That was the most fascinating and insightul film vs digital comparisons I've seen, thanks! While my experience with motion is limited to being a film buff, it was good to see such a test emphasizing real world shooting rather than test charts.
The test compares cine film with dSLRs - so the test setup is very demanding on digital from the get-go. While the beatifully shot video is 35 minutes long, the first 10 minutes is intro and the last 10 minutes is a visual digression which has little to do with the test itself. But in the middle there are two very demanding real life test scenes, and a quick dynamic range chart comparison, all shot with Kodak and Fuji cine film stock, Canon 5DMkII, D7 and another Canon, a Nikon and Panasonic GH1.
Spoilers:
Film beats digital in almost every aspect, but many of the heavy hitting veterans on the clip are very surprised by how close dSLRs are already with film - and some say it's a matter of subjective preference. There are no comparisons between the size, weight and especially the price of the gear used, which would have brought even more weight to that conclusion. And let's not forget that film stock itself is notoriously expensive.
I was shocked to see just how much film outperformed all digital cameras. Dynamic range especially was much superior with both films than any digital camera, in both shadows and highlights, in both real world and test target. The smaller-sensor digital cameras had some pretty obvious compression artifacts and banding visible even on the web video.
I would have expected that the wider dynamic range of still digital would translate equally to motion. Why doesn't it? Is it because cine film is so much better than still film? Because of poor downsampling algorithms to get to 1080p/720p video from 20+ megapixels? Because of choice scene and lighting favors film? Something else?
The take-home message for me is that sensor size matters as does the compression algorithm, and that dSLRs win hands-down in price-to-performance ratio. I think this test will turn even more serious DOPs into digital with dSLRs. The next generation of cameras will be even better, and I keep hoping for added latitude in highlights and lower noise in shadows.