Panasonic GH5 and the Atomos Ninja Inferno: Going Deep

hey everybody I'm Hugh Preston for three blind men and an elephant let me start by saying get a flu shot yes I know strains mutated very quickly big bad Pharma yada yada yada but this is now two years in a row I've come down with the flu around the same time of year and not to get too technical but it just sucks it lingers it keeps me cloudy and it keeps me curled up in a ball i leak like a faucet and yeah I'm a wimp but it doesn't matter if there's something that can reduce the likelihood of getting the flu and it's free well I've concluded I'm an idiot for being too lazy to trudge into my local pharmacy and just do it so I will do it and I suggest you do too next today I want to talk about the Atomos ninja Inferno the seven-inch HDMI only monitor recorder we brought with us on a road trip through New Hampshire Maine and eastern Long Island if you saw our previous episode on Zacuto gear we used on the same trip you'll know that my personal Bugaboo isn't lots logs or whatever third l-word would have fit in very beautifully if I'd had the patience but instead the simple challenge of seeing what I'm shooting in bright light and or at an angle which is precisely why the inferno was interesting to me in the first place so I'll cut straight to it broken up actually into two parts part one the inferno is a significant technical update over its predecessor the Ninja Assassin especially with firmware update 8.4 Atomos retained all that was good about the assassin 4k recording great focus and exposure assists high resolution screen excellent menu system with one of the best touch interfaces I've ever seen in the industry use of fast high-capacity solid-state or spinning disk drives a pile of codecs and then improves daylight view ability by raising screen brightness from 400 to 1500 nits manages to find space for an entire second battery up to the 4k recording framerate to 60fps cuts the price by $300 from the assassins original launch price of 1295 and introduces new HDR feature so kudos to Atomos for creating a precision tool clearly tailored for the gh 5 just as they did with the original Shogun for the sony a7s at such an aggressive price point but this begs larger questions around the magnitude and significance of these differences to you because while 10 bit 4k 60p is going to be important to a bunch of folks remember the gh 5 will only record that resolution and framerate at 8 bit internally and a 300 on price drop which will be important to a bunch more I'm betting for most of us the first question has to be so how much brighter is that while the second question has to be so how much longer recording is that hold those thoughts because a number of you will also be interested in the improved support of high dynamic range and hybrid long gamma in 8.4 at which point the third question becomes what is that exactly and how important is that to whom when hold that thought to because with all of this said there are costs too though I think they are reasonable the inferno is somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters of an inch thicker and wider and almost a pound heavier than the assassin it may look very similar to the assassin it's lost the bright orange protective rubber cover but really who cares but this is a new body kudos again adam oasiz doing what it takes to make the right product for the g h5 including expensive machining but these are not the only costs so hold that thought now to be perfectly candid up until GH 5's firmware version 2.0 I've always been more of a hey the atomos is a great monitor which just happens to have a built-in recorder that doesn't matter to me and I don't really want the price or weight penalty of it kind of guy I am NOT a visual effects person I'm not a green screen person my gear until the gh 5 didn't record in 10 bits I didn't want the overhead of shooting raw or ProRes if it wasn't going to significantly change my 8-bit for 2o image quality anyway I like traveling light so yeah there's that but the gh 5 does record 10 but 4 to 2 though not just a through HDMI but internally as just about everybody now knows all the way up to 400 megabits per second when shooting all interest so the fourth question becomes how much faster or better is recording directly in Pro res than that hold that thought - finally if there were good answers to all of these questions the last question would still have to be your questions how much money and weight penalty is all of it and is it worth it ok the lines have been drawn thus we can now turn our attention to part two of the bottom line which is this the net result of pairing an upgraded gh 5 with an upgraded ninja is that most shooters who don't already own an Atomos product will appreciate the outstanding interface and assists all will appreciate the greater brightness a much smaller group will like the inferno itself which in the end is really designed to do explore HDR NHL G as they begin to trickle into the mainstream the flipside is I'm guessing most of us will find the idea of recording externally for image quality differences less compelling than ever unless shooting 10 bit 4k 60 frames per second is critical to you let's get into some details first up brightness I've done a little googling before getting into it with the inferno but I'm going to attribute this to my enfeebled mental state from my ongoing battle with the flu I hadn't found a definitive comparison of mit's levels I still didn't know if this particular measurement is like lumens evey FSF stops decibels linear logarithmic or other so while my first guess was that 1500 Nancy is light after all is just under two stops brighter than the 400 nits of the assassin it took a long HDMI cable hooked up from the GH five to the assassin a second shorter HDMI cable from the assassin to the inferno three tripods a sony a6300 an iphone and a pile of LED lights on stands to determine that this is yeah about right in my imprecise testing the meter on the AC the 300 helped me deduce a 1.7 stop advantaged the inferno when both were set to 100% brightness in other words almost four times as bright but let me just interject for a moment to talk about the brightness metrics the industry is throwing around these days because nits as a late night for him late afternoon from his Skype call over the weekend with an animus but in the UK revealed our peak brightness ratings meaning most of the time you aren't seeing that level of brightness it's very much like the old audio amplifier ratings games of the 1970s Pequod's vs. RMS root-mean-square watts in the end what was more important was the amount of power delivered most of the time so back to the real world it's going to come down to what you see with your own two eyes when you're actually on location in bright light I didn't think two stops was going to be a retina frying difference or shall I say recalling the occasional synesthesia I have when taking nyquil I didn't think this was going to make my ears pop what I was wrong when I set up again outside the difference was dramatic this alone is reason enough to take a very close look at the inferno or a really really good hood not one of those short three-quarter jobs have more like what Goodman offers for a number of monitors though interestingly enough not for Atomos which I find strange but with this set both monitors Inferno and ninja suffered equally from glare and that's just annoying since the very concept of glare is antithetical to being daylight viewable now I understand why item o--'s has done this the blacks are richer just like they are when you print on glossy instead of matte print papers but still next battery life according to publish specs it turns out the two batteries in the Infernal have about the same longevity as one in the assassin which is disappointing but I assume it's a function of the screen being so much brighter and it's true that these kinds of monitors do suck batteries very quickly and yes there's great value in being able to hot-swap batteries but if you're going to be shooting all day if your objective is to minimize the number of distractions or failure points you'll want a truce in a style high-capacity battery with detail it's the better way to go from a workflow perspective but you'll need proper rigging and the budget for it I'll put a link to my review of the psuedo kit we used in the show more section below and in the upper right corner of the screen for you and on the upper left to me and thanks to one of you who reached out to me about small rig I have a review coming up of that too so keep an eye out in the meantime if any of you have a particularly sweet setup please share in the comments section below third dynamic range a hybrid long gamma guys it's still early days for HDR in a video now to be honest with myself as someone who is never going to be a dedicated DP or camera op but instead will likely always be a one or two man band whose intrinsic path is words and ideas first HDR today mostly just annoys the heck out of me because it makes things more complicated and gets in the way of my intent just like crappy camera body ergonomics and it begs me to spend more money but let's talk about it anyway because limited dynamic range can get in the way of intent when shooting outdoors it's beautiful when you have it and forget about me or you the industry has decided this is the next big thing after VR or AR on the other hand hey let's forget about what the industry had just decided just long enough to acknowledge this simple fact that the difference between even the best cameras and displays out there and the human eye is staggering and the gear loses biology is brilliant the human eye no religious connotation implied miraculous so I get the value of high dynamic range with this set I've never warmed to what I'll call first generation HDR still images for the most part that don't look remotely like what one sees in real life but instead might best be described as a kind of photo realism inspired by Peter max whose work I love by the way as originally created now you can argue that moonrise Hernandez New Mexico by Ansel Adams is in concept no different from HDR but I'd argue that even if he dodged and burned the heck out of that final image which he did printing on paper that by the way only has five to seven stops of dynamic range he managed to create an image very different from what the camera captured but one that somehow passes an instinctive or emotional sniff test and for me that's what's lovely about HDR and video the promise of capturing more of what the human eye can see or to put it better yet with the human eye brain and heart together can feel