@vicharris Well I tried, I really tried, but now I just see bad highlight roll-off in general. That being said I think this is going to turn out to be less a sensor issue and more a calibration or interpretation problem within the software. Its as if the exposure log scale ends abruptly in the highlights and immediately clips all the detail. I honestly don't see how a hardware issue could cause this unless it's due somehow to internal reflections that concentrate around the highlight areas on the sensor and amplify the respective light intensity.

I just liked the video :)

Created a short comparison between the GH2 and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera here:

Here's my explanation/review that I also posted on the vimeo page:

Conclusions

1) Although the German video site Slashcam found the non-artificial sharpness in the Pocket to be very high, it seems to me that the GH2 still resolves better image detail. (Not entirely surprising with an image downsampled from a 16 MP sensor as opposed to a debayered 2 MP image.) However, the GH2 video image would have been inferior resolution-wise if both cameras had been tested at 800 ISO.

2) In terms of dynamic range, gradation and shadow detail, the Pocket is in a different league than the GH2. This is already visible in the video image that has been graded to look like the GH2's. The possibilities to grade the image to match other looks/cameras are very limited for the GH2 and comparatively endless with the 10bit native ProRes material from the Pocket.

Caveats

...for owners of the GH2 and similar (amateur) cameras: operating the Pocket is much more demanding in every regard: exposure, focusing, white balance.

1) With its high native ISO, the camera absolutely requires the use of ND filters. They also are the best recipe against the camera's white orb/blooming problem.

2) The focusing aid zoom (for manual focusing) is less precise by design because it only zooms into a 2MP instead of a 16MP sensor; and while the camera offer focus peaking, I principally don't find peaking reliable enough for critical focusing.

3) Exposure aids are limited to zebras and, for electronic MFT lenses, an auto-aperture button. Thus, the camera encourages exposing to the right, which is not a good strategy if your scene has a high range of brightness (say: a street at night with cars driving by) and you need to let some highlights blow out. Highlight roll-off is harsh, and provokes white blobs if you overexpose by more than 2-3 stops. Conversely, there is no histogram or zebra to indicate underexposed parts of the image.

4) White balance is adjustable in a few preset Kelvin values, which is fine for photographers/cinematographers used to Kelvin temperatures for different film stocks. There is no possibility to set white balance by locking the camera to a neutral grey object, and no possibility to compensate for green/violet tint (a limitation when recording ProRes).

5) If you want a good image, don't use Panasonic's and Olympus electronic Micro Four Thirds lenses, at least no zooms and no focal lengths below 45mm, because their optics distort, have purple fringing and require in-camera software correction. That also rules out all available stabilized MFT lenses. If you want to shoot handheld or with a simple handheld stabilizer, your focal length should be 14mm or less, and 17mm maximum. I found the SLR Magic 12mm/f1.6 to be a good all-round lens for the camera.

Older 16mm cine lenses, such as the Canon TV16 13mm/f1.5 or the Kern Yvar 14mm/f2.8, work as well, but don't resolve as good as a modern lens - and they are among the very few wider angle 16mm cine lenses that cover the S16 sensor of the Pocket.

Yep, tons of room there to sharpen in post. Nothing surprising.

Not sure man. I'll have to say I can add much more sharpening with my BMCC footage than I would ever dare to with GH2 stuff. With GH2 footage, it loos bad really fast but just playing around with hair and sharpening with BMCC, it still looks pretty damn good. It's so easy to bring out the eyes with this footage and preserve everything else. Doing it right now with my latest promo I shot.

@vicharris the trick is you don't use a traditional sharpening filter. Those are garbage. You also don't apply sharpening to the image as a whole, both chroma and luma. But 10bit 422 isn't a panacea to allowing gobs of extra sharpening to be applied since 444 isn't either.

This was lamented to me by David Slade who was quite disappointed with how soft he thought his Alexa ProRes stuff from Hannibal looked. I thought he was smokin' crack because his episodes look fabulous and most folks would be seeing highly compromised, compressed and/or scaled episodes anyhow. So he really pushed as much as he could through on his episodes using a package designed for stills photography (NIK Sharpener) since the typical sharpening filters for editors and most post software are junk if you're not willing to "roll your own."

Also, with GH2 you're already starting out with a sharper image so it needs less post sharpening. Basically I don't work to bring out any structure or edges, it's tiny bright details and tiny black details that make the image pop when you apply local contrast enhancement techniques carefully, to just the luminance channel.

My brother is currently editing a proof-of-concept we shot where I was on A-Cam and a friend was on B-Cam with his Canon DSLR and he was shocked, even after we did a feature on the 7D, how soft the Canon stuff is. He and the other producer have listened to me talk schmack about how much better and sharper the GH2 is but this is the first time they've ever seen it side-by-side. It's got to be pushed to try to match the GH2 Moon Trial 3 footage and then I'll have to be careful that it takes even the mild enhancement I'd normally do the the GH2 footage, since it doesn't really need overall structure sharpening at all.

edit: oh, and I've never used Nik so I have no idea how easy or hard it is to work into someone's pipeline compared to Neat Video which is no biggie. Personally I use a manually constructed stack of effects in AE that does something like Unsharp Mask, but it doesn't false-edge in the same way that filter wants to do, feels faster, etc. I came upon the technique while researching what went into the "Dragan" look popular in commercial photography. Mostly I was interested in what made all the tiny bright and, especially, tiny black details really pop. Skin pores and stubble and that sort of thing. It also really brings out highlights in eyes.

I thought Olympus lens have less purple fringe because their camera don't do CA unlike Panasonic?

@BurnetRhoades

But the GH2 doesn't resolve the full 1920x1080, any more than Canon DSRLs do. Look at nomad's charts earlier in the thread.

Has there been any footage that's been shot with the PannyLeica 25mm? It's my favorite lens (that I own) on my GH2 and I'd be disappointed if it turns out like crap on the BMPCC... I also have the Panny 14mm but I don't really expect much out of that lens anyway.

The BMPCC definitely has aliasing and that means false detail. Sharpening will only make that worse.

The GH2 is not free of aliasing, but it's mainly in the luma channel. Hardly any chroma aliasing, which is massive in the BMPCC.

Making the stuff look better than a GH2 means using the better gradation of subtle color transitions when grading, not sharpening the hell out of it.

BTW, my tests can be reproduced by anybody with both cameras at hand and a standard ISO 12233 test chart, which you can download as a vector file at Cornell university for free.

@MagicMountainMan Be prepared for disappointment, because the PanaLeica 25mm has native barrel distortion that is firmware/software corrected in cameras like the GH2 but not in the Pocket (since it can't pixel-bend a 2MP image without degrading resolution). Besides, 25mm is really too long a focal length on the pocket for anything but tripod use. For handheld/rig-stabilized shooting, 12-14mm is ideal.