Treasured's Movie Repair Guide -- Panasonic Lumix GH5

Vendor: Panasonic
Models: Lumix DC-GH5 and GH5S
Compatible: Lumix GH4 (some recording modes)
Status: Routinely repaired.

Panasonic Lumix DC-GH5 was announced on 4 January 2017. Originally Lumix GH5 allows to shoot Cinema 4K (4096 x 2160) at 60p with a bit rate of 150Mbps, while Full HD video is also possible, up to 180p.

New iteration of this camera, the GH5S, was announced by Panasonic in CES 2018 claiming that the GH5S is a camera that has been designed specifically with filmmakers in mind.

Panasonic Lumix GH5source: Dpreview

The GH5 offers color subsampling at 4:2:2 and a color depth of 10-bit to improve the colorimetric information. It also provides live output to external recorders such as Apple ProRes via HDMI, as well as simultaneous internal recording.

But lately, on September 28 2017, its firmware has been upgraded to version 2.0 adding the ability to capture video using All-Intra compression (400Mbps All-I compression) options for the camera's 4K UHD 29.97, 23.98, 25 and 24p shooting modes as well as for wider format, DCI 4K shooting at both 23.98 and 24p.

SD Speed Class Guide table

To support such amount of different recording options, Panasonic strongly recommends the use of V60 SD cards or faster. These guarantee the ability to write at a sustained speed of 60MB/s or faster. Since an average bit rate of 400Mbps means data rates will inevitably sometimes exceed 50MB/s, these are the slowest cards that will dependably work.


Some fast U3 rated cards may be capable of exceeding the 30MB/s write speed they guarantee, but Panasonic says its testing suggests very few actually do, irrespective of the peak speed numbers printed on the cards. Use of these cards risks recording stopping unexpectedly, causing a common failure mode.

Another interesting feature included is the High-resolution anamorphic shooting that is is captured as 4:2:0, 10-bit Long GOP HEVC (H.265) footage at 200Mbps.

Another addition is the ability to shoot Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG). The GH5 offers two ways of shooting HLG footage: there's a 72Mbps HEVC (H.265) option, designed for simple HDR video capture for immediate playback on a compatible TV.

The alternative is shooting in the camera's 400Mbps, All-I, 4:2:2 H.264 formats, for editing afterwards in the non-linear editing software of your choice.

Failure modes:

The causes of failure reported by Lumix GH5 and GH5S users needing to repair files are: 

Repairability:

The damaged files cannot be opened because recording did terminate abruptly: While the media (video and audio) is present and not corrupt, the index and header of the movie indicating what the data means, is not present.
Repair consists in reindexing the movie.

PRICING

Damaged files from Panasonic Lumix cameras are detected as "DSLR", and as such have an affordable pricing.
See Pricing Chart.

Free Preview of corrupt Lumix GH5 videos with: