I don't have any headaches with H264, but I'm assuming the mercury engine can be retooled for H265 since I'm only using ~30 percent of the processing power from the card at any time. Assuming that workstations will be using octacore instead of quad core and better GPUs, that should (hopefully) do the trick.

Something to worry about is multicam with say 6-12 4K cams all playing together. Absolutely.

@DailyFilmFx some people--not all people--simply want to avoid several things: the time involved transcoding, the loss of detail (however slight) from lossy transcoding, and the increased disk space. Others want realtime native playback and faster rendering. However, other users want to capture for example Blackmagic output externally to Prores, and then edit that from an SSD. Still others use lots of cameras, and then the time and storage requirements become ridiculous--if you can't store a single project on a 4TB drive, that's a real problem, plus it gets really expensive. Others like to crop their video, and they want the "fill in" scaling from the Mercury engine, and so on. If you are only using two or three cams, space is not really an issue and neither is time, up to a point, unless you are shooting raw.

OTOH, there is no reason to take your perfectly good AVCHD footage and resample it it just to edit it. I would much prefer that the new GH4 capture to H265, and that the BM 4K was available in H265, but that seems a bit down the road. For me, I simply don't want to have so many 4TB hard drives filling up the garage.

Here's hoping we get a storage breakthrough soon, with a 100TB drive. I would rather spend the HD money on cameras and lenses than on platters.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev thanks, got it now

And I also discovered that Giulio Sciorio has t-shirt with "Giulio Sciorio" written on it

One of the things I would be most interested in regarding the GH4 features: Will there be a useable "continous auto focus" while recording video, possibly "thanks to the 'Depth from Defocus' feature?

Did any source mention anything about this, yet?

Having no useable continous autofocus (as in: "clips being destroyed by sudden episodes of 'hunting desparately for focus'") is one of my biggest issues with the GH2 when shooting larger animals under water. On these occasions, I was missing my much older Sanyo camera which despite its "obsoleteness" was quite good at keeping things in focus while recording.

On while you have to see 30min limit:

In EU VAT (about 20%) and expensive "marketing initiatives" (read - stealing money without much result) already add quite a lot. But camcorder tax is around 14% on top.

@DailyFilmFx re: "I don't know anyone who edits AVCHD natively." Everyone I know edits AVCHD natively. You take the footage from the Cam, drop it on the timeline in PP, and if your $50 Nvidia card is installed, you edit natively and apply effects, all in real time, and render the final project not only quickly but using superscaling for pan, zoom and crop. It is not only an enormous time saver, it is an enormous space saver--if you are running a dozen cameras, you can fill up a 4TB drive if you resample to an intermediary codec. Editing natively saves money on hard drives. The more cameras you use in your array, the more space, time and money you save, so the benefit scales to the size of the project.

This saving of time and money will increase exponentially with 4K, even with the presumed introduction of H265.

I have edited native AVCHD in premiere since 2012 (on a 21.5 inch imac i5 - 2012). It CAN be problematic for post work if the client / editor has not cleaned up his timeline properly. Often something goes wrong with the xml / file linking.. For instance I´ve had problems with wrong clips in the timeline, which can be very hard to spot - but that exclusively happens when the export comes from multiple tracks (often multiple clips on top of each other). A clean edit is a must - only individual clips can be used (multi-cam-edits need to be broken down into their original clips). If you have a clean edit, not only will you much more easily spot any problem - you are very unlikely to have a problem.

When there´s risk for problems and no budget / no time I ask for a prores 444 output of the edit which I re-cut and import into AE. I do not see any reason to transcode files before editing unless you work in ancient software or unless you have a corrupt file that needs saving or some file format that doesn´t work.

I currently edit in AVCHD in PremPro without problems. I have a 27 iMac which I bought in July.

Btw, an ExTele 4k crop mode on the GH4 would be just AMAZING...

@JFKa

In the interview with Eduardo Angel he explains with a 64 Gb card it has 29-30 minutes of 4k recording, and each official card will cost... about 150$ each. Good optical gear is indeed necessary in 4K.

The 64 GB cards are already down to $105 on Amazon. Using faster cards than this probably will not have any benefit. The camera is designed to work at no more than the minimum speed of these cards. Getting a faster card than that won't change the maximums that have been imposed on the camera.

Faster cards had benefits when cameras were hacked because we were basically removing that max write speed limit. Since the GH3 hasn't even been hacked yet I don't anticipate(or desire) a hack for the GH4 anytime soon. I suspect that once several cards with the right specs are out on the market the SD card price will not be a significant deterrent.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I3BQJNA/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3GAGRWZRDL55J&coliid=I32GI30ORADTZ8

@karl I suppose that editing natively is an option. With the GH3, the .mov can be edited nicely natively without trancoding.

But AVCHD is notorious for causing problems in post when attempting to edit natively. Before quad core machines, AVCHD could not be edited natively at all really. For example, my old G5 tower could not edit the footage unless I transcoded the files to Pro Res of AIC using an Intel machine.

I'm no expert, I suppose, but I don't know anyone who edits AVCHD natively, even with a monster machine. I will ask my wife what she does in Premiere, but her Canon cameras do not use the AVCHD codec.

Consider the workflow I employ: 1. Archive at the end of the shoot (on location, I use a MacBook Pro and FCPX); 2. Bring the footage into FCPX by importing (I create optimized media, with my old i3, I used to create proxy files as well, which are in the nature of Pro Res LT); 3. Sync the footage (now with multicam instead of Plural Eyes); 4. Edit.

My reason for creating Pro Res transcodes at the beginning is to have clean files that are all the same and ready to go. I want no issues once I start editing. It is time well spent. I do move the archives to a separate drive to save space on the array, but having everything in the same codec is ideal.

What NLE are you using? After some problems, the new FCPX is pretty good.

What a chunk!

@killagram

The 7Q won't take 4K through HDMI, but someone may make a cheap 4K HDMI to SDI converter box. The YAGH is probably the best option right now, though.