but at the moment HDR TVs represent a small fraction of the market I just saw a report that asserts by 2020 maybe 30% of HDR TVs shipped will have true HDR performance capabilities whatever that means even if virtually all of them will be HDR compatible whatever that means in 2016 that number was closer to four percent so the ramp up is clear even then we're talking what eleven stops of dynamic range compared to 15 stops of range for the best cameras today and 20 stops for the human eye and at what bit depth my brand new 2017 iMac doesn't support an HDR screen and even with 10 to 10 and a half stops the inferno isn't officially an HDR 10 or HDR 10 plus screen either though if we forget about standards and just look at the thing it surely is HDR relative to traditional monitors my point is if neither you nor I can see the HDR difference in our daily viewing why bother with it well you bother with it because you know it's coming you want to get familiar with it before things heat up too quickly and you want to make money with it so this is another reason why the inferno might be interesting to you unless it isn't what atomos has done with its atom HDR during this transitional time is figure out how to take advantage of the inferno is high brightness display and it's brilliant interface to create what is essentially a continuously variable set of monitor lots across exposures during live view using this simple slider control its value is clearest when you're shooting in log and want to envision what the final footage could look like after being properly great it's pretty darn cool but with this said and given my very clear biases starting point I found that not shooting in log and relying solely on the gh 5s rear LCD Penny's Synod II profile and some simple adjustments in post I could still get what I consider to be beautiful imagery which brings us to hybrid log gamma now the basic ambition for h LG is achieving the same end result as shooting in log and grading in post greater dynamic dynamic range without shooting in log or grading in post which is my kind of magic the way HDL h LG does this is by baking in the curves at the capture point and at the display point camera display using metadata catalog at capture to tell an official HDR display what to do what además has done with its h LG support properly tagging metadata is important if you're doing HDR and want to get to it without the overhead of log shooting and grading there's a lot more to say about HL g like how it's supposed to look ok on rec709 tvs as opposed to log which just looks washed out and this in turn helps productions like sports not require two sets of cameras to cover event but I don't have an H LG display so I'm breaking service to talk about the answer to the fourth question which is the advantage of recording directly to pro res or perhaps cinema d ng again I cop to not being the primary target audience for this I would have expected pro res to have a significant advantage over internally recorded files but given my subject matter and distribution channel which is YouTube and as I always kick off imports to include transcoding and simply walk away from the Edit Bay when this happens it's not a significant manage to my workflow though to be fair transcoding took much longer for all I than the usual long op the one other little thing is that the metadata tag coming over to Final Cut Pro 10 from the gh 5 doesn't properly show what the codec is it should read something from the gh 5 like all I but instead it reads as if someone had just put in some text and said we'll get to it later but never did the metadata from the animos had no such a problem the fifth question weight size and the cost of stuff I don't like mounting something as big and heavy as the inferno with batteries directly onto the gh 5s hot shoe it leaves me queasy as I implied earlier I'd explore attaching the mom into a camera cage that can properly support the weight but this Acuto rig alone can easily equal the price and weight of the gh 5 itself and for many people this will be a bridge too far in fact ditto the inferno all by itself which had a 995 dollar price point with weight and volume closing in on the gh 5 might be another bridge too far at which point you might seriously consider the monitor only small HD focus which although just about half in its carrying a marginally lower dots per square inch spec and only 5 inches diagonally is also half the price at $4.99 for the monitor alone and is 1/6 the weight before adding batteries and media so let me recap if you're the shooter and the editor maybe even the director and producer but in any case have a keen sense the time is money you want to record directly to ProRes you want that 60 frames per second 4k and 10 bits you want to get more comfortable with HDR and H LG and you have both the budget and back for a proper rig with Santa battery and enough loaded SSD caddies the ninja inferno is a no-brainer and a bargain at that to get anywhere close to that brilliant 7 inch display with assists never mind recording you're looking at something like the monitor only 1,500 bucks small HD 702 bright-eyed only a thousand nits or the even brighter but triple the price monitor only $3,000 2200 nits small HD 703 ultra bite but even then these monitors won't take in or pass through a 4k signal and they're just as