I entered a film for a 72 hour short film contest where the top 10 finalists get to screen in Chelsea's Clearview Theater in Manhattan (it's a normal theater that plays Hollywood films), and to my pleasant surprise, it made top 10 and got screened. I sent them a 1080p copy with a 10mbps MainConcept single-pass vbr encoded .mp4 file. I shot using only the Olympus 14-54mm zoom lens on a Quantum 9b hacked GH2. Unfortunately since the contest allowed such a short time (and we stupidly had lots of locations), I didn't have time to color correct and the sound was a bit sloppy.

When the footage came on, I noticed the resolution looked as good as any of the recent Hollywood movies I had seen (with 2k projectors of course). I had just seen Batman in 2k (imax was sold out) the day before, and the GH2 didn't look worse in terms of detail and clarity. I think if 2k is your final output, the GH2 can easily compare with any camera resolution-wise. I have to admit though, I was in the back row. Since I shot smooth with -2 on everything but saturation, it looked a bit washed out on many scenes, but scenes with hard sunlight had more pop since the limit of its dynamic range acted as a natural contrast booster. Overall, it looked really good and I can see why it was picked so much in the Zacuto shootout.

There was also a film shot with the Scarlet (it mentioned the camera in the credits), and I can say that it easily looked better than the GH2 on the outdoor scenes. The dynamic range just captured everything flawlessly even with the harsh sunlight. The sky was completely intact and the shadows held a lot of visible detail. Even if the GH2 can catch the entire dynamic range of a scene, the stuff captured three stops above or more just loses too much color information. The Scarlet just captured everything beautifully and even my layman friend next to me could notice. The indoor shots in the film looked noticeably better in the shadows, but the improvement wasn't as stark as it was in the outdoor scenes. It should be noted that they actually color corrected their film though.

All this is making me reconsider the BMC, but I will wait to see if they have an m43 version planned.

If you're curious about what my film is, here's a link to a color corrected version with some VFX added:

Here's a link to the one shot on Scarlet: Finally, here's the version of our film that was screened with no color correction and less effects: http://www.aafilmlab.org/72hours/2012/07/29/team-mintcheerios-early-adopter-2012-finalist/