John D

It isn't an image quality thing...
 
The different 1080p modes vary in other ways.
 
ALL-I for instance is easier on your computer to edit. The complex encoding for IPB is not there, just each individual frame 'as-is' one after the other like a sequence of JPEGs.
 
The bitrate of 200Mbit/s is higher in ALL-I just to maintain image quality, not to improve it from 100Mbit/s in IPB mode.
 
Because the efficiency of an ALL-I codec is lower, the data rate needs to increase.
 
So it is a common user misconception that image quality and bitrate have a direct correlation!
 
Shoot 1080p ALL-I if you need easier to edit files.
 
Shoot 1080p IPB if you need smaller file sizes and best quality compression.
 
Shoot 4K and upgrade your laptop if you want to get a clue ;)

There seems to be various pissing matches concerning specs of this camera and that. At the end of the day, does it produce an image you like and how useable it is? I'm in prep for a movie I start in a few weeks. Intended for theatrical release we need IQ that'll hold up to the big screen. So we tested F55 vs Dragon vs Alexa. The tests were precise and extensive: ISO, over / under exposure, all with people and Macbeth Color Charts. Because of the tight schedule, I wanted the smaller cameras (f55 and Dragon) to be as good or better than the Arri. So we graded and projected the results at a full on commercial grade suite with a 15' screen.
 
The producer and director immediately felt the Arri was a hands down the better image. They couldn't quantify it. Being a tech, for me and the colorist, it all came down to flesh tones and color grade across the entire exposure range. When we wrestled with the F55 to get a rich honest flesh tone, the color chart was completely off (read: extra time in post keying and windowing that no one wants to pay for). The Epic came close, having quietest noise at all ISO's, but it too had some flesh tone issues as well as color aberrations in clipped areas. Worth noting, we shot the Alexa at 444 Pro Rez, not Arri Raw. How does it retain its amazing colors? Trading pixels for color space, instead of spreading your butter too thin.
 
Why do I bring this up? Because much of the conversations here obsess about pixel count, DR and other specs but few mention how well it grades the human face and how the grade effects your back ground colors. When I compare cameras, it's the first thing I look at (and what audience's pay the most attention to). The F55 despite it's stellar specs is dead to me as a feature film camera. We don't make movies for techs.
 
So I'm holding my judgement on the GH4 until I see some footage, not of rocks, bridges and buildings at night, cars, aggressive music video LUT's but just attempts to shoot faces, graded as naturally as can be. This is what attracted me to the BMC line up. I felt the colors were honest, requiring little work out of the box. I believe this is much of the success of the C300/500 line (see Hurlbut tests) despite being 8 bit and clippy on the high end. The F55 held highlights 6 stops over key. Insane DR. But specs do not a great image make. We also tested Scheider Xenars vs Cooke S4's vs Super Speeds. The sharpest of the bunch, the Schneiders were the F55 of lenses. Soulless paperweights.

Ok. this is my last post for this thread cause I am tired of this dispute. I see many people here who are being so defensive like everyone is attacking their families or their belief system. To those I say that they should "pixel peep" more their philosophy in life and communication abilities and leave the technology for a later time.
 
Andrew, I find your post at least arrogant and at worst disrespectful. I could have easily asked if you are getting payed by Panasonic in order not to emphasise the negative sides of the camera. Is this the level of debate you want to maintain in the forum that you have created? I don't believe so but I could be wrong.
 
And last thing regarding objectivity, there are many people who support you cannot end up with 10bit data out of 8bit. I am not expert in that, but I do know there is another opinion on that matter. So I wouldn't call that very objective. 
 
