Alright, so today
we're going to be discussing the new firmware update
for the Panasonic S1H, which brings BRAW,
external raw recording using the video assist
and I have a lovely guest joining me
to talk about this today. Jordan Drake from DPReview,
say hi, Jordan. Hey everybody. You're using
that word lovely wrong, You're messing up the flow
of the cold open. what you're supposed to
just say is "Let's get Undone." It's Jordan with Gerald. Let's get Undone. [offbeat music] ♪ Gerald Undone ♪ ♪ He's crazy ♪ Okay, so as usual,
a little disclosure, Panasonic sent me the S1H. This is a 24-70.
I also have a 70-200. There might even be another
lens in the box there. I don't know.
And they arranged for Blackmagic
to send me the video assist. Although to be truthful
it's not this one. It was a 7" one
which I also have, but I've been using the 5" one
'cause it's more portable. Nikon arranged to send
me the 5" one. It's very confusing. All these things are loaners, I have to send them
all back afterwards. No money changed hands.
I don't get to keep any of this stuff,
but this is all on loan from Panasonic and I'm going
to be doing a Nikon video as well in the future and not
that it's important for me to disclose
any of Jordan's information, but I'm pretty sure
that Jordan has the same-- -Same deal. Yeah
-Yeah. Did you get a 5" or 7"? I got a 7" as well which--
I don't have a 5" from Nikon, so it was
a little cumbersome out there. This is already
kind of unwieldy. I mean I love the S1H
but it's a, it's a monster and when you add
all this extra stuff on-- This video is sponsored though
and that's by Storyblocks, Not by Panasonic. OK, so are you
posting your own video? -By the way, on this?
-I will be later. Yeah, we're still
running some tests here and I want to
get my hands on an S1. I don't have a date yet no. OK, what do you want to get
your hands on an S1? -For value comparison?
-Yeah, 'cause it got all the, like a lot
of the high res stuff from the S1H
and everything like that, so... People are probably gonna
ask me what I think of the S1H versus the S1 now
with the firmware updates. I already made
a video comparing them a few months,
maybe a year or so ago. I still think that video holds. If anything, maybe
just the gap closed even more, just a little bit, but I would
still say that the same principles-- So, I would watch that video
if like if you want to know whether to get an S1 or s1H, The S1 just got a
little bit better still is all I would say
and all these firmware updates for all the cameras are
available as of today for us, which is March 31st.
I'm not sure when I'm going to post
this video though, but the only one right now
that gets BRAW is the S1H. Panasonic told me they don't
really have any plans, but maybe if a lot of people
like the BRAW here, maybe other cameras
will get it, we'll see. So, jumping in on that,
Jordan, first impressions of the image I guess
would be my question for you. Yeah, I've been doing
ProRes RAW quite a bit off of the S1H and we've got
a couple of videos on that and it's been a real
development from being... It had very few features from
the get go and you couldn't do a lot of the stuff you'd expect
with raw video initially. Like, you know,
if you tried to do a complete white balance shift
from like daylight to tungsten,
the image would fall apart. So a lot of the advantages
of raw weren't there. And it's gotten better
over the last year where bringing it
into Resolve now with the BRAW
it feels very similar to where we already
are with ProRes RAW right now. It's-- we're not missing a lot
of features. They did-- I don't have access
to white balance, but that is coming very soon,
and they actually had a somewhat functional beta
of Resolve that supported -the white balance adjustment.
-You weren't using it? I'm still-- I'm still running
that, that, that sketchy beta and they were like, "Don't use
it to edit your videos." I edited my last two videos
on it, seems to be working, so I did play with
the white balance adjustment. It works,
I can say that it works. [Jordan] It's there.
Yeah, absolutely. [Gerald] What I can say though
is that it's not perfect. I haven't used
the ProRes-- by the way, if this-- so there's some
construction going on out here. It was supposed to stop by the time Jordan and I
scheduled a call, but if you keep hearing,
if it annoys you, here's some footage of it. I shot it
using Blackmagic RAW of them moving dirt out there.
