So, I just got back from the Panasonic S1H launch event
in Hollywood and was working on my video
when I noticed that DPReview already posted theirs.
So, I watched it and Jordan absolutely nailed it.
It covers pretty much everything you need to know
about the camera and you know my policy about videos.
I don't like to make videos
if somebody else already made one and did a great job.
I'd rather just link to it and give them the views,
and I'm still gonna do that,
but I wanted to make something on the S1H,
so instead, I'm gonna focus on little,
nerdier details that I found interesting.
Let's get undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and I'm a redundant audio solution.
So, first up, let's talk about performance,
and I don't mean the camera's performance
but I mean editing performance because I think 6K is great
and I'm glad that companies are adding it to their lineups,
but are you gonna be able to edit it without using proxies?
Now, this is pretty hard to give a definitive answer to
given the different computer configurations
and software options available, but what I can do
is give you a bit of gauge to help you decide
if you'll be able to handle it.
So, I've got two clips here.
The first one is your typical 4K H.264 150mbps 10-bit
Long GOP file from the S1H, and this is typical
to the type of file you'd be used to working with
if you've shot with Panasonic in the past.
And then, I've got a 5.9K 10-bit 200mbps Long GOP
from the S1H. The first clip was at 24 fps,
but the second clip is at 30 fps,
just to put the maximum stress on this test.
But, the other difference is that the second clip,
the 5.9K is using the HEVC H.265 high efficiency codec,
which is much more demanding on your computer
because it's a much more tighter, finely compressed file
which is more demanding typically
for your computer to unpack.
That means you're gonna get more out of that 200 mbps
than you would get out of H.264,
but it will have a negative impact on performance overall.
So, if we use the first 4K H.264 file as a baseline here
and we play it back in the timeline here,
we can see that we're not dropping any frames,
but if we look at the task manager here,
we can see that we're requiring about 30% CPU usage,
just a little bit higher than that and 18-19% of our GPU.
And my system, which you can see here,
uses an Intel i7-8700K at about 4.8 GHz overclocked
and my GPU is an NVIDIA GTX 1080.
Now, let's move over to the 5.9K clip
and see what we're getting there. So, we play this back.
Our CPU now drops down to about 10%,
but our GPU usage went way up to now about 40-- in the mid 40s.
And the timeline performance is fine.
What this is telling us is that the H.265 is being handled
by the graphics card and not the CPU
like it was with H.264. But, if we jump over to Premiere,
which has poor GPU optimization for this purpose,
we'll get different results,
so let's playback the H.264 clip in Premiere and take a look.
So, our CPU usage is about 32%
and our GPU is around 10%.
That's pretty similar to what we saw in Resolve,
but now if we move over to the 6K clip,
first of all, we're getting some frame drops,
quite a few there in the beginning and we'll look,
our CPU is now all the way up to 100%
and our GPU is only at about 19%
and even when the CPU kind of settles down,
it never really goes below 70-80%
and usually stays up in the 80% as you can see here.
So, this shows obviously that Premiere Pro is not
using the GPU to the same effectiveness in order
to deal with H.265 files, and so the CPU has to do
a lot more work. Now, it was still workable
in this current state and I found that I could still edit it
without too much trouble, but if we wanted to add
a second stream or change the colour grade
on two different streams or maybe layer some things up
like we can see here, then we can see a big problem,
so let's play this back and you can see there's already
a big spike at the beginning.
We're just pinned at 100% CPU
and now our GPU is at 50% as well.
Now, I'm gonna include a link to the file
that I just showed for testing there
in the description below so that you can download it
and test it yourself and see how it performs
for your system and another thing you should know
is that the file was about 19-20 seconds long
and took up 440 MB, so that means you'll need
about 90 GB for every hour of recording
with the 5.9K at 30 fps.
But, without even downloading the file,
we can make a couple deductions about the performance.
First of all, if you're currently struggling with 4K H.264
on your setup, then the 6K H.265
is gonna be probably twice as hard
or give you two times worse performance.
Also, if you don't have a modern GPU
or if you're using a program that doesn't really utilize
the GPU like Premiere, then you're gonna find
that the H.265 to be
specifically difficult to work with
without transcoding it first. But, to quantify this,
if you wanna take a look at one of your current 4K edits
with your grades and your effects applied
and play it back and check the task manager to see
what your CPU usage is, and if it's already 50-60%
or higher, then you probably will struggle a little bit
with the S1H's 6K. But, also if you're planning
to go this route and you're not already using
DaVinci Resolve, it might be time to switch
if this kind of footage is important to you
because it's much better optimized
for the GPU decoding. But, like I said,
download the sample that I used and test it out
for yourself and then feel free to let me know your results
in the comments below. Rest assured, however,
that if you have a computer with similar specs
or better than mine, then you will be able to edit
these files without too many problems,
but it does work better
in Resolve than it does in Premiere.
