I streamed for nearly four hours this weekend
using the Panasonic GH5 and the Sony a7 III,
and today I'm gonna tell you about my experiences,
and the pros and cons of using each of them.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What is happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and today's video is gonna be a bit informal,
because it's more of sort of an aftermath/recap video
based on the stream that I just did.
I've got my notes here of everything
that went on while I was streaming,
and I want to share them with you in case
you were deciding on getting or using one
or both of these cameras for streaming.
If you're wondering how I captured these cameras--
you know, like what card I used and in what configuration--
I just posted a companion video to this one,
which basically explains what I think
is the best capture card for the money,
so if you're interested in doing this,
I highly recommend you go and check that out
after this video. OK, so here's what I think
of these two cameras for streaming... they're great.
Both of them. Both of them are very capable,
but they do have a few quirks
that you'll need to be aware of and work around
in order to get the most out of them.
But I really do think that you'll have great success
with either of these options,
or both together if that's what you want to do.
OK, now let's talk about some of those quirks,
and we'll start off with Sony. Let me just pull up
my notes here. So, Sony can only output
HDMI display info at 1080p. So what this means is,
if ever you're trying to take a video where you show--
or you want to stream it--you know,
"this is my shutter speed, and oh, you see
this histogram over here, you want to do this and that,"
that whole info that can be showed on the display?
That doesn't show up in 4K.
When you have the camera set to do 4K
and you go into the HDMI output options,
the "HDMI Info Display" is just grayed out.
But as soon as you change the codec--and this isn't--
you don't change it on the HDMI output options, either.
You have to go back to, like, the first page
of the menu where you set up your actual recording
options and you're gonna choose 4K, 1080p--
if you change that from 4K down to 1080,
then the display options are available.
So you can't be in 4K recording mode
and have the HDMI display info up.
It's kind of a weird thing, but it is what it is.
Keeping in with that same thing,
when you're in the HDMI output options,
there is no 30p. There's 60p and 24p,
which I guess is pretty annoying,
because I think a lot of people probably want
to stream in 30p, but I think that how this works
based on my testing is that it's sort of more of, like,
what broadcast standard are you in.
So I think if you're planning on going live with 24p,
they have that option, and otherwise you use,
like, another NTSC option.
I know the GH5 breaks it down where it's like,
"What system do you want the camera to operate in?
Do you want it to be in 59.94 NTSC,
do you want it to be in 24p Cinema,
do you want it to be in 50p PAL?"
But I had the camera set to 60
and I had the capture card set to 30,
and it worked fine, so I think it probably just drops
every other frame, so the 60 just becomes 30.
And if you needed to do 24 and 24,
then you set both of those options.
So I don't think it's a big deal, but just so you know,
there is no 30p option in the menu.
Speaking of the menu, you can't see the menu
on the LCD screen when you're using HDMI display info
over the 1080p connection. So when you do that thing
I was talking about, where you show your info
in the frame, when you have it set up to do that,
the menu isn't available on the LCD screen.
It just goes black, and your menu shows up on the TV,
or on the monitor, or on the stream.
It's no longer available on the back of the camera.
Now, this one is kind of weird and kind of annoying.
I mean...I know that the Sony works best
with a monitor. I mean, that's obviously kind of, like,
what it's intended for, so obviously if they think
you're probably outputting to a monitor,
you would much rather see your menu
on the monitor than on the little screen, right?
'Cause it's probably got your matte box
and everything else, so that's the best thing.
But, I think duplicating it probably wouldn't have been
that big of a problem in the case of--
you want two different people,
one person's at the camera, one person sees
the monitor elsewhere... that's now an issue
because you can't see it that way. So that's kinda weird,
but that's just another thing to be aware of.
It didn't really pose many problems for me,
but I could see it being a problem if, like I said,
I was away from the camera, and--if I was
in a different situation, it might be a problem.
What I didn't test was how the viewfinder reacts
to that, if you have the detection up
with the viewfinder detection. I don't know if, like--
if you brought the thing close to your eye,
what would happen at the distant monitor?
It probably would do nothing, but I mean that just--
it's just another weird little quirk about
the screen turning off like that. Now, a lot of the posts
in the forums were concerned about
"Oh, because of the 30-minute record time limit
on the Sony, am I able to stream or have HDMI feed
to be longer than 30 minutes?" And the answer is yes.
It's only when you're actually recording--
when you start and you got the red light--
that you have a 30 minute limit.
If you just have an HDMI feed coming out of the Sony...
I had it running for a really long time,
and it never turned off or did anything like that.
Speaking of turning off, what about overheating, right?
Because that's the other thing.
I know that when I physically record with the Sony,
if I'm doing 4K recording for... I don't know,
an hour or two, I start to get-- there's a warning,
"It's getting a little bit hot!"
With the stream-- and there's two things to consider.
One, I wasn't actually holding it while I was using it,
but it wasn't doing any internal 4K recording
or doing any kind of, like, compression inside
of the camera. I didn't notice any heat problems at all
after running it for an hour or two, touching it gently,
putting my hands around it,
I didn't feel any serious heat. Just kind of, like,
the dull heat from any electronic device.
It was fine. It was comparable to the GH5 in that way.
So overheating doesn't seem to be a problem
in normal conditions-- I'm not out in the desert here--
when just streaming, like there is when you're doing
4K internal recording. I've got a note here
on battery life. Basically I said the battery's not bad.
