@itimjim, thanks for looking into this...you're right on my dell laptop and depending on the screen angle, it's not noticeable, when viewed straight on(highest contrast) you can clearly see what I'm talking about. Viewing on the screen is not the issue obviously, but when bumping up the curves especially the mids, it looks terrible as you can see in this adjusted attachment: Banding becomes very obvious as the shadows get darker, and then the macroblocks makes this look like a video taken with VGA phone camera :) And this is with the 100mbps flow motion patch!

Just been doing more testing with slight more lighting...noise is very obvious in any black objects especially if it's in the background...even at ISO 160...320 noise is almost the same and I make sure I switch to ISO 2500 then to 320 to avoid the ISO bug issue. I played around with WB settings but I either get blue noise or red noise. I'm sure neat video will fix the problem but I could swear that most of the ungraded low lighting videos I saw on this forum look better(probably because they are compressed?)

thanks for the explanation itimjim, so basically as you said and as I've been reading: 1)slightly over expose if the scene is not evenly lit(which is going to mean essentially over expose in dramatic lighting scenes) and this is to give the camera more to work with in the darker areas of the picture 2)The color noise in general is acceptable and is more noticeable with the higher bit rates, so if it's too much for the scene(e.g. scene with black objects showing this noise) denoise in post and with the high bit rates the details will be somewhat be maintained.

@iconflyer Just remember when using ETTR, it's about what you're willing to give up. When there's under exposed uniform lighting, it certainly makes sense to lift the exposure +.5 or 1 stop or so. Of course, becareful here under harsher lighting conditions that demand greater dynamic range. You may clip features that are import to your subject matter.

To tell you the truth, I hate over exposed images. It tends to shout out "video". This is certainly why most of the pros shoot during the "golden hours" (dawn, dusk). Or, find a way to diffuse hard lighting when outside.

The bottom line is: Shoot for best exposure. Depending on the lighting conditions, bring in lighting, diffusers, bounce cards. Whatever the fuck it takes to get as close to best exposure.

BTW, this is true for every camera. Also, if you think you see noise in the above under exposed image, try this test with other video cameras and DSLRs and you will be very happy with your GH2 results!