There you go. It's probably playing right
now while I'm talking. Anyway, you'll have to
excuse it, please. But yeah, so I, I don't know
what its like with ProRes RAW. The latest versions
with Final Cut when it comes to,
say, shooting at 3200K or 8000K and just
dropping it to 5500K. But I tested it
with BRAW and... It's way better
than shooting internal and trying to shift
your white balance a couple 1000 Kelvin
because that just-- You get crazy colour shifts
and everything-- and your exposure goes
out of whack too because of, you know,
moving the intensities. For BRAW if you adjust
the white balance your exposure remains intact and there's not really
any colour shifts. The only thing
is that it's not perfect in the sense of like...
you can't set a 2000K to 5500K
and a 10,000K to 5500K. They don't look
exactly the same. One might need a + 5 Tint and
one might be 5400K or something. With ProRes, is it kind of
perfect now where-- if you just type in a white balance,
it's the same on both? Or is there a little bit of... like finessing
you still have to do? There's still always
a little bit of finessing, and even when I was comparing
these two formats together, that was still the case in terms of how the tint
comes out on both of them. But I do find anytime I do a heavy white balance
push in ProRes I have to adjust the tint
to some extent a little bit. While we're on the topic
of colour. Have you compared internal
versus Blackmagic RAW? And did you notice there's
a bit of a colour shift. -Between the two of them?
-Yeah, I found it was a little warmer,
a little-- little pink. Like again, that magenta shift
a little bit when I brought the BRAW files in,
compared to the internal -10-bit V-Log profile,
-I found that, I don't know if you do much with sky,
but I found that a blue sky was actually a bit more cyan on
the BRAW and I shot a chart. I'll put it up right now. The internal versus the BRAW, and if you look at the
vectorscopes there is-- I don't know if, like,
I don't know if this is-- like, a Resolve update
will fix this, like the way that they are interpreting it
or something, or assigning it to V-Log,
but it's not quite right. It's like...
You know, a little bit off. Maybe that'll be fixed with just, sort of,
like, some future revisions, because I also
noticed something I wasn't sure If you did
where the levels seem wrong. On the BRAW recordings.
It almost seems like you're comparing, like,
full versus legal range or, like, video levels
versus data levels. At first I thought
it was just, like, "Ah, BRAW is
a bit more contrasty," but then I was talking to a
friend, Dennis, who pointed out that he thinks it looks
like a video levels thing. So I popped down one
of those level range fixes that you might be used to
using on, like, your Atomos and it just immediately
made the two clips look the same in terms of
luma values and intensity. So this is a Blackmagic--
saying to Blackmagic right now. There seems
to be an issue where The Blackmagic RAW clips
from the S1H are being interpreted at
like video levels, and even if you go into
the Clip Attributes, and change them to full.
It doesn't change anything. You have to apply, like, a
levels LUT, which is not ideal, so hopefully that can also be
fixed in the future updates. So the LUT that I made
for myself, Jordan, the monitoring lut,
was, like, a levels fix, a V-Log to 709 conversion, and then a bunch of,
like, hue shifting. Then I was able to really
monitor a really lovely image on the video assist, but I do
have one more complaint and then it's all positive,
I think, after this. Did your video assist
look kind of rosy, peachy, pink-er then... Do you have,
kind of, like a pink cast? Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
I thought it was-- I mentioned there was kind
of that warmer, magenta shift to it and I thought
it was much more severe when I was out shooting
than it actually was -once I got it into Resolve.
-Right. I think the screen I think the actual display...
and I did a little Googling and there's, like, a whole
forum on it where I think it might be
a known issue that... Really, it's my only complaint. I quite like the video assist, but the display
is a little bit pink, especially
if you compare it to the... The panel on the S1H itself,
but overall I did enjoy using the video assist,
the new 12G one. You said that you happen
to be a fan of it as well? Yeah, absolutely.
I really like... I just found, well, the
start-up time is a nice change -from the Ninja V
-[Gerald] It is, and you can -turn it off quickly too--
-[overlapping conversation] -SD card!
-[Jordan] Having double L-mount batteries
is really sweet as well. 'Cause we do tend to do
a lot of long takes and we've definitely had
Ninjas conk out and actually corrupt a file on us before
when we're recording raw. So, yeah, having that
I think was wonderful. The interface is great
for anybody that's ever used Blackmagic. I mean,
I might make a full video comparing the Atomos.
