KnightsFan

Thank you for the clarification. I am fairly certain now that I've been following your argument correctly. I do understand interframe compression, by the way.
However, you can't simply compare bitrates, even adjusted for motion artifacts. There are different algorithms being used. You need to show, with image analysis or an analysis of the algorithm itself, that your method of comparison is valid.
 
Again, for your conclusion, you have not shown that Prores is better. You are still just comparing the size of I frames from codecs that use different algorithms. That's why I suggest doing an actual analysis on real images.
Chroma subsampling is for static images, and jpegs do use chroma subsampling. "[Chroma subsampling] is used in many video encoding schemes – both analog and digital – and also in JPEG encoding." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling)

You conclude with "If you want to produce genuine 10 bit colour high dynamic range footage you need to buy an external recorded capable of supporting ProRes 422 HQ or there is not game."
That's why I'm suggesting an actual comparison with Prores that uses real world examples. If you just want to compare between internal codecs, that's a misleading conclusion.
Not all Jpegs are the same, you can actually specify the quality amount and chroma subsampling of a Jpeg when you encode it. Could you specify which type of jpeg you are referring to? Also--what does jpeg have to do with any of this? I'll admit I'm having a hard time understanding why you use it as an example.
Is that a valid assumption to make, though? My understanding is that motion artifacts is one of the main reasons people use All Intra codecs.
 
To summarize my skepticism: It seems to me that you are judging codec quality purely in terms of adjusted bitrate. If I am misunderstanding, my apologies.

Why? You can get all these bitrates with h.265. 
Anyway, how on earth anyone can compare efficiency without any info about PSNR and visual quality? 

The article date is in the leftmost column. I think that they often use old test numbers (e.g. on the Fuji page, they include existing numbers from Sony for comparison, rather than re-test the Sony).
I didn't find any Sony cameras where they claimed 14 stops, but I would not be surprised if they did on some very old articles. On this article (https://***URL not allowed***/lab-review-sony-a5100-video-dynamic-range-power/) from 2014, they mention a lot of changes to their testing in various updates. The a5100 was "updated" from 13 to 10.5 stops. If you find any, I'll add them to the list anyway. At the bottom of this 2014 article (https://***URL not allowed***/dynamic-range-sony-a7s-vs-arri-amira-canon-c300-5d-mark-iii-1dc-panasonic-gh4/) it says: "Note: We have at one point in 2014 updated our dynamic range evaluation scale to better represent usable dynamic range among all tested cameras. This does not affect the relation of usable dynamic range between cameras." So I would be be cautious comparing numbers from pre-2014 with modern numbers.

Can't really say I agree. You don't need a 10 bit monitor to utilize 10 bit, you don't need a monitor to display 15 stops to utilize an Alexa's DR, and you don't need a 4k monitor to benefit from 4k. That said I was heavily considering the C100 but the auto focus was just not good enough for me (center only). I agree that any of these hybrid cameras are not the best A cams in regards to form factor and you're right there is no step up above an XT3. You can always use them as a b cam but lenses wouldn't be compatible across the board.

I feel your pain. Between Premiere unstability and Flash vulnerabilities, I have a strong distrust of Adobe myself. I use Resolve for editing these days. My biggest project is ~5,000 files / 500 GB and Resolve is handling it just fine. Each of the files actually is imported both in full res and a proxy, so there's closer to 10,000 imported files. Not sure how that scales against your needs...

I feel your pain. Between Premiere unstability and Flash vulnerabilities, I have a strong distrust of Adobe myself. I use Resolve for editing these days. My biggest project is ~5,000 files / 500 GB and Resolve is handling it just fine. Each of the files actually is imported both in full res and a proxy, so there's closer to 10,000 imported files. Not sure how that scales against your needs...