Looking forward to the moment when human beings will be more interested about the way they communicate than the technological advancements of plastic or metallic boxes. :)

Nope. I hear these "video" comments when discussing cameras so often and they're really bizarrely off base. Please show me a camcorder that shoots your home videos at that resolution. Theres nothing "home video" about the GH4. The type of camcorder home videos you're thinking of have less resolution, more in focus, blown out highlights. Not remotely similar. The extra resolution is amazing. Its not a bad thing, not a video thing. You can always tone down detail through a whole array of techniques, however you cannot add resolution where there wasn't any. Where you see people using stock lenses on autofocus, without tripods or steadicams and without careful compositions - that is the shaky ugly home video you're seeing. It has nothing to do with the GH4 at all.
 
The tests to show off resolution show what is possible, they're not meant to be film-like. If you have an aerial shot of dolphins in a clear ocean you want that resolution. If you need to greenscreen, you need that resolution. Too much resolution? You simply soften in post. Its that simple, resolution is awesome and the Gh4 is amazing. The reason a focus on people hasn't been used in these tests is because character shots are normally shot wide open, which doesn't get to emphasize the resolution as well as bricks, trees and scenery does. 
 
Is the GH4 better than the 5D with raw? They're really close. Each have pro's and cons according to your workflow and depend perhaps on which lenses you own. Your 5DMK3 is a powerhouse. Seriously, time to put that bad boy to work. Have you tried ML raw yet? I know you mentioned before that you were hesitant to try it, but its worthwhile knowing if you can handle the extra hassle for the extra DR. At the end of the day editing is a huge part as well. The biggest advantage the 5D has over the GH4 is full frame, thats about it... but to me thats a big one. I direct commercials and do documentary work. If I was to be given a gift of a choice between the 5D and the GH4 - It would be a tough decision. I travel a lot, so a compact kit is important to me... but so is full frame, low light and top end stills. Decisions, decisions. I don't need a new camera immediately so I might wait for the A7s to decide. But if I owned a 5D, I wouldn't be pondering whether I made a good purchase or not.
 
You on the other hand, have mentioned that you're a school teacher and you've just bought the 5D in order to start doing documentary projects and are still new to both cameras and film. Honestly, you need to forget this obsession about which camera to get and the whole ML raw vs GH4 thing. Its really misdirected, as you have more than enough firepower to win an oscar. Rather buy some interesting lenses, a steadicam, follow focus, anamorphics... stuff like that to play around with. And then upload work for people to critique. Please be careful not to get too carried away at these comparisons at the cost of going out and filming.
 

The dynamic range just gets me on the GH4.  I preferred the 5d in every shot.  It jumps out at me in highlights mostly.  

that speed booster is doing wonderful things.  Nice to see the gh4 being exposed and treated properly.  the dr looks great.    
 
 
I'd love to see a follow up test with a human subject in medium and close shots with the lenses at f2.8 - f5.6.  - the type of aperture at 50mm that works well for slight human movement in frame while maintaining complete facial focus but with good defocus on show.  These type of shots will highlight the differences (if there are any to be seen) between a bigger sensor or smaller one.   

Where's 60p on the more compact models? The Studio offers 1080@60 on the $2K mark, so they now have the technology to offer that frame rate at this price range. I don't believe any of the cinema cameras do (beside from the URSA). Why is that? Am I the only one who was hoping from Black Magic a camera with similar specs to the new KineMini or at least an upgraded Cinema Camera able to reach 60p?

Not sure where to start here honestly.  Both new cameras look pretty cool.  BUT here is the problem they have if they dont offer some promissed updates to exsisting cameras.  How confident can buyers of the new stuff be that they will be fully supported with the new products they buy, if customers of existing products get very little in that regard.

There is another tool that is being, or will be marketed by a professional colorist.  Shian Storm is also, in a more limited way, doing some empirically derived filmstock transformations in his ColorGHear suite.  It may not always be FC but there is a lot of "film conversion" going on, even in professional circles.  Film and the way it renders tonality and color will haunt digital acquisition for a long time to come.  They've yet to build a digital camera that can hold a candle to the best work being done in celluloid even today.
 
