Exploring B-RAW on the Lumix S5 II: A Comprehensive Review

[Music] [Applause] so this video is going to be a bit of a

chunky in-depth look at BW on the Lumix S5 2x these cameras as you will know offer a great range of internal

recording codecs whether that's long op or intra H VC and also pror over the last year I've been shooting more and

more projects uh in BW on the Lumix S5 2x looking at these images over the last year it really does feel like the B- on

the mark 2's is a massive step up from the implementation on the original S5 but I've never done you know in-depth

side by-side tests between all these different codecs to really look at what the differences are we're going to be

doing some side by-side comparisons we're going to be looking at how the quality of each codec differs and look

at some of the ins and outs of recording B- on these new cameras on paper capturing B- obviously

gives you much more data to play with in post internal recordings max out at 10 bit whereas broll gives you 12 bit files

so even if you capture in PR 422 HQ you're not hitting the highest quality available from these cameras so if

you're shooting in mixed lighting or dodgy exposure green screen uh or just want to push your image around in the

grade then shooting in raw will obviously give you much more flexibility to work with of course it's not a Magic

Bullet you know if you put garbage in you're still going to get garbage out as many of you may know uh shooting and raw

offers some really useful features when you're working in posts such as the ability to change your ISO value and

wide balance rather than being baked into your footage which is the case when you're shooting in internal or in PR RAR

here we've got a shot uh and I've incorrectly set the white balance in camera is shot at daylight and I've set

the camera to 2,500 Kelvin you can see what happens when we try and correct it in post with the white balance uh slider

in resolve it's not an easy fix and a lot of the colors and exposure are sort of mushed up as you try and make this

sort of Brute Force adjustment to pull it back to the right color temperature temperature now let's look at the raw

file uh we can go into our raw Tab and make the easy white balance change here and you can see here that the difference

we're able to capture is much more balanced and faithful than the sort of brute force uh Technique we use we have

to use basically when we're using internal or compressed media for these cameras you are able to change the iso

values uh under the raw tab but you don't see that uh as a sort of Step ISO value what you get is this exposure

value adjustment and that is essentially the same effect as adjusting the iso what's happened here is that black magic

made it like this because different cameras will rate isos differently so unfortunately there can't be like a

unified ISO tab that will work across all cameras if you were to underexpose or overexpose your image um you have a

lot more to play around with um in the Raw images so let's take a look here we have an image underexposed by two stops

and we're going to pull it back in post [Music]

so there's noise apparent in all of these images but the BW image has probably what I would call the most

defined noise and that's a good thing raw should be noisy there should be little to no noise reduction being

applied to the raw image and that's the problem with the internal recordings because there is some quite aggressive

noise reduction going on which if you look at the noisy areas leads to quite a mushy swimmy image and that really

begins to affect image Clarity the BW escapes most of that and it just gives you much more control in post and

ultimately preserves detail and gives you a much better final image here where free stops Overexposed and you can see

that the bright area on my nice shiny forehead is clipping on every example if we pull it down um it's pretty much

unsalvageable even on the Mark 1 B uh it's unsavable as well however the b-w on the mark 2s has a little trick up its

sleeve as it now has this Nifty thing called highlight recovery watch what happens when I apply it here the once

clip highlights that we see in all of the other files are sort of magically restored from what I gather this uses

clever math to basically reconstruct the Highlight data using whatever available information is here from non-cp channels

it basically provides you with a bit of additional latitude in post uh beyond your usual clipping points if you do

look closely at this it's not 100% perfect but it's definitely usable and capable of savaging the shot which would

have been lost now you might say you don't need this you know you expose your subjects perfectly but what about all

the other elements in your frame you know what about Windows or lights in the back of your frame you know lighting

that you can't control this is where this feature becomes really useful and it's a massive benefit of the new BW

implementation on these cameras you know how cool is that being able to say save shots in post using this

feature another reason to shoot raw is that on the mark 2 cameras there does seem to be you know a bit more

aggressive image processing going on inside on the internal compressed recordings oversharpened looking images

I feel like there's a bit more noise on these cameras uh and I've also noticed a bit more banding in contrast gradients

on the internally recorded files on the mark 2 cameras so in these comparisons I kind of want to look a bit closer at the

over or picture quality or characteristics between these different files I don't think you'll be able to

see the differences between these files as clearly as I can on my computer on YouTube one of the things that was quite

surprising is just the differences between the BW the internal recordings in terms of contrast color reproduction

B on the back 2 just seems to have a much nicer smoother image it's still sharp but the sharpness feels much more

natural dare I say organic looking uh and when when I sort of cast an eye over these other images they are sharp but

the sharpness that is apparent in these images uh it just seems to be a sharpness that comes from sort of

digital sharpening so it looks more processed it's sort of sharpness I'd say without the detail to back it up so if

we look at my beard here on my computer I can see it quite clearly that the detail on the b-w file is there whereas

uh the detail on the internal and even on the pros file is a bit more muddy uh you get this kind of like sharpened uh

artifacting that is common when you apply digital sharpening I feel like the BW produces the most faithful neutral

image and ideally that's what you want as a starting point when you begin to work and grade your image in post I

think what surprised me the most When comparing these images is just how different the prores recording looks so

