Quantum 7 is great but will not play back any spanned segments in the camera. They edit fine.

Extremeley fine detail is getting smoothed over even at low ISO.>>

Same results here at 720p60 and even more at 1080i60 (the latter one with quite heavy "mosquito noise"). 24p looks better...

I'm excited about this patch, and look forward to trying it.

People have to realize that @LPowell isn't trying to make a patch that has absolute best image quality. He's trying to significantly improve over the stock (both static and motion rendering) while also allowing for in-camera playback and, in some cases, spanning on very good, but not top of the line cards and keeping file sizes from becoming enormous. So comments like "oh well, it was a very good write up and effort" are way off the mark.

If you've ever been the dp or camera operator on a shoot, you know that having equipment you can rely on is just as important as having the best image quality (which is why, for example, Philip Bloom returned his Epic). And honestly no matter how high your bitrate, if you don't light well, it's not going to be look great. This is evidenced by Musgo, which is one of the better looking GH2 hack narrative pieces but was shot on the 44mbs hack.

Llpowell's patch definitely seems to have a significant place within the offerings so far... something like a hybrid between cbrandin's and Driftwood's great patches. ...I've yet to try it though :)

@qwerty123

You said what I was thinking.

@qwerty123, I am sorry, I will be a good boy now and never speak out again in public. But before I do that, thinking it might be beneficial to the folks like me still using the great cbranding 66m patch (which accidentally is great looking and very reliable once you learn to live with its shortcomings), I dare to speak and share my findings that this particular effort falls a little bit short compared to the other reliable and great looking ones. I was of the view that it was the way forward to try to share one's findings in order to improve the developments. If that offends anyone then I'll keep quiet, or maybe rather say " wow, great f..king patch, let's try another one". Ah, discussion forums...

@LPowell no :o) of course not. When testing I didn't think about posting any examples here, therefore the subject matters were rather "not to share" ones (family and friends).. This particular frame was taken whilst the camera was being moved and I posted it simply because it shows the levels of compression in the shadows. The test overall was both in an overcast garden with lots of foliage moved on the wind, inside a darkish shed with a candle and inside the house with some dark areas, people moving around and a tv set playing in the background. Everything was more or less well exposed. Whilst there was lots of movement with lots of information in the frame the quality seemed to hold on (however subjectively lacking the fine detail), whilst when static, the shadows were developing a bit nasty compressed looking noise, with clearly visible macro blocking, hence the frame I posted as it clearly shows it (o.k. it was whilst the camera was being moved but there was little variation in the subject matter). I am truly more than happy to help with testing and I absolutely did and do not intend to make anyone angry! Discussion forums seem to be very dangerous places. One can be bitten unexpectedly.. and I now admit I seem to lack the good manors in terms of not praising one's work enough, therefore here is the late one, but honest: @LPowell , your job matters a lot and I am full of praises for your efforts, as I am for all the other patch developers, and of course Vitaliy himself, and if I can be of any help..

Valuable patch that I will continue testing and I understand its purpose - and naming ie Flomotion - but.. (ill post pictures and video tomorrow and back up my claims - again this patch is AWESOME - no hard feelings)

Huge drop in image quality using sharp lenses (Leica m and Zeiss 100mm macro) for me. I think people like piotremanuel and myself are used to Driftwood Seaquake and Quantum. I shoot lots of macro video and close up's of models' hair and eyes and jewelry - this just doesn't cut the mustard for people squeezing the most out of their GH2's for short clips. Lighting with your patch needs to be perfect because shadow detail turns to mush - just like piotremanuel mentioned. That has always been the GH2 weakness and now it rears its ugly head again. People using this patch will need to invest money in and haul around additional lighting gear to make the most of it. But then they might as well fork over the dough for more memory cards and run GOP1.

That being said the files sizes are lovely and motion does look great. Bravo on that.

I do think that GOP1 is the future because memory card prices are dropping, capacities are growing and computers are getting faster. For anyone shooting something important, I view GOP1 as having something closer to a digital negative that we can use many years in the future. A year from now we will look at the price of 64gb 95mbps memory cards and laugh at their price. Intel's new processors in 2012 will drive down prices of Sandybridge making editing ever easier as well.

Didn't want this to be a GOP1 debate (though have we squeezed everything out of GOP1 yet?) - just tossing out some ideas because your work is stunning to say the least. I just hope it won't be all in vain and forgotten in the coming months.

Thanks for the patch - no doubt it will be useful to many.

Great work on this @LPowell - understand where you're coming from with your desire to create a patch that significantly improves on the stock firmware while maintaining full functionality.

In light of that, I'd love to hear testers impressions on how this patch compares to and improves upon the stock firmware as opposed to it's perceived weaknesses compared to Driftwood's Quantum patches etc - which aim to get optimum performance in one mode at the expense of support for others.

lol :-)

@LPowell Preliminary impressions:

This absolutely blows away AVCCAM (Panasonic's "professional implementation of the AVC/H.264 codec.") If the AF-100 had this, it would be a better camera.

I tested it in all modes, and it spanned (once, I didn't have time for further recording) at 24H (in ExTele Mode) on a Sandisk 64 gig, 95Mbps card. Indeed, that panning flicker doesn't appear, although all the rules of panning still apply to 24p recording -- and everyone should know those rules.

In principle -- I love your concept, and agree that the ideal formula for the GH2 is somewhere in the realm of a high bitrate GOP formula -- combining the efficiency of GOP with a lower compression -- that should produce better results than a high bitrate intraframe.

The problem I'm having is that I've spent a week or so looking at Quantum 9b footage -- and that means I'm seeing more noise and less detail with Motion Patch V1.0. For example, at ISO 160 in ExTele mode, the noise in the shadows was painful.

So, I love your concept and look forward to further testing this and future evolutions -- but -- it doesn't kick me in the face like Quantum 9b does.

@spcamno: At this time you have to downgrade to 1.0 to use any custom patches, although this is easily done. Support for firmware 1.1 will have to wait until VK finishes the next release of PTools (don't bother asking when, just be assured that he's working hard on it and will release it as soon as it's ready). See the FAQ and/or the Beginner's thread for more specific information and answers to other questions like this.

Thanks LPowell. To me its one of the most exciting progress since a long time.

The default quality of my GH2 is in aspect of the money i paid for, absolut brilliant. Of cause it has problems in some situation where it needs to be quite better. Panasonic 1.1 fixed a few of them. Pleasant they relented the petition of so many european users for 25p. To get as solution for every problem, quantum, driftwoods and else came along. But caused by hardware limitation, every solution serves problems in other areas. I think it will be better better to push every "bad" aspect of the GH2 in the right direction, as far as other aspects ar not compromised. So the over all quality as a good video-camera will go much further than with the default fw of the camera.

Would be great to get a patch, that will make a well function movie-cam for flow motion out of a Foto/Video compromise. If needed, a second GH2 can be used with a dedicated patch for special solutions like troyjason needs. We do buy lenses for special solutions. So if needed, why not to buy a dedicated body? With this it is still far away from prices like AG100. I will start testing this patch, as soon as PTools for 1.1 has been released.