I actually do like the SSD caddy on the Atomos.
I think I prefer using SSDs over SD cards, just
due to, like, price per GB, but the interface is
fantastic if you've ever used -Blackmagic, it's like...
-[Jordan] The same as a camera. -[Gerald] Touchscreen buttons
just, boop, boop. It works well. Good
monitoring tools, it's great. [Jordan] And it's really nice
too that you've got those same tools
when you're shooting raw like you can choose
your constant bit rate or variable data rate, where with ProRes RAW, it's
just ProRes RAW, ProRes RAW HQ. And it doesn't actually
tell you what's going on under the hood there, so, I far prefer Blackmagic's
implementation of that. And it's impressive
what you can do to an SD card. I was a little bit
apprehensive. I thought 5.9K... At Q0 or 3:1
would not work, but I don't think
every SD card will work, but I was using
the TOUGH G cards from Sony, -like, the V90s.
-Same. Yeah. and no issues, even at Q0,
which theoretically should be able to go up to, like, faster
than the card will allow. I had it set to stop
recording if it drops a frame, so I would know if it did. I was just running around
like a maniac and it never, it never dropped a frame
for me so... but I mean you probably don't
need to shoot at that though. -I found that Q5, 5:1, 8:1.
-Yeah. I visually-- I'll put
some charts up on the screen right now going through
different compression ratios I couldn't see a difference
to be honest. Between 12:1 even, or whatever
the smallest one is. So, theoretically you can
get a decent bit of record time on an SD card if you
lower your compression. And like you said, it's great
that they have that option. Yeah, we did some tests on our
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema review doing a really tough key
and just ran through all the raw data rates and once
we got past 5:1, there was... 5:1 and down is still beautiful for pretty much
any use you've got. ISO control though
is not a thing. I'm sure you noticed in,
but that is in-- well, I watched your video
on the ProRes one, and some cameras have elements
and other ones don't, right, but I reached out to Blackmagic
to ask because you can do
white balance and they do have an exposure slider,
but they don't have a-- There's a drop down box
for ISO, it's in the same place 'cause you're still
just using Resolve, but it's always greyed out
on any of the three cameras that I tried for Blackmagic
RAW. And a product manager at Blackmagic
said that they've "disabled all third-party
cameras' BRAW ISO adjustment and it was decided because
across the camera manufacturers ISO is approached
in different ways. Different digital & analog gains. And as a result, we found that
the exposure control gives a consistent adjustment for
all cameras and ISO levels." So, if you were doing this
solely just to be able to change your ISO, that's
not a thing, but I found I wasn't even really using
the exposure control either. I was actually
just making a curve. Resolve is great in that way
that an early node is almost as good as a raw
panel, so I didn't really care, but it is worth noting
that there's no ISO control, And it is very important,
because that's not in there. If you're used to working with
a RED or something like that, you do have to choose
which of the two gain settings you're going to use
and pin it down properly. If you're going to
really push that exposure up, don't shoot your
camera at 640 ISO selected, you want to bump it up to
the 2000 ISO second gain step and then really bring it up,
so make sure you get that right in the camera, but
otherwise it's the same thing that we have
with ProRes RAW. I'm still waiting for
someone to give me an answer if there's any difference
between using their ISO slider and their exposure
adjustment on that. If you're running a camera with dual gain,
seems to just be like, Set the, you know,
one of the two base gain steps and you get
the exact same results doing an exposure boost as compared to you
doing an ISO adjustment. Did you notice any difference
in analyzing the image at all for, you know, detail
or noise or anything like that. There was a little bit sharper
image coming out of the BRAW, but it wasn't
actually recording more detail. Once I sharpened up
my ProRes RAW footage, they matched up,
so it does seem like you're just getting
a little closer to delivery with the BRAW once you run
those files through. Did you feel
the same way about noise? Did you find that
the ProRes was the noisiest and then BRAW was less so,
or what did you think? Looking at it, just in
the shadow areas at 2000 they look exactly
the same to me even though with
a little bit more sharpening on the BRAW, you'd think that noise
would be more noticeable but I'll have
to do a heavy push and see
if that's still the case. I shot at 640
and internal versus BRAW. I found the BRAW I was maybe
like a few percent noisier something I did notice though, which this is
probably good information. for people that have never
used any kind of raw thing and they
got the S1H. You can turn off
a lot of things in the S1H. You can turn
noise reduction down to -1 which is, that's-- Okay, when I say the noise
was very similar between BRAW and the S1H internal, that was with the noise
reduction set to minus one. If you have the noise
reduction at 0, +1 or +2. then you're going to find
that the raw is noisier. But also you can
turn off most corrections for like lens
and other stuff. There's one thing
you can't turn off though, which is
distortion compensation. So I noticed on the 24-70
if I compared just two images. The internal one always had
distortion compensation on and the raw one would have,
depending on whether I was at 24 or 70,
would have one type of distortion or another.
