© ROOT-NATION.com - Use of content is permitted with a backlink.
My final reviews are usually as long and detailed as possible. If you don’t believe me, you can check out my articles on e-readers or laptops on Root Nation. But the Panasonic Lumix S5 IIX turned out to be a completely different story. Thanks to this camera alone, I still have a job. It turned out to offer exactly the combination of features that has significantly sped up my workflow, simplified the shooting process, and saved me a huge amount of time, effort, and stress. It helped me get through two moves and two surgeries, and now I can finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. At least some light. Even if it’s a train – who knows, maybe I can still jump on the last carriage. So, the Lumix S5 IIX has seven key features that allow me to produce video content entirely on my own, as a one-person operation, at an almost industrial pace.
Read also: All reviews of photographic equipment on RN
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Panasonic Lumix S5 IIX Video review
Live Cropping
What is it? It is the ability to create an artificial camera pan directly in the camera.
Of course, this can be done manually in post-production – for example, in DaVinci Resolve: zoom in by 5%, move the frame to the left, set a keyframe, move it to the right, and so on. Why does this matter to me? Because 90% of my projects require exactly this kind of artificial camera movement. This is not the same as panning with a fluid head, although I have a high-quality Manfrotto 701HDV and can produce perfectly smooth pans with parallax.
Yes, you can create an artificial pan in DaVinci and copy the settings to all clips. But not every segment needs one. If you apply the settings to the entire footage, you then have to manually find and remove the unnecessary ones. That’s a waste of time and effort: you either have to mark the clips in advance or review the entire footage. All these routine tasks slow the workflow down from an industrial pace to… a basic YouTuber pace, which simply isn’t enough for me.
With the Lumix S5 IIX, things are much simpler: I see the frame, recognize that it needs a pan, and enable Live Cropping right during shooting. After that, all I need to do is color-grade the footage and occasionally stabilize it. This saves me 20–30 minutes on every edit and preserves a fair amount of mental energy. People with attention disorders know how repetitive, tedious tasks can completely kill your enthusiasm.
Recording Directly to an SSD
I use a 2 TB Goodram HX200 SSD with a MagicRig mount. It is an extremely reliable, metal-bodied, bright-colored drive with USB-C (10 Gbps). It’s practically impossible to lose or forget. What’s more, I still keep last year’s footage on it as a backup of unfinished projects. And an additional backup is always a good thing to have.
Blackmagic got me into the habit of recording to an SSD in the first place. Of course, recording to two SD cards in RAID 1 is useful, but I don’t even create an automatic cache, because footage from the S5 IIX is very easy to work with. I shoot in [specify codec/format, e.g. ProRes / H.264 All-I], which is no problem at all for a modern system with an RTX 5090 – even a smartphone could handle it. From there, processing speed depends solely on the complexity of the plugins and the shooting conditions.
Cinematic Features and Anamorphic Lenses
The camera offers a genuinely professional set of tools. You can adjust the shutter angle instead of using a conventional shutter speed, and it also provides full support for anamorphic lenses.
This was exactly what kept me motivated to work on the Den Blendamen project when I had the time to shoot but lacked the mental energy. I simply looked for a full-frame autofocus 35mm lens for the Leica L-mount. The closest option turned out to be the SIRUI 20mm T1.8 1.33X for Super 35, which, with the 1.5x crop, gives roughly a 30mm T2.5 equivalent. At around $800, the dream was finally within reach. And no, the Blazar Talon doesn’t count yet, since an L-mount version of that lens is still a long way off.
Also, no – I’m not interested in mechanical anamorphic lenses with a follow-focus system. If a setup can’t be taken off the tripod and mounted on a teleprompter within five seconds, it doesn’t work for me. With ADHD, removing and setting up a follow-focus is a separate depressing quest, especially since it doesn’t work with a teleprompter anyway.
Full Frame
I almost always have a terrible-looking background at my shooting locations, and usually neither the time nor the energy to completely fix it. Full-frame capture provides pleasing bokeh even for intros and product B-roll shots, which quite literally saves the footage.
If I see a shot I don’t like and can’t quickly improve it, I simply lose the motivation to make new videos. The S5 IIX solves that problem.
Slow & Quick (S&Q) Mode
I know Sony offers something similar, and Blackmagic has had it as well, but being able to slow down footage directly in the camera, automatically and without any extra work in post, is an absolute joy!
Yes, this mode introduces a Super 35 crop, but that’s not a critical issue for me because I have enough quality lighting. The important thing is that I don’t need to manually change the frame rate in the project. A 2.5x slowdown gives me 2.5 seconds of smooth footage – thanks to the in-body stabilization – for every second of actual handheld shooting.
High Resolution for Photos (“Macro for the Poor”)
This mode lets you capture a static photo at a resolution of 96 MP. The process is simple: take the photo, zoom in on the details by up to 5x in post, add an artificial pan and a little grain – and try to tell the difference from a real video pan. You won’t be able to.
Processing this kind of file is more demanding (with some plugins, even the RTX 5090 in my ASUS ProArt P16 starts to struggle), but you can always crop the file in advance to the section you actually need.
Lumix Lab App
This is the proprietary software I use when shooting product footage and A-roll. The app isn’t perfect: it can crash or behave inconsistently, but it exists and gets the job done. It installs and runs on practically anything – from the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra and Blackview Xplore 1 Pro to the Bigme B751CS e-reader.
Most importantly, Lumix Lab is fundamentally better than Blackmagic’s mobile software because it supports full wireless image monitoring. Most Blackmagic cameras don’t have Wi-Fi at all, whereas the S5 IIX connects to a network without any issues.
Of course, these aren’t all the features worth mentioning. Here’s a short list of some of the others:
- Phase Hybrid AF instead of contrast-detection autofocus
- Built-in active cooling fan
- Built-in LUTs (Real Time LUT)
- HDMI port
- In-body image stabilization (IBIS + Active I.S.)
Conclusion
To sum it up, the Panasonic Lumix S5 IIX is far from being the best camera in the world. However, it allows me to optimize my workflow in ways that no other camera does. And if it’s important to you not only to produce high-quality video, but also to do it as quickly as possible, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Panasonic Lumix S5 IIX.