or slightly heavier even if they do offer the SDI ports in addition to HDMI that they ninja inferno does not if you still want that 4k recording the most natural competitor to the Animas 4k recording line is convergence designs now reduce price 1495 Odyssey 7 cube plus the 7 Q plus offers an even bigger though lower resolution in brightness seven point seven inch screen a pile of SDI inputs and outputs along with a mini HDMI in and out a comparable pile of codecs comparable use of SSD your spinning media comparable weight rate but lower frame rates and an interface only a mother could love of course they've SDI is important you could move up to the Shogun inferno which sells for 1295 naked and has the ability to record up to the same 60 frames per second in full 4k and up to 240 frames per second in full HD or you could spend the same 995 on the Shogun flame which is the same price as the inferno includes SDI ports but omits the 4k 10 bit 60 frames per second capability now back at the low end you could also split the difference between the ninja inferno and small HD focus by ponying up 795 for the 30 frames per second in 4k limited hdmi only ninja flame you'd also do well to check out black magics eight hundred and fifty dollar video assist 4k which has the advantage of using less expensive SD cards like the inferno enflame it has a beautiful touch interface with robust assists with its latest firmware release an equally high resolution 1900 by 1200 display the additional benefit of SDI ports in and out as well as HDMI too many excellent our inputs but uses a pair of smaller Canon style batteries and isn't nearly as bright at 350 minutes in the end what makes the GH 5 spectacular is how much Panasonic has been able to pack into so little and the key parameter for how attractive the ninja inferno is to you probably rests on that one word little for someone like me the key to the GH 5 begins with unlimited recording time in a petite relatively affordable interchangeable lens a hybrid form factor camera and ends with how much it can grow with me as my skills and ambition dictated the assists are already in there not as nice as on the inferno 10-bit 4 to 2 internal recording is already in their higher frame rates are already in there I mean it's just peerless at anywhere near the price but when you add the inferno to the gh 5 you're adding a whole lot of big as I said it doubles the size and weight of the gh five even before you add in the rigging you may want for it and actually doubles the price once you add anissina battery and an appropriately sized SSD if you don't have them already on the other hand the inferno is also a big improvement in the ease of use for and viewability of assists composition and post-processing workflow and the only way to get 10 bit 4k 60p it's an interesting question isn't it which way to go gh 5 we'll all this stuff or something like an FS 7 and FS 7 to seat 200 or you da one without it or gh 5 naked I don't think it's clear-cut unless you have a very specific needs and budget which drive you to an obvious choice now as for me well in spite of the fact that we record internally and don't like carrying extra weight when we shoot commercially or for documentary work we always have either a ninja assassin or Blackmagic video 4k clamped to a tripod leg yeah a tripod leg which is why I'm looking so closely it rigs these days it's really splitting the baby if we didn't already have a 7 inch monitor it would actually be the ninja flame which would be at the top of our list though I will have to go hands-on with a small HD focus and as always your mileage may vary which brings us to one final thought for those of us who need want or insist on traveling light and cheap I think Adam owes is perhaps missing a market opportunity that small HD is not 7-inch and maybe 5 inch high brightness monitors without recorders I don't know how much cheaper they could actually make them I mean after all it would require new tooling and then Adam us would have to amortize that cost all over again across the new units but at a price point even modestly lower than the flame at 7 inches and approaching the price point of the small HD focus at 5 inches hopefully lighter and thinner than the combo monitor recorders perhaps even paired with the option of a power station to keep the weight of the batteries off the monitor itself I think atomos could have a couple of home runs then again I've been a statistical outlier before and I might be one now anyway hey if you like what you've seen here today please give a thumbs up subscribe join the conversation below share add to a playlist consider supporting our work by using our no cost to you affiliate links or even making a contribution directly via the PayPal link below as always we thank you for it for three linemen at an elephant I'm Hugh brownstone see you next time

Channel: Three Blind Men and An Elephant Productions

Views: 20,343

Keywords: Atomos Ninja Inferno 4K recorder camera monitor monitor videography photography Nov 6, 2017, Atomos, Ninja Flame, Shogun Inferno, Shogun Flame, smallHD Focus, smallHD, Convergent Designs, Odyssey 7Q+, Blackmagic Design Video Assist 4K, Panasonic GH5, GH5, videography, on-camera monitor, 7 monitor, HDR, HLG, daylight viewable, nits

Id: pX-TO7sTznw

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2017