In my experience, Red is very generous with its ratings. The MX was rated very high, but I remember in practice it had about one stop less DR than the C300 (which is a more recent sensor design, so it makes sense) when I used it, which in turn had two to three stops less DR than the Alexa. Then the Dragon was noisier in the shadows than the MX but had more highlight detail, still trailing the Alexa by a lot. That was the original OLPF, I think they switched it up. For the time it was pretty good, but today's mirrorless cameras have more DR than the MX ever did. Dragon looks great exposed to the left, though. Good tonality. Recently, Red's gotten a lot better. My friends who've used the Gemini think it's just great. Super clean, good resolution, great DR, too.
I've found CML does really good tests that correlate closely with real world use:
https://cinematography.net/CineRant/2018/07/30/personal-comments-on-the-2018-cml-camera-evaluations/
They give the Gemini half a stop less than the Alexa–not bad. They also post Vimeo links, where you can see skin tones, etc. Venice looks awesome.
Not sure about the Alexa and Amira being any different. Same sensor design and both to me seem leagues beyond anything else I've used. Not just best DR but best tonality and texture and color in the highlights. I remember that the original Alexa had worse performance than the Alexa Mini (pretty subtle, but it was there) and Arri confirmed that they did little tweaks that push the newer models to 15+ stops. But that should favor the Amira, if anything. In my experience the Amira is just as good as the Mini, though, 15+ stops. I think Cinema5D changed their testing methodology so their results are inconsistent, and they've always seemed pretty careless to me.
 

I feel your pain. Between Premiere unstability and Flash vulnerabilities, I have a strong distrust of Adobe myself. I use Resolve for editing these days. My biggest project is ~5,000 files / 500 GB and Resolve is handling it just fine. Each of the files actually is imported both in full res and a proxy, so there's closer to 10,000 imported files. Not sure how that scales against your needs...

Prores 4k is 500 mb/s, more than double the 200 on the xt3 which looks just as good to me. I may do some tests to see what the actual difference in accuracy is. The xt3 400 mbps is all i, which is significantly less efficient.

I can't say this test is at all conclusive. Neither camera clips, so you can't really see what the DR limit is on either camera. It looks like the Arri keeps the highlights a little lower on the waveform, but the Z cam's waveform shadows are also at a higher level so it could just be an exposure difference. The different field of view and angle make it hard to tell. I'm still going with "everyone exaggerates by 2 stops except Arri" so 15 for Z Cam is really more like 13 (as measured by Arri).
I do think that the color on the Z Cam is phenomenal. The real conclusion is that the Z Cam's footage is really good enough for any cinematic purposes.
 
@webrunner5 they are both UHD
I can't say I agree. The Z Cam actually looks like it has less noise. Arri definitely has more chroma noise. However, the Z Cam's depth of field looks shallower, so they might have a faster lens and a lower ISO.

Spoilers for anyone who wants to do a blind test!
 
 
It turns out that A is ProRes and B is H.265. As @Deadcode points out, B (H.265) has noticeably more detail. However, the ProRes file retains a tiny bit more of the chroma noise from extreme shadows the original video. As you can see in the 300% crop below, all that sparkly noise is simply gone H.265, and while the ProRes has some obvious blockiness, you can still faintly see the noise. This is of course a VERY extreme grade (see the curve from Resolve).

With extreme grades the other direction, the ProRes looks better up until the VERY extreme, when its blockiness shows. As I said before, encoders have many options so this doesn't mean much for cameras. However, if you are uploading to a site with file size limits, H.265 is a good option. Also, as @OliKMIA pointed out, this is not a comprehensive test: it's 3 seconds of HD, and only looks at one scenario. This shot is quite stable, so the interframe flavor of H.265 that I used has an easier time. Shakycam will reduce the quality of H.265.
Furthermore, the encode time on ProRes was significantly less: 11s vs 68s. I could have used a faster preset for H.265 which would speed up the encoding at the expense of quality (my guess is that cameras, tasked with real-time encoding, are not as good as the preset I used). On the other hand, I have a 2013 CPU. Perhaps newer CPUs with hardware encoding could narrow the gap? I'm not sure.
 
If you want to look at the original files (before I turned them into 380 MB monsters!) One final note: I accidentally encoded both with AAC audio, so ~6kb of the file size of each is an empty audio track.
ProRes: https://drive.google.com/open?id=102Ivc9Xa1Z7mPzCK8TgTqwh2GExMPOkZ
H.265: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NxMofYvrHcP6DHx5VECRwMNw8qA4KXOD

