I would be happy to share my filming workflow for the G85 and GH4.
White balance: This is a major key. When the white balance is set too warm with these cameras it can be very difficult to pull back in post due to shadow contamination and red channel clipping. Setting your white balance leaning toward the cool side can greatly improve your skin tones.
Exposure: The way I set exposure on fast shoots is with the camera's built in spot meter; also sometimes with false color when I can get it. I have found exposing the key light on skin tones to 1 stop under (3 bars on the meter) to be the sweet spot for healthy looking, non plastic, skin tones.
Picture Profile: (This one might be a touchy one:-) I use the natural picture profile. I have put in many hours extensively testing natural vs cine like D in different lighting situations and natural wins hands down for me in daylight.
Reasons for this: Cine Like D actually doesn't have that much more dynamic range than natural. It can appear that it does have more range, but this is simply because the camera drops the exposure by about a stop when you switch the profile to Cine Like D. After you bring the exposure back up 1 stop to match natural, you actually have about 1/2 stop less room in the highlights then with natural; you do gain about 1/2 a stop of shadow detail though. Natural on the other hand, gives you about 1/2 a stop more highlight detail and a much gentler highlight roll off; at the sacrifice of losing about 1/2 a stop of shadow detail. For me personally, highlight roll off and skint ones are much more important than shadow detail.
For the reasons above I shoot with these picture profile settings:
Natural
Contrast -2 (Any lower and skin tones start to lose the natural look)
Sharpness -3
Noise Reduction -5
Saturation -2 (This greatly reduces clipping in the red channel)
Curves at +1 Shadows, +0 highlights
iDynamic set to Low (This give a little bit of lift in the shadows without introducing noticeable noise)
Those are my daylight settings. Because Cine Like D handles shadows so much better, I shoot with it when I get in a low light situation. This gives much cleaner high ISOs than natural.
Like I mentioned in my first post, these settings are my personal choice after a lot of testing and filming. I would encourage anyone who shoots on a regular basis to get and test them for yourself with your camera, lighting, and lenses. Find your sweet spot and run with it:-)
I agree. Each sensor is different. Some sensors love over exposure, while others like the Panasonic cameras, really don't like it. ETTR with the GH4 in my opinion, can easily kill skin tones with red channel clipping.
You can see in some places in this video here, especially at 3:36, where I accidentally ETTR ed with the GH4; skin tones are kind of one golden block:-)