For me, I would estimate-- I didn't want to run it to zero,
obviously, while I was doing a stream--
but I would have estimated
that you'd get maybe two to three hours
of stream time on the battery, you know,
a brand-new battery. Which isn't bad, but luckily
the Sony has the option of being able to be powered
via USB, so the power thing should basically be
indefinite, and... I mean, you need to keep
the battery in there, 'cause it doesn't run without it,
but the fact that you can run it on USB power
without needing to buy an AC adapter,
which is something that you would need to do--
and I did do-- for the GH5 if you want
to run it indefinitely, the Sony can do that pretty much
right out of the box. I tested the autofocus on both
of these systems, and I thought the Sony handled
quite well, just with, like, medium balance settings.
You know, I just put it on, had Face Detect on,
and had, like, middle expandable point on.
If I held something up, like, "Hey, check this out, guys.
It worked fine," and then, like, moved around
a little bit, it worked. It was fine. Like, for a stream,
it was working-- I was really happy
with how the autofocus performed.
And I was also happy with how the autofocus
performed on the GH5. I did tweak my settings
a little bit, though. After the firmware updates
recently that made the autofocus even better
on the GH5, I found that my old sensitivity settings
needed a little bit of a spruce-up,
so if I had it on Face Detect like this,
which was good for the stream if I wanted
to show something, it wouldn't respond as quickly
as I wanted it to, so I made it a little bit more sensitive
so that if I was like, "Hey, take a look at this."
That it'd snap to it. I think it was using +2 and +2
on the speed and sensitivity on the stream,
and I found that to be a pretty good balance.
But both cameras, I was happy with their autofocus
for the stream. Also with the GH5, I was testing it out
to see how the app would work in relation
to the stream going on, and it had a similar kind of
screen-turning-off thing to the Sony,
but a different one. In this case, when I paired it
with the app and I started controlling it
with the app normally-- like right now, for instance,
I'm using the app-- I can see myself on the LCD screen,
and I can also see myself here, and if I make changes,
they do the both. But when I was streaming,
there was two iterations. Obviously, it was on
the LCD screen and where the HDMI went,
and I could also see it here in OBS,
but when I connected with the app,
the OBS one continued, but the LCD screen turned off.
So, it was just here and there.
So you can't have three different versions of it,
but you can have two, the one on the app
and the one on the stream.
Now, if you were using an HDMI pass-through,
then you could probably keep it going.
You could obviously go into the capture card
then out to another monitor, and then here and there.
But just natively, when you use the app using HDMI,
the LCD screen turns off. If that's--
just something to note, I guess.
Another weird little quirk about screens.
Like I was saying, you have to get the AC adapter
for the GH5 if you want it to last indefinitely
like you do with the Sony,
or because you can't really be switching batteries
in a stream or it's gonna be interrupted, right?
Unless you had a multi-camera setup.
But I got, like, a knockoff AC adapter from Amazon,
which was a lot cheaper than the official one,
which cost, like, a couple hundred bucks
when you buy all the parts separately.
Um, and it's OK. I will say, though, that the cheap ones
tend to produce sort of an audio humming/buzzing
kind of interference sound, so I wouldn't want
to be relying too much on the internal audio
sort of coming out of the GH5 through the HDMI,
because it's gonna grab that funky sound
coming from the AC adapter and feed it
into your stream. I would use a dedicated mic
plugged right into your computer
and then the video from that and then sync it up,
and...that's the drawback of using the AC adapters.
But right now I'm using one to record this,
and you can't hear it because I'm not using the output
from the camera, I'm using my interface straight
into the computer, and I would recommend
doing that as well for the stream.
But you can save a lot of money
if you get the cheap knockoff AC adapters that way.
But I'm not recommending you do that,
in case it fries your camera. I didn't tell you
to blow your camera up with some knockoff adapter.
But you would need one if you want
to stream indefinitely. And that's about it.
To be honest, that's all the quirks.
I tested everything I could think of,
and that's pretty much the only things I noticed
that were a bit weird. After three-something hours
of running them, temperatures were still fine.
Didn't notice any kind of, like, hiccups.
Audio didn't change at all. There wasn't any kind of
stability problems, they just kept performing
continuously throughout the whole thing,
and I was really impressed with it. So, like I said,
I think that these two cameras are great for streaming.
You just have to figure out your usage case,
and if any of these are gonna be obstacles to you,
then have a plan ahead of time to how to avoid them.
They're all something you can work around easily.
When you stream with them, it's as easy
as you would hope it would be, where it's like,
"Is it just gonna be, like, I plug it in and then it works?"
Yeah, it does, pretty much,
except for these few strange little quirks
that I mentioned. That's about it.
The display info for the GH5, I did not notice any issues
with that, if it's important to you.
Maybe you're doing some sort of tutorial
or something and you want to show
the screen display info. The GH5 seemed to work
in any settings, I was able to show the display info.
With the Sony, it was only in 1080p.
But likely, if you're streaming display info,
you're probably streaming at 1080p anyway...
so it might not be an issue for you.
But yeah, happy with both. I think they're both great.
I think that you'll have great results with both,
and go check on that other video if you want to know
what I used to capture them
and what settings I used and all that.
If you're interested in setting up a whole
little stream operation for yourself, get on over there.
But anyway, that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful, or at least entertaining.
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Alright... I'm done.