GH5 Pana President=we will enhance GH5 performance firmware "if there is customer demand"

[joe12south]

• Rear/Front Dial locking - function available on the G9
• Visible ISO, Aperture, Shutter values when using a Program mode
• Ability to perform AF-Lock before recording in VFR (So at least you can AF sort of)
• Ability to assign the control dials, jog dial to SS, Aperture or ISO, in any order you require
• 48fps with sound and AF (non VFR)
• True 'One-Touch' Manual WB. Point at subject, press Fn button and hey presto white balance is set and you are ready to shoot (without have to do WB, Up, Set)
• Ability to toggle HDMI Info overlay On/Off via an Fn command
• Standardise the menu system of the GH5 to incorporate the menu layout improvements from the GH5s
• Instead of the Flower / Mountain MF Scale, provide actual Mts/Ft where the focus is
• If using a program mode and if the camera is unable to provide adequate exposure, display the actual exposure reading (-3 on the scale for example) and not just -/+ icon.
• Add the option to display both Degrees and Gain at the same time instead of ISO/SS

All sensible suggestions. I would add the ability for some form of focus magnification while recording. I know there is an inherent design limitation in the GH-series image pipeline that makes this challenging, but anything would be most welcome!

 

[Greg_E]

All sensible suggestions. I would add the ability for some form of focus magnification while recording. I know there is an inherent design limitation in the GH-series image pipeline that makes this challenging, but anything would be most welcome!

I don't own the GH5 (and probably never will) but this is definitely something that would be nice to have. Along with the other stuff as well.

And I'll back up what you said about the compression codecs and bit rates, h.265 might not be as good at high bit rates (or more appropriately wasting bits as mentioned). You see the same thing in the AAC audio codec family. Yes you can run AAC+ (HE-AAC) way up at 384kbps, but you gain nothing past about 96 to 128kbps. It's strongest points are 16kbps (mono), 32kbps (stereo) and up to about 64kbps (stereo). By 96kbpa you are treading on AAC and might consider going to that part of the family.

All that said, I haven't studied and tested h.264 vs. h.265 as much as I have studied and tested AAC flavors, but I'm pretty sure the same guidelines apply. If you can prove this wrong, I'd be more than happy to be educated.

 

[TheDingo]

The two features I would like to see are...

- Focus magnification while recording

- Focus display in feet or meters ( this might help with manual focus-pulling )

 

[Dachicourt]

Here is my first contribution,

love my GH5 for both video and stills, lovely cam, light, nice for running, travelling, if Panasonic decide to go further with firmware update I'm on the boat.
I left Canon because of the lack of video feature (ok there is magic lantern, but the workflow is so heavy), I left Sony because we always need external recorder to get the best of S-Log.


I'm ok all those suggestion but I would give+ 10 for focus magnification, it's so critical to get the sweet focus point when using a fast lens (under F 1.4).
Other whises :
- Punch ETC while recording could bring us more versatility with limited range lenses.
- 4 tracks audio capabilities, main sound from stereo mic onboard + 2 from the mic input, then you can work woth a stereo amb and a couple of HF or a directionnal mic and a HF.
- RAW video capabilities, we can shoot up to 12fps in RAW at full def, it would be fantastic to have a FHD RAW with audio
- H265 12bit log

 

[Ralph B]

RAW recording for video would be fantastic, even if it's a crop of the sensor.

I also would like to see the focus display in feet/meters instead of the flower/mountain.

 

[Ralph B]

I would like to add something else. If RAW is not possible, the next best thing would be to have a compressed from of RGB video. In other words, after debayering, the RGB picture would be compressed and then written to disk. This would avoid the conversion to YCbCr, which is so destructive to the color information.

Seriously Panasonic - think about it. With mirrorless cameras coming this year from Canon and Nikon, you need something to set the GH5 apart from the competition. A true RGB picture could be that something.

 

[visceralpsyche]

RAW is actually not THAT hard to implement in this day and age of early 2018.

Proprietary codecs aside, Red had 4K RAW being recorded to CompactFlash cards at 36MB/s in 2008, ten years ago.

With modern SD cards now capable of sustaining 100MB/s+ without issue, 4K from the sensor should be simple, especially from the GH5S which has a proper DCI 4K capable sensor, so no need to deal with the 5.2K of the standard GH5.

This would be the kick arse feature to blow the competition away, but you need to consider that almost all companies are holding back features at this level to not cannibalise their upmarket models.

