The video capability of M5?

Marco Nero wrote:

lumenite wrote:

Now thinking of upgrading from M1 to M5.

Originally I did not care about M5's video. For me, EVF, fast AF, and abundant controls are good reasons for my move.

However, now I am considering taking video with M5.

How about M5's ability in this regard? Especially, when it is compared to EOS 5D mark 4?

I do not care about 4K. But what other aspects?

Marco, your posts are usually excellent, but this one really seems to be self-contradictory.  Also, I seem to remember a post from you a while ago extolling the video virtues of your new 4k capable iPhone compared to your then current Canon cameras.

Let me just start off by pointing out the common knowledge that Entry-level 4K cameras are NOT equal to the Pro-level 4K cameras. They are worlds apart. Just like your iPhone6/7 can shoot 4K video, it's nowhere near the grade of a Pro 4K Cine camera.

The same is true for 1080p cameras.

The reason most professionals shoot 4K is to give themselves more flexibility when editing their footage down to a 1080p output. You'll find this mantra repeated numerous places online as well. I feel that the footage (at any resolution) really depends on the camera and the capability of the sensor it uses.

The sensor only matters if all of the sensor is being used.

More important is the playback device.

Low res video jult looks even worse on a high end display.  Good quality video looks good on any dislplay.

A 4K UHD television is going to look inferior next to a 4H UHD HDR television. And a 4K UHD HDR television from Sony or Samsung (in the higher range) will exceed the visual clarity and viewing experience of lesser brands, regardless of which camera it was filmed with. Even the output of the editing software and the compression rate will affect whatever the camera shot. So many factors affect the end result. The M5 and M6 are considered ideal (if not the best) cameras for VLOGGING online.

Not because they offer the best quality video, but becuase they are relatively easy to use and the name "Canon" is in the front of the camera.

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The M5 and M6 both have image stabilization for video and the resulting footage is sharp, clean and quite appealing. I routinely film short clips with my M6 and the footage is excellent. Certainly better than my dedicated video cameras that are getting old now. The 5D4 is an advanced DSLR and it has 4K resolution with its video. But I don't need it myself and I'm sure Canon would want me to buy a 5D4 if I needed to shoot 4K video with my existing EF lenses. One of the "valid" complaints about Canon not including 4K in their lower model cameras is that it's included on the GoPro Hero cameras and those aren't expensive...

GoPro aside, more people are complaining because almost every smartphone and many other interchangeable lens cameras invlude 4k.

but take a look at the distortion on those lenses.... They're almost fish-eye lenses. But 4K playback in real-time on the vast majority of computers is difficult or impossible to achieve.

The "vast majority"?  My 5 year old laptop can handle it.  Any device that is remotely recent will have built in hardware acceleration to play 4k.

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What I can say about the M5/M6 footage is that it's smooth and has excellent color reproduction. The accuracy of the color is quite surprising. I'd personally turn off the Image Stabilization and tweak a couple of the color and resolution settings before used. The 5-axis image stabilization is DIGITAL on these cameras... unlike the Sony cams. But Sony's colors are less faithful than Canons.

You can get 4k from a lot of other manufacturers beside Sony.  Basically, Canon and Pentax are the only 4k holdouts.

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ABOVE: 3x unedited Stills from the M6 video taken in moderately-LOW light.
Note: Video setting was at 30fps instead of 60fps.
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There's not a lot of support for 4K because most televisions (including 4K televisions) will upscale a 1080p image to a respectable resolution via interpolation. And yet 4K is in demand by the public who believe that 4K should be "The standard". Sure, there's a few 4K monitors out there.

I remember a lot of similar claims about DVDs being upscaled to 1080p when HD TVs were first taking off.

The only downside of 4K is the larger (massive)

Technically the files would be 4X larger.  However, a low bitrate 4k video will generally look better than a high bitrate 1080p video.  In actual use, the difference is less than 4x.

file size and the the inability of any older computer to be able to render 4K footage quickly or efficiently. Sure, computers today can work with it... but a 3 year old computer with current software may struggle to keep up.

It would need to be a very low end 3 year old computer.

I own a couple of 4K UHD HDR televisions and there's very little content for them over here. I bought a 4K BluRay player for them and still can't find much content to play on them.

So, since there is not a lot of content right now, should we assume there will not be more content in the future?

Most YouTube videos are ideally 720p or larger (content upload resolution suggested) and yet most people view the videos at 480p on their phones to save bandwidth.
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Now I was looking into 4K video just last week to see if I should buy a 4K GoPro Hero5 Sessions camera. What I found was that the footage on YouTube was indistinguishable at 1080p from the footage from the EOS M5/M6 - when I downloaded the same resolution material. And the nicely color-graded and edited footage used Polarizing filters and further enhancements.

4k video from a camera with less than 1/10  the sensor area of the M6 downsalmpled to 1080p and compressed for YouTube was indistinguishable from video from the M6.  What exactly does that prove?

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In my personal opinion: The best 4K footage is going to come from a dedicated $6K-$12K video camera locked down on a tripod and subject to advanced editing software.

And the exact same thing is true of the best 1080p footage.

For this reason alone, the M6 will do me just fine until the technology changes... on until a client expects to pay me to produce 4K footage for a commercial project.

On the continuum of video quality there is consumer 1080p at the bottom and professional cinema 4k (soon to be 8k) at top end.  Consumer 4k and professional 1080p sit close to each other in the middle.  Even if your client only needs 1080p output, you could still provide a superior product if you started with a 4k source.