@thebrothersthre3 I find them to be equal for all practical purposes, even with extreme grading (by extreme I mean waaay out of the realm of usefulness). There are differences, but neither seems more accurate. I haven't tried green screening, and that would be an interesting test, but I don't have a RAW camera so I'm limited in the scenarios I can test. And naturally it defeats the purpose of the test if I start with anything less than a RAW file.
Interestingly, despite having a hard time making any substantive distinction between the two, when comparing the PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio), ProRes is higher than H.265 at this compression level. H.265 needs to get up to around 50% of the bitrate before the average PSNR is the same--and even then, the PSNR on I frames is higher than ProRes, but the PSNR on P and B frames is lower. That's to be expected. I could also push the preset to be even slower, or use two pass encoding for better results on H.265 as well.
No, I did RAW -> Uncompressed RGB 444
And then Uncompressed -> H265 -> Uncompressed
And also Uncompressed -> ProRes -> Uncompressed
I did it this way so that I would not be limited by Resolve's H.265 encoder, and so that I could do PSNR tests from Uncompressed, without having to futz with debayering messing up the PSNR comparison. I did a short clip to keep the file size manageable at only 380 MB each. I originally did 4k, but I figured no one wanted to download that! If there is interest I am happy to do more extensive examples.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EwZE4VEth8ri4YYDtqIozP9Xsg7PSX5g?fbclid=IwAR3C6M9YB3uAzsKTM6RjzbbgP76fjZtOHzbBqjKgPZ1C2KkuTjih0uMh-zU

They released footage comparing the Alexa to the Z Cam E2 in Zlog2. They claim it has better dynamic range then the Alexa. I haven't downloaded the footage yet, but let me know what you guys think. If its true, its pretty incredible. Zlog2 only works up to 30fps but still, this is a $2000 camera.

Spoilers for anyone who wants to do a blind test!
 
 
It turns out that A is ProRes and B is H.265. As @Deadcode points out, B (H.265) has noticeably more detail. However, the ProRes file retains a tiny bit more of the chroma noise from extreme shadows the original video. As you can see in the 300% crop below, all that sparkly noise is simply gone H.265, and while the ProRes has some obvious blockiness, you can still faintly see the noise. This is of course a VERY extreme grade (see the curve from Resolve).

With extreme grades the other direction, the ProRes looks better up until the VERY extreme, when its blockiness shows. As I said before, encoders have many options so this doesn't mean much for cameras. However, if you are uploading to a site with file size limits, H.265 is a good option. Also, as @OliKMIA pointed out, this is not a comprehensive test: it's 3 seconds of HD, and only looks at one scenario. This shot is quite stable, so the interframe flavor of H.265 that I used has an easier time. Shakycam will reduce the quality of H.265.
Furthermore, the encode time on ProRes was significantly less: 11s vs 68s. I could have used a faster preset for H.265 which would speed up the encoding at the expense of quality (my guess is that cameras, tasked with real-time encoding, are not as good as the preset I used). On the other hand, I have a 2013 CPU. Perhaps newer CPUs with hardware encoding could narrow the gap? I'm not sure.
 
If you want to look at the original files (before I turned them into 380 MB monsters!) One final note: I accidentally encoded both with AAC audio, so ~6kb of the file size of each is an empty audio track.
ProRes: https://drive.google.com/open?id=102Ivc9Xa1Z7mPzCK8TgTqwh2GExMPOkZ
H.265: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NxMofYvrHcP6DHx5VECRwMNw8qA4KXOD

Zoom in and hit play. There is the difference.
I created a sample myself from my old 5D2 RAW footage. Real codec killer due to the heavy moire and aliasing all over the image. If you zoom in and hit play you can see the ProRes holds up much better. But actually the h265 smoothens out some of the smearing and moire, so it's actually better looking ? h265 100Mbps vs ProRes 422HQ

@thebrothersthre3 I find them to be equal for all practical purposes, even with extreme grading (by extreme I mean waaay out of the realm of usefulness). There are differences, but neither seems more accurate. I haven't tried green screening, and that would be an interesting test, but I don't have a RAW camera so I'm limited in the scenarios I can test. And naturally it defeats the purpose of the test if I start with anything less than a RAW file.
Interestingly, despite having a hard time making any substantive distinction between the two, when comparing the PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio), ProRes is higher than H.265 at this compression level. H.265 needs to get up to around 50% of the bitrate before the average PSNR is the same--and even then, the PSNR on I frames is higher than ProRes, but the PSNR on P and B frames is lower. That's to be expected. I could also push the preset to be even slower, or use two pass encoding for better results on H.265 as well.
No, I did RAW -> Uncompressed RGB 444
And then Uncompressed -> H265 -> Uncompressed
And also Uncompressed -> ProRes -> Uncompressed
I did it this way so that I would not be limited by Resolve's H.265 encoder, and so that I could do PSNR tests from Uncompressed, without having to futz with debayering messing up the PSNR comparison. I did a short clip to keep the file size manageable at only 380 MB each. I originally did 4k, but I figured no one wanted to download that! If there is interest I am happy to do more extensive examples.

