Nick Driftwood has been one of a select few filmmakers who has been working with Panasonic on the development of the GH5. He’s perhaps best known in the GH user community for his Driftwood settings for Vitaliy Kiselev’s GH2 hack.

He has had a beta GH5 for some time now and earlier today sent us a short video that gives us a better idea of the low light capabilities of the camera.

He used the new Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60mm F2.8-4 lens and shot in standard picture profile set at -3,-3,-3,-3. Recording was internal at 4:2:0, 8-bit, 60p mode (59.94fps) in 4K UHD, H.264 Level High 5.2, 158 Mbps.

Nick then runs through the ISO range from 200 to 12800. He claims to see a definite improvement in performance over the GH4. 3200 ISO in particular looks really useful with not too much noise at all – nothing that NEAT video can’t fix. “Indeed, 6400 ISO is pretty darn good” he says.

The camera is still not running final firmware so things may still change, but for now the results do look promising.