Also, you should know that when I did this same test
using the Blackmagic RAW from the Pocket 6K,
it was only about half as demanding
as the H.265 from the S1H, making the Blackmagic
a much smoother edit overall when it comes to 6K performance.
Also, these tests are done on a 4K timeline,
but if you want a 6K timeline,
you might have to reduce your expectations by about 10%
because I did notice a little bit more of a performance hit
when working with a 6K timeline.
However, on that raw comparison front,
there is good news. They mentioned at the announcement
that they are working with Atomos
to bring raw recording capabilities to the S1H.
And this would hopefully not only help
with the editing performance comparison,
but also bring some of that workflow flexibility
that I've come to appreciate when working with raw.
There's no ETA on that yet though.
And speaking of connecting an S1H to an external recorder,
you will get improved chroma subsampling
from 4:2:0 up to 4:2:2 when recording over HDMI
and seemingly, this will work all the way up to 6K,
but that's kind of moot because I don't really know
of a recorder that will capture 6K over HDMI,
but because you can do dual recording to internal
and external simultaneously,
I suppose that you could capture the 6K 4:2:0 version
to the card and then have that down-converted
on the Atomos to a 4:2:2 10-bit 4K version,
which then you could use the card one as a master
or then even potentially use the Atomos recording
as a proxy so that you didn't have to transcode afterwards
if you were finding the 6K files difficult
because the DNX or ProRes recordings from the Atomos
will be able much easier to edit
than that 5.9K H.265 would be. I've got a few more things
that I want to tell you about, but to give your brains
a little bit of a break after all those numbers
and initialisms, here's a quick cut
of what some of the other creators' impressions
were after first laying hands on this camera.
Anamorphic. It's all about the anamorphic,
the multi-aspect ratio.
Very excited that stabilization--
Really, they just made it
a videocentric camera, which is exciting.
First off, this right here, I'm sure everyone's gonna say this,
but as a content creator myself,
this flip screen addition is amazing.
I wish it was on the S1,
but I'm happy to have it here with this amazing camera.
Initial impressions: beautiful camera.
Hefty, hefty solid build. The main thing I like
about this camera: articulated, origami LCD on the back.
Finally, they put that on
the full frame version of this camera.
It's pretty fantastic.
They've redressed the on/off switch of the S1 and the S1R,
which I always thought was kind of funky.
They're using really the same button from the G9,
so I much prefer that on, and that also lights up the screen.
The screen itself is bigger, which allows you to have
more information on it. I really like that.
Testing it out last night. What I love is the IBIS
along with the low light performance.
We were shooting it 12800, 25600, and with the IBIS,
I had no gimbal and some of the footage
I was able to capture is remarkable.
6K shooting clearly is pretty awesome.
I know a lot of people are going to say,
"Why would you need 6K?" But, just like when
we were shooting 4K to deliver in 1080p
and giving us room to push in, now we can shoot in 6K,
deliver in 4K and have that room to push in
just like we had in the old days,
so that's a pretty awesome feature right there.
You know what a lot of people are probably not mentioning is
is their menu that is exactly like the VariCam.
It's a classic, six button layout
and with the touch screen,
it works exactly like it would on a VariCam, on a Arri.
Like it is very, very nice and accessible
and I really like this thing.
By the way, something that I've been doing lately
that I also did at this event is to makes stories
on Instagram about the little discoveries
I was making about the camera throughout the day,
so make sure you're following me on Instagram to see those.
Now, another thing I wanted to talk about
was how competent this camera is at photos.
I thought for sure we'd be giving up some
photo capabilities in order to differentiate it from the S1,
but there's basically a fully featured S1 in there,
including the 6 fps burst and the high resolution photo modes.
The only difference really is that it has
the optical pass low filter, but other than that,
you can do pretty much everything
you can do on the S1 inside this camera as well
and that's great because that's now gonna increase
the value of the camera for people who want
sort of a "One camera to do everything" role
because it is expensive at $4,000,
but if you factor in I'm getting a fully featured,
full frame S1 as well as this fantastic new video camera,
then it actually starts to make the price quite fair.
And I really like the S1 as a photo camera.
If you remember from my review,
I had a lot of great things to say about it
and I have all those same great things to say
about the S1H as a photo camera.
Another thing I wasn't really expecting is
the in-body image stabilization that's in this camera.
I just thought it wouldn't have any like the GH5S,
but not only does it have it, but it's fantastic.
It's just as good as the G9 or the S1 or the GH5
or anything else we've come to expect from Panasonic.
I've even heard people say that it might even be
half a stop better in certain situations,
and that's fantastic. In fact, the clip that I uploaded
for you to test for the editing performance
was actually shot handheld at, like, 100mm
in a really awkward position moving back and forth
between two other shooters and so it should be sloppy
and shaky as hell, especially at 100mm,
but if you look at it, it's actually surprisingly smooth
considering how poorly I shot it,
and so the IBIS on this camera is very impressive
in my opinion. And, another thing that I wasn't expecting it
to have is the dust, splash and freeze resistance
that it does considering that it has those big fan grills
on the side. So, that was really smart design
in order to maintain the weather resistance
from some of the other models,
even though it has that active cooling.