I did a quick comparison between ProRes and H.265 encoding, and thought I'd share the results with everyone. I grabbed some of Blackmagic's 4.6k RAW samples and picked a 3 second clip. In Resolve, I applied a LUT and then exported as an uncompressed 1080p 10 bit RGB 444 file. This is my reference video. From this reference file, I encoded two clips. One clip is H.265, and the other is ProRes SQ, which I compared to each other and the reference video.
The reference video (which I did not upload) was 570 MB.
One of these files was created from the reference file using "ffmpeg -i Reference.mov -c:v libx265 -crf 20 -preset slower -pix_fmt yuv422p10le H265.mov". The file size is 7.81 MB (1.4% of the reference)
The other file was created using "ffmpeg -i Reference.mov -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 2 ProRes.mov". The file size was 44 MB (7.7% of the reference, or ~5x the size of H.265)
In order to keep the comparison blind, I then converted both the ProRes and H.265 files to uncompressed 10 bit 422. So you shouldn't be able to tell which is which from the metadata, file size, playback speed, etc. You can download these files (380 MB each) and do extreme color grades or whatever stress tests you wish, and compare the quality difference yourself.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Z5iuNkVUCM9BgygGkYRXizzr6XnSXDK7
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JHkmDKZU4qdS7qO_C0NwYH2xkey0uz7C
 
I'd love to hear thoughts or if anyone would be interested in further tests. Keep in mind that there are different settings for H.265, so this test doesn't really have implications for camera quality. since we don't know what their encoder settings are. However, it could have implications for intermediate files or deliverables, especially to sites with file size limits.

C5d puts the alexa at 14 using their SNR = 2 measurement.
I agree. But you cant blame z cam when everyone from sony to blackmagic exaggerate their dr. Only arri has the godlike status that allows them to be honest and still sell products.

It's actually been in and out of stock a few times at B&H.

If the signal is lower, the same noise will be more apparent. Or perhaps Nikon is doing some automatic corrections as suggested above.

I'm understanding what you're saying, it's just that the Z6 seems to behave differently than other cameras that I have used. I'm leaning toward the idea that there is something else going on correction wise that is affecting noise levels. It's nothing that cannot be worked around, but it is an additional consideration when planing a shoot. I might have to dig into the settings to see if there is anything enabled that could be the culprit. 

Most people do not even have theirs P4K yet, and you are selling it for 500-1000$ already?!
Get a grip guys!
At the moment there are cameras offered at higher than retail price on ebay. This camera is a huge success already, and it well a lot more before the end of its cycle.

I don't know about holding back, but it's all about priorities, I think. Z Cam is a bleeding edge company. They make 360 cameras and are actively working on integrating AI into their cameras. Z Cam has a smaller community, and many owners at this point expect bugs and workarounds--it's the price of using bleeding edge.
Blackmagic is focused on bringing cinematic imagery at a low cost: they care more about color science and integration into pro workflows than they care about high frame rates and next gen tech. Their target audience is more likely to have learned on film than Panasonic or Z Cam. The P4k is also significantly cheaper than the other cameras, the fact that it even competes spec-wise is impressive.
Panasonic is orders of magnitude larger than either company, and needs to compete with the other giants (Canon, Sony, Nikon), both today and tomorrow. Their products need to have near 100% reliability, and be easy for consumers to use. A single bug could kneecap initial reactions to a product, permanently damaging their reputation. Why spend the R&D money on 4k 120 if Sony isn't, and when that money could go towards QA?
Of those three companies, it seems to me that Z Cam has the most incentive to innovate with technology. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Z Cam ends up with the best specs.

as androidlad says, with h.265 and framerates of 30fps or below, you can get 400Mbps with both long gop or all i