No price yet on B & H.
Any leaks or speculation on cost?
Guesses,.....

Read on one of the legit releases, price is aimed at sub $2000! so, probably $1,999.99

this is what I read:

[Update]: Pricing will be announced in March (but less than $2,000)

Some footage,

$1499 Euros...maybe US in the $1700 range???

I'm curious about video quality at 4K since the datarate is not proportionally higher vs. 1080. Maybe codec is more efficient with more pixels?

I think one of the biggest upsides is not necessarily 4K delivery, but take 4K and downsample to 1080 and the result should be true 1920x1080 resolution, not the 850 or so horizontal resolution of current DSLR's. Plus you can reframe shots and use software stabilizers without losing resolution.

markymarkNY,

Yes the codecs generally are more efficient with higher resolutions. Meaning that while 1080p has 4 times the pixel density as SD, 4 times the bandwidth isn't required for compession. I've found that 2mbps for SD with mp4 compression is equal to about 5 or 6mbps quality-wise for 1080p.

Of course if you have extremely detailed images you could see linear scaling but generally there are solid (or nearly solid) color areas that the codec can exploit quite a bit of redundancy.

Think about it this way. A screenful of red at SD or 4K will require pretty much the same amount of bandwidth to compress. That's an extreme case but looking at the extremes is often useful for figuring out the read world "middle case" scenario.

I'm salivating....

@markymarkNY: The biggest upside in my mind is editorial cropping 4K to 1080p.

I would like to know what all the contents in that bags adds up to. Would like to make the switch. What would the basic lens to do some outdoor video?

yes the basic lens is good, but I use the 45-175 powerzoom for general outdoor point and shoot video stuff it's really nice has image stabilization and is not that expensive I got mine second hand just update the firmware to latest.
the 12-35 is nice as well for wider stuff but more expensive.

Here's a gh3 / 45-175 example.


Can't wait for the GH4 that looks so exciting the GH3 was nice enough! all the little bits I've started to want to use now appear to be there :-)

My credit card statements are telling me that I will be sticking with my GH3 for a while. I bought my daughter a G6 for Christmas. I got a particularly good deal on a Christmas special, and the image quality is very much on par with what you see out of the GH3 or the new GH4 at 1080p resolution. My biggest grip with the G6 is that there is no headphone out. The newest Olympus micro 4/3rds offerings look pretty wonderful as well. I also have a little GF3 that I bought used for a couple of hundred dollars. The GF3 can use the GH2 hack to up the bitrate to whatever your SD card will handle. I absolutely LOVE the micro 4/3 format, and lately, it's all that I use.

One of the new features of the GH4 is 1080p with 4:2:2 ten bit color. Does anyone know if Vegas still truncates those last two bits?

as far as I know, if you apply no fx to it, it will pass through the 10 bit signal, but if you make it process the footage in any way beyond cuts only. Then you need to change to the floating 32bit color space, at which point you can utilize the full 10 bit space.

I'm not sure however, if there are any 10bit supported output options from rendering. You may be forced to put the 10bit space to an 8bit space if you process it at all. However most any Delivery formats that are common are 8 bit (though you probably know this). And I've been out of the loop with a new TV show I'm producing for the last year or so, so 12 is still a little foreign to me at an in-depth level, so that may have changed, or I may have been mistaken somewhere along the way here :)

Dave