It also those display options that the GH5 has
where you can change your shutter speed and ISO
into shutter angle and gain, which is really nice to have
when you're shooting video. And, speaking of gain,
this is a dual gain system, just like the one you'd find
in the GH5S, but this has some applications
on photography that you should be aware of as well.
So, the dual gain changes depending on the gamma curve
that you're applying. When you're normal,
it's IS0 100 and ISO 640, meaning that when you go
to ISO 640, you then activate the higher gain amplifier
and in the settings, you can set one of three options.
You can set "auto", "low" or "high".
When you're on low, you can only go between
that 100 and 640, and when you're on high,
you have to be on 640 or above. You can't go to a lower set.
Auto lets you go through them both
and just switches the amplifier
once you cross over that threshold.
But you need to keep this in mind for photography
because unlike other cameras now,
that means you're gonna have that dual gain switch,
so you might be better served to maybe stop down
your aperture by a third of a stop
in order to bump the ISO past that threshold
and get into that higher gain mode
because it might actually lead to cleaner images.
Now, if you're somebody that's used
dual gain video before, you'll understand
that you just have to apply those principles
of photography, but if you've never used this before
and you're getting this camera as a hybrid camera,
you will want to sort of keep that in mind.
But it also changes depending on the picture profile
or the gamma curve you're applying.
So, for instance, if you're using
one of the Cinelike profiles,
then the ISO range is changed.
It goes from ISO 200
and 1250 becomes the two gain settings now
and if you set it to HLG, then they go up further.
It's ISO 400 and ISO 2500. And then finally,
if you use V-Log, they change to ISO 640 and ISO 4000.
Now, I wasn't able to test this precisely
because I didn't want to take the raws
and not be able to develop them
and have them mean nothing, so I did shoot
mostly JPEG when I was there, but I did test something
where I put the camera in raw photo mode
and checked and saw if the picture profiles
does affect these gains that we're talking about.
So, when I was in raw photo with the dial set to "M"
in photo mode and I had V-Log on,
I messed with the gain settings and when in "high",
the ISO does start at 4000, which means just like
with the Sony camera, remember I showed that video
about the Sony a7 III, how when you change
your picture profile, that the gamma curve does affect
the way that the ISO responds to even your raw photos?
It seems like it's gonna be the same thing with the S1H
where, say that you have V-Log set
and you forgot to take V-Log off,
and then you're in photo mode and you're taking photos?
Well, now your dual gain is gonna be based on V-Log
and not on based on the normal mode of 100-640.
It's gonna be based on the 640 and 4000 ISOs.
Another aspect that I know you guys care about
that I looked into is that the S1H can be charged
and actively supplied power to using USB.
It has a USB-C with power delivery
and a power delivery adapter
that comes with the camera that will allow you not only
to charge the battery, but charge the battery
while using the camera, which is great.
I didn't do a full battery rundown test
because it lasts a lot longer obviously
when it's plugged in and I only had a limited time
with the camera, but it does seem like it's going to
stretch your life a lot longer,
if not run it seemingly indefinitely.
I love being able to charge my camera via USB
now that I've gotten used to it with other cameras
and the ability to be able to charge your battery
while using the camera is great and that's a feature
that I wish that my GH5 had. And, speaking of photography,
the shutter is rated for 400,000 cycles
and it has two UHS-II card slots,
not a UHS-II and a XQD card,
but the two card slots now work in parity
in the same way as the GH5 did,
so you can not only write to backup,
like you can write the same video file or photo files
to both cards, or you can choose which ones go where,
but you also have that relay recording mode
where you can write to one card
and when it fills up, it starts writing to the second card
and then they're hot swappable, so then you can take out
the first card and put a fresh one in
so when the second card is used up, it goes back to card one
and you can do this over and over and over again
for as long as you can supply power to it.
Oh, and lastly, since so many of you asked about it,
the VFR mode, the in-camera built-in slow motion mode
that slows it down automatically for you,
all the functionality that was missing from the S1
is back on the S1H, so you can autofocus
and you can adjust your exposure settings,
which you couldn't do on the S1.
Now, I kinda got the impression from talking to people
that they're not going to ever fix that or add that
to the S1. It's gonna be one of the differentiating factors
between the two cameras, but you can do it
on the S1H now, but there's no audio just like normal
when using a VFR mode,
but it does have a great 1080p 120 fps option
which comes in 10-bit and does have audio recording
as Jordan from that DPReview video
that I recommended demonstrated.
[slow motion] Oh, my God!
So, I think that's everything that I wanted to talk about.
I hope I covered some details
that you haven't already seen elsewhere
and let me know in the comments
how intrigued you are by this camera
and if you'll be adding it to your wish list.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
helpful or at least entertaining, and if you did,
make sure to leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already,
but if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.