Anyway, yeah, people asked for "raw" but people don't ask for the highly imperfect and incomplete log-to-lin setup that's most commonly being used.  There is too much effort spent simply trying to manage up an honest and true rendition of what light the camera saw and the relative values present in a scene.  Getting to an appropriate linear representation so that you can then grade from a place of awareness and creativity, a place where you can make meaningful decisions that are more than just trying to get it to not look like shit anymore, shouldn't be an ordeal, it should just be.  It should be the first thing you see when you look at your footage.  
 
Seeing a meaningful representation of what you shot doesn't mean baking anything in or losing anything in the raw data. 
 
I got my first taste of that swapping over to ACES on this short I'm doing VFX for that was shot on the Epic.  It's shocking how a manufacturer IDT that's universally regarded as "horrible" is still so much better than their own ability to meaningfully render their own native footage to the monitor.
 
Anyway, the type of techniques that make FC possible are what will make mixing multiple cameras from multiple manufacturers on the same film as close to seamless as you will get until hitting their relative limits.

This isn't correct.  You're thinking of something like Magic Bullet Looks.  Film Convert transforms the measured response of a digital camera to the measured response of several actual film stocks.  It's essentially doing a very specific type of transform that you could do in an ACES color pipeline if you had an IDT for a given film stock.  The science being used is extremely contemporary and relevant.  It's the kind of thing that's going to eventually make all this sloppy, subjective "LUT jockey" business that's so endemic to raw photography an unfortunate little footnote of the past.
 
You could do a conversion and then consider this your "look", the same as filmmakers have for a hundred years or more shooting film and having it processed.  In the digital world the result of doing Film Convert is your inter-positive.  
 
If a filmmaker then has more money they could time their film to have a different look, instead of having just a "one light" processing.  That is the step that comes after Film Convert.  FC gives you your IP, now you can give it an artistic grade or not.  
 
They have some very basic controls for doing this but of course a dedicated grading tool will be better.  The ideal solution is to do your conversion and then grade.  Whether that is done is up to the sophistication of the end user, both their technical ability to grade and their ability to make the distinction between the two operations.
 
How it fits into a RAW workflow is another matter.  Their standalone tool, presently, I don't view as anything useful for more than a hobbyist that just wants to play around with it.  It doesn't even process AVCHD footage with sufficient accuracy or the quality you get by using the plug-in for After Effects and doing your conversion in a 32bit float environment.  For RAW you would definitely want to be using the plug-in and not the standalone, letting the host application handle the log-to-lin conversion (of course successful use of Film Convert is dependent on their "IDT" being based on the same linearized data).

If you already have good MFT glass then the BMPCC is perfect (compared to others) for that application.   The only thing that really bothers me about the BMPCC is the moire that appears in DNGs when the image is too bright and sharp.  I doubt that will be an issue with what you want to shoot.  On the plus side, in low-light RAW based cameras become grainy, H.264 cameras become blotchy.  When you shoot with any of the cameras above you'll get a nice, smooth image.  But your blacks will be crushed.  To see the difference in images lease look at these two shots I too with a H.264 and RAW based camera
 
http://maxotics.com/?p=146
 
The BMPCC also need the fastest SD cards, plan about $50 per 32GB at current rates.  Not a good camera to shoot long-form stuff; that is, leave camera on for an hour.  In general, any RAW based camera will require at least 4 times the money, time, effort, etc.  Out of the box, the video from a GH3 is, say, 10 times better than the image from the BMPCC.  And it will stay that way unless you put 10 times the effort into the RAW based video.  However, if you do that, then the BMPCC will end up 10x better than the GH3.  All depends on what trade-offs you want to with your time.

Blackmagic line immediately jumps to mind as the cheapest option. You are right in that dynamic range will be your friend in that scenario.
 
Canon C100 maybe? A bit out of your range, but good dynamic range/overall image and very friendly to long recording times. 
 
I think some of the newer Nikon DSLRs (5300, 7100) also have pretty decent dynamic range as well.