Reportage equipment at the USk Symposium Auckland

I'm writing this to share info on the equipment I used during my coverage for the previous symposiums and AsiaLink sketchwalks.

Camera

The camera I used was the Panasonic GH5 fitted with a Panasonic 8 - 18mm f/2.8-4 lens. I brought six batteries and on hindsight, four would have been sufficient.

The GH5 is a great camera for recording handheld footage because the In Body Image Stabalisation (IBIS) is so good that a gimbal is not necessary. If you have to use a gimbal, that's extra weight you have to carry. The total weight of the camera and lens is about 1kg and I'm just holding it by the grip for vlogging.

Lens

The Panasonic 8 - 18mm f/2.8-4 lens I'm using does not have image stabalisation (IS) but having IBIS is sufficient to smooth out handheld recorded footage. If you pair it with a zoom lens that has IS, the footage is going to be even smoother.

The lens I've used for previous coverage was the Panasonic Leica 12-60mm f/2.8-4. I've decided to go with the ultra-wide 8-18mm lens because I wanted to test whether this lens is any good for event coverage. Downside of this lens is at the 16mm focal length, IBIS can create more wobble with handheld footage.

Ex-Teleconversion
GH5 is a Micro Four Thirds system with a 2x crop so the equivalent focal length is 16 - 36mm. Together with GH5's Ex-Teleconversion feature, you can get 1.4X or 2.6X more crop when recording with 4K and 1080P resolution respectively. Since I'm recording at 4K resolution, the focal length I can effectively use is 16mm to 50.4mm. If I'm recording at 1080P, the effective focal length available is 16mm to 93.6mm.

Limitations
The downside of the lens is even with Ex-Teleconversion at 1.4x, the long end of 50.4mm is barely enough to fill the screen with the sketches people are drawing. When recording, my camera is almost beside the heads of the sketchers and that's just waiting for heads to knock into the camera.

To record close-ups of people sketching, I use my iPhone 14 Pro Max at 3x zoom. The phone's telephoto lens is able to capture a good amount of detail, the compression isn't too bad, and overall video quality is decent. When recording myself sketching, I'm just holding the iPhone recording at 1x and the handheld footage is smooth enough and has enough details. It is not possible to record myself drawing while holding the Panasonic camera.

So I mixed the footage recorded with the iPhone and Panasonic camera for the Youtube videos and it's not easily to tell which footage comes from which device unless you're really looking out for the differences.

The other noticeable limitation is bokeh or subject isolation isn't that great with an ultra-wide at f/2.8. Sometimes backgrounds can be distracting so it would be great to have the option to blur out the background but the bokeh is really limited. A lens with equivalent 24mm and f/2.8 still provides noticeable better background blur, but the downside is the extra crop that makes your head fill the screen. A selfie stick (not gimbal) would help a lot to get a wider view.

I used the iPhone with cinematic mode to shoot some footage with background blur and those look alright but not really something I would rely on for consistency or quality.

And I am using an iPhone only because it's incredibly difficult to find an Android phone that records at 25 FPS (PAL video standard).

Interview mics

The two interview mics I brought are the Boya iPhone wireless clip-on mics and the Saramonic Blink 500. These mics can record dual input and are great for interviews. I did not use them though. I probably won't bring them next time unless I know that I will have to record interviews, lectures or talks.

Camera malfunction

My camera started showing signs of malfunction on the second day of the event. The camera started to become sluggish when powering on or off. It takes few seconds for the display to show anything after powering on. Switching between photo and video mode also takes a few seconds, and due to that I took most photos with the iPhone instead of the camera.

I bought the Panasonic GH5 in 2017 and have been using it for 6 years. Since I don't want to spend so much on buying a new camera, or a secondhand camera, I will have to repair this camera.

It sucks to have the camera malfunction, I had planned to use the camera until it no longer can be used and unfortunately that day came too early.

I have on many occasions been tempted to buy APSC or full-frame cameras but when you look at the weight of both camera and lens, they are significantly heavier compared to Micro Four Thirds system.

Low light
The main downside is video quality of the iPhone suffers with low light. GH5's low light performance struggles at ISO 1600 but I still have to use the footage because the iPhone footage is not good enough, and made worse due to the extreme compression Apple uses.

The ideal lens
The ideal lens for event coverage is actually the Panasonic Leica 10-25mm f/1.7. It's a lens that's fast enough that you may not even need to go up to ISO 1600.

The mic

The mic I used is the Sennheiser MKE 400 gen 2 directional mic. The audio quality is excellent. I had used the first generation of this mic before and liked the audio quality which is why I upgraded. Sennheiser MKE 400 gen 2 is so much better than the first generation due to the new design, more specifically the non-moveable hotshoe mount, dual batteries for longer battery life, auto power on/off that follows the camera, furry windshield that doesn't fall off.

Tripod

I actually brought a small Velbon tabletop tripod for those times where I need to record myself sketching. Most of the time I'm just recording handheld footage.

And I have a phone case with landyard that turned out to be extremely useful. Since I'm using both camera and phone, it's good to have phone accessible at all time. I also have a Manfrotto phone holder attached to the phone case and that turned out to be quite handy as a phone grip too. That phone case is just SGD 5!! What a terrific deal.

Earphones

I usually bring noise cancelling headphones but this time I went with wired earphones to reduce the weight I have to carry. That's a fantastic choice because with the correct ear tips, you can actually block out noise quite well with just passive sound isolation. I won't be bringing any ANC headphones for future trips.

I wish I had brought a lightning to 3.5mm adapter so that I can listen to the songs I've downloaded on my iPhone.

Data SIM plan

I bought the unlimited data plan at the symposium but only used 11.5GB of data even with 3 Youtube livestream. If you don't use mobile data for uploading or backing up photos or videos, 20GB should be sufficient for a one week trip.