And you can fix this in post. But what was interesting
is it actually made the BRAW
a bit sharper because I think the distortion
compensation kind of like blurs the edges a little bit,
so when I shot BRAW before applying the distortion,
it looked a bit sharper and then when I corrected
the distortion in Resolve then they looked
equally sharp again. So maybe that means if, that
if you were going to crop in a little bit,
that you might get a slightly sharper image because
it's not distortion corrected. But again, this is marginal,
like super marginal-- it's probably not
even worth talking about. But what is
my channel for if not that? [Jordan laughing] I'm curious if you noticed-- my theory is that you
wouldn't have noticed a difference in dynamic range. My gut tells me that
they'd look the same to you. I had a very
high contrast shot I can actually send you,
with the sun behind a windmill. And yeah,
my clipping point was identical and shadows lined
up exactly the same. So that's good to know because
I did test it like you know, with the charts and stuff like
that, I busted out the Xyla 21 and it is
slightly worse on the BRAW. like one fifth
of a stop consistently. And I was able
to reproduce this if I overexpose by
about half a stop to a stop, and then I recover
the highlights, the internal recovers just a
sminch more-- is sminch a word? -Sminch is a word, yeah, It recovers a sminch more
detail on the internal, but I think that's why
I asked you the question first. Functionally, I don't think
you'll notice a difference. One thing I should say
about dynamic range, though, is that currently
there is no highlight recovery checkbox option enabled in
Davinci Resolve, but I was able to get that on the other
third party cameras, so maybe that will be
a future possibility for this camera
and then in that case, it might change
what I said about-- there's a little bit
better recovering the highlights then the BRAW might win. Currently, it doesn't
win by just a little bit, but it might if they
activated that highlight recovery, but right now it's not a thing.
Did you hear anything about them doing
anything with that? They didn't mention
anything on my briefing, but I did find that
the highlight recovery with the,
when I was just shooting with the 12K camera made actually
a substantial difference. So yeah, I think I'm very
curious once that's enabled, if it will pull it ahead
of ProRes RAW a little bit. I did go through and experiment,
changing it to Canon Log, changing it to
Blackmagic Design Gen 5, changing it to different--
'cause you can convert to different Logs
to see if there would be any... you know,
a better Log to choose. I actually got
the best result from V-Log. It was like 12.6.
If I went to Canon Log-2 I got like 12.5,
then like it was 12.3 so. Stick with V-Log.
I wouldn't bother, like, if you have a workflow
for like ARRI Log C, I mean you can do that,
but I do find that the V-Log was probably
the best of the conversions. I just didn't
like the colour shift, but hopefully
that will be fixed. I know you're
a fan of V-Log. -Love V-Log.
-And I thought it looked great. I'm pretty
happy with the image coming from somebody who
didn't use ProRes RAW on it. That's me, but you maybe you're
not really that surprised? Like is the image
is kind of like, yeah, that's what you were
expecting or what you think? Yeah, I was really looking
for a big differentiator like you said, for someone
who's used-- using both NLEs, is there one reason
to choose one over the other? And there's small
nitpicky differences, like I mentioned the tints
and things like that or applying a tiny bit more
sharpening to the ProRes RAW. But in general, it took me
like 30 seconds to match every one of those clips
between the two of them. So, the big benefit is now we have the option
of very flexible raw, especially once we get white
balance adjustments in BRAW, then the only reason
that I would choose one over the other really
is what am I planning to edit it on so I don't have
to round trip anything. I still think for
the majority of work, you know, shooting raw really brings
a lot of extra work into it. You have to do things
like those lens corrections, or sharpening,
noise reduction. All of those are steps
that are all pretty demanding on your machine as well. So if quick turnaround is
important, I do tell people, just disregard raw video
for the most part 'cause you're not seeing
a big dynamic range bump. It's really
the white balance adjustments is what I find
most useful about it. So for a short film or big
commercial project, absolutely. But a lot of the times, like do you have
dialed in colour already? Does everything
look great on the monitor? You can probably get by with internal 10-bit
in most situations, and that's not the case
on a lot of other cameras. Learn how to white
balance correctly, and then, really what are
you getting out of it? Nothing really, right? Unless you just
need maximum control like you know less filtering, less sharpening,
less all that stuff. But, it's the S1H
is probably the worst example to sell BRAW
because it does so well to not mess the image up
that much to begin with, and I think you just said
that like on other cameras, there might be a much more
compelling reason, but for the S1H it's really just
white balance and performance. We generally shoot in the
10-bit 4:2:2, 150 Mbps mode, and yeah, it chugs
your computer, absolutely. So, depending on what your
workflow is on other NLEs, its proxy is a lot of
the time or I'll just do like a base adjustment
and then I've already got optimized media
on Final Cut once I do that. but it is much easier to work
with native ProRes RAW in Final Cut
or BRAW in Resolve, so if you don't want
to worry about proxies or something like that, it will take up
more storage space, but that could be
a compelling reason to just jump over
to working with these. But again,
factor in the fact that the most demanding
things to render seem to be noise reduction
and lens correction, and you're
gonna have to do that. Maybe I'm just going
to fall back to the workflow that I like,
but maybe the best bet is just
to record externally, but using
the image they already like. You know,
just using ProRes or DNX, not raw, and that way
you're still getting, you're getting 10-bit. White
balance that properly yourself, but then you got
the lens corrections. You can control
the noise reduction in camera, and the S1H is
a great control for that, if you want
a minimal amount, like maybe that's still
'cause, then you're still not
poorly leveraging SD cards. And your performance
is going to be right in line with those. So yeah, I think
you're absolutely right. You're not going to
get 6K out of the HDMI for DNX
or ProRes normal. You have to do raw, but you
do get an oversampled 6K to 4K which I compared them,
and the oversampled 6K image on the S1H is very good. It's hard to tell
the difference in a 4K timeline between the oversampled 4K
and the actual 6K raw, but if you want
to shoot 4K60, well 4K60 is always
a super 35 crop on this. But if you just
want to shoot 4K24, you're not getting some
kind of oversampled image. You're still
getting a super 35 crop. Keep that in mind,
if you're a 4K shooter, this probably doesn't make
any sense to go this route. -Yeah.
-Wrap this up for me, Jordan, what's the,
what's the final word? Final word is... really, what I
kind of I touched on before-- God damn it,
let me clean that up. No, that's it. Well, that
was our final word-- My final word is
what I said ten minutes ago. Have you ever found
yourself in a situation where you could really use some
footage, but shooting yourself was either logistically or,
like, you know, budgetarily unfeasible? That
ever happened to you, Jordan? That has
happened to me on occasion. This is
an excellent segue, Gerald. well, you know
if that happens to you or any of our lovely viewers,
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so you can use it as much as you want wherever you want. So if you think, Jordan,
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footage and effects, check out Storyblocks using the
link in the description below and thank you
Jordan for joining me in this
impromptu raw talk. Definitely check
out DPReview if you haven't. I don't know how.
I don't know how Gerald Undone is plugging DPReview TV.
That doesn't make any sense. I watched you guys too,
back when-- before I even had a YouTube channel, I used
to watch Camera Store. Yeah,
you guys are great and it's been great
having you on, man. Congratulations
on 250,000 as well. Thank you, sir. But that's
going to be it for me. I hope you found this
video entertaining or at least helpful.
And if you did, make sure the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already, but if you did not find this
video helpful or entertaining, try setting
playback speed to 75%. Alright... we're done.
