they were still there.

The GH5 now uses a process similar to bi-cubic scaling where for each pixel it looks at nine surrounding pixels to create an averaged super pixel during a down conversion. This is why 4k can now use the full sensor on the GH5 and look very clean and detailed. Same is true for the 1080p. The VFR or slow motion modes drop the precision of this process some which is why 180fps can show some extra artifacts. The straight up to 60fps HD however still uses a very clean 9 pixel surrounding process to down convert and it looks great. If it looks as good as scaling 4k in post I'm not sure but it look vastly better then shooting HD on the GH3/GH4.
 
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Thomas Smet said:
If it looks as good as scaling 4k in post I'm not sure but it look vastly better then shooting HD on the GH3/GH4.
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One would have to really, really stretch to see a difference. The in-camera sub-sampling is very good.

That said, one should have a really good reason to not acquire in 4K...like if you are required to deliver 1080P files straight from camera to client. The flexibility gained when dropping 4K source into a 1080P timeline in post is meaningful, the files aren't much bigger, and there is a negligible performance difference with a modern NLE and decent computer.
 
Thanks very much for all your replies. Looks like GH5 is my way forward. Will mean an upgrade with my laptop for sure, but that had to happen anyway! Cheers all.
 
The in-camera GH4 1080p is pretty good, but still along ways off from downscaled 4K/UHD. The G7, G85 etc are definitely another step down in 1080p mode as well, as they're only 25mbps.

FYI, I can edit GH4 4K on a 1080p timeline just fine with Premiere CC on a six-year-old computer with a second-gen i7 and a lowly GTS450, so you may not necessarily need to upgrade your computer if you're going to be editing and delivering in 1080p.
 
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