But can you imagine a RAW capable GH5S? It would sell like no other camera before it, even at a higher price.

I'd be first in line, that's for sure, having worked with Red cameras for a decade and seen how good RAW is to play with in post.

Cheers,

Paul

 

[Cary Knoop]

This would avoid the conversion to YCbCr, which is so destructive to the color information.

What in this conversion do you find so destructive?
Did you perhaps mean color-subsampling to 4:2:2 or 4:2:0?

YCbCr is pretty darn common in the video world, RGB however is not.

 

[Ralph B]

The conversion from RGB to YCbCr causes nasty ringing along the borders of saturated colors that are far apart on the color wheel. This becomes a major issue when doing blue or green screen keying. And it's irreversible. Once the conversion to YCbCr is made, there is no way to undo it. I've struggled with this problem for over a decade. The only solution is to shoot raw. However, an RGB picture would work, too. And all this bitching about 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 would go away if people had a virgin RGB picture to work with.

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

RAW is actually not THAT hard to implement in this day and age of early 2018.

Proprietary codecs aside, Red had 4K RAW being recorded to CompactFlash cards at 36MB/s in 2008, ten years ago.

With modern SD cards now capable of sustaining 100MB/s+ without issue, 4K from the sensor should be simple, especially from the GH5S which has a proper DCI 4K capable sensor, so no need to deal with the 5.2K of the standard GH5.

This would be the kick arse feature to blow the competition away, but you need to consider that almost all companies are holding back features at this level to not cannibalise their upmarket models.

But can you imagine a RAW capable GH5S? It would sell like no other camera before it, even at a higher price.

I'd be first in line, that's for sure, having worked with Red cameras for a decade and seen how good RAW is to play with in post.

Cheers,

Paul

+1 to all of this.

And Panasonic will not implement a RAW codec in a $2500 camera that will endanger the sales of their more expensive cameras.

 

[Cary Knoop]

The conversion from RGB to YCbCr causes nasty ringing along the borders of saturated colors that are far apart on the color wheel.

RGB to YCbCr is a pixel based translation, it could not possibly create ringing of neighboring pixels.

Chroma subsampling can cause those effects but that should not happen for YCbCr 4:4:4.
Of course one cannot have chroma subsampling in RGB.

 

[joe12south]

- Yes, RAW on a GH-series camera would be the most amazing, killer feature. A game changer if there ever was one.
- Yes, it's technically do-able. RAW compression would take less processing power than H.264 or H.265.
- No, it's not likely to happen for one simple reason: there is no standard for compressed RAW files.

The big electronics giants are loathe to not follow lowest common denominator consumer standards on consumer devices. The only reason we even have HDMI ports on these things is so Jim Bob Consumer can plug his camera into his TV and look at his cat swatting his toddler. Look no further than HLG for another example. Look at how Panasonic labels the MOV wrapper in the menus (with a disclaimer.) Look at all the worthless REC709 hobbled picture profiles. (Oooh, VIVID!)

To record the SD card, even the v90 cards, would require compression. (4K Cinema DNGs would be too big.) At that point, Panasonic has to create their own file format. At that point, no NLE can read the files. Panasonic must now almost make software for transcoding. None of this is something Panasonic is gonna want to do.

Panasonic has proven me wrong in the past. I'd love for them to do so on this point. But I think we're more likely to get RAW from a hack than from the mothership. (And there hasn't been a hack since the GH2.)

 

[Bassman2003]

Maybe they could fix the HDMI monitor lag?

 

[Ralph B]

For those who are interested in learning the truth about the destructive nature of YCbCr, you should read this technical paper by Charles Poynton from 2004.

poynton.ca/PDFs/Merging_RGB_and_422.pdf


Here are a few bullet points:

However, even sophisticated filters can exhibit fringing on certain color edges, if conversion between R’G’B’ and 4:2:2 is repeated many times. – page 2
(actually one time is all it takes)

Loss of color detail makes it more difficult to pull bluescreen or greenscreen mattes from 4:2:2 than from R’G’B’ – page 2

Of the 16.7 million colors available in studio R’G’B’, only about 2.75 million are available in Y’CBCR. If R’G’B’ is transcoded to Y’CBCR, then transcoded back to R’G’B’, the resulting R’G’B’ cannot have any more than 2.75 million colors! – page 5,6


The bottom line is YCbCr should not be used for acquisition, period. It’s a relic from the past century of analog broadcast television. There’s really no reason to be using it in today’s digital cameras.
We have the processing power, compression technology and media speed to be saving the pictures in RGB.