I had to double check this when I got the files back but there is what seems to be like a real gamma shift going on

in this image you know just look at the dark areas this black area here uh it seems to be pulled down much more in the

prr recording than uh on the BW on the other internal compress codex and I think this is something you should

really be aware of when shooting PR rares uh especially if you're mixing it with other Vlog

recordings let's take a quick look at how uh the B- on the mark 2 cameras compares to the original B-

implementation on the Mark 1 S5 in my opinion the new b-w implementation looks much nicer

the Mark 1 seems to have that internal processing uh present in the b-w it looks a little bit

oversharpened uh it just overall doesn't look as nice or as natural or as organic as this new implementation I think Lumix

and black magic whatever they've been doing to collaborate have done a fantastic job in the BW implementation

on the mark 2 cameras one thing that seems to catch out a lot of people is that you can't

capture open gate um in B on these cameras so if you're shooting at the highest resolution you're going to be

locked to shooting in 169 and you can only go up to 30 frames a second if you drop down to 4K in crop sensor mode then

you unlock up to 60 frames a second when you're recording on the video assist and in BW there are a

selection of different quality levels that you can record at the main two options are constant bit rate or

constant quality constant bit rate locks the bit rate so whatever you're recording you're recording at the same

bit rate throughout the file constant quality however is like a variable bit rate recording mode which will vary the

bit rate uh depending on the complexity of the thing that you're shooting so if you're shooting like loads of trees or a

snowstorm it will bump that bit rate up to cover the complexity of that scene and these different quality levels are

just sort of the quality levels of the variable bit rate I tend to prefer constant bit rate because you just know

what you're getting you know how much time uh is left on your recording media uh with constant quality it throughout

the day your remaining time on your recording media will change because the bit rate is always changing and the file

sizes will vary from file to file in terms of constant bit rate in terms of which bit rates to use uh I'd recommend

jumping between 5:1 and 8:1 generally I would record something longer like an interview uh at 8:1 uh and then switch

to my b roll at around 5:1 12:1 might be great uh for YouTube content um if you just want like a slightly higher

recording format that there's just a bit more than something like all intra but with the benefit of the raw features

have a look at 12:1 uh 3:1 is super chunky I'll quickly show you how much recording time you get if you're

shooting at 25 frames at full res resolution 5.9k with a 1 TB SSD so at 3: 1 uh you'll get about an hour 5

to1 you'll get uh about 112 minutes 88 to1 you get about 180 minutes and then at 12 to1 you'll get uh 269 minutes big

chunky amount of record time recording time May determine you know which qualities you want to shoot at because

the thing about shooting raw is that you do need to consider the data rates in your

[Music] workflow once you get your b-w into D Vinci resolve uh and you have it on your

timeline you go to the color tab you can navigate to the uh raw tab here and you will see something like this um under

decode using you can select between using a Blackmagic default which uses the Blackmagic profile camera metadata

which will apply the settings used at the time of shooting project if you have any Project Specific raw settings or you

can go down to clip which you might find the most useful which will allow you to change settings on a clip by clip basis

it's here where you'll be able to change uh your col color temperature uh exposure or ISO value uh and adjust the

tint one of the great things about BW is that you are not locked in at using the Panasonic color profile V gamut or Vlog

If instead you want to move the color profile into the Blackmagic color space you'll now see that these settings are

unlocked and you can make more granular adjustments it's up to you which of these you use but just bear in mind if

you're using any lcks that are designed for Vlog then they may not work as intended when you're in a different

color space first one's quite a big one to be honest it's monitor delay or lcen Su so

if you want to pass audio through to your video assist then this will really hit the delay and lag uh that you see on

the monitor I can live with this for interviews but for anything else it's not super workable in my opinion um so

if I am shooting uh Boll uh then I tend to disable the audio pass for through uh and generally I tend to just record

audio externally anyway and then just stick with like a clap sync on interviews just to sort of remove the

issue of that latency when you don't have the audio pass through there's still a bit of latency but for me it's

not enough to sort of really bother me obviously when you're shooting raw you're recording externally that does

introduce other points of failure in your workflow uh especially when you're using HDMI cable and an SSD cable so you

want to make sure all of those are sort of locked down and secured and pinned in I personally wondered what would happen

if the recording got interrupted you know if the HMI cable got yanked out so on these tests I'm just going to

hold up this timer to the phone and at 10 seconds I'm going to yank the HDMI cable out to see where that terminates

the recording and as you can see here the recording pretty much freezes on that frame when I've yanked out the

cable but it still continues to record interestingly when I place the cable back in uh the video doesn't come back

in so although everything up to that moment is saved you'd have to stop and restart the recording to continue here

we've got the SSD cable being yanked out from the recorder side quite surprising actually the recording just

automatically terminates uh and everything up until that point uh is safe and sound and ready to go so that's

really reassuring both on the HDMI front and on the USB front that should those cables get yanked out anything that you

recorded up to that point should be safe I think if you want to work with the

best picture quality that is available out of these cameras and you want to skip some of that internal processing

that seems to be going on behind the scenes I really recommend considering Boll for your next project of course you

could also choose prores raw but I think the functionality and convenience of b-w far outweighs that of prores raw I think

the implementation of BW on the mark 2 cameras is a massive step up from the original S5 and it just offers was a

great balance between data rates and the ability to push your image around in post the cost of this I think is also

really attractive uh you can pick up uh a video sist for around 500 600 and the cost of the Lumix S5 2x fluctuates

between ,500 and 2 Grand so if you're lucky you could pick up a raw capable setup for between 2,000 and

2,500 the fact that this is all available on a tiny compact camera a hybrid camera that you know gives you

features like Ibis and autofocus is a testament to what Lumix has done uh with these little cameras and I'm really

interested to see how they're going to implement BW into you know their next Flagship camera whatever that might be

will we see internal BW on a future lumus camera I don't know I don't even know if that's allowed or possible but I

would love to see that myself personally I hope this video has been useful thank you for sticking around and watching

through these tests if you are new here then check out some of the other Lumix content I have across my channel but

thanks for watching I'm Ed prer and until next time see you [Music]

later