I hope Panasonic will lead the charge and make this bold move. Great sales will follow!

 

[fboonzaier]

- Yes, RAW on a GH-series camera would be the most amazing, killer feature. A game changer if there ever was one.
- Yes, it's technically do-able. RAW compression would take less processing power than H.264 or H.265.
- No, it's not likely to happen for one simple reason: there is no standard for compressed RAW files.

The big electronics giants are loathe to not follow lowest common denominator consumer standards on consumer devices. The only reason we even have HDMI ports on these things is so Jim Bob Consumer can plug his camera into his TV and look at his cat swatting his toddler. Look no further than HLG for another example. Look at how Panasonic labels the MOV wrapper in the menus (with a disclaimer.) Look at all the worthless REC709 hobbled picture profiles. (Oooh, VIVID!)

To record the SD card, even the v90 cards, would require compression. (4K Cinema DNGs would be too big.) At that point, Panasonic has to create their own file format. At that point, no NLE can read the files. Panasonic must now almost make software for transcoding. None of this is something Panasonic is gonna want to do.

Panasonic has proven me wrong in the past. I'd love for them to do so on this point. But I think we're more likely to get RAW from a hack than from the mothership. (And there hasn't been a hack since the GH2.)

+100...even if they can give us RAW over an external recorder that would be great....not sure HDMI could handle it, but the new HDMI 2.0 cables seem capable of moving massive amounts of data...that certainly would completely revolutionize the GH5 series!

 

[Thomas Smet]

+100...even if they can give us RAW over an external recorder that would be great....not sure HDMI could handle it, but the new HDMI 2.0 cables seem capable of moving massive amounts of data...that certainly would completely revolutionize the GH5 series!

I would love external raw and would be 100% cool with that. Only problem is external raw requires SDI. Easy to support on the EVA1 but impossible on the GH5. In theory if Panasonic brought back the YAGH unit we could add SDI but I think that was more of a HDMI to SDI conversion adapter and not a true SDI path. Raw on the GH5 would also be 5.2k raw since raw tends to grab the full sensor and isn’t capable of scaling. Those files would be huge.

 

[Cary Knoop]

For those who are interested in learning the truth about the destructive nature of YCbCr, you should read this technical paper by Charles Poynton from 2004.

poynton.ca/PDFs/Merging_RGB_and_422.pdf

The truth here is about going from 4:4:4 to 4:2:2, which is subsampling, not the Y'CbCr format itself.
They are two different things.

 

[Thomas Smet]

The RGB thing gets back to how exactly does Panasonic record RGB video? What format do they use? ProRes4444 can encode RGB but that format would upset a lot of PC users. How exactly does Panasonic use a RGB format that still works with other devices and systems? As much as we don't like YCbCr it is "the" industry standard across NLEs, monitors, hardware devices and disc formats. A RGB format would be awesome but what does that format look like and how is it supported? Many are still struggling with playing back the 10bit formats from the GH5. An RGB format may be even worse since no GPUs or CPUs will have any form of hardware instructions for that type of media playback. How do you preview a RGB format on an external monitor via HDMI?

Don't blame Panasonic for a lack of a RGB format. Blame the entire video based industry. If you want RGB the most realistic option is going to be raw which unfortunately I think is physically impossible on the GH5. This is what we get for buying a $2,000 DSLR designed for "video". if you want RGB go buy a raw camera.

 

[joe12south]

The truth here is about going from 4:4:4 to 4:2:2, which is subsampling, not the Y'CbCr format itself.
They are two different things.

This. RGB is an inefficient way to represent the signal. YCbCr conversion isn't lossy. Throwing away half or more the color resolution is.

 

[Ralph B]

@Thomas Smet

Things aren’t as dire as you think. There are currently many RGB codecs available and they play fine in all current NLE’s and media players. Ex: Quicktime uncompressed 8-bit and 10-bit, UT RGB & RGBA, Lagarith RGB, to name a few. Also RGB transmits just fine over current HDMI cables at all resolutions up to 4K. Proof: Most current graphics cards and computer monitors have HDMI ports and it’s RGB signals that are flowing between them. Furthermore, you can connect the HDMI output of a computer into the HDMI port of a TV and get a picture. Once again, this is RGB data that’s flowing.

The infrastructure for an RGB workflow is currently all in place. Now we just need somebody to start implementing it in cameras.